Pisteuomen - πιστευομεν - T. Michael W. Halcomb

When I first became a Christian, I was part of the Southern Baptist denomination. The Sr. Minister took me to his Southern Baptist alma mater when I was visiting colleges and he strongly advised me to go there. I declined. When I went outside of the denomination's selected schools, my home (Baptist) Church would not help me like they helped Baptist college students; oh well. I love the Baptist Church. It is where I laid down my roots and got excited about Christianity. But, I must say, I'm not too excited about some of the leading Southern Baptists these days. My disinterest in these leaders has mainly to do with what they say about natural disasters. Take Franklin Graham, for instance, a leading voice among Baptists. He was one of the first to suggest that when Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast, that God sent it. Moreover, God sent it because those places were sinful and needed wiped out and cleansed. This is patently absurd! I might clarify myself here. I ...

Over the last few years I have done a lot of thinking, reading and researching on the issue of theodicy (in its simplest form: God can either be all-loving or all-powerful but not both at the same time). It has continually been the prophetic passages of Scripture that have been the hardest to wrap my head around. For instance, today I was reading Amos 3.6, which says: "Or if the horns are blown in the city will the people not tremble? Or if there is disaster in the city has the Lord not made it (or: acted)?" Clearly, here and at many junctures all throughout Amos, it is God who is involved in heaping disaster upon the people. And that is the issue: Yes, an all-powerful God can do this but how could an all-loving God do it? Doesn't God have to be one or the other? There are a couple of ways that I have been dealing with this issue: 1. From a theological point-of-view, I have re-configured my definitions of the "omnis" (e.g. "all"-whatever). ...