We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

henry

Some Questions a Year After Her Child’s Death

Jessica Kelley wrote a post for The Jesus Event that we wanted to share with you. You might remember that last year we were getting to know Jessica as she lost her four year old son Henry just before Christmas. In this post, she reflects on the theology of the people around her concerning her son’s death. She has some questions she wants to ask them that she didn’t ask at the time. You can read the whole post here.

We love you dear Jessica!

From her blog post:

They celebrated the coming of Immanuel, God with us.

 And I wondered… how many of those, who celebrated the God-child, believed that our child died according to God’s perfect plan?  Did they think the humble one, who once lay in a manger, inflicted our son with brain cancer?

 Those who had lifted us in prayer, did they believe this silent night… was a holy night? Was this despondent Christmas the one he’d planned for us?

Related Reading

Problems with the Simple Foreknowledge View

Some have proposed a model of divine foreknowledge which allows them to avoid the dilemma of affirming either that God creates people for the purpose of sending them to hell (Calvinism) or that he creates them without certain knowledge of their fate (open theism). In this alternative view God knows that certain individuals will be…

Topics:

Boyd’s Bad Ass Tattoo

by: Greg Boyd In the process of working through a philosophical issue surrounding the openness of the future around twenty years ago, I and two friends (Alan Rhoda and Tom Belt) ended up creating the “Hexagon of Opposition”, or “Hexagonic Logic of Futurity,” as I’ve sometimes called it. I’ll explain what it all means in…

5 Ways the Bible Supports Open Theism

Open Theism refers to the belief that God created a world in which possibilities are real. It contrasts with Classical Theism which holds that all the facts of world history are eternally settled, either by God willing them so (as in Calvinism) or simply in God’s knowledge (as in Arminianism). Open Theists believe God created humans and…

The God of the Here and Now

Several years ago an acquaintance told me she and her husband were going to travel to Lakeland, FL, where a “healing revival” had purportedly broken out. When I asked them if they were going because they needed healing, they replied that they just wanted to witness “God doing stuff.” Even though I have nothing against…

Paradigm Shift Questions

A couple that was recently introduced to ReKnew and several of my books recently wrote to tell me that they are in the process of embracing the warfare worldview along with the open view of the future. They said that they “realize that these things aren’t minor adjustments but are rather all-encompassing paradigm shifts in…

Topics:

The One True Image of God: God’s Self-Portrait, Part 4

This point is emphasized throughout the New Testament because, if we don’t get this, we are left to our own imaginations about God, and we’ll draw from a multitude of different sources to construct a mental picture of God that will, to one degree or another, fall short of the beauty of the true God…