Have you read Marcus Borg ‘Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time’ and Philip Yancy ‘The Jesus I Never Knew’. Both touch on theodicy, and bring it back to love not being controlling and looking at the nature of God. Whilst I still have a lot issues with the free will, not compelling someone, argument - it has no compassion to it, no answer for those suffering or watching others suffer - but it did give me enough pause to start to think about what we mean when we say God is love and how that affects his use of power.
"I am still somewhat ‘uncomfortable’ about ‘ditching’ the notion of God being all-powerful (at least in the way I’ve always understood it)"
For me, the part in brackets is the important bit here. The issue is not that God is not powerful; the issue that we humans tend to have completely the wrong idea about what true power is.
Have you read Thomas J. Oord’s The Uncontrolling Love of God and/or Richard Beck’s excellent blog series on the “weakness” of God? (I can find you the link to the latter if not.)
I haven’t read Oord’s ‘The Uncontrolling Love of God’ (but might well do so) and was wondering about his ‘The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence’. A link to Beck’s series would be much appreciated, thank you.
I haven't read the more recent Oord book but I can recommend The Uncontrolling Love of God. It's explicitly open theist in orientation, and there are aspects of that I don't go along with, but I found some of it very helpful.
I found them myself earlier today and have read through them, fairly rapidly - a very interesting take on the subject, worthy of a lot deeper consideration and a re-read.
Have you read Marcus Borg ‘Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time’ and Philip Yancy ‘The Jesus I Never Knew’. Both touch on theodicy, and bring it back to love not being controlling and looking at the nature of God. Whilst I still have a lot issues with the free will, not compelling someone, argument - it has no compassion to it, no answer for those suffering or watching others suffer - but it did give me enough pause to start to think about what we mean when we say God is love and how that affects his use of power.
Thank you… I’ll respond more fully when I manage to bring my current cogitation to a conclusion!
"I am still somewhat ‘uncomfortable’ about ‘ditching’ the notion of God being all-powerful (at least in the way I’ve always understood it)"
For me, the part in brackets is the important bit here. The issue is not that God is not powerful; the issue that we humans tend to have completely the wrong idea about what true power is.
Yes - how we view God’s power is something I need to think about much more at some point.
Have you read Thomas J. Oord’s The Uncontrolling Love of God and/or Richard Beck’s excellent blog series on the “weakness” of God? (I can find you the link to the latter if not.)
I haven’t read Oord’s ‘The Uncontrolling Love of God’ (but might well do so) and was wondering about his ‘The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence’. A link to Beck’s series would be much appreciated, thank you.
I haven't read the more recent Oord book but I can recommend The Uncontrolling Love of God. It's explicitly open theist in orientation, and there are aspects of that I don't go along with, but I found some of it very helpful.
Here's the link to the first part of Beck's blog series on the weakness of God. Each post in the series has a link at the end to the next post: https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/06/on-warfare-and-weakness-part-1-real.html
I found them myself earlier today and have read through them, fairly rapidly - a very interesting take on the subject, worthy of a lot deeper consideration and a re-read.