Have you noticed the shifts happening all around us in our culture? Skepticism of traditional institutions from the government to the media to churches is at an all time high, while increasingly we're told to discover our authentic self and live it out courageously. Universal truth claims sound like power grabs while individual personal truths are celebrated no matter how patently false they seem. Corrosive deconstructionism has decimated traditional virtues, traditional ethics, and traditional ways of making sense of the world. The only hero that remains is the triumphant victim who boldly stands against the majority, shouting "This is who I am, you must accept me or we will take you down."

Ok, so I hammed it up a little there. Not all expressions of postmodernism are so strident. Even so, what is going on?

Pastor Jacob Ballard from Timberland Bible Church in Indiana will help us understand and engage with this incredible worldview shift that has occurred over the last few decades. Over the next four weeks, Ballard is going to share key insights from a class taught at the Atlanta Bible College designed to help students understand and minister to our changing society.

—— Links ——

• Find out more about Jacob Ballard at the Timberland Bible Church website
• Check out Dan Kimball's They Like Jesus but Not the Church
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Leave a voice message via SpeakPipe with questions or comments
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library

Have you noticed the shrill tone that permeates public discourse in our time? It seems like everyone is on a hairpin trigger ready to rage and vent at their ideological enemies. What is a Christian to do? Should we stand up for our beliefs, morals, and politics? Should we disengage from conversation about controversial issues? Is there another way? Peter Miano, my guest for today, shares how respect, courtesy, and love can navigate us through these stormy waters. After earning degrees from Boston University, Union Theological Seminary, and Harvard Divinity School and becoming an ordained United Methodist Minister, Miano founded the Society for Biblical Studies, which coordinates trips to the Holy Land and other interesting places where conflict abounds.

—— Links ——

• Learn more about Peter Miano and get in contact with him at The Society for Biblical Studies of which he is the executive director.
• You may also like to read this article: "The Power of Unity in a Polarized Time"
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Leave a voice message via SpeakPipe with questions or comments
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library

Did you know the Unitarian Christian Alliance just launched a podcast? In this interview, Mark Cain explains what he aims to do with this newest addition to one God podcasts and how the UCA podcast is different from the others. Ultimately, he wants to see unitarian Christians carry ourselves with confidence, knowing that our faith is firmly rooted in the scriptures.

—— Links ——

• Contact Mark Cain: [email protected] or by calling 615-581-1158 and leaving a message
• Check out the UCA podcast webpage or subscribe on Spotify
• More about Cain's church: Church of the Open Bible in Bedford, OH
• More about Cain's denomination: Church of God General Conference
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Leave a voice message via SpeakPipe with questions or comments
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio

Sam who asked me not to use his last name for fear that he will get kicked out of his current church, tells his story of navigating evangelical Christianity as a biblical unitarian. He shares two sad stories of excommunication from a college ministry and a local church. As you might suspect, this harsh treatment drove Sam to question his non-trinitarian beliefs. Even though he had every reason to abandon his unorthodox convictions, his research into bible, theology, and history strengthened his faith that the Father of Jesus is the only true God. Now he has a YouTube channel where he interviews theologians and recently he debated Chris Date on Preston Sprinkle's Theology in the Raw podcast.

—— Links ——

Pastor Jeff Deuble of the Churches of Christ in Sydney, Australia shares his journey to uncover the genuine Jesus from scripture alone. After his brother Greg challenged him to understand Christ from a Jewish perspective, Jeff set out on a quest, reading through all of scripture to see what it really said about the Messiah. What he found upended his life, bringing both delight at his clearer understanding of Christ and heartbreak over losing the church he planted and pastored for 19 years. This is his story.

Here are some of the questions that caused Deuble to doubt the "traditional" understanding of Christ taught in the creeds:

• How can you have a singular God who is also plural?  How can you explain three “persons”, who constitute one “being”?
• How can Jesus be both “fully human” and “fully God”?  How does that work?
• How can Jesus be eternal, yet “begotten” by God? 
• The Bible says that “God cannot be tempted” but Jesus was tempted – in fact “in every way, just as we are” (Hebrews 4 says)
• We know “God alone is immortal” and therefore unable to die (Rom 1:23; 1Tim 6:16) yet Jesus was died, and was raised to life again by the Father. 
• We read that “no one has seen, or can see” God (1Tim 6:16) - that “no one has ever seen God” (Jn 1:18; 1Jn 4:12) yet Jesus was seen.
• God “knows everything” (1 Jn 3:26) yet Jesus himself admitted there were things that his Father knew that he himself did not (Mt 24:36; Mk 13:32).
• Why would “all authority in heaven and on earth” have to be given to him (Mt 28:18)?  Wouldn’t this already be his by virtue of him being God?
• If Jesus is God, how can he have a God over him (Which Paul clearly states is the case on many occasions, especially in 1 Cor 15)

—— Links ——

• Leave a voice message via SpeakPipe with questions or comments
• Get in touch with Jeff Deuble via email: [email protected]
• Check out the interview with Greg Deuble (Jeff's brother) They Never Told Me This in Church
• More interviews with those who studied their way out of the Trinity
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio

This is the second part of a conversation where Jerry Wierwille challenges Brandon Duke's soul-making theodicy. In particular, Wierwille raises the following questions:

1. Why is hiddenness and epistemic distance considered a necessity for moral development considering the biblical examples where people experienced God and still retained their ability to make real moral choices either to obey or reject him?
2. How can the four Ds (death, decay, deprivation, and damage) be considered good when scripture calls death itself God's enemy?
3. Considering that evil and suffering are not 100% effective in bringing about moral development and are in some cases even deleterious to that end, how can soul-making work as a thoroughgoing theodicy?

—— Links ——

• Leave a voice message via SpeakPipe with questions or comments
• Get in touch with Brandon Duke on his website: TruthBorn
• See other episodes with Jerry Wierwille
• Get in touch with Wierwille at his website
• More episodes and posts about the problem of evil and suffering
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio

In our last two episodes, Brandon Duke laid out his way of answering the question of why God allows so much suffering in our world. He did so by putting forward a modified version of the late John Hick's soul-making theodicy. In this episode, Jerry Wierwille pushes back on a few issues with soul-making, preferring instead a classic free will theodicy. First we'll see how Duke's version of soul-making differs from John Hick's then we'll examine how soul-making lines up with the four major elements of the biblical meta-narrative: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Lastly we'll discuss whether moral improvement necessitates suffering.

—— Links ——

• Leave a voice message via SpeakPipe with questions or comments
• Michael Murray vs. Phil Harper on Unbelievable, discussing "Animal Suffering and God"
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on John Hick
• See Sean Finnegan's atonement research, outlining seven major views Christians have taken over the centuries
• Get in touch with Brandon Duke on his website: TruthBorn
• See other episodes with Jerry Wierwille
• Get in touch with Wierwille at his website
• More episodes and posts about the problem of evil and suffering
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio

In part one, Brandon Duke laid out some of the important groundwork for thinking about how a good and powerful God might have a world capable of experiencing immense amounts of evil and suffering. In our conversation today, we'll delve further into the idea of soul-making to explain why suffering like death, damage, decay, and deprivation along with the limitation of God's hiddenness are necessary conditions for a world where authentic moral decisions occur and human development becomes possible.

—— Books——

• God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views by Chad Meister, James Dew Jr.
• Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views by Gregory Boyd, David Hunt, William Craig, Paul Helm
• The Triumph of God over Evil by William Hasker
• Four Views on Divine Providence by Paul Helseth, William Craig, Ron Highfield, Gregory Boyd
• Divine Hiddenness: New Essays by Daniel Howard-Snyder, Paul Moser

—— Links ——

• Leave a voice message via SpeakPipe with questions or comments
• Get in touch with Brandon Duke on his website: TruthBorn
• Check out Duke’s videos at the Unitarian Christian Alliance YouTube Channel
• Watch Duke’s Trinity debate
• Also check out this six part series on various theories of divine foreknowledge, including Calvinism, Arminianism, and Open Theism.
• More episodes and posts about the problem of evil and suffering
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library

If God is so good and powerful, why is there so much evil in our world? Although you might retort, "It's because humanity fell into sin and we are all suffering the consequences." Such an answer merely pushes the question back one step, since God is the one who determined just how fallen our world would become once sin entered the picture. Why doesn't he allow more suffering or less? What are his aims in having the world be how it actually is? Why doesn't he intervene more to stop harm? Brandon Duke has wrestled with this question extensively and today he'll provide a lay of the land to help you think through the issue. He breaks up the problem into three categories (1) human evil, (2) natural suffering, and (3) God's hiddenness. Today he'll cover a number of presuppositions about God's knowledge that play into how we approach evil as well as what God's objectives are that he ultimately will bring to pass.

Here is the full John Hick quote that Duke paraphrased in this episode:

"We can imagine a paradise in which no one can ever come to any harm.  Instead of having its own fixed structure, the world would be plastic to human wishes.  Or perhaps the world would have a fixed structure, and hence the possibility of damage and pain, but a structure that is whenever necessary suspended or adjusted by special divine action to avoid human pain. Thus, for example, in such a miraculously pain-free world, one who falls accidentally from a high building would presumably float unharmed to the ground; bullets would become insubstantial when fired at a human body; poison would cease to be poison; water to drown, and so on.  We can at least begin to imagine such a world, but... a world in which there can be no pain or suffering would also be one without moral choices and hence no possibility of moral growth and development. For in a situation in which no one can ever suffer injury or be liable to pain or suffering, no distinction would exist between right and wrong action.  No action would be morally wrong, because no actions could ever have harmful consequences; likewise, no action would be morally right in contrast to wrong.  Whatever the values of such a world, its structure would not serve the purpose of allowing its inhabitants to develop from self regarding animality to self giving love."

—— Books——

• God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views by Chad Meister, James Dew Jr.
• Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views by Gregory Boyd, David Hunt, William Craig, Paul Helm
• The Triumph of God over Evil by William Hasker
• Four Views on Divine Providence by Paul Helseth, William Craig, Ron Highfield, Gregory Boyd
• Divine Hiddenness: New Essays by Daniel Howard-Snyder, Paul Moser

—— Links ——

• Get in touch with Brandon Duke on his website: TruthBorn
• Check out Duke's videos at the Unitarian Christian Alliance YouTube Channel
• Watch Duke's Trinity debate
• Also check out this six part series on various theories of divine foreknowledge, including Calvinism, Arminianism, and Open Theism.
• More episodes and posts about the problem of evil and suffering
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3

When Joshua Anderson left home and attended a secular college, the environment bombarded him with skepticism and criticism of Christianity.  He internalized the general attitude manifested on campus from professors, students, and text books to such a degree that he began doubting his faith.  He fell into a two year period of existential despair as he desperately read book after book trying to find satisfying answers to his nagging anxieties about Christianity.  In this episode he shares how he was able to escape his dark night of the soul and reclaim his walk with God.  If you've ever struggled with your own doubts about God's existence or the bible's veracity, or the Christian worldview, this episode will help you understand the mental forces at work as well as the limits of absolute certainty.

—— Links ——

• More Joshua Anderson podcasts
• See Anderson's 5 part evangelism class, called "Announcing the Kingdom"
• Visit Anderson’s website Pascal’s Jacket
• More episodes about doubt
• If you’d like to support Restitutio, you can donate here.
• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library