omnibenevolence

• the Christian understanding of God holds unequivocal that God's nature is love

  1 John 4: 7-21

  vs 16: "God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him"

  OT: "hesed" - Hebrew word for God's love for Israel

  • God's love is not caused/ deserved, he simply loves because it is in his nature - it is one of his attributes
• Unfailing love

  God's love = unfailing - Psalm 62

  vs Noah's ark - Genesis 6:5-8

  'The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.”
• Challenge 


  Problem of evil

  • evidential POE - Mill, Rowe and Dostovesky - unnecessary and extreme cases of evil point to a sadistic, malevolent and unloving God
  • if God was loving then evil/suffering would not exist
• Response to challenge

  Aquinas

  • using analogy - God is infinitely greater than the love we know and can describe - analogy of proportion

  
  

  • we cannot fully understand the love of God and his actions

  
  

  • God does not leave us to suffer alone - God in human form as Christ suffered with us - God is with us in our pain - even when we don't understand the reasons why - Job

  
  

  • despite our suffering we can be confident in God's love and life after death where all will be revealed
• Moltmann: God does not just sit outside of time being perfect and immutable - he gets involved with us and shares our pains - Jesus' crucifixion

  • he explored Christian theology as a result of his own experiences in WWII
  • he concluded that God exists within time rather than in the timeless, eternal way that Anselm suggests
• Swinburne


  Swinburne says God is everlasting is because he thinks God can change. He disagrees with the idea that being perfect is based on being immutable (an idea that comes from Plato and Aquinas). A loving God must be able to change - an unchanging God would be a “lifeless thing” and it would not be possible to have a relationship with Him. Therefore, God must be within time. King Hezekiah example.