Justin is a great facilitator 👍🏽👍🏽

We do indeed need to be more savvy about our histories, both I and Mr. Wright come from a country that used to burn heretics.

It’s incredible how much ego influences the mental gymnastics that people go through trying to reconcile a concept like free will.

Thanks for posting.

What does NT wright believe about the Eucharist?

Understand that it's a fool's quest to make yourself travel far and wide only to do and to have what can be accomplished close to home. Likewise, you can count on always being lead a stray and come to learn nothing of truthful meaning by listening to contrived and delusional notions while the simple truth that protects is plain to the eyes. In this life some of the best lessons we can learn from are at our very feet. Often times, the more we do things the less we come to realize its whole significance. The seemingly simple chore of walking we do every day belies the early lessons we had to realize when learning how to walk. We can't ever forget that the most significant part of learning to walk is the first-step. We had to learn that if you get the first-step wrong the second-step is to fall down. Every walk begins with the first-step but if you get it wrong the next step in your trip will always be to fall down. Mr. Wright would offer the comment, "if we believe that God is the good and wise creator then evil doesn't make sense.......The danger then is if we as clever theologians or philosophers think we can make sense then we're saying that actually God created a world within which, yeah, there's a place for evil.......which is actually a very dark conclusion to reach." NT Wright would also state, "there is something then about the freedom of God and the freedom which God gives to creation, um, which remains a mystery." This life and the life we all live is not a life of absolutes but rather everything about us bears witness to the creator's paring that unites. There's no such thing as absolute free-will but instead our God given free-will is always paired with the witnessing-of-the-spirit. Free-will and the witnessing-of-the-spirit come in pairs and you can't have one without the other. If the lessons of history teach us anything about free-will is that unchecked free-will is only good for a season. Unchecked free-will is no different than a ship without a rotter. A ship without a rotter doesn't go anywhere but instead it remains in the same place until it gains its rotter. Our God given free-will is no different than a ship without a rotter. Motivation is the rotter to our free-will and in life the spirit will witness us choosing to be motivated by doing what we want or witness us choosing to be motivated by doing what is best. The question was asked, "Tom, many Christians like to use the Bible as a moral guide book and extrapolate from that what their fellow citizens must live by and the debate tends to circle around what good biblical politics looks like, personal moralism on the one side, and corporate moralism on the other, but can Christians really take the scripture and use them to tell the rest of the country what laws they must live under, does this get too close to a theocracy?" In his reply, Mr. Wright said ".......the God who is the father of Jesus Christ, who says I love you so much I'm giving my son to die for you, I love you so much I'm putting my spirit within you so that you can be genuine humans." The only difference between human beings and all of the creatures that exist on this earth is the one fact that our God given free-will always comes united with the witnessing-of-the-spirit. Thus the exercising of our free-will will have to be motivated by either the same impulses that motivates all of the lesser creatures on this earth or be motivated by the higher purpose that makes us genuine human beings. In order for the society-of-men to succeed, now and forever, we have to always assure that the first step we take is supported and balanced by the strength of knowledge and wisdom handed down to us so that the second step isn't one that leads you to fall down and remain in one place, but instead carries you along with peace and safety the full length of your travel. ReneB, Florida.

We might consider evil in context to the love God and love your neighbor commandments. Unlike the other regulations of law, love—if it's to be sincere at all—can't be simply commanded. So a Creator God would defeat enemies, heal disability, raise the dead and command nature—and did—with many genuinely loving him with "all their mind, soul and strength" as a result.

What God could not do by the same authority is make us love our neighbor—at least not without undoing the integrity of his intended image and likeness. The command to "love your neighbor as yourself" would need to be handled in a totally different way.

Every time I hear about suffering, I point to the cross. Christ obeyed in the MIDST of suffering and gave it purpose. Either it edifies us or frustrates us

Also ephesians

I wonder if the answer to why the problem of evil did not trouble pre-enlightenment people is that they believed in a young earth that was created completely good (no carnivores, no earthquakes etc)  that subsequently fell.

Once you accept that life from its beginning was locked into a titanic struggle for survival, and that drives the development of life itself, then the problem of evil becomes a lot more philosophically demanding because it now seems suffering is a tool used by God to create life.

The problem of evil and free will may just be one for believers in ancient texts to worry over but it doesn't reference to an offended god or indeed any notion of a 'creator'.   Evil committed by one person on another can simply be condemned because it is antisocial.

People confuse freedom with power. We have freedom to choose between offered choices. But we don't get to create our own choices. All the way down to choosing to be born. What people want is power not freedom. They want to create their own choices. Down to what they are.. Even though they did not create themselves

One listens to Godly people, sincere, humble, faithful, doing their best to explain evil to us (as best they can, and they recognise that their answers are imperfect), and one is comforted, carried along with the narrative. Then next day an innocent child is tortured to death by some depraved human, and the comfort melts away like snow in sun. Blessed are you whose theodicy carries your faith safe to the other side of such events.

The most recent intentional Theocracy was South Africa - the one with Apartheid! It was based on Dutch Reform theology, and it failed!
I look for the day when there will be a Theocracy, that of Jesus Christ. Until then I will fight for and support Western Liberal Socialist Democracy as exemplified by most of Europe, one in which the rights of all people are protected, religion is not imposed, and religion (or non religion) is protected. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And so I will not support any state attempt to impose the Bible - as interpreted by a select group of Bibliocrats  - on the people.

For both the atheist and the theist there is not free will and we have no control over the circumstances we find our selves in at each present moment. The pragmatic response is to say it is possible that a good God did create us as immortal souls and our souls are learning and growing becaus of experiencing the circumstances He has put us in. The pragmatist acts accordingly.

Everything is caught in the web of cause and effect, including what you think and do.  If free will exists, only God has it.  In fact, that might be what makes God God.

The basis of Christian redemption doctrines, the Fall, makes no sense from a free will aspect. Without knowledge of Good and Evil (which god forbids them from obtaining) no wisdom is possible, neither is sin. For if you have no knowledge of good or evil you wouldn't even be aware of the wrongness of an action.

There is no "problem of good" for atheists because the atheist does not believe that the universe is the product of a deity with a certain moral character. So, things we label as "good" can happen just as things that we "label" as evil can happen because the universe is mindless and indifferent. Even a theist that believes in a morally neutral creator doesn't have a problem of good or a problem of evil because there is no contradiction in that creator allowing some mixture of evil and good. There is only an issue when one posits that there is some omnipotent creator deity that is "all-good" or "all-evil" because we wouldn't expect to see instances of evil in the former case or instances of good in the latter case.

Refer to the book “Determined”. There really is no free will.

There is no problem of good nor evil for the non believer, it's been demonstrated that morality is developed slowly through evolutionary adaptation favouring altruism as a technique for survival