By Matthias Remenyi, Würzburg
- The question of suffering
Suffering, as Georg Büchner put it in a formulation that has become classic, is the “bedrock of atheism.”[1] That fact questions our theological designs and faith in God because it blocks any intellectual and existential synthesis. “The least quiver of pain,” Büchner continues, “makes a rent in the curtain of your creation from top to bottom.”[2] The experience of suffering, pain, and evil cannot be offset against anything because it is always the experience of one, of an individual. As such, it is always individual and unique and therefore refuses any attempt at systematizing relativization. At the same time, theology, as the scientific reflection on faith in God, cannot avoid dealing with this problem and working on it repeatedly. The irritation of faith associated with suffering and evil is too lasting and fundamental! It is the question of theodicy, i.e., the justice and venerability of a God believed to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent, given the existence of suffering and evil in the world, which poses itself to the faith in God.
Struggling for answers, even though it is clear that none of them is persuasive – this inevitable dilemma is faced by perhaps the most elaborate theodicy model we currently have: a defense of free will (free will defense) in combination with a defense of the natural order (natural law defense).[3] In short, this model states that the central goal of creation for God is to create free beings who can reciprocate his love. God wanted to create fellow lovers. Love, however, can only flourish in freedom, which presupposes the ability to choose between given possibilities. Those who can choose can also choose the wrong, the bad, and the evil. So, the possibility of free choice is necessarily connected with moral ability and culpability. According to the argument of the free will defense, the possibility of moral evil, wickedness, and culpably caused suffering is consequently grounded in the higher good of free will, which must exist to be able to love God truly.
But how can the question of physical suffering and evil in nature be explained? Despite environmental destruction and anthropogenic climate change, humankind cannot be held responsible for all natural disasters, tsunamis, earthquakes, or even coronaviruses. This is where the natural law defense comes into play. It says that the concrete form of creation with its basic parameters under natural law, as we find them, was necessary for free and self-conscious life to develop evolutionally at all over millions of years. If the initial conditions of our universe had been only minimally different, if the natural order with its quasi-legal regularities had not exactly been as it is now, then – so the argument goes – there could not have been any self-conscious life on our planet. Concerning God, the point of the argument is: God does not want wickedness and evil, suffering and pain, neither on account of humans nor as a natural given, but he permits all of this so that there can be free creatures at all and with them faith, hope, and love in the world.
Perhaps the most outstanding merit of Thomas Jay Oord’s book The Uncontrolling Love of God is to have once again revealed in a new and radical way the difficulties associated with this standard model of theodicy. It is no coincidence that he begins his reflections with particularly pithy examples that raise the question of theodicy of an ethically perfect and historically powerful God in the face of overtly innocent suffering: the bombing of the Boston Marathon, the hurled stone that smashes through the car window and kills the mother of two children; the little girl suffering from a rare disease; the African woman whose family is killed in the war and is the victim of the cruelest rape. The list could go on and on; these days – I am writing this article at the end of March 2020 – the COVID-19 patients worldwide are, of course, particularly in mind.
All these horrible events converge on the one question so disturbing for the faith in God: Is it plausible to assume that God permits all this, although he could prevent it if he wanted to? What reasons could be conceivable that are so strong that a God who permits such suffering could nevertheless be thought of as ethically perfect, in other words, as a loving God? Can the free will defense bear this burden of justification?
In this argument, everything depends on the difference between causation and permission – and on the existentially and intellectually pressing question of whether such a distinction is suitable for God’s justice in the face of pain and suffering, wickedness and evil. A critical intermediate step in clarifying this question is the concept of genuine evil. For Thomas Oord, a genuine evil is an evil that, even with the inclusion of all conceivable circumstances, makes the world worse than it would have been without this evil.[4] Classical school theology speaks here of an intrinsice malum, meaning something inherently bad that a higher-ranking good could not morally justify under any circumstances and in any possible course of the world. This concept of genuine evil is crucial because it ignites the question of theodicy with particular poignancy: in the face of evils, without which this world would, in any case, be a better world or which in no possible world could be justified by a higher-ranking good, a naive free will defense fails, as does the common distinction between causation and permission evil by God. Even a God who willingly permits genuine evil, although he could prevent it – in other words: that God as conceived by the classic theological concept of divine permission of evils for the sake of our freedom – is guilty of failure to render assistance. Any talk about a loving God or a benevolent, best-working divine providence must face this challenge. Otherwise, it becomes tacky and cheap. This is the urgent and vital homework that Thomas Oord’s thesis has given theology anew.
- The basic idea: Essential Kenosis
What does Oord’s proposed solution look like? In the center of his considerations is the concept of essential kenosis, i.e., the – depending on the preferred translation – the essential, substantial, or intrinsic kenosis of God. With the word kenosis, Oord adopts a key concept from the New Testament hymn to the Philippians (Phil 2:7), which in German is mostly rendered with the somewhat cumbersome expression Selbstentäußerung (self-renunciation). With Thomas Oord, however, the word gains a contoured meaning: essential kenosis means God’s love that gives itself away, does not control others, and does not force anything; hence the book title: The Uncontrolling Love of God. Only such a love of God, which releases the creatures non-violently, encourages and empowers them in an enticing and wooing dialogue to cooperate freely with their Creator, can give an at least somewhat satisfactory answer to the question of theodicy. The decisive point here is that God does not have to decide willingly, as in conventional theological concepts, to give Himself away in the form of powerlessness but that this movement of unreservedly giving Himself away is a constitutive, necessary part of God’s nature. Oord contrasts the widespread interpretation of kenosis as a voluntary self-restraint of God with the essential, substantial kenosis. Through the attribute essential, the concept of kenosis, which generally describes the relationship between divine and human nature in Christ, becomes a characterization of the divine being as a whole or modeling of the entire God-world relationship.
Oord wants to get serious with the thesis that God is not just a somehow loving reality, but that he is love itself in a broad sense of the word: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). But what does that mean in terms of theological theorizing? For Oord, this means love is not just a divine attribute alongside other divine attributes, but it is the logical and factual primary element from which everything else in the concept of God is to be determined, including those attributes that are usually more in the foreground of the theological reflection, especially omnipotence, absolute sovereignty and also freedom of God. But if God’s innermost being is love, then he cannot choose not to love. He necessarily loves in this sense: “God loves necessarily”.[5] 2 Timothy 2:13 reads, “If we are faithless, He [God, M.R.] remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.” For the most part, this verse is understood to mean that once God has made a decision, he will stick to it over time. Oord reads it as a metaphysical statement of the essence.
The relevance of this theoretical model for the theodicy is that the morally so subtle distinction between actual causation and merely willful permission of genuine evil by God no longer applies. Thus, the accusation of failure to render assistance also falls away. Oord rightly points out repeatedly that for God to be genuinely thought of as worthy of worship and faith, He must not undermine our minimum moral standards. No loving father or mother would, however, with seeing eyes, let the beloved child run into ruin with reference to its free will. In contrast, Oord’s central thesis is: even if He wanted it, “God cannot unilaterally prevent genuine evil.”[6] Just as mermaids cannot run a marathon, according to Oord’s telling image,[7] God cannot arbitrarily intervene in the creation and force anything in it without the help of the creatures. It is not in His nature, for divine love limits divine power in this respect. The answer that Oord proposes to the question of theodicy consists in a further progression in conventional kenosis theologies. In contrast to a mere willful self-limitation of God according to his creation decree, Oord postulates an essential-ontic powerlessness of God, which results from his innermost being as love. Because love can never force anything because love cannot unilaterally control others, therefore, without the free cooperation of creatures, God cannot prevent genuine evil. He cannot do it: God Can’t – that’s the descriptive title of Oord’s latest book, which unfolds central ideas from Uncontrolling Love again for a broader audience.[8]
Is God thus incapable of action, condemned to passively observing world events that he cannot influence? In other words, does Oord present a deism that may be morally pleasing but ultimately shallow? Not at all! The question of God’s action or work in the world is theologically hotly debated, and the debates about it fill libraries. Even the question of whether one can appropriately speak of God’s action at all is by no means undisputed. Thomas Jay Oord, however, is convinced: God can act in the world, and he acts not despite, but precisely because of, his nature as love, uninterruptedly and most effectively. But he does not act by coercion, and he does not intervene in creation from outside.
Oord’s specific definition of love provides an essential aid to understanding this concept of divine action. According to Thomas Oord, love is by no means a romantic feeling that somehow overwhelms you, makes you unable to think clearly, and keeps you trapped in an emotional bubble. Love is more different than the much-praised butterflies in the stomach. In German, one would perhaps characterize this more as infatuation. For Oord, real love is characterized by a deep sympathy, which guides action insofar as it knows the well-being of the loved one as the sole goal of action. Whoever loves acts intentionally, in a dialogical or answering, reciprocal relational event, supported by deep empathy and sympathy, to promote the well-being of the beloved counterpart in the most comprehensive way possible.[9] This concept of love is in the background when Oord reflects on God’s actions in the world.
- Open and relational theology
In all of this, Thomas Jay Oord’s independent and original theological approach must also be considered, in which his theory of an essential kenosis and a non-controlling, loving action of God are embedded. The subtitle of Uncontrolling Love of God is An Open and Relational Account of Providence because this book is not just about a specific interpretation of the doctrine of divine providence (doctrine of providence in the narrower, school theological sense of the word) but about a new approach to the God-world relationship or the work of God in the world as a whole. However, this new approach is, and this is the decisive point, interdisciplinary. He wants to combine the best of two different theological schools of thought, open and relational theology, into a creative and theologically fruitful synthesis.
Thomas Jay Oord belongs to what is known as the Church of the Nazarene. This is an evangelical free church community that came into being in Los Angeles towards the end of the 19th century and stands in the tradition of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church. In 1908, the Church of the Nazarene was formally established in Texas by merging with two other similarly oriented denominations. Today it has over two million members in many countries around the world. As with other evangelical free churches or evangelical groups, the sanctification of personal life through cultivating an intense relationship with Jesus is central to their devotion. As a result, these movements often have an affinity with theologies that operate under the label of open theism. The suitability lies in the fact that open theists not only embrace a future that is also open to God (hence the label) but, in particular, that they see God in a thoroughly univocal sense as a loving person with whom we humans can enter into a truly personal and free relationship.[10] The concern for reading the Holy Scriptures that is as impartial and verbatim as possible plays a vital role in this. This open theism is one pole of Thomas Oord’s interdisciplinary project.
The other pole from which Oord forms his new (open and relational) theological approach is the process philosophy and theology inspired by Alfred N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, as he got to know them during his studies at the local Center for Process Studies in Claremont/ California in the form of thinkers like John Cobb or Philip Clayton. Here the concern to reconcile philosophy and possibly theology with the results of modern natural sciences is much stronger in the background. The theological variant of this way of thinking is usually panentheistic and assumes that God is inherently present in all things. Thus, so to speak, he lures, woos, and attracts them to the good from within. Here God is not so much the actor, as in open theism, who intervenes in the course of the world from the outside (interventionism), but rather the effective force in the created things, which leads them to creativity, ever-new vitality and – in the case of humans – to the doing of good. Oord’s idea of an equally effective and non-interventionist action of God cannot be understood without these two sources of his theology.
The bridge that connects both strands is, in addition to the common rejection of comprehensive divine foreknowledge, the criticism of the classical school-theological concept of God, which focuses on God’s inability to suffer, immutability, and timelessness. Both ways of thinking reject, for example, Thomas Aquinas’ assumption that God, because of his timeless immutability, stands in no real relationship to the world but only governs it from without through his eternal decrees. Instead, both open theism and process theology assume that creation unfolds feedback to God because God is a maximally empathetic reality that allows Himself to be deeply affected by everything that is. However, the question of theodicy also plays an essential role in the concern to combine both paradigms. It is this question that, according to Oord, makes clear the inadequacy of scholastic open theism and accordingly blurs the boundary between these two schools of thought.[11] In the meantime, on Oord’s initiative, a separate network of theologians of various backgrounds has been formed who are committed to the common concern of open and relational theology. In 2019, a Center for Open & Relational Theology was founded with a corresponding web presence.[12]
- Which god is worthy of worship?
How will Oord’s theological synthesis and its central content-related model proposal of essential kenosis be assessed? An intensive discussion must be reserved for a later occasion, but a few hints may still be possible at this point. The first thing to be emphasized is that Oord’s starting point with the question of theodicy helps strengthen the plausibility of faith in God in the face of hardship, suffering, and evil in the world. The probing question in the background is: Which god is ultimately worthy of worship? And what does the attribute of divine perfection mean? Oord answers that, because of the abyss of pain around us, only a God can be convincing, who not only suffers with us and all creatures but who as pure and deep love is in no way, not even in merely willful permission, responsible for the moral and natural evils, has high persuasive power. Oord rightly emphasizes that we can only entrust ourselves to God completely without reservation, without calculation, and without a vestige of servile fear if love is that essential quality in God himself, which, as Paul says in his hymn to love in First Corinthians, transcends everything else (cf. 1 Cor 13:13).
With one stroke, Oord swept away the last remnants of the old potentia absoluta Dei doctrine, which stands in the nominalist tradition and thinks of God first and foremost as absolute, unlimited omnipotence. The debate about God’s omnipotence also fills libraries. Can God, in his absolute omnipotence, also work the logically contradictory? Can he create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it himself? – This was asked in all seriousness in the theological tradition. But even for those who deny this, the following applies: if God’s central attribute is absolute omnipotence, which he can exercise in unlimited freedom, then he must first decide not to be angry and punish but to stand kindly and faithfully by his creation decree. As the psychoanalyst Tilman Moser once called it decades ago, the danger of “God-Poisoning” in view of such an image of God is great. Even if fortunately only very sporadically, there are voices in German-speaking Catholicism that play this card of God’s black pedagogy in the face of COVID-19. Once again: Oord’s essential kenosis has a plausibility advantage that should not be underestimated.[13]
But, of course, the Oordian theodicy model also has a price. The existentially relevant problem is, for example, whether such a God lets us hope at all. Oord tries to solve the problem of theodicy by radically limiting divine omnipotence, and with essential kenosis he goes beyond similar attempts such as those presented by, e.g., B. Hans Jonas and Jürgen Moltmann in the German-speaking region.[14] The pressing question is, of course, whether – and if so, how – such a limited God can still be thought of as a redeemer and savior of the world and humankind. To put it another way: Does not the very existence of suffering, pain, injustice, guilt, and evil in nature and in history call for that omnipotence of God which was previously curtailed in the name of precisely this suffering and evil?
When it comes to the question of natural evils, this touches – among many other things – on the phenomenon of entropy. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this is the degree of disorder that can remain the same or increase in closed systems but never decrease. All higher evolutionary developments and all complex systems of life must be wrestled with this structure-dissolving law of entropy. According to all we know physically, entropy will emerge as the winner in the process. Like many process theologians, Thomas Oord also assumes that God, through His immanence in creation in the spirit, constantly sets new creative impulses to promote vitality and self-organization. But with which concept of God, with which God-world relationship can it be made conceivable that God can also save the cosmos as a whole? What is the theological possibility of thinking about what Scripture and tradition metaphorically call the new heaven and the new earth? This is a challenge for any process theology, not just Oord’s specific approach. But it seems to me worth considering in this context as well.
The same applies to the phenomenon of moral evil, i.e., to anthropogenic suffering, to guilt, and wickedness. Here, the question arises as to God’s power to save history to ensure justice eschatologically. For Immanuel Kant, the post-mortem balancing of the natural and moral law, of factual happiness and moral worthiness of happiness, as illustrated by the Last Judgment metaphor, was essential not to deprive our moral convictions of their foundation. For him, the experience of the categorical imperative – that unconditional obligation that we feel when faced with morally relevant decisions – leads to the moral postulate of God.[15] Given the hardships and injustices of earthly history, only a God who is powerful in history can give hope for a happy ending, also for the victims, the lost and those marginalized in our time and in all times.
- Setting a new beginning
Ultimately, everything revolves around whether God can make a new beginning out of nothing. This is eschatological, i.e., concerning the so-called last things: can God create new life out of the emptiness of death? Oord expressly affirms the possibility of thinking of the resurrection of Jesus Christ but does not see the creaturely cooperation in the form of a however-to-be-imagined inclusion of the physical and spiritual elements of the earthly Jesus suspended.[16] This is difficult for me to imagine. I understand the resurrection of Jesus as an act of God on the dead Jesus of Nazareth. God can also create new life where we have reached the end of our potential, even where we can no longer cooperate in the absolute powerlessness and deepest passivity of deathly loneliness. In my opinion, such a hope for resurrection does not violate the theological demand for non-interventionism, which I also advocate (here, too, as in so many things, I am in complete agreement with Thomas Oord), because resurrection is a reality that goes beyond our empirically accessible categories of time and space. It is a redemptive and re-creative act of God in absolute historical transcendence. This also applies to the resurrection of the dead Jesus. I am convinced: a camera in Jesus’ tomb would not have recorded anything. Nevertheless, I firmly believe in the holistic, in other words: in the bodily resurrection from death, because this word means more and something different than the reassembly of catabolically decomposing cell matter (to avoid the somewhat crude reference to the decomposition of the corpse)[17]. Not to be misunderstood: Thomas Oord rightly speaks of participatory eschatology.[18] By this, he means the rejection of a divinely enforced universalism of salvation, in which God would have to override our free will and the perpetrator-victim difference. This does not put the hope of universal salvation or universal reconciliation with God after death in the wrong. But such an automatism would indeed be historically nihilistic. However, for God to win us in the encounter with Himself to a life in abundance in His kingdom, He must first be granted the power in faith to make a new beginning in the end of death of his own accord and without our involvement.
Protologically, that is, with regard to the beginning of creation, the same question arises: Can God create something new out of nothing? The open and relational theology advocated by Thomas Oord is fundamentally compatible with the idea of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. Nevertheless, he seems to approach this idea with a certain skepticism. Instead, Oord prefers to speak of creatio ex creatione a natura amoris, an incessantly continuing creation from the nature of God’s love.[19] What is meant by this is the idea that God is constantly creative by virtue of his loving nature. While God is indeed free to choose in which way He wants to be creatively active, He is not free not to create. That would contradict His nature as self-giving love. Of course, Oord is right insofar as the concept of a creation from nothing is highly unclear and needs explanation. He pours the faith of Abrahamic monotheism, that there can be no counter-god, no counter-divine, second primal principle besides God, into a catchy linguistic formula, but leaves open how this is to be imagined in more detail. For me, however, the thought of creatio ex nihilo is helpful because it expresses God’s radical world transcendence well, which is needed to be able to think of his equally profound world immanence. However, I agree entirely with Thomas Oord on this point, and it is necessary to hold on to it.
- Freedom and love in God
With the question of creation from nothing, we have arrived at the decisive point on which Oord’s concept wants to reflect even more deeply: the relation between freedom and love in God. Usually, speaking of creation from nothing emphasizes God’s total freedom toward his creation. Freedom is precisely the art of being able to make a new beginning. Freedom is the “faculty of beginning a state from itself,” as Immanuel Kant puts it.[20] God was completely free in the creation of the world. It would not have meant any deficiency for him if he had not created the world because he is, so one usually adds, already in himself – inner-Trinitarian – unlimited fullness of love, life, and relationships. However, it is not an entirely trivial theological problem how the divine fullness of relationships between three inner-Trinitarian persons who are devoted to each other in love can be thought of without running the risk of tipping over into tritheism. This applies in particular to social doctrines of the Trinity, which conceive the three persons in God as ego-conscious subjects with mind and will and corresponding to God’s nature as commerce of three freedoms. Conversely, for representatives of the classical Latin, mono-subjective doctrine of the Trinity, it is not always easy to argue how God can be conceived as the fullness of life and relationships if Father, Son, and Spirit can only be described as persons in a highly analogous sense.[21] It is precisely here that Oord’s creation-theological solution offers itself because, in his approach, God has always already realized His love and willingness to relate to creation.
Thomas Oord rightly points out that although he does not start his theology with inner-Trinitarian reflections, it is very much connectable to Trinitarian thinking; as shown, this applies in a unique way to Latin mono-subjective Trinitarian theology. Of course, this is not the end of our reflections on the interrelationship of freedom and love in God. How could it? And who could claim to have ever come to an end with it? I am impressed by the seriousness with which Oord spells out what it means to think of God as love. To the objection that love cannot be thought without freedom because love cannot be forced but can only flourish in freedom, he responds by pointing out that in his model, too, God has all freedom in the way of the concrete exercise of his loving care. How God makes his love effective is entirely within his freedom.[22] Ultimately, in thinking about both love and God’s freedom, we are dependent on analogies from the interpersonal realm and yet suspect the inadequacy of such comparisons. Thus, the hope remains that both love and freedom in God exceed our earthly horizon of experience by an infinite amount.
Most open theists attribute to God the structurally identical form of freedom as humans. They are convinced that God can do one way or the other under given conditions, i.e., that he has the same freedom to choose between morally significant options just as we do. In contrast to a freedom-theoretical compatibilism that seeks to think of freedom and necessity together, one speaks here of a libertarian conception of freedom. It is an interesting question where Thomas Oord’s theology would fit here. On the one hand, his cooperative and dialogical God-world model strongly suggests such libertarianism regarding divine freedom. On the other hand, his theology of creation and his skepticism towards creatio ex nihilo show that he wants to think of freedom in God as being shaped by love in a peculiar and, for me, very fascinating way. A whole cascade of follow-up questions erupts: Is freedom of choice the final word when we think about God’s freedom? Does it make sense to conceive temporally structured decision-making and deliberation processes in God analogous to our freedom decisions? On the other hand: Wouldn’t the libertarian freedom (of choice) of the human being, which can be assumed with good reasons, ultimately be assessed as somehow tragic and deficient? But what would this mean for the idea that man is made in the image of God?
Würzburg, im März 2020 Matthias Remenyi
[1] G. Büchner, Danton’s Death, trans. James Maxwell, London 1979, 44.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Cf. K. v. Stosch, Theodizee. Paderborn 2013, 56-69 (natural law defense), 87-111 (free will defense); A. Kreiner, Gott im Leid. Zur Stichhaltigkeit der Theodizee-Argumente. Freiburg 2005, 207-239 (free will defense), 321-393 (natural law defense).
[4] T. Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God. An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press 2015, 65: „Genuine evils are events that, all things considered, make the world worse than it might have been.“ I draw on my discussion of the English original in the following, including some verbatim transcriptions. Cf. M. Remenyi, Rez. T. Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God, in: ThRv 115 (2019) 313-315.
[5] T. Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God (fn. 4), 161.
[6] Ibid., 167.
[7] Ibid., 181.
[8] Cf. T. Oord, God Can’t. How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils. Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press 2019.
[9] Cf. T. Oord, Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos 2010, 15: “To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others […] to promote overall well-being.“ Cf. also the good account of the Oordian metaphysics of love in K. Vanhoozer, Love Without Measure? John Webster’s Unfinished Dogmatic Account of the Love of God, in Dialogue with Thomas Jay Oord’s Interdisciplinary Theological Account, in: O. Crisp; J. Arcadi; J. Wessling (ed.), Love, Divine and Human. Contemporary Essays in Systematic and Philosophical Theology. London / New York u. a.: T&T Clark 2019, 7-26, here 11-13; ibid., 11 citation above.
[10] Cf. J. Grössl, Gott als Liebe denken – Anliegen und Optionen des Offenen Theismus, in: NZSTh 54 (2012) 469-488; ibid., Die Freiheit des Menschen als Risiko Gottes. Der Offene Theismus als Konzeption der Vereinbarkeit von menschlicher Freiheit und göttlicher Allmacht (STEP 3). Münster 2015, esp. 21-26.
[11] Cf. A blog entry on Oord’s personal homepage, January 7, 2015: Open and Process Theologies Blur? – http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/open-and-process-theologies-blur (last viewed 12/22/2022).
[12] Cf. https://c4ort.com/ (last viewed 12/22/2022).
[13] Cf. Oord’s statement (Mar. 17, 2020) on the Corona pandemic and whether it is God’s will: http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/gods-will-and-the-coronavirus (last viewed 12/22/2022).
[14] Cf. H. Jonas, Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz. Eine jüdische Stimme. Frankfurt a. M. 1987; J. Moltmann, Gott in der Schöpfung. Eine ökologische Schöpfungslehre. Gütersloh 41993, 98-105.
[15] Cf. I. Kant, KpV, A 223-226.
[16] Cf. T. Oord, Analogies of Love between God and Creatures: A Response to Kevin Vanhoozer, in: O. Crisp; J. Arcadi; J. Wessling (ed.), Love, Divine and Human. Contemporary Essays in Systematic and Philosophical Theology. London / New York u. a.: T&T Clark 2019, 27-42, here 33f. in response to a query from Vanhoozers (cf. fn. 9): „He [Vanhoozer, M.R.] rightly summarizes me as believing this resurrection includes cooperation from Jesus’s mind/soul and Jesus’s bodily members.“
[17] Cf. M. Remenyi, Auferstehung denken. Anwege, Grenzen und Modelle personaleschatologischer Theoriebildung. Freiburg 2016, 270–298 (on the debate about the empty tomb of Jesus), 298 – 329 (on the theological interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus), 594–634 (on personal-eschatological model formation and my own theological model proposal, which conceives resurrection as a Gestalt change).
[18] Cf. T. Oord, Analogies of Love between God and Creatures (fn. 17), 36.
[19] Cf. T. Oord, Uncontrolling Love (fn. 4), 146 (FN 58).
[20] I. Kant, CPR, B 561 / A 533.
[21] A good overview is also offered here by K. v. Stosch, Trinität. Paderborn 2017, 82-112 (monosubjective models of a theology of Trinity), 113-136 (social or interpersonal models of a theology of Trinity).
[22] Cf. e.g. ibid., 35.