| Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
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The 10th and 7th most influential philosophers 1990-2020.
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| Ever since I became a Christian as a teenager, I’ve longed to make a difference in the world for Christ, to have an impact for the Kingdom of God. You can imagine, then, how gratified and encouraged—not to say bowled over!—I was to learn that Academic Influence has ranked me as the tenth most influential philosopher in the world over the last three decades (1990-2020)! What is especially significant is that these rankings are not just someone’s subjective opinion but are computed according to an algorithm that takes into account such objective data as number of citations of one’s work. According to Forbes magazine, “Using machine-learning technology, . . . Academic Influence searches open-source data in two massive sources. . . for papers, chapters, books, and citations to individuals worldwide. Collectively, these databases contain billions of continuously updated data points about millions of individuals’ achievements.” I was especially thrilled to be ranked just behind my philosophical role model Alvin Plantinga at number seven.
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| At the same time, through the various ministries of Reasonable Faith we have also been able to touch the life of the man in the street as well. Just this week I received in the mail a popular book totally out of my field with a letter from the author in which he reported,
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| May God guide this man along his spiritual journey to a saving knowledge of Christ!
It is deeply humbling to receive such reports, and we share them with you as an encouragement to all of you who support and pray for us and our ministry.
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| Once again the past month was busy with appearances on various social media. One particularly important interview I did was with Melissia Travis for Christianity Today on my work on the historical Adam. Melissa is such an intelligent interviewer that we had a very profitable conversation about the issues. In the same vein, I appeared with Joshua Swamidass, author of The Genealogical Adam and Eve, on Justin Brierly’s podcast “Unbelievable,” contrasting and comparing our two proposed models of the historical Adam.
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| I did an extremely interesting interview with the philosopher R.T. Mullins, who has declared “the end of the timeless God,” on God’s relationship to time and creation. Mullins’ reservations about divine timelessness tend to be bound up with his scepticism about divine simplicity, which I also share. Freed of that doctrine, divine timelessness without creation is quite defensible, I think, and Ryan did a great job of being a sympathetic interviewer.
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| More contentious was my appearance on the podcast “Pints with Aquinas” along with the Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin. A great many Catholics are benefiting from Reasonable Faith material, and so my desire is to reach out to them and build bridges, as I did in my public dialogue with Bishop Robert Barron. Unfortunately, Jimmy kept raising objections that my positions were incompatible with specifically Catholic doctrines, thereby fostering division rather than unity. Fortunately, there were also numerous other philosophical issues raised in the course of our discussion that viewers can profit from.
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| Finally, I did an interview for a podcast in Brazil, where our ministry is touching many lives, as it is throughout Latin America. Kevin Harris and I also recorded another round of “Reasonable Faith” podcasts, including a very timely one on recent Supreme Court decisions supporting religious liberty.
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I have had a recent paradigm shift concerning the publication of my projected systematic theology. I had intended to write the whole multi-volume work before publishing any of it, so that I could revise the earlier volumes after finishing the later ones. Now I’ve come to realize that such job of revising could itself take years, the task is so huge! The Scottish call such a task “painting the Forth Bridge”—by the time you finish painting the long bridge over the Firth of Forth you’ve got to go back and start again!
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In my writing, I’m engaging the cutting edge work on each topic, some of it not yet even published. So I’ve decided to publish each volume consecutively as they are finished, so that each volume will be on the cutting edge as it appears. My change of plans will be great news to folks who are eagerly waiting for this work to appear! I’ve already submitted proposals to two publishers for the multi-volume work. Asking a publisher for a contract on a multi-volume book that is not yet written is asking them to take a leap of faith in its author, so I hope we’ll be able to secure a contract.
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My writing is coming along very nicely! After spending a long time on divine simplicity, I had a good time of it with divine eternity, as I had already spent eleven years working on that topic. Now I’ve commenced work on divine omnipresence, on which there is a fairly sparse literature, and I have the added advantage of having a research assistant who is writing his doctoral dissertation on the subject! He has been a great help to me in guiding me into the important literature. Just as the debate over divine eternity concerns whether God is timeless or in time, so the debate over divine omnipresence concerns whether God is spaceless or in space.
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This month our Defenders class begins to meet again in person after more than a year of meeting virtually. Since we have completed the video recording of the entire Series 3 of Defenders, we’ll no longer be recording the class as we meet in person.
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to reading more this month on divine omnipresence!
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| For Christ and His Kingdom,
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I recently started following a YouTube channel that covers quite the variety of content. A video that instantly caught my eye was titled, "Was Jesus Actually Resurrected". Being from a rather secular topical channel I just had to click on it and check it out. It turns out that the video seemed fairly unbiased to either side and covered the arguments for and against the Resurrection of Christ. Listening to the narrator deal with the so called "issues" that atheists bring up a thought struck me; "These are almost word for word explanations that Bill uses to do away with these so called problems against the resurrection". So, I instantly checked the works cited link in the description and sure enough, your content from debates with people like Dr. Ehrman and previous talks at colleges were plentious in the works cited. How awesome is it, I thought, that your work is being used to defend the historicity of Christ's resurrection on a YouTube channel with over 10 million subscribers! Thank you for all your work and the endless content that I get to absorb to be a better warrior for the Kingdom of God.
Jonathan
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