The Christian Vanguard

I was asked to give a short talk to the Newman club here at CSULB, and they asked me to answer the question: How did you fall in love with God? Now, I'm not the sentimental type, and this was definitely out of my comfort zone, but they asked for a short 5 minute talk, and I figured it wasn't that bad. So here is what I wrote up. I didn't read it out, but I typed it so that when I gave the talk, I knew in my mind what to say. Here it is.  How I Fell In Love With God Many of you have already heard my long and dry conversion story from atheism, that is, my move from believing that there was no such thing as God and no such person as Jesus, to not only believing such people did exist, but that they were legitimately Lord of my life. While many people are interested in the arguments and evidences of my beliefs, I don’t really talk about how my relationship with God developed. I’ve said a lot about how I came to know God, but not how I came to love God.  The two are ...

I came across an open air preacher at CSULB. He didn't seem any kind of offensive or distasteful like many others are. I begin to talk to him at the 21:30 mark when he revealed to us that he was an Open Theist . I didn't really communicate what I was trying to communicate all that well. I haven't looked into Open Theism in like five years, so I was extremely rusty. Besides, he seemed kinda friendly, and didn't care so much if I didn't slam-dunk on this point. The point I was trying to articulate was this: God makes promises. These promises are special, infallible, because they are guaranteed. There is no way they could be false. However, in Open Theism, this is not necessarily true. It's possible that some state of events in the future may not occur even if God says they will occur. Perhaps in practice God never makes a mistake in Open Theism, but so long as it is possible, and necessity is a necessary condition for infallibility, then in principle, God could b...