Books by "Andrew Ter Ern Loke"
3 books found
The central question addressed in this book is whether Paul thought that Christ Jesus pre-existed in heaven, "in the form of God," through whom all things were made, before being sent into the world to be born of a woman, in the likeness of sinful flesh. A significant body of scholarship these days, both conservative and critical, supports the view that he did. Andrew Perriman examines the assumptions and reasoning that underlie this consensus, and makes a thorough and innovative case for reading the relevant texts from the narrow and distinctive perspective of the gentile mission. How would pagans and post-pagan believers have heard and retold the back-story of the one whom they knew only as the exalted Lord who would one day rule the nations? Such an angle of enquiry sheds fascinating, and sometimes quite startling, new light on the many exegetical difficulties that attend this aspect of Paul's Christology--not least in respect of the opening lines of the extraordinary Christ encomium in his letter to the Philippians. But it also yields compelling insight into the significance of Jesus for the Pauline mission and, indeed, for the ancient pagan world.
Being divine seems to entail being omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, but the New Testament portrays Jesus as having human properties. It seems logically impossible that any single individual could possess such mutually exclusive sets of properties. A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation aims to provide a critical reflection of these challenges and to offer a compelling response integrating aspects from analytic philosophy of religion, systematic theology, and historical-critical studies.
This book develops a novel argument which combines the Kalam with the Thomistic Cosmological Argument. It approaches an ongoing dispute concerning whether there is a First Cause of time from a radically new point of view, namely by demonstrating that there is such a First Cause without requiring the controversial arguments against concrete infinities and against traversing an actual infinite (although the book presents original defenses of these arguments as well). This book also develops a novel philosophical argument for the Causal Principle, namely that ‘everything that begins to exist has a cause’, and offers a detailed discussion on whether a First Cause of time can be avoided by a causal loop. It also addresses epistemological issues related to the Cosmological Argument which have been relatively neglected by recent publications, and demonstrates (contra Hawking et al) the continual relevance and significance of philosophy for answering ultimate questions.