The purpose of the dissertation was to analyze Elihu Palmer's critical responses to Christianity as an historical witness to what Christianity was in his lifetime (1764-1806). Palmer's life story, following the memoir by John Fellows primarily, was interwoven chronologically with analyses of his publications. The first chapter traced Palmer's eventful first thirty-one years. Born and reared on a farm in Connecticut, Palmer graduated from Dartmouth College in 1787. After supplying the pulpit of First Presbyterian Church, Newtown (Queens), New York, he moved to Augusta, Georgia, where he studied law and lectured on deism. For his denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ, he was fired from a Philadelphia church belonging to the Society of Universal Baptists. He advertised in Philip Freneau's National Gazette and the General Advertiser (later the Aurora) that he would lecture against Christ's divinity. However, Episcopal Bishop William White intimidated landlords to prevent Palmer and John Fitch from renting a public hall for the lecture. Palmer completed his legal studies in western Pennsylvania and returned to Philadelphia in 1793 to open his law practice. He then was blinded in a Yellow Fever epidemic and resumed preaching deism. The second chapter included analysis of Palmer's publications during his first five years in New York City. His perceptions of Christian doctrines and their social impact were discussed. The last section traced Palmer's tour through Philadelphia and Baltimore as reported in Dennis Driscol's newspaper, the Temple of Reason, and John Hargrove's short-lived Temple of Truth. The third chapter contrasted the deist movement's potential during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson with its rapid decline after the return of Thomas Paine to America. Palmer's bitterness toward Christianity and his failure to articulate a positive message in competition with revivalists were considered. His belabored critique of the Bible in his magazine, Prospect, was interpreted as a cause of the American deist movement's decline. The conclusion suggested that Palmer's antithetical relationship to Christianity contributed to the rise of Christian social reform, the further separation of church and state, and biblical criticism.

How exactly could God achieve infallible foreknowledge of every future event, including the free actions of human persons? How could God exercise careful providence over these same events? Byerly offers a novel response to these important questions by contending that God exercises providence and achieves foreknowledge by ordering the times. The first part of the book defends the importance of the above questions. After characterizing the contemporary freedom-foreknowledge debate, Byerly argues that it has focused too narrowly on a certain argument for theological fatalism, which attempts to show that the existence of infallible divine foreknowledge poses a unique threat to the existence of creaturely libertarian freedom. Byerly contends, however, that bare existence of infallible divine foreknowledge cannot threaten freedom in this way; at most, the mechanics whereby this foreknowledge is achieved might so threaten human freedom. In the second part of the book, Byerly develops a model for understanding the mechanics whereby infallible foreknowledge is achieved that would not threaten creaturely libertarian freedom. According to the model, God infallibly foreknows every future event because God has placed the times that constitute the history of the world in primitive earlier-than relations to one another. After defending the consistency of this model of the mechanics of divine foreknowledge with creaturely libertarian freedom, the author applies it to divine providence more generally. A novel defense of concurrentism is the result.

In this ground-breaking study, Jc Beall shows that the fundamental "problem" of Christology is simple to see from the role that Christ occupies: the Christ figure is to have the divine and essentially limitless properties of the one and only God but Christ is equally to have the human, essentially limit-imposing properties involved in human nature, limits essentially involved in being human. The role that Christ occupies thereby appears to demand a contradiction: all of the limitlessness of God, and all of the limits of humans. This book lays out Beall's contradictory account of Jesus Christ — and thereby a contradictory Christian theology.

First Published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings addresses the problems an Anselmian perfect being faces in contexts involving unlimited options. Recent advances in the theory of vagueness, the metaphysics of multiverses and hyperspace, the theory of dynamic or sequential choice, the logic of moral and rational dilemmas, and metaethical theory provide the resources to formulate the new challenges and the Anselmian responses with an unusual degree of precision. Almeida shows that the challenges arising in the unusual contexts involving unlimited options sometimes produce metaphysical surprise.