What is the true nature of God? How should we understand monotheism? What about heresy? In today’s interview, I ask Dr. Dale Tuggy about his new book, Monotheism, Heresy, and the Bible, published by Theophilus Press. Our discussion ranges from handling proof-texts that call Jesus “God” to the role of logic in sorting out doctrine to how and when it’s appropriate to call a belief a heresy. We also talk about the tendency of Trinitarians to defend their doctrinal convictions by appealing to mystery.
In case you don’t know him, Tuggy is an analytic philosopher with a BA from Biola, an MA from Claremont, and a PhD from Brown University. He had a career teaching philosophy and adjacent subjects at the State University of New York at Fredonia for 18 years after which he founded the Unitarian Christian Alliance to help unitarian Christians connect with each other, promote scholarship, host conferences, publish books, and participate in debates.
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—— Links ——
- Get Dale Tuggy’s book, Monotheism, Heresy, and the Bible
- More about Tuggy at blog Trinities.org and at the UCA website.
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- Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library.
Christadelphian Devil debate: https://www.youtube.com/live/jHQK0YkPhZM?si=0OzxOaNxRh5xVx9R
Hi Sean, I met you at the Dr Tuggy vs Dr Bird debate in Australia! In this episode you talked about organising a debate about the existence of Satan and demons from a Christadelphian view. I’ve given the link to my one above! I’m a Christadelphian, and my opponent was some sort of Unitarian.
Regarding the idea of probing the understanding of who or what Satan is, then I’ve chatted to Jonathan Burke, who you met in New Zealand.
He’s debated this with Anthony Buzzard, and published on the subject.
He and I agreed that a chat would lead to better understanding rather than going for a win or loose debate.
He’s very happy to connect with you on the subject to improve people’s understanding on this topic. As you say, not many actually study it having taken the current traditional position as truth.
Please contact me, David j Fenton or Jonathan directly if you have his details. I’m the treasurer of the UK uca International conference, hence we met briefly last year.