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Date
September 25, 2025 at 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM EDT
Location
Chesterton House’s Theological Society presents:
Is the True God of the Bible Nonviolent? Making sense of God’s coercion in the Old Testament and the New
September 25th, 2025 | 1:00pm
Readers of the Old and New Testament cannot escape being confronted by morally challenging passages. How are we to understand God’s injunctions to drive out the Canaanites from the land, to utterly wipe out the Amalekites, and the many stories that depict God acting violently against many peoples, including his own people Israel?
One option is to deny that any of these things actually originated in God, on the hypothesis that God reveals himself definitively in Jesus Christ in his power-surrendering, non-violent, and self-giving love on the cross. This is the route that pastor and theologian Gregory Boyd has taken. With a christocentric hermeneutic in hand, he reinterprets OT passages and argues that coercive force never in fact stems from God or is commanded by God; to the contrary, God hates violence through and through.
Philosopher and apologist Paul Copan, on the other hand, argues that Boyd underestimates indications of God’s coercive judgment that are revealed in the New Covenant itself, thus leading to a view that stresses greater continuity between the Old and New Testament depictions of God.
Join us as at Theological Society on Sept 18, 2025 at 1pm, as we welcome Paul Copan in person to wrestle through these matters and engage him in conversation. The Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University, Paul Copan has authored more than 50 books, including the popular Is God a Moral Monster? and its companion volume, the award-winning Is God a Vindictive Bully?
Paul Copan; Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics, Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach, FL
Paul Copan (Ph.D., Philosophy, Marquette University) is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach, Florida. He teaches in the M.A. in Philosophy of Religion at PBA, which also offers an undergraduate degree in Christian Apologetics. For six years, he served as president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.
He is author or editor of 45 books, and his books have been translated into over a dozen languages. He has also contributed essays to over 70 books, both scholarly and popular, and he has written many articles published in professional journals. He has done work in the philosophy of religion, ethics, human dignity and rights, Old Testament ethical challenges, Christian apologetics, the impact of the Christian faith in history, and various theological topics as well. His books include The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues, A Little Book for New Philosophers, Christianity Contested: Replies to Critics’ Toughest Questions, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics, Is God a Moral Monster? and Is God a Vindictive Bully?
Paul is currently chair of the Tyndale Fellowship Philosophy of Religion Study Group (UK). In 2017, he was a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University and once again at Oxford (Oriel College) in 2024. Paul and his wife, Jacqueline, have six children, and they reside in West Palm Beach, Florida. His website is www.paulcopan.com. He is also part of the team that contributes to the online Worldview Bulletin—a site that explores issues related to the Christian worldview, apologetics, philosophy, science, and culture (https://worldviewbulletin.substack.com/).
