a Systematic Theology of Love with Thomas Jay Oord

About this episode

Thomas Jay Oord discusses his new book, a Systematic Theology of Love, exploring themes of love, God, and progressive theology.

Okay, I genuinely don't know how many times Tom Oord has been on this podcasttwenty plus times, but this one felt different, because Tom has officially done the thing: he wrote a Systematic Theology of Love, Volume One, which is also his 50th book, which means his wife has had to endure approximately 50 different versions of "another love book." We dug into what makes this project unusual — a progressive, open relational systematic theology organized around love as its orienting concept, built on abductive reasoning rather than deductive certainty, which turns out to matter a lot when the thing you're centering is inherently vulnerable, risky, and relational. Tom walked us through his claim that God is a universal spirit who is genuinely material without having a localized body, why he's done with creatio ex nihilo and what his very Latin replacement actually means, the distinction between animate organisms and inanimate aggregates (rocks, it turns out, are great for explaining panpsychism), and why he's invented a new word — Gino-Theology — to talk about God as a dynamic becoming rather than a static being. We also covered why he thinks Whitehead solved both the problem of evil…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Tripp Fuller

Guest: Thomas Jay Oord

Topics covered

• systematic theology
• love
• progressive theology
• abductive reasoning
• panpsychism
• problem of evil
• Christology

Keywords

• systematic theology
• love
• Thomas Jay Oord
• Gino-Theology
• abductive reasoning
• panpsychism
• problem of evil
• Christology

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Systematic Theology of Love, Volume One, Gino-Theology

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