Abstract

What follows is a continuation of a debate that dates back to at least John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius but took on its naturalistic guise in the third generation of the Chicago school between Bernard Loomer and Bernard Meland. Basically, the argument pertains to whether God is to be associated with everything that is, including suffering and evil, or whether God is more rightly associated with what we take to be good or redemptive. Loomer defended the former position. Late in life, he came to embrace pantheism, arguing that God and nature are identical. The thesis of his 1987 essay, “The Size of God,” was that the divine is to be equated with the world in its ambiguous and mysterious entirety—with the “Whole...