David R. Larson

[This little paper contributed to a lasting differene in the dialogue between process theolgy and openness of of God theology. This difference has subsquently been most fully developed in Thomas J. Oord's "Essential Kenosis." DRL /20/2025] Process Theology and Openness of God Theology:  Necessarily, Essentially, Neither or Both:  How Does God Love the World? A Presentation by David R. Larson at the  November 2004 meetings of the American Academy of Religion  meetings in San Antonio, Texas “There is in God both supreme necessity and supreme contingency.” Karl Barth  God’s “conceptuality at once exemplifies  and establishes the categoreal conditions.”  Alfred North Whitehead  “God’s sociality cannot be satisfied by God’s self;   God’s love requires an object that is not God, namely, a world.”  Donna Bowman  [This little paper contributed to a lasting difference the dialogue between process theolgy and openness of of God...

Many of President Trump's supporters are ethics consequentialists. They believe that right actions are right because and only because they produce good results and wrong actions are wrong because and only because they produce bad results. What do we mean by "good" and "bad?" For whom must these results be good? When should they be evaluated? Who should evaluate them? Should they be evaluated on a case-by-case basis or a policy-by-policy basis? Different combinations of different answers to each of these five questions create a family of consequentialist ethics theories and not just one. For many supporters of President Trump the answers are as follows: A good result is an outcome that is an improvement in overall wellbeing. These results must first be good for the United States and then, if possible, good for other nations too. They should be evaluated by the voters in the 2028 elections. They should be evaluated on a policy-by-policy basis. There is a goo...

There now are three primary and overlapping schools of theological thought each of which has several versions, among Seventh-day Adventist in the local congregations of North America. All of them blame the delay of the second coming of Jesus on human failure. Although they differ in what they say this human failure is, they all say that it is the culprit. Last Generation Theology. Those in this group say that the Second Coming of Jesus has been delayed because not enough of us are perfectly reproducing the character of Christ. They are confident. They believe that there is only one true version of the Gospel and they know what it is. All others are counterfeits. They sometimes divide families, congregations, campuses by insisting that everybody must agree with them. They are theological exclusivists. They are swift to call other views "heresy" and those who hold them "heretics." They think in either/or terms. Either we are members of their group and see th...

More than  seven thousand religion scholars of all faiths and no faith at all convene each year at some city in the United States the weekend before the nation's Thanksgiving holiday for the joint annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).  They begin at noon on Saturday and continue through noon on Tuesday. The meetings of the AAR and SBL are usually integrated.They meet in the same hotels and convention centers.  Scholars may belong to either society or both.  They have the same schedules.  They print the sequence of their hundreds of sessions in the same thick 81/2 x 11 catalogue that also features many advertisements for new books and other things. When the catalogue is open, the times and places of the AAR sessions are often presented on the left page and those of the SBL are often presented on the right page.  Both societies host large plenary sessions in the evenings.  Even if they the...

What are the rules by which specialists in natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology properly distinguish truth from error? What procedural guidelines appropriately govern the work of specialists in social sciences such as psychology, sociology and anthropology? Do specialists in philosophy and theology have trustworthy rules for their work too? If not, why not? If so, in what ways are these norms similar to, and in what ways are they different from, the canons that we rightly expect natural and social scientists to follow? Because it responds to these questions with comprehensiveness, precision and clarity, and because it is one of the first publications by a younger theologian whose influence is growing, this book is worth studying today even though it was first published more than a dozen years ago.  Philip Clayton, who was born in 1956, earned degrees from Westmont College and Fuller Theological Seminary before studying the history of philosophy and theology for t...

David R. Larson presented this at the September 1, 2007 Memorial Service in Loma Linda, California for Ralph S. Larson (1920-2007). Our father was born on November 14, 1920 near Salem, Oregon. He was the eighth child in a family that would include five sons and four daughters, once his younger sister Doris was born. Of the nine children in his family of origin, she is the only one who still lives and we are delighted that she and her husband are with us today from Maryland. His mother’s family, which was of Irish and Scottish descent, traversed the Great Plains in the wagon trains of the nineteenth century. His father was an undocumented immigrant from Sweden. The men in his family worked in the forests, lumber mills, dairies and businesses of the Pacific Northwest. He might have lived a similar life had he not become a Seventh-day Adventist through the evangelistic campaigns and radio broadcasts of Elders Dan and Melvin Venden, the “true” Venden brothers who are respectively the uncle...