Culture Influencers: Joshua R. Farris

Dr. Joshua R. Farris, assistant professor of Theology, participated in “The Nature of God: Personal and a-personal concepts of the divine,” a summer study and conference at the end of July leading into August. While there, he was a part of a summer study that included three instructors: Christoph Jager, Yujin Nagasawa, and Thomas Jay Oord. During this time, the participants discussed differing conceptions of God. Dr. Farris also presented a paper criticizing emergent-theism. During this time, Dr. Farris was able to collaborate and get to know several well known philosophers and theologians like John Kwanvig, Thomas Schartl, Georg Gasser, Simon Kittle, R.T. Mullins, Matthias Remenyi, among others.

Dr. Farris also recently co-authored an article with the Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies entitled quite provocatively, “This is My Beloved Son, Whom I hate? A Critique of the Christus Odium Variant of Penal Substitution.” In this article, the authors critically engage with a recent development in some quarters of American evangelicalism that seem to affirm not only a broken Trinity, but that God the Father pours out his perfect hatred, not on humanity, but no humanity’s substitute–Christ. The authors show that this development is a dangerous piece of theology and offer several critiques of it (e.g., biblical, creedal and theological).

The authors have also written a more popular level piece criticizing the same theory on Patheos.