Over the course of my long friendship with Zach Breitenbach, he has consistently shown a remarkable willingness to keep struggling with an issue until clarity comes. I recall that he used to be a wrestler, and it would appear that he still is! Like many of the luminaries in the history of apologetics, he is willing to sit with an issue, live and wrestle with questions, and give a topic the time and effort required to do it justice.
This delightful book is a product of such laudable patience, tenacity, and labor, and the result does not disappoint. To the contrary, he has done the Christian, philosophical, apologetic, and theological community a wonderful service. Unafraid to tackle prohibitively difficult questions, the prodigiously gifted author has the expansive mind and requisite skill and aptitude to navigate their contours, often with penetrating profundity. He is unrelenting in his search for a theory that is at once both philosophically rigorous and biblically sound.
One of the significant challenges assailing those who believe in a wholly good and loving God is to make sense of the category of the “contingently lost” (i.e., those who are lost but would have been saved in other circumstances that God could have brought about). Indeed, this problem is intractable enough that some insist that no sense can be made of it at all, and that no one is ultimately unredeemed in the actual world if they are redeemed in some other world that is feasible for God to make. This deep existential issue of whether some people “slip through the cracks,” as it were, can hardly be overstated, shedding light by turns on the human condition and questions of ultimate meaning and significance, the nature of reality and the very character of God.
Breitenbach’s original theodicy offered here is both extremely thoughtful and eminently worthy of careful consideration. Canvassing and digesting, integrating and synthesizing an array of disparate discussions—from Reformed epistemology to Molinism, from exclusivism to theodicy—he makes accessible and brings to life wide, important, and difficult literatures, deftly navigating their nuances and generating real clarity in the process.
With lucid prose and crystal clear explanations, he has written a wonderful book that is both philosophically astute and historically informed, and both theologically sophisticated and biblically faithful. He does not make the job he carves out for himself an easy one. He aims to effect a rapprochement of nothing less than the conjunction of exclusivism and the possibility of some people being contingently lost, a God of perfect love (for all) and substantive doctrines of sovereignty—albeit decidedly non-Calvinist variants of election and predestination. His interlocutors may agree or disagree with his analysis, but they will be unable responsibly to ignore it.
-David Baggett, Executive Editor
