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The Personal God and a God who is a Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Adrian Thatcher
Adrian Thatcher
Affiliation:
College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth
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Extract

If one believes in a personal God, must one also believe that God is a person? I hold that the former is essential to Christian faith, the latter an impediment to it. Several recent writers in the philosophy of religion have however assumed that to believe in God is to believe in a person. The most subtle and influential proponent of ‘bodiless person theism’ is Richard Swinburne. I hope to show that this philosophical presentation of theism is unwarrantable and misrepresents what the theological tradition says about God. In section (I) I describe how Swinburne justifies his view that God is a person. In section (II) I show that this view is defective. In section (III) I uncover a common, though mistaken, procedure among several other advocates of this type of theism. In section (IV) I suggest that the belief that God is a person is foreign to Christian theology, with the unfortunate consequence that a philosophical defence of it is not only mistaken: it is also pointless.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 1985 , pp. 61 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

page 61 note 1 Swinburne, Richard, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford, 1977) p. I.Google Scholar

page 61 note 2 Op. Cit. p. 99.

page 61 note 3 Op. cit. p. 1, note 1; p. 99.

page 62 note 1 Op. Cit. pp. 99–100.

page 62 note 2 Op. Cit. pp. 99–102.

page 62 note 3 Strawson, P. F., Individuals (London, 1957). p. 102.Google Scholar

page 63 note 1 Swinburne, , op. cit. pp. 102–5.Google Scholar His source is Harrison, Jonathan, ‘The embodiment of mind, or what use is having a body?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. LXXIV (1973–4), 33–55.Google Scholar

page 63 note 2 Op. cit. pp. 111–25.

page 65 note 1 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), section 282.Google Scholar

page 67 note 1 Hudson, W. D., for similar reasons, ascribes to God a substitute by. See his A Philosophical Approach to Religion (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 166–76.Google Scholar

page 68 note 1 Owen, H. P., Concepts of Deity (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971), p. 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 68 note 1 Ibid. For a detailed criticism of this concept of God see my ‘Concepts of deity: a criticism of H. P. Owen’, Anglican Theological Review LXVIII, 3 (July 1976).

page 69 note 1 Shepherd, John J., Experience, Inference and God (London, and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), p. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 69 note 2 Op. Cit. p. 129.

page 69 note 3 High, Dallas, Language, Persons and Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 180–1.Google Scholar

page 69 note 4 King, R. H., The Meaning of God (London: S.C.M. Press, 1974), pp. 50, 73, 80.Google Scholar

page 69 note 5 Hodges, H. A., God Beyond Knowledge (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), p. 51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 69 note 6 Op. cit. p. 48.

page 70 note 1 Op. cit. p. 75.

page 71 note 1 Ward, Keith, Holding Fast to God (London: S.P.C.K., 1982), p. 6.Google Scholar

page 71 note 2 Küng, Hans, Does God Exist? (London: Collins, 1980), p. 633.Google Scholar

page 71 note 3 Above, p.

page 72 note 1 Macquarrie, John, Principles of Christian Theology (London: S.C.M. Press, rev. edn, 1977), p. 116.Google Scholar

page 72 note 2 Op. cit. p. 143.

page 72 note 3 Küng, , op. cit. p. 633.Google Scholar

page 72 note 4 I defend this idea in ch. 8 of my The Ontology of Paul Tillich (Oxford, 1978).