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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
“These volumes are chock full of arguments in a way that stands out in this field. . . . This is a remarkable, generational work that will become the resource in philosophical theology.”
—J.P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Biola University
“An enormous undertaking. However, Craig’s past record indicates that he can and will carry it through to completion. Furthermore, his established reputation. . . guarantees that the work will attract wide interest and will have a ready readership.”
—William Hasker, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Huntington University
A transformative journey through Christian doctrine, Volume IIa. On God: Attributes of God
William Lane Craig’s Systematic Philosophical Theology is a multi-volume explication of Christian doctrine in the classic Protestant tradition of the loci communes as seen through the lens of contemporary analytic philosophy. Uniquely blending the disciplines of biblical theology, historical theology, and analytic theology, these volumes aim to provide readers with a biblical and philosophically coherent articulation of a wide range of Christian doctrines.
Volume II treats the locus On God in two parts. The first part, Volume IIa. Attributes of God, explores the coherence of theism. Conceiving of God as an infinite and personal being of maximal greatness, Craig carefully defines and explicates the divine attributes of incorporeality, necessity, aseity, simplicity, eternality, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness.
In the second part, Volume IIb. Excursus on Natural theology, The Trinity, Craig examines six arguments for God’s existence, including the argument from contingency, the kalām cosmological argument, the argument from the applicability of mathematics, the argument from cosmic fine-tuning, the moral argument, and the ontological argument, along with the problem of evil. Following the excursus, he transitions to an articulation and defence of Christian theism, formulating a biblical doctrine of the Trinity and offering a model of God as a tripersonal soul.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Preface to Volume IIa
Locus III
De Deo
PART I:
ATTRIBUTA DEI
1 Introduction
2 Incorporeality
2.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Incorporeality
2.2 Natural and Perfect Being Theology
2.3 The Coherence of Divine Incorporeality
2.4 Concluding Remarks
3 Necessity
3.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Necessity
3.2 Two Notions of Divine Necessity
3.3 Coherence of God’s Necessary Existence
3.4 Concluding Remarks
4 Aseity
4.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Aseity
4.2 Testimony of the Church
4.3 Requirements of Perfect Being Theology
4.4 The Challenge of Platonism
4.5 Concluding Remarks
5 Simplicity
5.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Simplicity
5.2 Roots and Development of Divine Simplicity
5.3 Arguments for Divine Simplicity
5.4 Objections to (DS+)
5.5 Concluding Remarks
6 Omniscience
6.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Omniscience
6.2 The Concept of Omniscience
6.3 Divine Foreknowledge of Future Contingents
6.4 Middle Knowledge
6.5 Concluding Remarks
7 Eternity
7.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Eternity
7.2 Arguments for Divine Timelessness
7.3 Arguments for Divine Temporality
7.4 Eternity and the Nature of Time
7.5 Concluding Remarks
8 OMNIPRESENCE
8.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Omnipresence
8.2 Divine Omnispatiality
8.3 Historical Representatives of Omnispatiality
8.4 Assessment of the Debate
8.5 Concluding Remarks
9 Omnipotence
9.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Omnipotence
9.2 The Concept of Omnipotence
9.3 Concluding Remarks
10 Goodness
10.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Goodness
10.2 The Content of God’s Moral Character
10.3 God and the Good/Right
10.4 Divine Freedom and Perfection
10.5 Concluding Remarks
11 Summary and Conclusion
Bibliography for Volume IIa
Scripture Index
Name and Subject Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 4
Figure 1 Options for dealing with the challenge of Platonism to divine aseit...
Chapter 7
Figure 1 Clock synchronization of relatively stationary clocks in absolute m...
Figure 2 A depiction of a tenselessly existing space‐time universe. The vert...
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Preface to Volume IIa
Begin Reading
Bibliography for Volume IIa
Scripture Index
Name and Subject Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Systematic Philosophical Theology
On God: Attributes of God
Volume IIa
William Lane Craig
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To Jan, who inspired this monumental project and sustained me throughout.
Preface to Volume IIa
I have little to add to my general Preface affixed to vol. I. Given the size of the locus De Deo, which constitutes the heart of Christian theology, it seemed best to commence a new volume with this topic. Indeed, the subject proved to be so large in scope that, in order to keep the volumes in this series to approximately similar lengths, it was decided to break this volume into two parts. Accordingly, in vol. IIa I treat the attributes of God or, in philosophical parlance, the coherence of theism. This field has been my preoccupation since completing my doctoral work, yielding extensive studies of the coherence of divine omniscience, eternity, and aseity. Here I discuss nine of the central attributes of God, examining both their biblical basis and their most plausible philosophical articulation. Although I consider myself to stand in the tradition of classical theism, it will become obvious that I do not embrace strong accounts of divine simplicity, immutability, or impassibility.
In the Preface to vol. I I asked whether there were any philosophical distinctives that characterize this systematic philosophical theology. The present volume prompts me to ask a similar question about theological distinctives. Already in vol. I my Molinist convictions began to surface, playing the key role in articulating a plausible doctrine of verbal, plenary, confluent biblical inspiration. The present volume permits me to explain more fully the doctrine of divine middle knowledge, which is in my opinion one of the most fruitful theological concepts ever conceived. Molinism plays such a major part in my understanding of Christian doctrine that I think these volumes deserve to be described as a Molinist systematic theology, the first such that I am aware of in centuries.
In vol. IIb we turn from generic theism to the subject of the Trinity. I am convinced that the New Testament teaches a primitive doctrine of the Trinity, according to which (i) there is exactly one God, and (ii) there are exactly three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – who are properly called God. I hope to show that such a doctrine is not only logically coherent but can also be plausibly modeled along Social Trinitarian lines as tri‐personal monotheism.
In between the discussion of the coherence of theism and the discussion of Trinitarian theism is the logical place for an Excursus on Natural Theology. Although, as I explained in the Prolegomena to these volumes, I do not consider natural theology to belong inherently to systematic theology, since the systematician does not bear the burden of proving his scripturally based doctrinal claims, nonetheless natural theology has historically been a part of some systematic theologies, and so the inclusion of such an Excursus seems altogether appropriate, given my great interest in the field. Having already defended the proper basicality of theistic belief in the locus De fide, I here offer six arguments for the existence of God that I find convincing, including the Leibnizian argument from contingency, the kalām cosmological argument, the argument from the uncanny applicability of mathematics to physical phenomena, the teleological argument from the fine‐tuning of the universe for embodied, conscious agents, the moral argument from the objectivity of moral values and duties, and the ontological argument from the metaphysical possibility of a maximally great being. Also included in this Excursus is a response to the principal atheistic counter‐arguments, particularly the so‐called problem of evil and suffering.
In our Prolegomena I explained that the subject matter of Christian systematic theology is God and anything else in relation to God. Having laid in this volume the theistic foundations, we may move in vol. III to De creatione, other things in relation to God.
I wish to thank once again my research assistant Timothy Bayless for his hard work in compiling the indices and bibliography and helping to put the typescript into Wiley‐Blackwell’s house style.
Although I draw in this volume from previous publications, I have in every case updated and expanded my earlier discussion. Previous publications relevant to vol. II include: The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez, Studies in Intellectual History 7 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988); Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism I: Omniscience, Studies in Intellectual History 19 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991); The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1987; God, Time and Eternity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001); Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001); Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. rev. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008); “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” with James Sinclair in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. Wm. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009), pp. 101–201; “Divine Eternity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. Thomas Flint and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 145–66; God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); God and Abstract Objects: The Coherence of Theism III: Aseity (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2017); Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, with J. P. Moreland, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017); A Debate on God and Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties? with Erik J. Wielenberg, ed. A. Johnson (London: Routledge, 2020); “The Argument from the Applicability of Mathematics,” in Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology: God and Rational Belief, ed. C. Ruloff and P. Horban (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 195–215.
Locus IIIDe DeoPART I: ATTRIBUTA DEI
1Introduction
The existence and nature of God are central concerns of Christian theology. While the systematic theologian may not engage in natural theology but may simply assume on the basis of scriptural teaching that the God of the Bible exists, he cannot be indifferent to the question of the nature or attributes of the biblical God, since God’s nature is determinative for the entire Christian theological system. Unfortunately, in the words of Lutheran theologian Robert Preus, “The doctrine of God is the most difficult locus in Christian dogmatics.”1 Does God exist necessarily or contingently? Is he absolutely simple or complex? Is he timeless or omnitemporal? Does he transcend space or fill space? Does his almighty power imply the ability to do the logically impossible or are there limits to his power? Systematic theologians have often assumed uncritically traditional answers to these sorts of questions, answers that have been sharply challenged in modern times. During the late twentieth century the concept of God became fertile ground for anti‐theistic philosophical arguments. The difficulty with theism, it was often said, is not merely that there are no good arguments for the existence of God, but, more fundamentally, that the concept of God is incoherent.2
It is here that the contribution of contemporary Christian philosophers to systematic theology has been most pronounced and helpful. The anti‐theistic critique evoked a prodigious literature devoted to the philosophical analysis of the concept of God.3 As a result, one of the principal concerns of contemporary philosophy of religion has been the coherence of theism.
Two controls have tended to guide this inquiry into the divine nature: Scripture and so‐called perfect being theology. For thinkers in the Judeo‐Christian tradition, God’s self‐revelation in Scripture is obviously paramount in understanding what God is like. Still, while Scripture is our supreme authority in formulating a doctrine of God, so that doctrines contrary to biblical teaching are theologically unacceptable, contemporary thinkers have come to appreciate that the doctrine of God is underdetermined by the biblical data. The biblical authors were not philosophical theologians but in many cases storytellers whose accounts of man’s relationship with God bear all the marks of the storyteller’s art, being told from a human perspective without reflection upon philosophical considerations. The biblical theologian will therefore search in vain for clear answers to many philosophical questions concerning the divine attributes. Answers taken for granted by traditional dogmaticians need to be brought anew before the bar of Scripture and their biblical support and consonance re‐examined.
In addition, St. Anselm’s conception of God as a being than which a greater cannot be conceived (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit)4 or most perfect being (ens perfectissimum) has guided philosophical speculation on the raw data of Scripture, so that God's biblical attributes are to be conceived in ways that would serve to exalt God's greatness.5 The biblical concept of God’s being almighty, for example, is thus to be construed as maximally as possible. John Hick aptly credits Anselm for bringing the Christian doctrine of God to full flower:
Perhaps the most valuable feature of Anselm’s argument is its formulation of the Christian concept of God. Augustine (De Libero Arbitrio II, 6, 14) had used the definition of God as one ‘than whom there is nothing superior.’ … Anselm, however, does not define God as the most perfect being that there is but as a being than whom no more perfect is even conceivable. This represents the final development of the monotheistic conception. God is the most adequate conceivable object of worship; there is no possibility of another reality beyond him to which he is inferior or subordinate and which would thus be an even more worthy recipient of man’s devotion. Thus metaphysical ultimacy and moral ultimacy coincide; one cannot ask of the most perfect conceivable being… whether men ought to worship him. Here the religious exigencies that move from polytheism through henotheism to ethical monotheism reach their logical terminus. And the credit belongs to Anselm for having first formulated this central core of the ultimate concept of deity.6
Unfortunately, the conception of God as a perfect being is not without its ambiguity. Nagasawa takes God to be “the greatest metaphysically possible being,” a view he calls the perfect being thesis.7 Nagasawa holds that the perfect being thesis need not be taken to entail that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, since those properties are a matter of philosophical dispute, but simply that God has “the maximal consistent set of knowledge, power, and benevolence.”8 He thinks that there are neither biblical grounds nor compelling philosophical arguments for the entailment of the omni‐attributes “in a philosophically strict sense.” That seems to me a dubious stratagem for perfect being theology, since the maximal, consistent set of attributes could describe a limited and finite God. Nagasawa’s construal seems to rule out the incoherence of theism by definition.
By contrast, Michael Almeida takes as “a defining feature of perfect being theology” the inference from the proposition that God is a perfect being to the conclusion that God has every property that it is better to exemplify than not.9 Unfortunately, it will not always be clear which properties it is absolutely better to have than to lack. My own understanding and utilization of perfect being theology is more informative, being what Almeida calls a posteriori Anselmianism, which extrapolates divine attributes from Scripture as greatly as possible.10
Since the concept of God is underdetermined by the biblical data and since what constitutes a “great‐making” property is to some degree debatable, philosophers working within the Judeo‐Christian tradition enjoy considerable latitude in formulating a philosophically coherent and biblically faithful doctrine of God. Philosophical theists have thus found that anti‐theistic critiques of certain conceptions of God can actually be quite helpful in framing a more adequate conception. Thus, far from undermining theism, the anti‐theistic critiques have served mainly to reveal how rich and interesting the concept of God is, thereby refining and strengthening theistic belief.
In what follows we shall explore some of the most important attributes traditionally ascribed to God.
Notes
1
Robert D. Preus,
The Theology of Post‐Reformation Lutheranism
, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1970), 2:53.
2
Thus, an obviously unsympathetic critic like Kai Nielsen characterizes fellow atheists “who believe ‘There is a God' is simply false” as “Neanderthal atheists,” whereas atheists like himself “who reject the very concept of God as unintelligible” are “non‐Neanderthal atheists” (Kai Nielsen, “A Sceptic's Reply,” in
Faith and the Philosophers,
ed. John Hick [London: Macmillan, 1964], 232).
3
See William J. Wainwright,
Philosophy of Religion: An Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth‐Century Writings in English
(New York: Garland, 1978). Reference works in philosophy of religion thus almost always include a sizable section on the various attributes of God, for example, Chad Meister and Paul Copan, eds.,
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion,
Routledge Philosophy Companions (London: Routledge, 2007), pt. 4; Paul Copan and Chad Meister, eds.
Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pt. 3; Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea, eds.,
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pt. 2; Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn, eds.,
A Companion to Philosophy of Religion
, 2nd ed., Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 8 (Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2010), pt. 4; Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister, eds.,
The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pt. 1; Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion
, 4 vols. (Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2021). The same is true of anthologies in philosophy of religion.
4
In his
Proslogion
2 Anselm thus addresses God: “And, indeed, we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Cf.
Proslogion
3: “this being thou art, O Lord, our God.” Hoffman and Rosenkrantz explain, “Another way of putting the matter replaces the partly psychological term ‘can be conceived' with the wholly modal term ‘is possible,' resulting in a definition which states that God is a being than which nothing greater is
possible
. Such a revision is advantageous in that the resulting definition is less psychological, and therefore, more objective” (Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, “Divine Attributes” in
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion
, ed. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2021),
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119009924.eopr0106
). Anselm thought that “if a mind could conceive of a being better than thee, the creature would rise above the Creator; and this is most absurd” (
Proslogion
III). This does not seem to be a very good reason for understanding God to be such a being, since one can conceive of things greater than oneself, whether existent or non‐existent. It would be better to stipulate that by “God” one means the being than which a greater cannot be conceived, so that it impossible to conceive of something greater than God. Intuitively, this is what believers mean by “God.”
5
Of Anselm's concept, Brian Leftow comments, “Talk of God as a perfect being is certainly appropriate theologically, and perfect being theology has been the main tool to give content to the concept of God philosophically almost as long as there has been philosophical theology” (Brian Leftow, “The Ontological Argument,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion
, ed. William J. Wainwright [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 110). Yujin Nagasawa observes that “Perfect being theism is widely accepted among Judeo‐Christian‐Islamic theists today. It is no exaggeration to say that nearly all the central debates over the existence and nature of God in the philosophy of religion rely on this form of theism” (Yujin Nagasawa,
Maximal God: A New Defence of Perfect Being Theism
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 2; cf. 7).
6
John Hick, “Ontological Argument for the Existence of God,” in
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, 2nd ed., ed. Donald M. Borchert (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006), 7:15–20. Nagasawa traces the Anselmian concept of God all the way back to Plato (
Maximal God,
15–24).
7
Nagasawa, 9.
8
Nagasawa, 92.
9
Michael J. Almeida, “Perfect Being Theology,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion, ed. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2021),
https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781119009924.eopr0295
.
10
Observing that it is hard to deduce divine attributes from the claim that God is a perfect being, Michael Rea suggests, “Perhaps instead… we should think that the claim that God is perfect merely imposes constraints on our theorizing about the divine attributes; or perhaps we should think… that our grasp of perfection simply helps us to flesh out our understanding of divine attributes that we arrive at via special revelation or some other route” (Michael C. Rea “Introduction,” in Essays in Analytic Theology, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology, vol. 1, by Michael C. Rea [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021], 11).
2Incorporeality
Fundamental to Christian theology is the conviction that God is an incorporeal being. Despite the etymology, by “divine incorporeality” we do not mean that God is without a body – indeed, according to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, God the Son does have a human body since the moment of his assumption of a complete human nature in Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus – but rather that God is an immaterial being. Just as the human soul, whether embodied or disembodied, is taken by anthropological dualists to be immaterial, so God, whether bodiless or incarnate, is an immaterial substance distinct from the world.
2.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Incorporeality
2.1.1 Divine Creation
Among the most important scriptural evidences for God’s immateriality are passages affirming God’s creation of the physical world, indeed, of everything distinct from himself. The Bible opens with the majestic words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1.1). Although we shall have much more to say about this passage in our locus De creatione, we may note in passing that most scholars today recognize this statement to be an independent clause, not a subordinate clause. Moreover, v. 1 is arguably not simply a title for the creation story, since it is connected to v. 2 by waw (and) and, if taken as a title, would be inaccurate, since the ensuing account does not, in fact, describe the creation of the earth (v. 2). The author of the opening chapter of Genesis thereby differentiated his viewpoint from that of the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths. For the author of Genesis 1, no pre‐existent material seems to be assumed – in the beginning there is only God, who is said simply to “create” “the heavens and the earth,” a Hebrew merism for the totality of the world or, more simply, the universe. Neither is the world said to have been created out of the divine substance, as in some Ancient Near Eastern myths.
The conception of God in Genesis 1 is thus stunningly different from anything else in the Ancient Near East. The dominant and distinguishing tenet of Hebrew thought, state Henri Frankfort and H. A. Frankfort, is the absolute transcendence of God.1 Nahum Sarna encapsulates the teaching of the biblical creation narrative thus: “Its quintessential teaching is that the universe is wholly the purposeful product of divine intelligence, that is, of the one self‐sufficient, self‐existing God, who is a transcendent Being outside of nature and who is sovereign over space and time.”2 The author of Genesis 1 thus gives us to understand that God is independent of and the Creator of the material realm, thereby implying that he is not a material object.
In the New Testament (NT) the prologue of John’s Gospel underlines the teaching of the Genesis creation story. The author begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (Jn 1.1–3). Harking back to Gen 1.1, the author affirms that in the very beginning all that exists is God and his Word (logos). Then everything else comes into existence through God’s Word. The verb ginomai (v. 3) has the meaning “to be created” or “to come into being.” Creation comes to the fore by John’s indicating the agent who was responsible for all things’ coming into being. John speaks of God’s Word as the one “through whom” (di’ autou) all things came into being. So at the very beginning is God and his Word, and then everything else comes into being through the creatorial power of God’s Word.
By the time of the NT classical Platonism had evolved into so‐called Middle Platonism, and Hellenistic Judaism bears its imprint. The doctrine of the divine creative Logos found in John’s prologue was widespread in Middle Platonism, being attested as early as Antiochus of Ascalon (125–68 B.C.) and Eudorus (first century B.C.), two of the earliest Middle Platonists. Hellenistic Jews, notably Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C.–A.D. 50), adapted the Logos doctrine to Jewish monotheism. The similarities between Philo and John’s doctrines of the Logos are so numerous and so close that most Johannine scholars, while not willing to affirm John’s direct dependence on Philo, do recognize that the author of the prologue of John’s Gospel shares with Philo a common intellectual tradition of a Middle Platonic interpretation of Genesis 1.3
Interested as he is in the incarnation of the divine Logos, John does not pause to reflect on the state of the Logos “in the beginning,” causally prior to creation. But this pre‐creation state does feature prominently in Philo’s doctrine of the Logos. According to David Runia, a cornerstone of Middle Platonism was the division of reality into the intelligible and the sensible realms.4 The former realm is grasped by the intellect, while the latter is perceived by the senses. The sensible realm comprised primarily physical objects, while the intelligible realm included what we would today call abstract objects. For Middle Platonists, as for Plato, the intelligible world served as a model for the creation of the sensible world. As a Jewish monotheist, Philo thinks that this intelligible world exists as the contents of the divine mind.
This view was not original to Philo, however. The interpretation of the Platonic Ideas as thoughts in the mind of God was characteristic of Middle Platonism and became widespread throughout the ancient world.5 For example, Nicomachus of Gerasa (ca. A.D. 60–120), held that of the four subjects of the classical quadrivium,
arithmetic … existed before all the others in the mind of the creating God like some universal and exemplary plan, relying upon which as a design and archetypal example, the Creator of the universe sets in order his material creations and makes them attain their proper ends. …
All that has by nature with systematic method been arranged in the universe seems both in part and as a whole to have been determined and ordered in accordance with number, by the forethought and the mind of him that created all things; for the pattern was fixed, like a preliminary sketch, by the domination of number preexistent in the mind of the world‐creating God, number conceptual only and immaterial in every way, but at the same time the true and the eternal essence, so that with reference to it, as to an artistic plan, should be created all these things, time, motion, the heavens, the stars, all sorts of revolutions.6
Notice that the material world is created on the pattern pre‐existing in the immaterial divine mind. Philo concurred. The intelligible world (kosmos noētos), he maintains, may be thought of as either formed by the divine Logos or, more reductively, as the Logos itself as God is engaged in creating. In his On the Creation of the World according to Moses 16–20 he writes:
God, because he is God, understood in advance that a fair copy would not come into existence apart from a fair model, and that none of the objects of sense‐perception would be without fault, unless it was modeled on the archetypal and intelligible idea. When he had decided to construct this visible cosmos, he first marked out the intelligible cosmos, so that he could use it as an incorporeal and most god‐like paradigm and so produce the corporeal cosmos, a younger likeness of an older model, which would contain as many sense‐perceptible kinds as there were intelligible kinds in that other one.
Notice that Philo holds corporeal things to be patterned on the incorporeal models in the divine mind.
We cannot know if the author of the prologue to John’s Gospel embraced a Middle Platonic doctrine of divine ideas. But whether or not he did, there can be no doubt, I think, that given the similarity of his Logos doctrine to that of Middle Platonism, he understood God and his Logos to transcend the material realm and so to be immaterial in nature.7
2.1.2 Divine Omnipresence
Second, in addition to biblical passages like those cited earlier on divine transcendence and creation, passages expressing God’s omnipresence are naturally interpreted to imply divine immateriality. We shall review scriptural data supporting God’s ubiquity when we discuss the divine attribute of omnipresence.8 For now suffice it to say that biblically God is not thought to be located in a particular place as material objects are but is said to be everywhere in space. If we think of divine omnipresence as God’s transcending space while being cognizant of and active at every place in space, then divine immateriality follows at once, since any material object is spatially located. On the other hand if we take God to exist spatially, it would be implausible to think of him as extended throughout all space like the aether of nineteenth century physics, for then parts of him would exist here and parts there, which is certainly not the biblical notion of God’s entire presence to anyone wherever he might find himself (Ps 139.7–10). Wherever anyone is in space God is there to help him when called upon. If God is spatially located, then, he must be wholly located at every region of space that he occupies, that is to say, at every region. In that case, he would have to be extended throughout space after the fashion of a mereologically simple object, having no proper spatial parts but occupying multiple regions of space. Some Christian theists, as we shall see, conceive the soul to be so extended throughout the body, wholly present at every spatial sub‐region of the body, and some have even suggested that God, too, may be extended throughout space, wholly present at every region. But these thinkers conceive God and the soul to be immaterial beings and so able to have no parts located at different places in space. How a material object could be spatially extended and yet simple is almost unimaginable, although some philosophers have defended such a notion.9 We can say with assurance that none of the scriptural writers affirms such a conception of God as an extended, material simple. It is far more plausible that if they assumed God to be literally spatially present everywhere, it was because God was thought to be an immaterial spirit (Ps 139.7).
2.1.3 Divine Imperceptibility
Third, the biblical descriptions of God as indiscernible to the five senses confirm divine immateriality. The Scriptures repeatedly testify that God is invisible. I Timothy speaks of him “whom no man has ever seen or can see” (6.16) and offers this doxology: “To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be power and glory for ever and ever. Amen” (1.17). God’s invisibility will naturally encompass not merely God’s imperceptibility by eyesight, but also his imperceptibility by the rest of the five senses, such as touch and smell. In Rom 1.18–20 Paul says that though God is in heaven, “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” Moreover, Paul says of Christ that “in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2.9), and thus “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col 1.15). In the same way, Jn 1.18 states, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (cf. 6.46; I Jn 4.12, 20). God’s imperceptibility to the five senses, apart from his revelation in the world and his embodiment in Christ, is naturally accounted for by God’s not being a physical object.
2.1.4 Prohibition of Divine Images
Fourth, the OT prohibition of making images of God (Ex 20.4–5a) is ultimately rooted in divine incorporeality. The prohibition is motivated, not by the danger of inaccurately portraying God’s material form, but more fundamentally in his lacking such a form altogether, so that physical images inevitably distort. Moses warns, “Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in the form of any figure… . if you act corruptly by making a graven image in the form of anything, … you will soon utterly perish from the land” (Dt 4:15–16, 25–26). God is not to be portrayed in paintings, in statuary, in any sort of visual image. For any sort of image, however beautiful, however artistically inspiring, will diminish who God is by portraying him in some necessarily limited, corporeal way.
2.1.5 Divine Spirituality
Fifth, God is described in Scripture as a spirit, which implies his immateriality. We need not be distracted by the vast range of meanings of the Hebrew and Greek words rûaḥ and pneuma, both translated as “spirit.”10For our interest is not in the use of these words in a meteorological sense to designate the wind or in a biological sense to designate the breath or vital force of an animate, corporeal creature, but in a theo‐anthropological sense to designate intellectual substances, that is, immaterial personal agents or spirits.
2.1.5.1 God as Spirit
In the Old Testament (OT) we find a dualism of flesh and spirit, such as comes to expression in Is 31.3:
The Egyptians are men, and not God;and their horses are flesh, and not spirit.
Here the focus seems to be on the weakness and vulnerability of material things in contrast to God.11 It is significant that although rûaḥ is often used to refer to God (136 times in the OT), bāśār (“flesh”) is never used of God.12 As the Creator of the material realm, God is not flesh and has power over things of flesh. According to Eduard Schweizer, from the time of Is 31.3 the divine realm was characterized in Hellenistic Judaism by “pneuma” and the human realm by “sarks.” In the Hellenistic world this was understood as a distinction of substance.13
In the NT this same dualism of flesh and spirit is presupposed. It manifests itself in Jesus’ logion “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mk 14.38). Again, Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail” (Jn 6.63). In Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus appears to the disciples after his resurrection, they “supposed that they saw a spirit,” which draws Jesus’ reply, “a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Lk 24.37, 39). This dualism of flesh and spirit plausibly forms the backdrop of Paul’s statement in Rom 1.3–4 that Christ “was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness.”
The biblical conception of spirit bears no relation or resemblance to the extra‐biblical Greek notion of spirit as a thin material substance permeating the universe, epitomized in Stoicism. Kleinknecht observes that “The constitutive factor of πνεῦμα in the Greek world is always its subtle and powerful corporeality. Because of its material character it is never spiritual in the strict sense, as in the NT. It is never wholly outside the realm of sense… . it is never set in antithesis to matter as the supernatural, wonder‐working spiritual gift or manifestation of a transcendent personal God.”14 In biblical usage, by contrast, “spirit” connotes immateriality.
Our interest lies in the use of rûaḥ and pneuma with respect to human spirits, unembodied finite spirits, and preeminently the divine Spirit. Without allowing ourselves to be distracted by the question whether anthropological dualism is the biblical view,15 we may note simply in passing that in the OT the rûaḥ in man is the seat of states of mental awareness that dualists would attribute to the mind, such as emotions, intellectual functions, rational and religious perception, and the dispositions and actions of the will.16 As such there is an overlap of terminology with the heart (Heb. lēb) and the soul (Grk. psychē), to which such mental states are also attributed.17 Disembodied human souls after the death of the body are referred to as spirits (I En 10.15; 20.3, 6; 22.5–7; Jub 23.31; Acts 23.8–9; Heb 12.23).
More directly relevant to our concern is the use of rûaḥ and pneuma to designate unembodied spirits. These are invisible, independent spirit beings other than God, including angels, demons, and other elohim. Though they can assume bodily form, that is not their natural estate. Scripture refers to such spirits as divine beings (elohim) or sons of God (Gen 6.1–4; Dt 32.7; Ps 82.1–7; 89.5–7; Job 1.6–12; 38.4–7; I Kg 22.19–22; cf. I En 15.3–7; 61.12–13). Of the angels, the writer of Hebrews asks, “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve?” (Heb 1.14). John calls angels spirits (Rev 1.4). Demons are sometimes referred to as “unclean spirits” (Mt 8.16; 10.1; 12.43–45; Mk 1.23–27; 3.11; 5.2–13; 7.25; 9.25; Lk 4.33; 6.18; Rev 16.13) or as “evil spirits” (Lk 8.2; Acts 19.15–16). These spirit beings are differenced from God in that they belong to the created order and are finite in every respect.18
By contrast, the Spirit of God is not an angelic being or finite heavenly being. He is never present in the heavenly assembly before the throne of God.19 Although rûaḥ and pneuma are frequently used to denote God’s power which comes upon men, the words are also used hypostatically to refer to God himself as a personal agent. Even in the OT “the Spirit of the LORD,” the supernatural source of prophetic utterance, is not an impersonal power. Baumgärtel explains, “Classical prophecy… lifted the divine out of religious and ethical neutrality, and understood it as the teleological will and work of personal divine power. יְהוָה [the Spirit of the LORD] is a term for the historical creative action of the one God which… is always God’s action. Hence יְהוָה can be an expression for God’s inner nature and presence.”20
Kleinknecht explains that from the time of Wisdom and Philo, under Jewish and Christian influence, pneuma “is cut off from its basic relation to nature, transcendentally spiritualised, and hypostatised and personified as an independent, personally living and active cosmological and soteriological Spirit or God sui generis.”21 The appellation “Holy Spirit” is especially significant in this regard. Without being prematurely drawn into a discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity, we can say that the Holy Spirit in the NT is not an impersonal power but God himself, endowed with the properties of personhood, such as intellect and will.22 Observing that the concept of a pneuma hagion is unattested in secular Greek literature, Kleinknecht asserts, “Here biblical Gk. has coined a new and distinctive expression for the very different, suprasensual, supraterrestrial and in part personal character and content which πνευ˜μα has in Judaism and Christianity.”23 By contrast, “Profane Greek knows no hypostatic person of the Spirit understood as an independent divine entity. In the Greek world πνευ˜μα is always regarded as a thing, never as a person.”24
So in the NT the Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force but God himself. Most famous and direct are the words ascribed to Jesus: “God is Spirit” (Jn 4.24).25 In John’s Gospel the Holy Spirit is a personal agent who instructs the apostles and of whom masculine personal pronouns may be used, despite pneuma’s being a neuter noun (Jn 14.17, 26; 15.26; 16.13). The Spirit continues to speak to the church of John’s day (Rev 2.7, 11, 17, 29; 3.6, 13; 3. 22; 14.13; 22.17). Paul in II Cor 3.17–18 identifies the Spirit with the person referred to as “the LORD” in Ex 34.34. In Luke–Acts, the Holy Spirit is similarly a personal agent who employs first‐person indexicals, for example, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13.2), indeed, who is God himself (Lk 2.26; Acts 1.16; 5.3–4, 32; 8.29; 10.19; 11.12; 15.28; 16.6, 7; 20.23; 21.11; 28.25). The Holy Spirit speaks to us in Scripture, as we have seen (Lk 12.12; Acts 1.16; 28.25; Heb 3.7; 9.8; 10.15).26 He is placed on a par with the Father and the Son (Mt 28.19; II Cor 13.14). In sum, God’s being a spirit implies his incorporeality.27
2.1.5.2 Bodily Descriptions and Appearances of God
What, then, shall we say about Scripture’s abundant use of bodily descriptions of God? Such descriptions fall into two quite distinct categories.28 On the one hand there are passages describing God anthropomorphically. Such descriptions are common in the Psalms. For example:
In my distress I called upon the LORD;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.
Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations also of the mountains trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.
Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.
He bowed the heavens, and came down;
thick darkness was under his feet.
He rode on a cherub, and flew;
he came swiftly upon the wings of the wind (Ps 18.6–10).
Here God is described by the Psalmist as a fire‐breathing humanoid who rides on the cherubim through the clouds. Such anthropomorphisms are pervasive in Scripture. It is not simply that bodily parts are attributed to God; even actions like God’s seeing the distress of his people or God’s hearing their cry are anthropomorphic, since if taken literally they require that God have eyeballs that receive photons and so give him visual images of things and eardrums on which sound waves can impinge so that he can hear the cries of his people.
On the other hand there are biblical passages describing divine theophanies, God’s manifesting himself to human beings in bodily form. For example, when Moses asks to see the glory of God, Yahweh accedes to his request.
‘But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live.’ And the LORD said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand upon the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen’ (Ex 33.20–23).
Here God describes himself in very human terms as having a face and hands and even a back that Moses can see.
With respect to the first category of texts, in light of the scriptural data that imply that God is not a material object, we should understand anthropomorphic descriptions of God to be figurative rather than literal. Two considerations support this understanding.
First, these descriptions serve a clear literary purpose. A good example is I Pet 3.12: “The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those that do evil.” Clearly, it would be inept to try to interpret such a passage literally; that somehow the eyeballs of God are resting on top of the righteous people or that the face of the Lord is up against those that do evil. Clearly the eyes and the ears and the face of the Lord here are meant as literary figures of speech. When the Scriptures speak of God’s eyes, they are speaking of God’s knowledge and regard. When the Scriptures speak of God’s ears, his attentiveness to certain persons is meant. When they speak of God’s face, they are referring to his presence. When they speak of God’s arm, they are speaking of God’s power. All of these corporeal descriptions have a clear literary purpose. The fact that such descriptions should not be taken literally is reinforced by the poetic context in which they often appear. I Pet 3.12 is drawn from Ps 34, which also speaks of tasting the LORD’s goodness and taking refuge in him. Ps 18, quoted above, describes the earth as rocking and reeling and the mountains as trembling.
Second, if we were to take such anthropomorphic descriptions of God literally, then they would be mutually inconsistent. For God is differently described in these passages. In some passages, God is described in very human terms but in others with wings or breathing fire (Ps 17.8; 18.8; 57.1; 91.4). Therefore it is obvious that we should understand these anthropomorphic descriptions of God in a metaphorical way rather than a literal way.
What, then, about the theophanies? Such cases are often plausibly taken to be visions, mental projections of the percipient’s mind, even though caused by God. In the above‐cited case, God seems to provide Moses with a vision, causing him to project a mental image of God, that conveys to him a sense of God’s glory. Another such example would be Isaiah’s vision of God in his glory in the Temple:
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory’ (Is 6.1–3).
Here God’s holiness is manifested in a corporeal vision of God upon a throne, a manifestation of God’s holiness that causes Isaiah to feel conviction of his own sin and inadequacy.
Visions of this sort are very common in the Bible. Acts provides several examples. For instance, we have Peter’s vision of a sheet being lowered from heaven that is filled with various kinds of animals:
And he became hungry and desired something to eat; but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance and saw the heaven opened, and something descending, like a great sheet, let down by four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. And there came a voice to him, ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘No, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.’ And the voice came to him again a second time, ‘What God has cleansed, you must not call common.’ This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven (Acts 10.10–16).
Obviously, this is not a case of a literal seeing of a sheet full of animals in the external world that other people passing by Simon’s house would have seen coming down from heaven. Peter was in a trance when he saw this. Therefore, we should not think that this involves a huge tarpaulin of some sort filled with clean and unclean animals jostling with one another and trying to maintain their balance as this sheet is being lowered and raised. This is a mental projection that God has caused Peter to have to teach him a lesson about clean and unclean, preparing him for proclaiming the Gospel to Cornelius and his household, who would be regarded by Jews as unclean and therefore not worthy to receive the Gospel.
Acts 7 provides a more relevant example. We have here Stephen’s vision of the exalted Christ as the Son of Man:
But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.’ But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him (Acts 7.55–57).
Again, this was a purely private vision that Stephen alone enjoyed. The people standing around saw nothing. Its visionary character is also evident in the fact that he sees the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, which is itself an anthropomorphic description of God’s sitting on a throne that serves a literary purpose, namely, Jesus’ exaltation to a position of authority. Stephen’s vision is not therefore reckoned among the resurrection appearances of Christ. Rather than a resurrection appearance story, we have here a vision story. It plausibly concerns a vision of the exalted Christ that God caused Stephen to project.
Finally, consider Paul’s own account of his experience of seeing Christ in the Temple. Christ’s earlier appearance to Paul on the Damascus Road, though semi‐visionary in nature, involved extra‐mental phenomena apprehended by his traveling companions. But after his baptism, “When I had returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me, ‘Make haste and get quickly out of Jerusalem, because they will not accept your testimony about me’” (Acts 22.17). Here Paul is in an entranced state and has a vision of Jesus warning him to get out of the city. This is not a second resurrection appearance to Paul. Rather it is an entranced vision of Christ for the purpose of warning Paul to escape. These kinds of visionary experiences, as mental projections of the percipient, do not imply that God has a body or is a material object.
Nonetheless, there are theophanies that do not seem to be merely visionary experiences. In these cases we do seem to have a temporary physical manifestation of God or a finite spiritual being for the sake of interacting with human actors.29 A noteworthy example is God’s appearance to Abraham related in Gen 18. That this is a special theophany rather than God’s normal state is evident in the opening words, “And the LORD appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre” (v. 1). Although the three visitors whom Abraham entertains could be merely visionary, the more natural explanation, in view of his providing a meal, which they then eat, is that they were physically present. Presumably the meat, bread, and milk he saw them consume (v. 8) were gone after their departure. Moreover, Sarah took part in the experience as well (vv. 9–15).
Similarly, although Jacob’s experience at Bethel, related in Gen 28, in which he sees both angels and the LORD, is doubtless merely intra‐mental, being described as a dream (vv. 12–13), Jacob’s mysterious nocturnal encounter with a man at Peniel, recounted in Gen 32, seems quite different. For in this case we have enduring extra‐mental effects after the experience.
When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ And he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then he said, ‘Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Tell me, I pray, your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his thigh.
