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The Personal God and a God who is a Person
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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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.
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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.
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page 63 note 2 Op. cit. pp. 111–25.
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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
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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).
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page 72 note 4 I defend this idea in ch. 8 of my The Ontology of Paul Tillich (Oxford, 1978).
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