In a 1987 paper Thomas Morris introduced the phrase ‘perfect being theology’ and argued that in our efforts to construct an adequate theistic conception of God the most fruitful procedure will be for us to engage in reflection and dialogue about what a maximally perfect being would be like (‘Perfect Being Theology,’ Nous 21:19–30). To some of us that approach seems so obvious as to be without a significant alternative, but there are other approaches that have been followed – such as working up a conception of God solely from the statements in a purported repository of divine revelation, such as the Bible (for example, when I was in seminary in Yale Divinity School in the early 1960's, ‘biblical theology’ was the rage and ‘philosophical theology’ was looked down upon). Another approach has been to study a wide range of religious scriptures to see what common conception of the divine can be found in them or most plausibly constructed from them. Those approaches, Morris said, have left us with something unsatisfactorily incomplete, static, and perhaps self-contradictory. Morris argued, a la St. Anselm and René Descartes, that the notion of a maximally perfect being is the north star that has been at the heart of the theistic traditions of the world, and it is that notion that we must explore and elaborate in order that we might construct an adequate conception of God. I agree.
