Debates about God's personhood, or lack thereof, are central to philosophy of religion. This article aims to advance these debates by presenting the ‘greatness of personhood argument’ for God's personhood and a dilemma for those who deny God's personhood. I also consider various objections to this argument and this dilemma and argue that they fail. Notably, my reasoning in defence of personal theism is cross-cultural insofar as personal theists across various religious traditions can use it. Thus, this article defends personal theism in a manner that can bring Western and non-Western theists into closer dialogue regarding the topic of God's personhood.

Classical Indian thought contains a number of arguments for monism that reject the cogency of metaphysical pluralism's account of change, development, and causation in the world. They do this on the basis of (a) the coherence of changes that we see in the world, (b) the difficulty of limning absolute distinctions between individuals, and (c) the prerequisite need for some medium explaining causal interactions. This article provides some background to Indian philosophical thought about a basic fabric of reality that grounds changing forms, containing the telos of their evolution in potentia. It then sets out Coherence, Complexity, and Connection Arguments for monism as employed by the Vedāntic scholastic philosopher Śaṃkara. Along the way, we clarify the Vedāntic conception of a single material, efficient, and formal cause that provides a medium for connection and combination, is naturally replete with generative order and impetus, and in which the teloi of all forms are embedded. We will briefly consider what the argument shows, if it succeeds – comparing with current philosophical approaches to monism. Finally, we observe that this rich monism, describing a single vertiginous reality of many levels and powers, is central to classical Hindu conceptions of what makes something ‘divine’.

Centred on the ‘devotion to the ineffable divine’ (nirguṇ bhakti), the sectarian community known as the Dādū Panth (lit. ‘Dādū's path) had a class of sant-intellectuals who conceived their tradition on high literary and philosophical grounds. Succeeding on the local level, but aspiring to imperial ties, the intellectuals of the Dādū Panth not only built their community identity in relation to the Mughal-Rajput imperial milieu but also to the overlapping ideals of emerging sulh-i kull (universal peace) and Vedānta paradigms. Such expertise on the part of the Dādū Panthīs made their ties with the Marwar royal polity strong and long-lasting, as demonstrated in their hagiographical accounts which are corroborated by land grants by the kingdom. Later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the imperial order was waning, the Dādū Panthīs expanded their networks in the Rajput courts of not only Rajasthan, but also Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The sants of the bhakti movement(s) are normally thought to have had a lower-caste base—and thus a subaltern voice—but the example of the Dādū Panth presented in this article demonstrates that sants’ social base was broad and that the interrelation of sant-bhakti with the courtly order was strong; sant-bhakti therefore needs to be rethought in the study of bhakti traditions.

Recently, Erik Baldwin and Tyler McNabb have brought Madhva's epistemological framework into active dialogue with Alvin Plantinga's religious epistemology and have argued that individuals within Madhva's tradition cannot make full use of Plantinga's epistemology, according to which, Christian belief resists de jure objections and can also have warrant. While I do not contest this specific claim, I demonstrate that an analysis of Madhva's epistemological framework reveals that this framework has its own resources through which it can resist de jure objections. I address various objections to the rationality of Mādhvic belief and conclude that there are no de jure objections to Mādhvic belief that are independent of de facto objections.