Chapter One: Classical Theism
The concept “God” is in crisis
in the context of the dominant culture of North America today. It is in crisis in many other contexts too,
especially in the context of Western Europe.
Indeed, in Western Europe the crisis is considerably more advanced that
it is in North America. Christianity,
the primary religious tradition in and through which Western Europe has known
God for the last seventeen hundred years or so, is virtually dead in most of
that area. Western Europe still produces
great Christian theologians, and throngs of people still crowd into St. Peter’s
Square to hang on every word of whoever happens to be Pope at the moment. Yet very, very few people in Western Europe
attend church any more. Christianity in
Western Europe gives us a grim picture of where Christianity in North America
is headed. The numbers of both those who
attend church regularly and of those who say they are Christians have been in
decline in the US for decades.[1] Many theologians and sociologists have
studied this phenomenon of the decline in American religiosity for a very long
time and have posited many different explanations, or elements of the
explanation, for it. Whatever any
particular scholar says about the matter, it seems clear that fewer and fewer
Americans are finding the concept “God” to be convincing or important in their
lives. Several authors have made quite a
name for themselves, and I presume a good deal of money, attacking the very concept
of God. These so-called “new atheists”
include Richard Dawkins[2]
and Christopher Hitchens.[3] Dawkins, Hitchens, and others gleefully
attack religion as they understand it and ridicule belief in God as nothing but
juvenile superstition. The image of God
that is projected by the most vocal of our Christian voices is an image that
fewer and fewer people find compelling or even convincing. Until recently that truth was somewhat masked
by the seeming popularity of very conservative Christian churches, but more
recently even conservative traditions like the Southern Baptist Convention have
experienced a decline in numbers. The
concept of God is indeed in crisis among us.
God has been dead in American
academia for a very long time.[4] When I was studying for my Ph.D. in history
in the 1970s my major professor, the late Donald Treadgold, was a great rarity
among university faculty and prominent scholars among us. Don was an actual, practicing Christian. Many of his colleagues more or less ridiculed
him for his belief, although his standing as a scholar was such that they had
nonetheless to respect him and his historical work.[5] That Don was close to unique among his
university colleagues as a believing Christian simply highlighted the extent to
which faith had nearly disappeared from intellectual America by the 1970s. That particular decline of faith is
particularly important, for the content of cultures is always determined in the
long run by the small numbers of scholars, authors, and artists among them
whose thinking eventually seeps down into the culture and determines its form
and content.
The decline of religion among us
raises serious questions. The basic
question is of course why. Why are so
many Americans, especially Americans who belong to the still dominant, white,
Europe-based North American culture, rejecting religion? Why is atheism growing among us? There is no simple answer to these
questions. Any complete answer must
start by going back at least to the rationalism and scientism of the European
Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Or perhaps it has to go back as far as the
establishment of Christianity as the official faith of empire in the fourth
century. Mercifully the task of this book
doesn't require us to provide a complete answer to our question. Our question
is about God, not about the decline of religion as a whole. To proceed with our inquiry we need look only
at the question of how the image of God that has come to dominate in our
context has contributed to the decline of religion and specifically of
Christianity among us. For there is a
dominant image of God in our context, and that image is simply not believable
to a great many people today. The image
of God to which I refer is the image that I call the God of classical theism.
Before we dive into what
classical theism is we need to talk a bit about the term itself. The key word in this two word phrase is of
course theism. Theism is an English word
that comes from the Greek word Theos. Theos
is simply the ordinary Greek word for God.
It is the word used to mean God in the Greek originals of the New
Testament documents. We don’t call God Theos, but some of us do “theology,” an
English term built from the Greek words Theos,
God, and logos, word, theology then
being “words (or a word) about God.”
Theism then is simply “God-ism.”
The most basic, foundational meaning of “theism” is “ believing in
God.” Yet some scholars today expressly
reject theism but do not deny the reality of something they too call God. The best example of this phenomenon is the
prolific John Shelby Spong. We will cite
more of Spong on what he calls theism and we here call classical theism
shortly. Spong acknowledges on occasion
that rejecting theism leaves one, linguistically speaking at least, with
“atheism.” Nonetheless, Spong insists on
using only theism for the image of God that he rejects as no longer
believable. He’s right that what he
means by theism is unbelievable today, but Spong never adequately deals with
the truth that even he admits that rejecting simply theism leaves one with
atheism. Spong is not an atheist. His language however leaves him open to the
charge that he is, so I will not call the image of God that I will here reject
simply theism. I remain a theist and am
not an atheist, by which I mean that I accept the reality of something that I
and many others call Theos, that is,
that we call God.
Yet we must have some term for
the image of God that we reject. How
else are we to talk about it? Theism
without more won’t do, Spong to the contrary notwithstanding. So what are we to use? As she does with so many theological
questions, Elizabeth A. Johnson gives us the answer to that question. She uses the term “classical theism” for the
concept of God that Spong simply calls theism.
I will use that term here, but as I do I must offer some explanation of
why I think adding the adjective “classical” to the noun “theism” solves the
linguistic problem we face.
Adjectives of course add meaning
to the noun they modify. In the phrase
classical theism the adjective classical adds meaning to the noun theism. Exactly what meaning it adds shall unfold
anon. Suffice it to say for now that the
term classical refers here to a particular type of theism. Unlike the naked term theism itself it does
not refer to all belief in the reality of God.
It refers to something much more limited than that. The word “classical” in its original meaning
refers to the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, i.e., the classical
world. That of course is not its meaning
in the term classical theism. Ancient
Greece and Rome certainly had gods who in many ways fit the definition of
classical theism that I will develop here, but by classical theism I don’t mean
the belief about God or gods of ancient Greece and Rome.
Classical has come to have other
meanings of course. Classical can refer
to something that is supported by a large body of literature. It can mean something that is considered
standard, that is considered to be a norm or a commonly held conception of
something. Even though it doesn’t
necessarily point to ancient Greece and Rome, classical does point backwards
not forwards. Something that is
classical is something that has been established in the past. It is something that is at least a bit
old. Innovations are not classical. Hollywood may occasionally promote some movie
as an “instant classic,” but that phrase is an oxymoron. It contradicts itself. Something becomes a classic over time, not
instantly. Something that is classical
is something that has come to be accepted as a standard, as generally
considered valid, as something few if any question.
It is in this sense that I and
others use the phrase classical theism. Classical theism is a theism, that is,
a particular view of or a particular belief in God, that has become standard in
our time. It is the view of God that
most people hold today. Classical theism
is what most people think of when they hear the word God. When most people answer the question of
whether they believe in God they are really answering the question do you
believe in the God of classical theism, for most people in our context today
who haven’t made an intentional study of the matter (and some who presumably
have, like those new atheists I mentioned above) have no other image of God to
which to refer in answering the question.
Classical theism is an image of God that indeed arose in the past. It isn’t new.
It wouldn’t be classical if it were.
It isn’t rare. It wouldn’t be
classical if it were. Rather, it is
widely held both by people who accept it (or who at least say that they do) and
by people who reject it, either replacing it with a better image of God or
denying the reality of God altogether and becoming true atheists.
OK, so classical theism isn’t
rare, and it isn’t new; but what is it exactly?
What is its view of God? Who is
the God of classical theism? To help us
answer those questions let’s turn to two authors I have already mentioned, John
Shelby Spong and Elizabeth A. Johnson.
In particular, here are some statements from Spong’s book Why Christianity Must Change or Die[6]
and Johnson’s book She Who Is, The
Mystery of God in Feminine Theological Discourse[7]
that tell us pretty clearly what classical theism is. As I’ve already said, in this work I will
reject classical theism. The next
chapter of this book sets out my objections to it, and I’ll mention only a few
of them briefly here. But before we can
reject something we must know what it is.
Spong and Johnson will help us with that task.
Spong says that what he calls
theism and what I call classical theism is “the idea of God defined as a
supernatural person who invades life periodically to accomplish the divine
will.”[8] He quotes the English theologian Richard
Swinburne as saying that the God of theism is “‘something like a person without
a body, who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is
perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the
creator of the universe.’”[9] To return to Spong’s own words, he says that
theism is the “belief in an external, personal, supernatural, and potentially
invasive Being.”[10] The God of theism is then, for Spong,
personal, external, omnipotent, omniscient, and One we should worship. This God is not only personal, He (the God of
theism is always a He) is a person.[11] A very unusual person to be sure, unlike any
other person, but still a person alongside other people. This God is a being alongside other beings, a
“Supreme Being” of course, but still a being.
Johnson’s discussion of
classical theism, which she also calls philosophical theism, is much more
sophisticated than Spong’s, but then Johnson is a much more sophisticated
theologian than Spong is generally. She
begins a discussion of the God of classical theism by saying that classical
theism
refers to the concept of God
developed by medieval and early modern theology in close contact with classical
metaphysics. It signifies the
understanding that there is God (contrary to atheism), that God is one
(contrary to polytheism), and that the one God is not to be identified with the
world (contrary to pantheism.)[12]
That classical theism does all of those things is
certainly true, and those things are fine as far as they go. There is, however, much more to classical
theism than that. Johnson continues:
Theism [Johnson
here, perhaps inadvertently, uses Spong’s term] in this specific sense views
God as the Supreme Being who made all things and who rules all things. Although architect and governor of the world,
it is essential that ‘he’ (the theistic God is always referred to in male
terms) be essentially unrelated to this world and unaffected by what happens in
it so as to remain independent from it.[13]
Johnson remarks that this view of classical theism emphasizes
God’s divine transcendence and in the process tends to lose an awareness of
God’s immanence in creation. It stresses
God’s perfections, and God becomes “‘infinite, self-existent, incorporeal,
immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent.’”[14] The theistic God, Johnson says, is “modeled
on the pattern of an earthly absolute monarch….”[15]
Classical theism tends to get
caught in contradictions between its words about God and its functional
understanding of God. Johnson points out
one of those contradictions. She notes
that classical theism will always say that God is mystery. In making that statement it agrees with what
will become one of the primary elements of the liberated understanding of God
that I will develop in this study. In
practice, however, classical theism makes God into a thing. It is guilty of, in Johnson’s words, “reducing
infinite mystery to an independently existing Supreme Being alongside other
beings, a solitary, transcendent power who together with the world can be
thought to form a larger whole.”[16]
Johnson then states: “Classical theism emphasizes in a one-sided
way the absolute transcendence of God over the world, God’s untouchability by
human history and suffering, the all-pervasiveness of God’s dominating power to
which human beings owe submission and awe.”[17] We need to be a bit cautious here about
simply agreeing with Johnson on this point.
Yes, transcendence, power, and awe are certainly aspects of the God of
classical theism. Yet many who hold that
view of God also experience God’s presence in their lives. We must not decline to give credit to the
view we will ultimately reject when that credit is due, even if classical
theism is easier to attack when we deny it all theological virtue. Take for example Reza Aslan, the well-known
American Muslim author of Iranian origin.
In the introduction to his book Zealot
he speaks of having converted (temporarily as it turned out) to evangelical
Christianity in his youth. The God of
evangelical Christianity is of course the God of classical theism, yet Aslan
says that during his time as an evangelical Christian Jesus Christ was a real
and helpful companion in his life.
Perhaps classically theistic Christianity uses Jesus as an offset
against an excessively remote, powerful, and judgmental God. Still, for Christians Jesus is God Incarnate,
so the way in which many traditional Christians feel an intimate relationship
with Jesus does, to some extent at least, mitigate the remoteness and other
aspects of the classically theistic God.
Johnson, a great feminist
theologian, then points out that classical theism’s God is “the reflection of
patriarchal imagination, which prizes nothing more than unopposed power-over
and unquestioned loyalty.”[18] Classical theism’s God indeed has power that
no one can effectively oppose if God decides to use that power, and that God
indeed demands unquestioned loyalty.
So what then precisely is the
classical theism with which I begin this book?
It is an image of God that is still pervasive among us. That image is the God of Fundamentalism and
of conservative evangelicalism. It is
the God of most of the people in the pews of the once-called mainline
Protestant denominations. It is the God
of most Roman Catholics.[19] Classical theism’s view of God is the first
and primary thing from which God needs liberating. Why that is so will appear in what follows in
subsequent chapters.
The most fundamental thing about
the theistic God is that this God is an independently existing being. God is the Supreme Being. Perhaps most people who call God the Supreme
Being think mostly of the adjective Supreme when they use the phrase, but the
phrase nonetheless calls God a being.
Writing Being with a capital B doesn’t change that fact. In classical theism God is not being. God is a
being, even if we more commonly say the
Supreme Being. The God of classical
theism is neither being itself nor the ground of being, to use two of Paul
Tillich’s key phrases for God. This God
is imagined as something. In this view God is radically separate from
creation. In the course of this work we
too will say that God is separate and different from creation, but we will at
least attempt to avoid classical theism’s one-sidedness in making that
assertion by also emphasizing God’s immanence in the world. In classical theism God as the Supreme Being
exists beyond the world and outside of it as an entity existing over and
against a very separate created universe.
The God of classical theism is
“up.” He (again, the God of classical
theism is always “He”) is a separate being and as such is located
somewhere. That somewhere is heaven, and
heaven is located in a physical place in our sense of physical places. God’s place is heaven, and heaven is located
up. The ancient world thought that
heaven was up too and that it wasn’t very far up. In that ancient cosmology the sky was a dome
over the earth (see Genesis 1:6-8), and it wasn’t very far away. That’s why, in the story from Genesis, the
people of Babel thought they could build a tower to reach it (see Genesis 11:1-9). That’s why Jacob, in another story from
Genesis, has a dream in which a ladder reaches from the earth to heaven (see
Genesis 28:10-17). That’s why the first
Christians could imagine Jesus physically ascending to heaven after his
resurrection (see Acts 1:6-11). Few
people with a classically theistic image of God think that simplistically about
God and God’s heaven anymore. They have
learned more contemporary astronomy than that; but for most of them heaven is
still where God lives, and heaven is up.
There’s more. Much more.
The God of classical theism is the God of the “omnis.” This God is imagined as radically other, as
vastly beyond and different from creation while at the same time being thought
of mostly as some kind of supreme man.
There is truth in that understanding that God is beyond and different,
as we shall see in this work; but classical theism lets its belief in the
radical otherness of God lead it into seeing God in some problematic ways. Those ways are expressed with a number of
words that begin with the particle “omni,” from the Latin meaning “all.” In classical theism God is omnipresent,
omniscient, and omnipotent, and we need to understand what those terms mean in
order to understand the God of classical theism.
The God of classical theism is
omnipresent, in theory at least.
Omnipresent means all present, present everywhere. Again, God as omnipresent is not something
with which a liberated view of God has a problem, but classical theism gets
into trouble here because of it radical emphasis on God’s separateness from the
world over God’s presence in it.
Omnipresence becomes a characteristic of God to which classical theism
more or less pays lip service, all the while seeing God as really out there, up
in heaven. God’s omnipresence is useful
for the churches of classical theism, for they can use the concept to tell the
people that they cannot escape from God, usually for the purpose of inducing a
guilt which gives the church great power over the people.
God is indeed omnipresent. The Psalmist of Psalm 139 knew that truth a
very long time ago. He wrote:
Where can I go from your spirit?
O
where can I flee from your
presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are
there;
if
I make my bed in Sheol, you are
there.
If I take the wings of the
morning
and
settle at the farthest limits of
the
sea,
even there your hand shall lead
me,
and
your right hand shall hold me fast.[20]
Many of us with a liberated view of God, myself included,
find God’s unfailing presence with us both comforting and challenging. God as omnipresent isn’t the problem with
classical theism. The problem with
classical theism is rather its one-sided emphasis on God’s transcendence, which
in practice tends to limit people’s understanding of God’s actual presence in
their lives and the nature and purpose of that presence, subjects to which we
will turn in the course of this study.
The God of classical theism is
“omniscient.” Omniscient means all
knowing. The God of classical theism
knows everything. Again, the problem
isn’t that this contention of classical theism is wrong on its face. Liberated theology also understands that
nothing is beyond God’s knowledge. The
problem is more what classical theistic Christianity has tended to do with the
notion of God’s omniscience. I have a
colleague who says that when he was growing up he was afraid to lie on his back
in bed because he could see God looking down at him, knowing everything he had
done, and judging him accordingly. The
problem with God’s omniscience in classical theism is the way it connects God’s
omniscience with the notion of judgment and condemnation, something we will
discuss at some length later in this study.
The most significant of the
“omnis” of classical theism is “omnipotent.”
Omnipotent means all powerful. It
usually gets rendered in English as “Almighty.”
In classical theism God becomes “the Almighty.” What began as an adjective gets turned into a
noun, a proper noun even, that functions essentially as the name of God, always
spelled with a capital A. The question
of God’s power or lack thereof over creation is one of the thorniest problems
in contemporary theology. We will devote
a good deal of space to it later in this work.
In classical theism God’s omnipotence means that there is nothing that
God can’t do on earth. God in this view
has the power to do absolutely anything.
God could intervene on earth to usher in the Kingdom of God this very
instant if God wanted to. God could end
all human suffering. God could end human
death. God could save the environment
from human degradation. God could end
war. The God of classical theism has the
power to do anything. That God has all
the power there is, power beyond our human imagining, power to control the
entire universe and everything and everyone in it.
Ascribing omnipotence to God
creates immense problems for theistic theology.
It creates problems especially when it is put together with another
theistic aspect of God, namely God’s goodness.
In Archibald MacLeish’s play JB,
the character JB says “If God is God he is not good. If God is good he is not God.” That statement rather obviously assumes the
God of classical theism, especially a God who is omnipotent; and it powerfully
points out the ultimate impossibility of holding together both God’s
omnipotence and God’s goodness. We will
have a lot more to say about that issue in this work.
Perhaps the most central thing
about the God of classical theism is that that God is anthropomorphic. He (again, always He) is some kind of
man. An immensely wise and powerful
man. An immortal man to be sure, for the
God of classical theism after all doesn’t die.
A supreme man. A radically other
man, yet still a man.
To understand the God of
classical theism, think of this picture:
It is of course Michelangelo’s image from the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, usually said to be of God creating Adam even
though it doesn’t actually represent anything related in that story from
Genesis. This image give us the God of
classical theism. He is an elderly man,
very definitely a man. He’s up in the
sky. He is coming down to earth to
intervene and do something that no ordinary man could do, to create human
beings and give them life. He is the
Creator God, and he comes into creation from outside creation. He looks like an ordinary man, a Caucasian
man of course, for classical theism is the creation of European civilization;
and he’s a man not a woman because that European civilization was highly
androcentric. Adam is a white man too,
but he’s not the focus of our interest here.
Our focus is the anthropomorphic God who breaks into creation from above
to do miraculous things to complete His divine purpose.
That is the God of classical
theism. That is an image from which God
very much needs to be liberated. The God
of classical theism may once have had great meaning for people. Indeed, millions upon millions of people in
former times found that image of God convincing and compelling. For many people today, it no longer is. The God of classical theism once conveyed
God’s spiritual gifts to a great many people.
People found in it meaning, comfort, hope, encouragement, and
challenge. Few people today still do. So what in any detail is wrong with the God
of classical theism? Why does that God
no longer speak to us? Why do we no
longer believe in that God? To those
questions we now turn.
© Thomas C.
Sorenson, 2013. No portion of this
document may be copied without the express written consent of the author. All rights reserved.
[1]
See Bass, Diana Butler, Christianity
After Religion, The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening,
HarperOne, 2012, passim.
[2] See in particular his The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2008.
[3] See his God Is Not Great, How Religion Poisons
Everything, Twelve, 2007.
[4] See my Liberating Christianity, op. cit.,
Chapter One, for a very brief account of the rise of secularism in the West.
[5] Don was the author of what
is still a major textbook on the history of Russia in the twentieth
century. It has the somewhat unoriginal
title Twentieth Century Russia. Don died in 1994, but his text book has been
re-edited and reissued since his death through the work of his colleague Herb
Ellison and others. Once when I was
arriving at Don’s house for a dinner party a young faculty member arrived at
the same time. He looked up at the
lovely home Don owned and said “Oh to have published a successful
textbook!” Indeed.
[6] Spong, John Shelby, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, A
Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile, HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco,
1998.
[7] Johnson, Elizabeth A., She Who Is, The Mystery of God in Feminist
Theological Discourse, Crossroad, New York, 1997.
[8] Spong, op.cit., p. 46.
[9] Id., quoting Swinburne,
Richard, Coherence of Theism, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 1.
I’m not sure Swinburne is right that the God of classical theism is
without a body. See my discussion of Da
Vinci’s image of God below.
[10] Spong, op.cit., p. 46.
[11] A quick word about God
and gender. We’ve all heard God called
“he” over and over again. Most of us
have rarely heard God called “she.” Yet
even classical theism acknowledges in theory that God transcends gender, gender
being a characteristic of created beings not of God. In this work I will not call God “he” except
when referring to the God of classical theism.
I may on occasion call God “she,” because it is so important for us to
overcome the tendency of our language to turn God into a man and to open our
minds to other images for God. Mostly,
however, I will avoid gender specific pronouns when I refer to God.
[12] Johnson, op.cit., p. 19.
[13] Id.
[14] Id., pp. 19-20, citing
Owen, H. P., Concepts of Deity,
Herder and Herder, New York, 1971, p. 1.
Again let me say that the image of the theistic God, especially in
popular understandings, isn’t necessarily “incorporeal” as Owen says here.
[15] Johnson, op.cit., p. 20.
[16] Id.
[17] Id., p. 21.
[18] Id.
[19] Although as I said in the
Introduction, I write from and mostly to a Protestant context, let me hasten to
add that the God of classical theism is not the God image of many more
enlightened Roman Catholics. After all,
Elizabeth Johnson is not only Roman Catholic, she is actually a nun, albeit one
that the Catholic hierarchy is trying in some ways to silence.
[20] Psalm 139:7-10
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