In his thought‐provoking critique of classical Christian theism, Isaak Dorner argues that a traditional understanding of God's immutability precludes any diversity in God's action and presence in the world. Dorner reasons that the view of God developed in scholastic thought entails a ‘uniform’ divine causality in which God cannot act in new and distinct ways according to the various circumstances of his creatures. This sort of critique elicits the question of whether God's immutability, if taken to include his pure actuality, flattens out his action such that he is no longer truly engaged in the lives of his creatures. In this article, I propose that a development of the virtual distinction found in scholastic theology proper will enable us to integrate (1) the pure actuality of God and (2) what we may call the formal and temporal diversity of God's action pro nobis that confirms his authentic involvement in the world. Unfolding the explanatory power of the virtual distinction will require considering its relationship to the concept of God's pure actuality and analyzing different aspects of divine action in which the diversity of that action might be located.
This article will address some claims in recent biblical scholarship about God having a body. This will involve first considering what recent advocates of divine embodiment in the Bible are actually asserting. The following section will then examine the conception of a body that one finds in Aristotle and some Christian authors like Thomas Aquinas in order to discern whether or in what sense proponents of divine embodiment in the Bible in fact present something contrary to the doctrine of divine incorporeality. There, the article also offers a few thoughts on why one might want to retain the doctrine of divine incorporeality and contend that one can maintain divine incorporeality while still making sense of the Bible’s corporeal or anthropomorphic descriptions of God.
In this article, I respond to each of the three authors who have engaged my book God in Himself. Regarding Gray Sutanto’s response, I offer comments on his effort to integrate Schleiermacher and Calvin on the human “feeling of dependence” and the sensus divinitatis and to draw upon the insights of Bonaventure to frame our natural knowledge of God. Regarding Scott Swain’s response, I seek to build on his thoughts about the necessary use of metaphysical concepts by considering some additional biblical material and by clarifying the way in which metaphysical concepts might be treated as developments of ordinary, common human knowledge of reality. Finally, regarding Dolf te Velde’s response, I seek to clarify further why I think Scotus and Aquinas may not be too far apart on the nature of theological predication and why I think Aquinas’ view of analogy and divine simplicity is still sufficient for confirming the veracity of Christian speech about God.
Recent work from analytic philosophers taking an interest in Christian theology has sought to uncover an apparent tension between divine simplicity and divine freedom. In response, this paper contends for the compatibility of the simplicity of God with the freedom of God and contingency of creation. This response is undertaken, not by developing new counterarguments also in the analytic vein, but by recovering older insights of various scholastic and Puritan authors. With the help of these authors' expositions of divine simplicity and its theological moorings, the paper identifies problems with postulating divine complexity and then maintains the coherence of divine simplicity and divine freedom through discussions of God's relative attributes, God's will to create, and God's omnipotence.
This chapter provides an account of the way in which some major figures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Reformed, Anglican, and Lutheran theology interacted with the theology of Thomas Aquinas. As in contemporary Protestant engagement of Aquinas, this reception of the Angelic Doctor’s thought has both appreciative and critical moments. The section on the Reformed tradition discusses the role of Aquinas in the Systematic Theology of Charles Hodge and the early volumes of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics. The section on the Anglican tradition discusses the role of Aquinas in the ecclesiological reflections of E. B. Pusey and Charles Gore. Finally, the section on the Lutheran tradition discusses the role of Aquinas in the work of Isaak Dorner.
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