Against Theistic Personalism: What Modern Epistemology does to Classical Theism

Authors

  • Roger Pouivet Université de Lorraine / Institut Universitaire de France

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v10i1.1871

Keywords:

God's nature, person, Swinburne, Aquinas, Prayer

Abstract

Is God a person, like you and me eventually, but only much better and without our human deficiencies? When you read some of the philosophers of religion, including Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, or Open Theists, God appears as such a person, in a sense closer to Superman than to the Creator of Heaven and Earth. It is also a theory that a Christian pastoral theology today tends to impose, insisting that God is close to us and attentive to all of us. But this modern account of God could be a deep and even tragic mistake. One God in three persons, the formula of the Trinity, does not mean that God is a person. On this matters we need an effort in the epistemology of theology to examine more precisely what we can pretend to know about God, and especially how we could pretend to know that God is person.

Author Biography

Roger Pouivet, Université de Lorraine / Institut Universitaire de France

Professor of Philosophy

References

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Published

2018-03-11

How to Cite

Pouivet, Roger. 2018. “Against Theistic Personalism: What Modern Epistemology Does to Classical Theism”. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10 (1):1-19. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v10i1.1871.