What is the difference between classical theism and theistic personalism?

Classical theism stresses God's simplicity, immutability, and transcendence as pure being, while theistic personalism conceives God more as a person without a body who has properties like ours to a supreme degree; critics argue the latter risks making God a being among beings.

What does omnipotence mean?

Most theologians take omnipotence to mean the power to do whatever is logically possible and consistent with God's nature, rather than the power to do the strictly contradictory such as making a square circle.

Divine Attributes and Classical Theism

Classical theism conceives God as a single, perfect, self-existent being and analyses the divine attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, and goodness.

Definition

The study of the properties traditionally ascribed to God and the classical conception of God as a simple, perfect, necessary being.

Scope

This topic surveys the model of God shared by mainstream Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theology: God as one, simple, immutable, impassible, eternal, and possessing the omni-attributes to a maximal degree. It examines how these attributes are derived (from God as the absolutely perfect being or as pure actuality), the conceptual puzzles each raises, and modern alternatives such as theistic personalism and open theism. The account is descriptive, presenting the positions and their arguments rather than adjudicating the truth of theism.

Core questions

Which attributes belong to God, and how are they known?
Are the divine attributes mutually consistent?
Does divine simplicity require that God's attributes are identical?
How do classical and personalist conceptions of God differ?

Key theories

God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived: Anselm's characterization of God as the greatest conceivable being, from which the perfections (omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness) are derived as the attributes a maximally great being must possess.
Pure actuality and divine simplicity: Aquinas's account of God as actus purus (pure act, without potentiality), entailing that God is simple, immutable, and eternal, with the attributes being one in God and only conceptually distinguished by us.

History

Conceptions of God's attributes drew on both biblical sources and Greek philosophy, synthesized by patristic and medieval thinkers such as Augustine, Anselm, Maimonides, and Aquinas into classical theism. The Reformation and Enlightenment largely retained this framework, but twentieth-century philosophy of religion produced revisions, including process theism, open theism, and the analytic 'theistic personalism' associated with Swinburne.

Debates

Omniscience and human freedom: Whether God's exhaustive foreknowledge of future actions is compatible with libertarian free will, prompting solutions such as Boethian timeless knowledge, Molinist middle knowledge, and the open-theist denial of foreknowledge of free acts.
Coherence of the omni-attributes: Debates over whether attributes such as omnipotence are even coherent (e.g., the paradox of the stone) and how omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness can be jointly held.

Key figures

Anselm of Canterbury
Thomas Aquinas
Maimonides
Richard Swinburne

Seminal works

anselmProslogion
aquinasST
swinburne1993

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between classical theism and theistic personalism?: Classical theism stresses God's simplicity, immutability, and transcendence as pure being, while theistic personalism conceives God more as a person without a body who has properties like ours to a supreme degree; critics argue the latter risks making God a being among beings.
What does omnipotence mean?: Most theologians take omnipotence to mean the power to do whatever is logically possible and consistent with God's nature, rather than the power to do the strictly contradictory such as making a square circle.