An Atheist Eavesdrops on a Clash Between Christians

How to understand the conflict between classical theists and theistic personalists

Imagine the thrill of being a spy, of seeing or hearing something important that wasn’t meant for you. There happen to be internal disputes between Christians that are so revealing, I think, that a skeptic would have that kind of thrill were she to eavesdrop on them.

Take, for example, the clash between classical theists and theistic personalists. Granted, this feud has raged out in the open rather than being a secret. But the debate has been framed in abstract, metaphysical terms so that most Christians, let alone non-Christians wouldn’t be interested in following the controversy or in pondering the implications. Nevertheless, from an atheistic perspective, the debate is illuminating.

What’s at issue in that debate is the nature of God. On the one hand, there are the classical theists, from the Church Fathers to the early modern philosopher GW Leibnitz, and their thinking has defined the theologies of the Latin and Greek churches. On the other hand, there are the theistic personalists who bring Protestantism to fruition and whose thinking supports the Evangelical’s emphasis on the need for a personal relationship with God.

Perhaps, though, we can shed some light on the debate if we leave out the pieties.

The Abstract Art of Classical Theism

Classical theists take as fundamental the metaphysical question of what’s ultimately real or most fundamental. Their main concern is also what occupied the presocratic philosophers. The latter, too, wanted to understand what the world is really like, beyond the misleading appearances and perceptual illusions. The Presocratics posited various foundational forces and substances, and Aristotle posited an unmoved mover or a first cause that isn’t itself caused by anything else.

As in physics, the task is to explain how these theoretical entities relate to the perceived world. Scientists use math to model scenarios and perform experiments to decide which model is best. Classical theists adopt Aristotle’s view as the culmination of pagan thinking and use technical metaphysical language instead of math to provide a rational foundation for the Christian religion.

In short, these theists analyze this concept of a first cause to unravel the nature of God. The medium is the message here, so the metaphysical form of their arguments leaves an impression on their depiction of the deity. Thus, God ends up being an abstract, unique, paradoxical substance.

As the primary cause or as that which accounts for everything else, but which isn’t itself explained by positing a deeper reality, God creates from nothing, which means God is the reason there’s something rather than nothing. But God’s “act” of creation is timeless, so the first cause metaphysically sustains nature, as the ongoing, unchanging source of all change.

As this metaphysically crucial ground of all beings, God is no ordinary contingent thing; on the contrary, God must be self-sufficient, impassable, and immutable. Otherwise, God would be just another creature rather than the Creator. God is the sole occupier of a pivotal Archimedean point which makes everything else dependent on him and which makes God invulnerable to the created world.

As the source of space and time, God is immaterial and timeless. And following this metaphysical train of thought, God must be metaphysically simple, which means he lacks parts; otherwise, you’d have reason to search for a deeper explanation of why God’s parts are arranged as they are.

Thus, God doesn’t have his properties in the way you, a person with a changeable nature might be good one moment and bad the next. Rather, God must be identical with his characteristics, and these must reduce to one to make God primary. God isn’t merciful and just, for example. Rather, God is X which somehow includes mercy and justice. Likewise, God doesn’t perform multiple actions, but only a single simple one that includes what we think of as the multiplicity.

Consequently, the paradigmatic religious descriptions of God in the Bible must often be analogical at best. Specifically, the Bible speaks of God as a king, a judge, a father, or more generally as a person. But it’s plain that this metaphysical God of the philosophers and of the classical theists can’t be a person in the literal sense. The classical theist’s God isn’t a person in such a way that you and I and God would be members of the same class.

God would be a person in the same way in which a rock is a person in that both can be compared to people in certain dubious respects. For example, a person has a hard head, thanks to the bony skull, and a rock is also hard. Similarly, the baffling mystery of the uncaused cause or the unmoved mover can be arbitrarily compared to a person, just as anything whatsoever can be compared to anything else thanks to pareidolia, assuming you’re in the mood for identifying superficial, metaphysically empty similarities.

The Personal God of Protestantism

Plainly, if you think that, for there to be any point in being a theist, God must be literally a person — albeit a disembodied one — you’ll think classical theism went astray in trying to apply metaphysical reasoning to monotheistic religion. Indeed, you’ll infer that in so far as most Christian leaders were so-called classical “theists,” much of Christian history has been implicitly atheistic.

That will surprise you at first, but once you realize that the classical theist was playing with fire in applying the Greek philosopher’s armchair-metaphysical reasoning to scripture and to the Christian creed, you may find yourself wondering how it could have been otherwise. How could the medium fail to have been the message? How could the classical theist’s God not be naturalized by the effort spent in trying to understand God with such systematic formal inferences?

Still, this implication is, of course, perfectly blasphemous since it means that most of Christian history has been a hoax that effectively enslaved the Christian masses by telling them only what they wanted to hear rather than the truth of implicit atheism. The Church would mostly have catered to the flock’s naïve expectations of God’s personhood, while entailing for the priestly elite the literal impersonality of God in so far as “He” is metaphysically conceived.

The flock wanted a father figure and a sovereign judge to right all wrongs, but the classical theologians could reason their way only to an ultimate substance.

Indeed, this is the upshot of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther rejected the lawyerly, Jesuitical and Scholastic philosophizing about God, and he repudiated the Catholic Church that depended on that fraud. In its place Luther posited as his starting point the personal relationship between God and human.

God must be that which can save a person without the rigmarole of the priesthood, so God must be Jesus in whom we can trust. For Luther, salvation is by the inward act of faith alone — faith not in a metaphysical abstraction, but in the scriptural narrative of how Jesus died to save us from the consequences of our sins.

If Jesus hadn’t been resurrected after he died, ongoing faith in Jesus would be senseless. But because Jesus derived from and ascended back into “God,” according to the New Testament, the deity must inherit Jesus’s personhood. God must be personal because we’d better be saved by faith alone; after all, by the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church was plainly corrupt, so its traditions and hierarchy were incapable of spiritually enriching anyone who wasn’t being fooled.

Moreover, in the West, ordinary folks couldn’t hope to trust in a metaphysical abstraction since they couldn’t even speak Latin, which was the language of the elites that explicated the obscure nature of that unmoved mover. Thus, to save us from ourselves, God must descend to our level. For Protestants, that was the point of God’s incarnation as Jesus. God must be essentially a person to relate to ordinary people, and God must be knowable today as a resurrected, ghostly form of Jesus.

Theistic personalists are mainly Protestants such as Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who push this line of reasoning to its furthest conclusion. They reject classical theism for being irrelevant to the Christian mission of saving ordinary, non-intellectual sinners. Rather than beginning with metaphysical questions about ultimate reality, theistic personalists such as William Lane Craig, Richard Swinburne, and Alvin Plantinga start from God’s love of humankind which motivates the Creator to save us from destruction in Hell.

In other words, these Christians start from a naïve, literalistic reading of the Bible, and they infer that God must be that which makes the biblical narrative true and worthy of Christians’ trust in it and in the church.

For the personalist as opposed to the classical theist, God must be essentially, not just figuratively a person. That’s not to say God is just an average person. Of course, the personalist agrees that God is also the ultimate substance and the first cause of all beings that has various mysterious metaphysical properties. But the personalist denies that that metaphysical analysis excludes God’s essential personhood. The personalist insists on that not so much because she has a rival metaphysical picture, but because of her presumed religious experience of God.

An External Perspective on this Intra-Christian Dispute

The upshot is that classical theists or adherents of Christian orthodoxy would say that theistic personalists have simpleminded devotion to a biblical fiction, whereas the truth about God is revealed by metaphysical philosophy that entails atheistic paganism. Meanwhile, the theistic personalists reject that entire theological tradition of the Christian institution as an obfuscation of the plain biblical truth. For the personalists, God reveals himself not through reason but through scripture and inner experience.

Either way, the dispute looks a lot more fundamental than apologists like Edward Feser would have it. In laying out the disagreement, Feser brushes aside personalism by saying that classical theists, too, maintain that God is a person since God is analogous to something that has that property.

But what Feser doesn’t emphasize is that attributing either literal or analogous properties to a supernatural entity is vacuous: God would have the property of being a person in the same superficial way he’d have the property of being a rock or a sailboat or a gymnasium. None of those descriptions would be meaningful since they’d be undermined by the metaphysical point that God is really an X known only negatively as not natural or familiar, as absolutely independent, changeless, timeless, immaterial — and impersonal.

The theistic personalist asks how God could be a person if God can’t be emotionally affected by anything we say or do. How could God be our parent if God isn’t distressed by the thought that his creatures might be destroying themselves? If God is changeless, he can only observe what we do but couldn’t relate to any of us personally since an emotional relationship is dynamic.

And the classical theist replies that God is too important to be a mere person. God accounts for the profound fact that there’s something rather than nothing. As reason informs us, a natural kind of person couldn’t perform that metaphysical function. Therefore, the scriptures are fictions or metaphors that point the way to God, without being idols that should stand in for that ultimate being.

Keep in mind that this conflict is internal to Christianity. Leading Christians themselves came to these opposite conclusions, which led first to the Reformation and later to the Evangelical emphasis on the born-again religion experience and on the need for a personal relationship with “Christ Jesus.”

Why shouldn’t atheists bring this conflict to the fore, then, letting each side discredit the other for being equally unworthy as a solution to our common, existential problem?

Theistic Personalism and the Social Instinct

Indeed, from a naturalistic vantagepoint, we can understand how this intra-Christian dispute arose. Historically, as I said, classical theism was founded as an offshoot of pagan philosophy. Yet the theological use of philosophy was like the Sophistical one that Plato had condemned. In either case, this was illegitimate, unethical pseudo-philosophy that led only to confusion and to exploitation of the unreflective masses.

The eventual Scholastic encasement of the Church’s game-like metaphysical reasoning was, of course, pseudoscientific. God was a suitably perplexing abstraction that pleased Christian intellectuals and that warded off more skeptical inferences. Throughout what we can call the classical period, that is, from the second century CE to the rise of Protestantism, Christendom was sustained and promoted by the sword. Philosophical justifications were just afterthoughts and rationalizations since the Church had the power to coerce people’s compliance with Christian beliefs and practices.

It’s no accident, then, that the rise of Protestantism also marks the beginning of what we call the period of progressive, secular modernity. Protestant individualism (and the rediscovery of ancient Greco-Roman humanism) propelled the Italian Renaissance, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the Enlightenment, and the democratic and capitalistic overthrows of European monarchies. The relevance here is that the end of the classical period is when the Church began to lose its power to enforce theological correctness or to control the contents of people’s minds.

This suggests, then, another motive for theistic personalism. If in the post-classical period people could no longer be forced to be Christians on pain of being persecuted as heretics or as pagans, some other weakness had to be exploited to advance Christendom. Perhaps Protestants took advantage of a psychological one. After all, we have a social instinct, a predisposition to form social relationships. That’s why babies’ first word is often “Mama.”

Instead of thinking of God as a metaphysical abstraction, as a move in a decadent language game that made excuses for Christian imperialism, Christendom had to be supported and expanded in the modern period without the benefit of European theocracies. Why not emphasize God’s literal personhood, then, regardless of the philosophical absurdities that ensue, to cater to our natural preference to make friends and to be part of a family? Why not say the primary Christian mission is to spread the news that we ought to take up God’s offer of having a personal relationship with him here and now?

Instead of torturing or excommunicating non-Christians, the theistic personalist can leverage the human social instinct to preserve her religion. Thus, we could overlook how modernity had turned Christianity into an embarrassing anachronism and we can submit not to the powerful Church (which no longer existed) but to our genetic code’s control over some of our ways of thinking, to our preoccupation with feeling emotions that makes sense only in a social context.

Perhaps that more cynical agenda is what’s playing out in this internal conflict. The issue for Christians isn’t so much theological as political: How can Christians empower themselves even in the modern secular period?

Evangelical Tactics

And we should note that so-called Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and born-again Christians give the game away by making this Protestant strategy impossible to miss. For example, these in-your-face Christians are liable to lay a guilt trip on you in their effort to convert people to their religion.

“Don’t you feel ashamed,” they’ll say, “for rejecting God’s offer of having a personal relationship with you? God’s trying to get to know you and you’re spurning his advance. God made the first move when he came to live as Jesus, and if you keep ignoring him, you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

That evangelical tactic exploits the fact that if a human person tried to befriend you and to warn you about an imminent danger, you’d be rude and foolish not to respond with appreciation. A conscientious and self-interested listener would have to react as a fellow person by turning and saying “Hello.” Clearly, the evangelical Christian uses the strained metaphor of God’s personhood to tap into our common social instinct, to convert people to Christianity by shaming us for ignoring this divine individual.

Indeed, the Christian can equate secularists with the ancient Romans and Jewish elders who victimized Jesus. By not praying to God, confessing our sins, and begging for Jesus to come into our heart and be our lord and savior, we’re shunning the God whose personhood was revealed in Jesus’s character.

Yet by so boldly resorting to these tactics of exploiting our social instinct, the more obnoxious Protestants indirectly attest to their religion’s weakness. The Christian message ought to speak for itself, but that’s no longer useful because the message is archaic and preposterous according to modern knowledge and enlightened sensibilities. If you must exploit people’s emotions and con them into signing up to your faith like a cultist, your religion is deficient.