Competing conceptions of God: the personal God versus the God beyond being

Among philosophers and theologians today, one of the most important dividing lines is the one separating those who advocate a personal conception of God (personal theism) from those who embrace the idea of a God beyond or without being (alterity theism). There is not much dialogue between these grou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Religious studies
Main Author: Stenmark, Mikael 1962- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press [2015]
In: Religious studies
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Idea of God
RelBib Classification:AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism
NBC Doctrine of God
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
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Summary:Among philosophers and theologians today, one of the most important dividing lines is the one separating those who advocate a personal conception of God (personal theism) from those who embrace the idea of a God beyond or without being (alterity theism). There is not much dialogue between these groups of scholars; rather the two groups ignore each other, and each party typically believes that there is a fairly straightforward knockdown argument against the other. In this article I explore these two standard objections - the idolatry objection and the no-sense objection - and show why they both fail to be convincing. This failure to convince is a good thing, because it opens up the possibility that both personal theism and alterity theism are legitimate research programmes, each worthy of being further developed in philosophical theology.
ISSN:1469-901X
Contains:Enthalten in: Religious studies
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0034412514000304