The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories, Revised Edition by Roy A Clouser

Author:Roy A Clouser
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: RELIGION / Philosophy
ISBN: 9780268077013
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2014-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

A. An Assessment of the AAA View of God

Let’s start with the premise that all God’s attributes are to be understood as perfections, the highest possible degrees of whatever properties it would take to make a being the greatest possible being. My first objection to this is to point out an important difference between the meaning of “perfect” as it is used in Greek philosophy and the Hebrew sense of that term as used by Bible writers. For no Bible writer ever used “perfect” to mean the highest degree of a property. The Hebrew sense of the term means “complete,” “completely,” or “unfailingly.” So when Jesus said to his disciples “You should be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” he was not admonishing them to be God! Rather, he was saying that they should be as completely (unfailingly) faithful to their end of the covenant as God is to His end of it. The fact is that no Bible writer ever ascribes to God the “highest possible degree” of a property; and to construe God’s attributes as identical with that pagan Greek idea is to have already imported a clearly Platonic notion into the interpretation of scriptures that are profoundly Hebraic documents.

No doubt saying God’s attributes are perfections and that God is the greatest conceivable being is intended as a compliment to God. After all, Plato had postulated a realm of perfections distinct from the world we inhabit, and his theory not only dominated the ancient world but has enormous influence still. So isn’t it not only harmless but imperative to propose that these perfections be ascribed to God? That way it isn’t an impersonal realm of many individual abstract entities that are divine per se, but rather the one true God who has all perfections as attributes of His nature.20 Shouldn’t theists therefore be quick to affirm that God is the greatest possible being? The answer to this question is that although it may at first seem harmless to construe God’s attributes as Platonic perfections, and a compliment to God to refer to Him as the greatest possible being, these departures from the ways Bible writers speak of God actually have very serious consequences which are utterly unacceptable from the point of view of a number of scriptural teachings. I will return to this issue in more detail later, but for now think about just this one point: doesn’t calling God the “greatest possible being” require that there be standards for both greatness and possibility that are independent of God? Doesn’t it require that God be judged and measured by those standards? If so, then even if the conclusion is that God comes out at the top of the scale when judged by them, God has still been subjected to standards independent of Him. That is not a compliment to God, even if it’s intended to be. Rather, it’s an unintended denial of His unique per se divinity and His creatorship3 of every standard by which anything can be judged.

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