Idealism and Christian Philosophy by Steven B. Cowan;James S. Spiegel;

Author:Steven B. Cowan;James S. Spiegel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628924077
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2019-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

6

Idealism and the Nature of God

Adam Groza

In a poem written about his conversion, Blaise Pascal distinguished between the God of Scripture and the God of the philosophers:

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.

Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.

God of Jesus Christ.

God of Jesus Christ.

My God and your God.1

The Apostle Paul sounds a similar warning in Colossians 2:8, saying, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the basic principles of this world, and not according to Christ.” Pascal and the Apostle Paul both recognize the subtle danger of sacrificing orthodoxy at the altar of philosophy and pursuing the question of God’s nature by reason alone and apart from special revelation.

Berkeley himself is suspected of making just this sort of illicit exchange. Stephen Daniel interprets Berkeley’s God to be “the semantic matrix of reality, the place or space in which all things (including minds and ideas) have identities and are originally differentiated.”2 G. Dawes Hicks claims that Berkeley is either a pantheist or a panentheist.3 In the process of defending the Christian faith against deists such as John Toland and Anthony Collins, was Berkeley himself heterodox?

The subject of God’s nature includes such topics as God’s existence, triunity, simplicity, omnipotence, transcendence, and immanence. God’s transcendence refers to his being separate and distinct from all that is created. The Bible refers to God’s transcendence in many places, such as in Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1. According to these (and other) passages, God exists prior to creation, is separate from creation, and sovereign over creation. The Apostles’ Creed speaks of God as “maker of heaven and earth.” It is safe to say that an orthodox Christian understanding of God’s nature requires affirming the transcendence of God.

The claim of Daniel, Hicks, and others seems to be that idealism necessarily conflates any meaningful distinction between God and creation such that idealism entails pantheism, or at least, panentheism. If Berkeley’s God is merely a semantic matrix of reality, then He is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. He is, in fact, the sort of “God of the philosophers” of which Pascal, and the Apostle Paul, warned. In what follows, I will attempt to offer an explanation of Berkeleyan idealism that maintains an orthodox Christian understanding of the nature of God.

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