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Concept

Classical Theism vs Theistic Personalism

Intro

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Ask two Christians, "What is God?", and you can get two very different answers. One says God is the ground of all being, the source from which everything else flows, outside of time, with no parts and no change. The other says God is the greatest possible person, a mind with feelings and choices, the biggest and best version of what a person can be. These are not minor differences in vocabulary. They are two distinct pictures of God.

The first picture is called classical theism. It comes from Augustine, Aquinas, the early church fathers, the Reformed scholastics, and the official teachings of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The second is called theistic personalism, a label coined by philosopher Brian Davies in 2004 to name the modern analytic-philosophy version of God you find in writers like Plantinga, Swinburne, and William Lane Craig.

Why does it matter? Because the choice between these two pictures shapes almost everything else. It changes how you read the Trinity, how you handle hard passages where God seems to change his mind or grieve, how you think about God's knowledge of the future, and which positions count as still inside Christian orthodoxy. It also lines up with two further positions that sit further out on the same spectrum: open theism (God does not know all future free choices) and process theism (God grows and changes as the world unfolds).

This page lays the two main views side by side, walks the spectrum from classical theism through theistic personalism to open and process theism, lists who holds what, and explains the trade-offs at each step.

In full

The master comparison hub for the contemporary metaphysics-of-God debate in analytic philosophy of religion and Christian theology. The term "theistic personalism" was coined by Brian Davies (An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford, 3rd ed. 2004) to name the contrast class to classical theism, the contemporary analytic-philosophical conception of God-as-a-maximally-perfect-person, distinct from the patristic-medieval-Reformed conception of God-as-ipsum esse subsistens. The debate is not academic-fringe: it cuts across the central doctrines of God (simplicity, immutability, impassibility, eternity, aseity, foreknowledge), shapes how the Trinity is conceived (numerical-identity-of-being vs. shared-divine-nature-among-three-persons), determines what counts as compatible with Open Theism or Process Theism on the spectrum, and frames the live exegesis-of-Genesis-and-the-attribute-passages disputes. The position-spread runs as a continuum from strict classical theism through theistic personalism toward open theism and (further) process theism, with each step relaxing one or more of the classical-theist constraints.

The four positions in this synthesis

Position God is fundamentally... Simplicity Immutability Impassibility Foreknowledge of free choices
Classical theism Ipsum esse subsistens (Being itself, subsisting) Yes (strict) Yes (strict) Yes (per Divine Impassibility) Exhaustive (by virtue of timeless eternity)
Theistic personalism A maximally perfect person Generally no (rejects strict simplicity) Qualified yes (God's nature unchanges; mental states may be temporally indexed) Qualified no (God has genuine emotional life, time-extended) Exhaustive (foreknowledge robust)
Open Theism A maximally perfect responsive person No No (God grows in experience) No (God is genuinely affected) Limited (future free choices not yet determinate)
Process theism A dipolar entity (abstract eternal nature + temporally-changing consequent nature) No (God is composed of dipolar aspects) No (God's consequent nature grows by prehension) No (God essentially suffers with creation) Limited

A useful frame: classical theism and theistic personalism share a commitment to divine perfection (God lacks no perfection); they differ on what perfection requires. Classical theism: perfection requires aseity-grounded-simplicity, which entails immutability + impassibility + atemporality. Theistic personalism: perfection requires a robust personal-relational interior life, which is incompatible with strict simplicity + immutability + impassibility.

Classical theism

Core thesis

God is ipsum esse subsistens, Being itself, subsisting; not a being among beings but the ground of all being. The divine attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, eternity, etc.) are not distinct properties God has but are identical with God's essence (this is the doctrine of Divine Simplicity). From simplicity flows the rest: Aseity (God depends on nothing for his being), Divine Immutability (God does not change), Divine Impassibility (God is not acted upon by creatures), Eternity (Divine) (timeless or "tota simul", see Boethius's interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio), Actus Purus (Pure Act, no potency to be actualized), Ipsum Esse Subsistens (Being-itself-subsisting). The Christological resolution: the Hypostatic Union preserves the immutable-impassible divine nature while the assumed humanity bears the time-extended passible properties; the impassible one suffers impassibly (Cyril's epathen apathōs).

Strongest biblical and creedal anchors

  • Exodus 3.14, ehyeh asher ehyeh ("I am who I am") read as the self-existence / aseity declaration
  • Malachi 3.6, "I, the LORD, do not change"
  • James 1:17, "with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow"
  • Romans 11:36, "from him and through him and to him are all things"
  • Acts 17:24-25, "not served by human hands, as though he needed anything"
  • Westminster Confession 2.1, "without body, parts, or passions"
  • 39 Articles 1, Belgic Confession 1, Second Helvetic Confession 3, the Reformed confessional consensus

Key thinkers (classical and contemporary revival)

Patristic / medieval: Augustine (De Trinitate), Boethius (Consolation of Philosophy), Anselm (Proslogion), Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I qq. 2-11), John Calvin (Institutes 1.13). Reformed orthodox: Francis Turretin (Institutes of Elenctic Theology), Petrus van Mastricht. Contemporary revival (post-2000): Brian Davies (The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, 2006), Edward Feser (Five Proofs of the Existence of God, 2017), James Dolezal (All That Is in God, 2017; God Without Parts, 2011), Steven Duby (Divine Simplicity, 2016), Matthew Barrett (None Greater, 2019), David Bentley Hart (The Experience of God, 2013), Paul Helm (Eternal God, 2nd ed. 2010), Eleonore Stump (Aquinas, 2003, partial alignment).

What classical theism gains

  • Aseity is preserved fully. God does not depend on creation for any aspect of his interior life; nothing happens to God.
  • The Trinity is metaphysically tighter. Father, Son, Spirit are not three centers-of-consciousness sharing a divine kind but three relations subsisting in the one identical divine essence (Aquinas's relatio subsistens). The social-Trinitarian drift toward tritheism is avoided.
  • Christological coherence. The two-natures-one-person framework requires an unchanging divine nature; the cross is real suffering of the assumed humanity by the eternal Son who in his divine nature remains what he is. See Divine Impassibility §1.
  • Anthropopathism resolves the OT "God-relents" texts. Gen 6:6, Jonah 3:10, 1 Sam 15:11/35 are anthropopathic accommodation, God's settled covenant-disposition expressed in temporal-relational language, not metaphysical perturbation. Calvin: "God lisps to us as nurses are wont with little children."

What classical theism is criticized for

  • Apparent disconnect from biblical language. OT and NT freely attribute love, delight, grief, jealousy, anger to God in temporal-relational language. The classical-theist anthropopathism move can feel like explaining away the plain force of these passages.
  • Hellenistic intrusion charge. Adolf von Harnack (History of Dogma, 1894) argued that the divine attributes of classical theism were Greek-philosophical accretions on a more dynamic Hebrew picture of God. Open Theists (Pinnock especially) revived this charge. Reply: the doctrine is independently anchored in OT-NT texts and is developed by Hebrew-thinking patristic theologians (Athanasius, Cyril) without imperialist Hellenization motive.
  • The "cold uncaring God" pastoral problem. If God is impassible-impassive, does he love? Reply: God's love is better than creaturely love precisely because it is not creature-imposed-emotional-perturbation but willed-perfection-of-disposition (see Divine Impassibility §3-4).
  • Foreknowledge-and-free-will tension. Exhaustive divine foreknowledge of free choices appears to compromise libertarian freedom (Boethian-Molinist responses engage this; see Calvinism vs Arminianism vs Molinism vs Open Theism).

Theistic personalism

Core thesis

God is a maximally perfect person, a being possessing all great-making properties (omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, necessary existence, etc.), but conceived on the analogy of a person rather than as ipsum esse subsistens. The divine attributes are properties God has (not identical with the divine essence); God is the bearer of those properties. Divine simplicity in its strict Thomistic form is rejected (or radically modified). Aseity is preserved but read more weakly (God depends on nothing external, but God's interior life may include genuinely time-extended states). Foreknowledge is exhaustive. Immutability is qualified, God's nature and character don't change, but God's mental states may be temporally indexed and creature-responsive. Impassibility is qualified, God genuinely loves, delights, grieves, etc., in time-extended fashion. Most theistic personalists hold to a Social-Trinitarian model (three persons sharing a divine nature) rather than a classical relation-subsistens model.

Strongest biblical anchors

The same biblical texts the classical theist reads anthropopathically, Genesis 6:6 (God grieving), Hosea 11:8-9 (God's heart "recoiling"), the parable-of-the-prodigal Father, are read by theistic personalists at face-value as real emotional-relational engagement on God's part. The OT and NT relational language is taken to require a non-strict-classical metaphysics.

Key thinkers

Alvin Plantinga (Does God Have a Nature? 1980; the classical-attributes critique chapters); Richard Swinburne (The Coherence of Theism, 1977/2016; The Christian God, 1994, Social-Trinitarian); William Lane Craig (Time and Eternity, 2001, defends temporal eternity against atemporal classical eternity; the kalam-cosmological-argument framework requires a temporal God-since-creation; Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview with J. P. Moreland, 2nd ed. 2017); Nicholas Wolterstorff (Suffering Love, 1988; defends qualified-impassibility-denial); Marilyn McCord Adams; Stephen T. Davis (early Logic and the Nature of God, 1983, strict-kenotic-leaning).

The 19th-century strict kenoticism of Thomasius (Christi Person und Werk, 1853-61) and Gore (The Incarnation of the Son of God, 1891) is a historical forerunner of theistic personalism in Christology; their attribute-divestiture-during-incarnation thesis presupposes that the divine nature can change/divest attributes, which classical theism denies.

What theistic personalism gains

  • Closer fit with biblical-relational language. The OT-NT portrayal of God as loving, grieving, jealous, angry, responsive is taken at face value rather than translated through anthropopathic accommodation.
  • Robust analytic engagement. Theistic personalism's analytic-philosophical articulation engages contemporary philosophy of religion on its own terms; the Plantinga-Craig-Swinburne tradition has dominated analytical apologetics 1980-present.
  • Apologetic flexibility. Defending divine love and care against atheist accusations of "cold uncaring God" is rhetorically easier from a personalist starting point.
  • Compatibility with kalam. Craig's kalam cosmological argument requires God to enter time at the moment of creation (atemporal-before-creation, temporal-since-creation). This is incompatible with strict atemporal eternity; theistic personalism handles the kalam framework natively.

What theistic personalism is criticized for

  • Drift toward open theism and process theism. The classical-revival critique (Davies, Feser, Dolezal, Duby, Barrett, Hart): once strict simplicity is abandoned, the slope toward open theism (where God doesn't know future free choices) and then process theism (where God essentially depends on creation) is logically continuous. Theistic personalism is the "first stop" on this slide.
  • Compromise of aseity. If God's interior life includes time-extended creature-responsive emotional states, then God's interior life is in some sense dependent on creation, a denial of strict aseity.
  • Trinitarian drift toward tritheism. Social-Trinitarian models (three persons sharing a divine nature) raise the question: is the "divine nature" a kind that the three Persons share, or a numerical identity? If the former, three numerically-distinct divine beings (≈ tritheism); if the latter, the social-Trinitarian framing is just a renamed classical relation-subsistens position. Critics (Brian Leftow God and Necessity, 2012; William Hasker Metaphysics and the Tripersonal God, 2013, ironically defending a Social variant; James Dolezal) regard the contemporary social-Trinitarian tradition as having unresolved tritheism-pressure.
  • Hellenistic-Christian doctrinal-tradition discontinuity. Patristic-medieval-Reformed tradition is overwhelmingly classical. The theistic-personalist revolution is a 20th-century analytic-philosophy-of-religion development; its claim to fit "the biblical God" cannot be made over against the classical tradition without significant historical-theology cost.

Open theism

Core thesis

God is a maximally perfect responsive person who, in creating libertarianly-free creatures, has chosen to limit his exhaustive foreknowledge of their future choices. The future is not yet determinate in those respects, so even God cannot know it (this is held not as a defect in omniscience but as a logical impossibility, there is no fact-of-the-matter about an undecided free choice). God is genuinely affected by creaturely choices, grieves real loss, responds to actual events, and adjusts his providential strategies. Open theism is the consistent extension of theistic personalism (relax simplicity → relax immutability → relax impassibility → and you arrive here). See Open Theism.

Key thinkers

Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, Gregory Boyd, The Openness of God (IVP, 1994) is the manifesto; Boyd God of the Possible (Baker, 2000); Sanders The God Who Risks (IVP, 1998; rev. 2007). Plantinga and Swinburne themselves are not open theists; theistic personalism does not entail open theism but is open theism's natural genealogical predecessor.

What open theism gains and loses

Gains: Maximal fit with the biblical-narrative portrait of a God who genuinely engages, responds, grieves, rejoices. Resolves the foreknowledge-and-libertarian-freedom tension. Permits a robust theodicy in which God doesn't already know the specific evil that creatures will commit.

Loses: Aseity is substantially compromised. Strong sovereignty / providence is weakened (God doesn't know with certainty how history will unfold). The Christological resolution becomes complex (the eternal Son's kenōsis is even more pronounced if God's prior interior life is itself time-extended). The classical-and-creedal tradition is largely abandoned. The "what could surprise God?" question becomes pastorally pointed.

Process theism

Core thesis

God is a dipolar entity, an eternal abstract nature (the unchanging "primordial" pole) plus a temporally-changing consequent nature constituted by God's prehensions of every actual occasion of experience in the universe. God does not create ex nihilo; God works alongside actual occasions, luring them toward greater value-realization rather than creating them. The classical attributes, omnipotence, creatio ex nihilo, simplicity, immutability, are all denied. God essentially suffers with creation; divine love is passion in the technical sense the classical theist denied. The position is the limit point on the spectrum away from classical theism.

Key thinkers

Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality, 1929; Science and the Modern World, 1925); Charles Hartshorne (The Divine Relativity, 1948; Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, 1984); John B. Cobb Jr. (Christ in a Pluralistic Age, 1975); David Ray Griffin; Marjorie Suchocki; Philip Clayton (panentheism / process). John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke are sometimes associated with process theism but are better described as panentheists who do not fully adopt the Whiteheadian framework.

What process theism gains and loses

Gains: Maximal "biblical-relational" feel; the strongest possible affirmation of divine suffering-with-creation, central to post-Holocaust theodicies (Jürgen Moltmann The Crucified God, 1972). Compatible with thoroughgoing evolutionary metaphysics.

Loses: Aseity is denied, God essentially depends on creation. Creatio ex nihilo is denied. The Christian-creedal tradition is largely abandoned. Eschatology is uncertain (process eschatologies tend toward open-ended "objective immortality in God's memory" rather than resurrection-renewal). The position is widely regarded by both classical theists and theistic personalists as not Christianity but a different religious-metaphysical system.

Where on the spectrum?

The four positions form a coherent spectrum. Movement from classical theism toward process theism systematically relaxes:

  1. Simplicity (classical: yes strict; personalist: no; open: no; process: no);
  2. Aseity-as-non-dependence-on-creation (classical: yes strict; personalist: qualified yes; open: weaker yes; process: explicit no);
  3. Immutability-of-the-divine-nature (classical: yes; personalist: qualified yes; open: weakened; process: no);
  4. Impassibility (classical: yes; personalist: qualified no; open: no; process: essentially passible);
  5. Exhaustive-foreknowledge-of-free-choices (classical: yes; personalist: yes; open: no; process: no);
  6. Atemporal-eternity (classical: yes; personalist: usually no, temporal-since-creation; open: no; process: no);
  7. Creatio ex nihilo (classical: yes; personalist: yes; open: yes; process: no).

A position can be characterized by which of these it holds. Classical theism holds all seven strictly. Theistic personalism holds (5), (7), and weakened versions of (2), (3); rejects (1), (4), (6). Open theism holds (7) and weakened (2), (3); rejects (1), (4), (5), (6). Process theism holds none strictly.

Apologetic deployment

When defending classical theism

  • Anchor in patristic-medieval-Reformed consensus. The classical position is the historical Christian doctrine of God; the theistic-personalist tradition is a 20th-century analytic-philosophy-of-religion development. The burden of proof is on the personalist who departs.
  • Engage the slippery-slope argument carefully. Davies's case is: once simplicity is dropped, the slide to open theism and (further) process theism is logically natural. Plantinga and Craig deny this, they hold the line between theistic personalism and open theism on independent grounds (libertarian-free-will and the foreknowledge-and-counterfactuals debate). The slope is real but is not necessary; classical theists should engage the argument rather than assume it.
  • Christological payoff. The two-natures-one-person Chalcedonian resolution requires immutability-impassibility of the divine nature. Departures from these constraints generate Christological tensions the personalist tradition has not fully resolved.

When defending theistic personalism (per Plantinga / Craig / Swinburne)

  • Anchor in biblical-relational language. The OT-NT freely portray God as engaged, responsive, loving in a way that the classical-anthropopathism move struggles to honor at face value.
  • Engage the analytic-philosophy-of-religion frontier. Most contemporary academic apologetics is done in the personalist key (Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology; Craig's kalam; Swinburne's Bayesian cumulative case); the engagement-quality is higher there than in the classical-revival literature (which is more theology-internal).
  • Hold the line against open theism. Affirming exhaustive foreknowledge and full sovereignty without strict simplicity is doable (Craig, Plantinga). The personalist need not slide to open theism.

When the audience is hovering toward open / process theism

  • Engage the aseity argument. A God who depends on creation for his interior life is not the God of Acts 17:24-25, Romans 11:36, or Job 35:6-7. The biblical-relational language must be read in concert with the biblical-self-sufficiency language.
  • Engage the Christological argument. Process theism's "God essentially suffers" framework changes the meaning of the cross from "the eternal one enters our suffering" to "God has always been suffering"; the gospel is therefore reduced.

See also