NOTE: This is the third and final part of a three part series on classical theism by theologian Thomas M. Cothran. Be sure to read part one and part two.

Any defense against Stephen H. Webb’s critique of classical theism must, then, defend some particular form of classical theism that does have an ontology. Webb declares that “Aquinas is the best representative of what is often called classical theism,”¹ and so for the remainder of this article, we will consider whether Webb’s arguments hold as against Aquinas, unless Webb has made clear that the target of his criticism belongs to a different school.²

Aquinas is a hylomorphist. Webb identifies hylomorphism as the doctrine that “all beings except Being itself are composed of form and matter,” which is decidedly incorrect. Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas—hylomorphists par excellance—believed that all beings save one are composed of form and matter. Aristotle taught the existence of a number of separate immaterial substances³ and Aquinas believed that angels were immaterial forms.

But Aquinas does believe that physical things are composed of matter and form. Form refers to any way in which a thing is actually determined. Being green, positively charged, dry, or 6 feet long, or having a location, a certain mass, or subatomic spin—all these are “forms” in the general sense in which Aquinas uses the term. “Matter” simply refers to the potentiality in a thing to take on different forms (in the case of accidental change, such as when an apple ripens) or to the potentiality in a thing to cease existing by having its matter incorporated into something else (in the case of substantial change, such as when an apple is eaten). Matter is then the principle that permits a thing to change and that, in the same stroke, renders the thing liable to extinction.

That matter itself is potential, and not actually anything is a crucial point. And only if one misses this point will Webb’s claim that modern science has overturned the classical understanding of matter be plausible. We know more about the nature of blood and the composition of human tissue than did the ancients or the medievals. We know that the fundamental elements resemble the periodic table more than the fourfold of earth, air, fire, and water. Does this mean we know more about matter? If we discover capillaries in the lungs, striation in muscle tissue, the atomic number of a carbon atom, or the charge of an electron, we have gained knowledge of forms inherent in the world—we have learned something about the way things actually are.

Matter in itself is not actually anything; it is the potential of some thing to change or to cease to be. For this reason, it is wrong to say that carbon is, strictly speaking, matter (though it is material).⁴ Matter refers to the potential to take on different forms. No discovery of modern science overturns this notion of matter—as philosophers such as David Oderberg have pointed out, modern science must actually presuppose this, however tacitly—particularly in studying the basic elements of the universe. To say that a being is material is to say that it is composed of form (actual determinations of the thing) and matter (the potential to take on different determinations). There is no being called “matter”; matter, strictly speaking, is a constitutive principle of material beings.

Because matter refers to that principle in a being which could be otherwise or not at all. No material being exists necessarily, and every material being depends for its existence on parts. Because a statue is made of bronze, there is no necessity that it go on existing. The statue can be melted down and the matter reshaped into something else. Likewise, I am a material being. Some day my matter will be set loose from the human form, and I will cease to be. To be material is in principle to be capable of change and extinction.

Claiming that God is material, then, is to declare God contingent, and consequently to deny that God is a necessary being. Such a move is jarring, of course, because God would be dependent upon not only prior parts, but upon some further necessary being—a being that could not but exist and be what it is.

Conclusion

David Bentley Hart has observed that monotheism and polytheism do not differ by the number of deities they posit, but by what they mean by “divinity.” It was quite common in the ancient world to speak of anything that was intelligent, immortal, and powerful as a god. The revelation of monotheism is not that there is only one of these powerful beings loose in the heavens, but that all beings derive from something not itself a being—at least, a being among other beings. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures assert this ontological difference by dividing all that is into created and uncreated being.

The notion of an infinite cause of finite being that transcends the cosmos believe is signified by the word “God” with a capital “G” (or in Greek, “ho theos,” preceded by the definite article). A being within the world who is distinguished from us by powers such as immortality, greater knowledge, and so on, but who is nevertheless a being in the cosmos is traditionally referred by the word “god” with a lower case “g”, or else been called angels or demons.

Hart notes that the comparatively recent trend of insisting that God is a finite spirit whose existence and personhood are more or less like our own has been called “theistic personalism,” but holds that a better title would be monopolytheism. Monopolytheists assert that there is only one God, but they understand divinity as the ancient pagans did—as simply referring to a powerful spirit within our world of space and time.

Yet one might question the monopolytheist label as descriptive of Webb’s position not because of the “poly” but because of the “mono.” After all, one carbon atom shares the same form as another, but is a different entity because it is composed of different matter. If the eternal Word is essentially material, then he must be a different entity than the Father. Just as I am constituted as a different being than another person by virtue (at least in part) of the difference in what I am made of, so the Father and Son would be different, even if they shared the form of divinity. Or else Father and Son share the same matter, in which case they are but different aspects of the same being. Webb’s view is ineluctably heretical—either polytheistic or modalist. It is no coincidence Webb’s conception of the divine is based on “Mormon metaphysics”; Mormonism is explicitly polytheistic. Accepting the consequences of God’s materiality puts one outside the ambit not only of what is intellectually respectable, but also what is permissible for a Christian to believe.

By now, it should be clear that atheist readers should neither adopt Webb’s criticisms nor confuse his theology with orthodox Christian dogma. And while I have as yet only seen little evidence of the former, there is abundant evidence of the latter. In fact, the new atheists seem insistent that the monopolytheist notion of God is native to Christianity, while the monotheistic notion is some sort of recent academic fabrication. The traditional notion of God as infinite, transcendent, and simple, while neither entailing nor presupposing the doctrine of the Trinity, in fact is necessary for it. The philosophically defensible notion of divinity (the “monotheistic” or classically theist notion) is integral to Christian dogmatics. For this reason, Christians can merrily agree with the attacks of a philosophically dessicated and theologically unsound notion of divinity we too easily find misnamed “Christian.”

NOTE: This is the second of a three part series on classical theism by theologian Thomas M. Cothran. Read part one here.

Stephen Webb not only misstates what classical theists believe, he misstates why they believe it. Consider, by way of example, Webb’s review of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God. Webb claims that Hart infers “the main tenets of classical theism … from the deceptively simple premise of God’s immateriality.” Webb attributes a similar line of reasoning—namely that “being immaterial, God is not limited in any way”—to classical theists in his book Mormon Metaphysics.¹ But classical theists, including Hart, can (and for the most part do) believe in all manner of immaterial things—angels, concepts—without ascribing to them divinity or infinity. Classical theists, including those Webb cites as representative, simply do not argue that immateriality entails divinity or infinity.²

Webb’s review proceeds to claim that Hart “does not mean that God is literally infinite.” This is quite an odd statement, since an insistence on God’s infinity has been a core theme of Hart’s work for well over a decade. Hart, in fact, clearly and repeatedly insists on a positive notion of divine infinity not only in the Experience of God,³ but also his more substantial Beauty of the Infinite and sundry essays such as “The ‘Christian Infinite.’”⁴

These sorts of misreadings are not limited to contemporary authors. Webb attributes to Plato (among others) the notion that God is “pure being” when famously, for Plato, being is subsequent to the one in the metaphysical order. Webb claims that “Christians worshiped Jesus for several centuries before any of them thought to argue that God created the world out of nothing ….”⁵ In fact, the Old Testament narrative probably presupposes creation ex nihilo⁶, and the doctrine is rather baldly stated in 2 Maccabees 7:28. The doctrine can be found quite early among Christian sources such as The Shepherd of Hermas and Irenaeus’ Against Heresies circa 180 AD.

The result of all of this is that it is quite difficult to find anything salvageable in Webb’s critique of classical theism, since he accurately presents neither what classical theists believe nor the arguments they actually give for their beliefs. Atheist polemicists unfortunate enough to adopt Webb’s account of classical theism would resemble a ragtag legion lost on the wrong continent, without enough of an idea what the foe looks like to identify him in the unlikely event that they someday meet. Webb sometimes abandons even the semblance of rational argument and stoops to accusing classical theists of bad faith, as when he says “for me, [Hart’s] mantra that ‘God is outside of space and time’ is most certainly false, and I think he knows that too.” If there is one thing popular anti-atheists do not need to learn from theologians, it how to make nasty personal attacks.

Why Is God Immaterial?

If classical theists don’t affirm God’s transcendence in bad faith or because they think God is imaginary, what reasons do they have for so overwhelmingly conceiving of God as immaterial? The Christian answer comes quickly enough from Scripture. The Gospel of John stoutly declares that ”God is a spirit,” and, as Jesus himself says, spiritual things “lack flesh and bone.” The Hebrew scriptures define idolatry as the confusion of God with any particular reality on earth, below the earth or in the heavens, the Wisdom literature praises God’s transcendence, and the New Testament indicates the abyss of God’s transcendence through Jesus Christ’s very imminence.

It is unclear whether Webb intends to indict the author of John’s Gospel with those “elite theologians” embarrassed by Christian doctrine. Yet the theological reason that Christians do not believe God to be material does not hinge on this or that text considered in isolation, but on the basic notion of God that emerges from the Scriptures: as the Creator of the universe, the ultimate source and origin of all that has being.

Webb, on the other hand, proposes a material god, a god with a body.⁷ Such a deity cannot be the creator of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, for reasons Philip Cary cites in his review of one of Webb’s books. All material beings depend for their existence on something more fundamental—that out of which they are made. Yet any god who is dependent for his existence on something else is only a proximate, and not an ultimate, source of being.

Take the classic example of a statue. A statue can be made out of bronze while sharing the same form, say, of Richard the Lionheart. The material is not really identical to the form—since the same material can be reshaped to become a pillar or a number of coins—but it is necessary to the statue’s existence. The statue depends on the material out of which it is made, and we rightly speak of the bronze as a cause of the statue. Material entities have material causes.

If God were a material being, then, he would be caused and dependent. God would not be the ultimate origin of all that is; he would himself depend on something more basic. No Christian could affirm this, of course, because it puts God on the side of the caused and the contingent. It is, therefore, straightforwardly the case that asserting the materiality of God is inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of creation.

The Intrinsic Connection Between Classical Theism and Christian Doctrine

Webb also thinks the doctrines of divine immateriality and the Incarnation are ill suited for one another. For example, in “Plato is not Paul” he says “I don’t believe that God is outside space and time for the simple reason that I believe Jesus Christ is in heaven, fully bodied, and ruling over the world.” And indeed, readers unfamiliar with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation might find themselves confused: if Jesus is God and Jesus is a material being, why shouldn’t way say that God is a material being?

Yet for the Christian, this objection runs immediately into problems: if we attribute materiality to God, why not attribute ethnicity to God. Does it belong to God to be semitic? The way that Christians have thought about this answer traditionally has been to say that Jesus had two natures: human and divine, and that those two natures are unmixed. Indeed, the denial of this point places one outside Christian orthodoxy.⁸ Not everything true of Jesus with respect to his humanity can be affirmed straightforwardly of his divinity.

Christians, then, can attribute material being to God in much the same sense as they can attribute to him an ethnicity or being the son of Mary. But this does not commit us to say that God qua God is a material being. The eternal can become united, in history, to the temporal. While perhaps paradoxical, it is obviously not contradictory.

Indeed, it is the notion of a material deity which cannot be reconciled to the doctrine of the Incarnation. Webb’s materialism would mean that the Incarnation would no longer be the singular event in which the infinite and eternal takes up the finite and temporal. It would be simply the reincarnation of a certain extra-terrestrial. Christians, after all, believe in the eternal Logos who took on flesh, not in bad late night science fiction.

The classical theistic notion of God is not only necessary to maintain Christological doctrine; it is requisite for Trinitarian dogma. Webb makes several strange claims on this point. He claims, for instance, that classical theists consider “Jesus Christ identical with God the Father”⁹, when, in fact, any orthodox Christian denies this. Webb veers to the other extreme when he says that “[n]o classical theist has ever given a convincing account of how God can be without parts and yet composed of three persons.”¹⁰ But of course, no orthodox Christian thinks that the divine persons are “parts” of God.

Webb frequently misstates what divine simplicity is understood to be. For example, Webb claims that simplicity and immateriality are equivalent: “divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided).” Webb’s assumption that simplicity just is the same as immateriality rather obvious errs, of course, in that there are immaterial things that are not simple—such as angels or concepts. Moreover, as William Vallicella has pointed out, Webb’s summary of simplicity is deficient: divine simplicity excludes not only parts, but metaphysical composition between act and potency, thus ruling out any real composition of essence and existence, substance and accident, matter and form, and so on.¹¹

Far from being at odds with the Trinity, the doctrine of simplicity is a necessary component to any sound Trinitarian dogma. There is one God. Yet simplicity, while excluding composition and extension, does not exclude all real relations. Were the persons “parts” of God or distinct accidents that belong to God, the triunity of God would contravene simplicity. However, the persons are subsistent relations. None of the arguments used to establish God’s simplicity would exclude subsistent relations; and, indeed, when the notions of simplicity and subsistent relations are combined we are given a perfectly consistent (though obviously not comprehensive) way of affirming the unity and triunity of God.

If Webb’s theological arguments run afoul both of the historical record and logical coherence, what of his philosophical argument? Is Webb right that classical theism asserts God’s immateriality because it misunderstands the nature of matter?

Webb’s exposition of how the Western philosophical tradition understands matter is, unfortunately, unreliable at best. In the first place, Webb misunderstands what classical theists typically mean by “matter.” For example, he attributes to classical theists the view that matter is “a substance that makes up everything we know, [and] is unknowable.”¹² Yet perhaps the most elementary point about the classical Western understanding of matter and substance is that matter is not a substance.

Webb goes on to claim that the traditional notion that matter is a limiting factor is true “if matter is the inert stuff that is destined to disappear when our souls enter into the afterlife. But what would happen to these assumptions if we thought that matter is more like the fields of energy that animate the whole cosmos rather than incredibly small particles held together by external forces?”¹³ But precious few classical theists think of matter as “incredibly small particles held together by external forces.”¹⁴ Webb’s assertion that classical theists talk about “bare matter in its most elementary form,”¹⁵ wildly conflates the most basic metaphysical categories of theists like Plato, Aristotle, Origin, Aquinas (etc.) are.

But then, classical theism as such entails no particular position on the relation of matter and form (other than their distinction). Indeed, though none of the classical Western traditions actually resemble Webb’s portrait, classical theists do not hold to a single doctrine of what matter is. Being a classical theist does not commit one to any particular Greek, Latin, German, of Indian view of material being. Webb’s attempts at refutation are directed only at his Frankensteinian creation, and do not come near any particular living species of theism.

NOTE: Stay tuned for part three of this series on Friday.

NOTE: This is the first of a three part series on classical theism by theologian Thomas M. Cothran.

Over the last few years, Stephen H. Webb has waged a crusade of sorts against classical theism, especially with respect to its notion of divine transcendence. Webb has authored, by my count, no less than 10 articles on the subject at First Things¹, and similar critiques have also been central to his books Mormon Christianity and Jesus Christ, Eternal God. Perhaps surprisingly, Webb is not an atheist. He is a philosopher and theologian, and a Roman Catholic.

To hear Webb tell it, the core tenets of classical theism are foreign to Christianity, emigres of Greek extraction. Webb concedes that the mainstream Christian view since the Patristic era has been classically theist. He suggests, however, that this consensus was established by “elite theologians” because of their “embarrassment” of more original but less sophisticated Christian doctrines. At this decisive and distant moment in history, elite theologians opted for Plato against Paul.

The classical notion of God which emerges from this Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian synthesis is, on Webb’s account, inconsistent (or at least sits ill at ease) with traditional Christological and Trinitarian dogma. Moreover, classical theism’s insistence on God’s transcendence rests on a scientifically outmoded and philosophically defective view of matter.

Webb therefore levels two distinct charges:

Theological charge: classical theism’s assertion of divine transcendence is incongruent with Christian doctrine.

Philosophical charge: classical theism’s assertion that God transcends matter is based on an antiquated notion of matter.

Although Webb is a religious believer, atheists may be tempted to coopt some of his arguments to the service of anti-theist polemic. If the classical notion of God—that is, God with an capital G, rather some object in the universe—can be eliminated, then the remaining gods will quickly topple with the merciless onslaught of the empirical sciences. If Webb’s critique of classical theism is right, then most mainstream religious traditions have been, at a stroke, debunked—along with the main thrust of the classical Western metaphysical traditions.

And, while atheists will not agree with Webb’s theology, his theological argument that Christianity and classical theism do not agree with one another directly serves the anti-theist cause. For if Webb is right, Christians can be separated from the theistic herd and, deprived of its intellectual resources, made easy prey. After all, if Christians do not subscribe to divine transcendence, then they (unlike classical theists) cannot entirely avoid the stereotyped notion of God as a bearded man in the sky, or a glorified extra-terrestrial.

Faulty notions that originate within Christian theology often migrate to the secular world. For example, the voluntarist notion of freedom—unconstrained choice—originated in debates about God’s omnipotence but migrated to political philosophy with—to my mind—some unfortunate and overlooked consequences. My purpose in this three part series, then, is simply to caution atheists against the effects of taking up certain theological castoffs. The attempt to present classical theism as an academic luxury divorced from any organic connection to living faith runs contrary to both Christian history and the substance of Christian beliefs.

Classical Theism Defined

What is classical theism? Classical theism refers very generally to the way most of the great theological and philosophical traditions have conceived God: as the cause of all finite being, the ground of the good, eternal, immutable, transcendent of space and time, perfect, omnipotent, immaterial, infinite, and omniscient.

These very general lines are, of course, construed differently in the various traditions, but the general picture stands out clearly. Classical theism is perhaps most readily explicable by its negations: God is not a being that has come to be, he does not change, he is not limited by space or time, nor indeed limited in any way. God is not an effect, he does not depend on anything more fundamental. God is not a finite spirit flitting about the cosmos like a ghost; he is not a being differentiated from other beings simply by a greater degree of power or knowledge. God’s mode of existence differs from ours as the infinite to the finite.

This view is, by and large, held by the mainstream of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions; it is the common inheritance of the most influential classical forms of the Western metaphysical traditions; and it may be found by many forms of Hinduism, Taoism, and certain quarters of Buddhism.

By identifying these similarities, however, I certainly do not mean to give the impression that classical theism is a single tradition. It is a post-hoc identification of the convergence on a general sense of what is meant by “God.” Not every classical theist affirms everything I’ve listed (certain Greek thinkers didn’t think of God as infinite, for example.) And even while agreeing on the general marks of divinity, how those are construed differs even within particular religious traditions. God’s omnipotence, even within medieval Catholic theology, was construed very differently by Aquinas and Occam. Careful thinkers avoid reducing classical theism to one of its articulations.

Still less does classical theism entails a particular ontology—whether Platonist, Aristotelian, Thomist, Hegelian, Vedantic etc. There is no “classical theist” theory of being or of matter. Classical theism is a common notion of God abstracted from the great religious and philosophical traditions. It is not a single school of metaphysical thought.

Despite these differences between concrete religions and philosophical traditions, the convergent belief that all finite being depends on an eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, and transcendent source—God with a capital “G”—is strong enough to identify classical theism and to talk about it coherently.

What Does Webb Think Classical Theism Is?

What I have just said about classical theism should be entirely uncontroversial. Unfortunately, Webb’s portrayal of classical theism is tendentious, inaccurate, and often unrecognizable.

Consider Webb’s essay “Is God More Like A Rock Or The Idea of a Rock?” Webb characterizes “classical theism [as] a formidable consensus that includes Plato, Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas.” Webb explains classical theism in terms of the following dilemma:

Is God more like a rock or the idea of a rock? If you had to choose one or the other, which would it be? … Rocks represent matter at its most obdurate state, while ideas transcend matter altogether. Ideas are the proper activity of the intellect. They live in minds, while rocks don’t live at all.

Classical theism takes the option that God is “much more like an idea of a rock than a rock,” because classical theists deny that God is a discrete being in the world. For classical theists, “God is absolutely simple, immaterial, and indivisible…. That makes God much more like an idea of a rock than a rock.”

Classical theists conception of God as more mental than real is accompanied by an eschatology.

All physical things, according to classical theism, will come to an end when God is all in all, because matter, being formless, is the absence of the divine…. We will arrive in eternity to find ourselves in the mind of God. There will be no bodies, or persons, since persons are bodies with their own individual thoughts. Needless to say, God will no longer think about rocks, or even the idea of a rock, since God’s thinking is identical to his creating. Will God even, in the end, think about us?

This description of classical theism is so idiosyncratic that neither Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, nor even Origen would count. Aristotle fails to qualify because he regards the physical world as eternal; Aquinas, Origen,² and Augustine because they, like all orthodox Christians, believe in the resurrection of the body; Plato because he regards pure being as second in the metaphysical order. Indeed, if Webb has mapped out the criteria to be a classical theist, then it appears that “classical theists,” like their God, exist only in the imagination.³

Where, then, does Webb’s “classical theism” come from? Webb has cobbled together notions from a broad variety of thinkers—pagans, Christians, Platonists, neo-Platonists, Thomists,—into a sort of Frankensteinian theism. Webb’s description of classical theism eschatology mixes more or less at random the Christian scriptural tradition (”when God is all in all”) with Plotinian eschatology, Platonic and Aristotelian notions of matter, and elements of subjective idealism. The result is a set of doctrines that bear no organic relation to one another and that is not actually held together by any real thinker. The difficulties and incoherences Webb notices in the resulting Frankenstein results from its piecemeal creation in Webb’s writings, but are not often present in any particular theist’s articulation of his beliefs.

But one does not need to know the ins and outs of the history of metaphysics or the distinction between real and intentional being to know something is wildly off with Webbs’ account. And the initial implausibility descends to patent absurdity upon reflection. Someone who regards something as existing mentally but not really thinks of it as imaginary. When I think of Sisyphus’ stone as having mental but not real existence, I think of it as imaginary. This is not to say that I think of Sisyphus’ stone as mental rather than real and that I also think of it as imaginary. To believe something has mental but not real existence is just what it means to hold something as being imaginary. As with Sisyphus’ stone, so with God. If Webb is right about what classical theists believe God to be, then classical theists advocate belief in a God they themselves think of as imaginary (or at least more imaginary than real).

Some of the trouble seems to arise from Webb’s misunderstanding of how the classical tradition uses the word “Idea” (eidos). Webb is very specific about what he understands “ideas” to be: the sort of things that “live in minds.” Rocks, on the other hand, exist independently of our minds. But this is not at all how classical theists use the term “idea.” “Idea” is a term of art in Greek philosophy. The Platonic tradition uses “idea” to refer to a subsistent form; that is, a form that exists independently of both our minds and of matter. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy, for example, points out that our modern notion of idea as “entities that exist only as contents of some mind … must be distinguished from Plato’s Ideas or Forms, which are non-physical but exist apart from any conscious beings.”⁴

For the Aristotelian tradition, on the other hand, the eidos exists as a form typically (though not always) in composition with matter. In no case does “idea” refer primarily to a concept living in our minds, as Webb thinks.

Webb’s account confuses classical theism with contemporary religious non-realism—namely, the notion that there really is no God outside how we choose to think of the world. When one has conflated Thomas Aquinas with Don Cupitt, one has left the realm of the history of ideas altogether.

NOTE: Stay tuned for part two of this series on Wednesday.