I just ran across a blog post that Al Kimel, or Aidan, as I like to call him, recently posted on so called theistic personalism. It implicates Evangelical Calvinism, insofar that our project, after both Barth and Torrance, respectively, attempts to engage in a ‘personalistic’ project in regard to who we understand God to be. Unfortunately, it appears, that Aidan has succumbed to his deep dives into apophatic theology over the last many years, and has allowed people like David Bentley Hart and Edward Feser to have too much say in regard to the ‘biblical’ conception of God that Aidan used to think God from. Here is a lengthy excerpt (about 2/3 of his post) of Al’s thinking on these things:

Confession time: for most of my parochial ministry, I was a theistic personalist, to use the term coined by Brian Davies.

“Egads! Tell me that’s not true.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“But what is a theistic personalist?”

“Someone who espouses theistic personalism, of course.”

“And now you are going to tell me what it is, right?”

“My pleasure.”

According to Davies, theistic personalism makes person the decisive philosophical cate­gory for thinking about God (Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, pp. 9-15). We all know what persons are. For good or ill, we have to live with them every day. So what do we mean by the word? I don’t know what the philosophers would say, but let me throw out this tentative definition—a person is a center of consciousness with whom we can ratio­nally converse. This is probably severely defective (I’m a blogger, dammit, not a philoso­pher!), but at least it will get us started.

Now let’s turn to the Bible and its rendering of deity. Doesn’t YHWH sound and act like a person, not in the sense that we can physically see him, but in all the other important ways that constitute personhood? Consider the definition of God advanced by one of the world’s premier Christian philosophers:

By a theist I understand a man who believes that there is a God. By a “God” he understands something like a “person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sus­tainer of the universe.” (Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, p. 1)

God is that person, Swinburne says, who is “picked out by this description” (The Existence of God, p. 8).

If Swinburne’s exposition represents theistic personalism, then this is pretty much what I preached and taught throughout most of my parochial ministry. I suspect that theistic personalism is the default position of the overwhelming majority of Protestant preachers and probably a fair number of Catholic and Orthodox preachers. It begins where all preachers begin, namely, with the Scriptures. We preach the God of the Bible—the Holy One who spoke to Abraham and commanded him to leave his home and journey to Canaan, who delivered his people from slavery in Egypt, who gave Torah to Moses on Mt Horeb, who spoke to Israel through the prophets, who sent his beloved Son in the fullness of time to die for the sins of humanity and rise into indestructible life. Once God is intro­duced as a character in a narrative, then of course he will and must be portrayed as a being, a divine self, analogous to a human self. How else could a story be told about him? In the pulpit, every preacher is a theistic personalist. This means that if we take the Bible straight, as it were, we will always think of God as person, as a person. All we then need to do is detach God from embodiment and finitude, and … voila! … we have Swinburne’s omnipresent spirit.

Edward Feser has criticized theistic personalism as inescapably anthropomorphic and contrasts it with the classical Christian understanding of divinity:

Theistic personalists, by contrast, tend to begin with the idea that God is “a person” just as we are persons, only without our corporeal and other limitations. Like us, he has attributes like power, knowledge, and moral goodness; unlike us, he has these features to the maximum possible degree. The theistic personalist thus arrives at an essentially anthropomorphic conception of God. To be sure, the anthropomorphism is not the crude sort operative in traditional stories about the gods of the various pagan pantheons. The theistic personalist does not think of God as having a corporeal nature, but instead perhaps along the lines of something like an infinite Cartesian res cogitans. Nor do classical theists deny that God is personal in the sense of having the key personal attributes of intellect and will. However, classical theists would deny that God stands alongside us in the genus “person.” He is not “a person” alongside other persons any more than he is “a being” alongside other beings. He is not an instance of any kind, the way we are instances of a kind. He does not “have” intellect and will, as we do, but rather just is infinite intellect and will. He is not “a person,” not because he is less than a person but because he is more than merely a person. (Also see Feser’s article “Classical theism“)

The emergence of theistic person­alism, unfortunately, has made it possible for theologians and philosophers to begin to significantly redefine the attributes of God. The first to go were immutability and impassibility. After all, don’t the biblical writers speak of God as changing his mind, repenting of his actions, and experiencing grief, anger, and joy? More recently, open theists have begun telling us that the divine omniscience is limited—God does not exhaustively foreknow the future. A significant revision of the traditional under­standing of divinity is now taking place in some Christian quarters. When one reads a philosopher like Swinburne, one hardly notices the shift in emphasis; but the shift becomes marked when one reads those who are more fearless in departing from inherited formulations. Jürgen Moltmann immediately comes to mind.[1]

I offered a brief response to this on my Facebook feed, I wrote:

Certain philosophical theologians have called theologians and Christians who conceive of God in personal terms as: theistic personalists. They ultimately believe this is a dangerous step away from so called classical theism. In certain instances folks who fit on the continuum of theistic personalism very well could fall into heresy vis-a-vis orthodox (per conciliar Christianity) categories. But not all, say someone like Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, Evangelical Calvinists, Robert Jenson et al who think God in personal terms, fit into this notion of theistic personalism. We work through the conciliar categories *constructively*, but do not abandon them. Our priority to thinking God, though, is through God’s Self revelation in Jesus Christ, as attested to in Holy Scripture. To think God from this starting point, to think God *triunely*, is to necessarily think Him personalistically. Yes, there are potential dangers here; think of so called social Trinitarians, who often function with a view of God that has three distinct subjects (so we would collapse into tritheism, at best, and polytheism, at worst). But these are not necessary errors if we allow the reality of God in Christ, as understood in Chalcedonian pattern, to regulate the way we think the Triune God from the very Primacy of the risen Christ. The only other alternative, that I can see, is to think God from the philosophers; and I’d rather not.

It is too bad when philosophical categories supplant biblical ones when it comes to the way we think God. I suppose this is what differentiates some Protestant thinkers from Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and scholastic Reformed (and Lutheran) thinkers in regard to the way we think God. It is not necessary to posit that because we think God in personalistic terms that we do so from a social analogy, or bottom-up approach. Instead, as Barth, Torrance, Evangelical Calvinists et al. maintain, our idea of personhood isn’t read back into God from an abstract conception of what humanity entails from below; but we understand personhood from what God has revealed about Himself in the singular person of Jesus Christ—a decidedly ‘from above’ development of personhood and anthropology. Categories like immutability, impassibility, so on and so forth do not have to be victims of operating from this sort of ‘theistic personalism’ mode; indeed, such categories only have a chance of being Christianly viable insofar that they can be evangelized and come under the pressure of God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, as attested to in Holy Scripture.

It’s actually an interesting proposal, Aidan’s and his friend’s, you see it works from petitio principii, or circular reasoning; it works from a built in analogia entis (analogy of being) wherein such supposed ‘divine’ categories like infinity, immutability, eternity, so on and so forth are thought of out of negating finitude, mutability, temporality, so on and so forth. It is really the so-called apophatic theologians, or metaphysicians who engage in a social-analogy, bottom-up approach for thinking God. People are well advised to think God in personalistic terms, since that’s how the Bible discloses God to the world; and even more palpably, that’s how Jesus Christ reveals God to the world.

[1] Mr. Al, How Anthropomorphic is your G-O-D?  (Eclectic Orthodoxy blog), accessed 08-09-2020.