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Competing conceptions of God: the personal God versus the God beyond being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2014

MIKAEL STENMARK
MIKAEL STENMARK*
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Box 511, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: mikael.stenmark@teol.uu.se
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Abstract

Among philosophers and theologians today, one of the most important dividing lines is the one separating those who advocate a personal conception of God (personal theism) from those who embrace the idea of a God beyond or without being (alterity theism). There is not much dialogue between these groups of scholars; rather the two groups ignore each other, and each party typically believes that there is a fairly straightforward knockdown argument against the other. In this article I explore these two standard objections – the idolatry objection and the no-sense objection – and show why they both fail to be convincing. This failure to convince is a good thing, because it opens up the possibility that both personal theism and alterity theism are legitimate research programmes, each worthy of being further developed in philosophical theology.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 205 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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