Classical Theism: An Introduction (Part 1)

What is classical theism, and why does it matter?

The Tetragrammaton, as depicted on the ceiling of the Chapel of Saint Nicholas at Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight, England.

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ויאמר אלהים אל־משה אהיה אשר אהיה

What is Classical Theism?

In offering a definition of classical theism, it is somewhat difficult to know where to begin. My first inclination—which may simply be a vestige of my status as a former Anglican—is to quote from the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, the first of which begins as follows:

“There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.” — The Thirty-Nine Articles, Article #1: Of Faith in the Holy Trinity.

As a statement of foundational theistic belief, it is difficult to do much better than that. But of course, this is the stuff of catechisms, more Sunday school than seminary, and as such is necessarily rather vague; indeed, there is little here that could not be affirmed (albeit perhaps in a modified form) by a neo-classical (or otherwise non-classical) theist. If we wish to understand what distinguishes classical theists from their non-classical counterparts, we will need to go deeper.

Staying within the Anglican tradition, we find a helping hand in the person of E.L. Mascall, the great 20th-century theologian and professor of historical theology at King’s College London. Taking the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas as his central focus, Mascall wrote as follows:

“[The] conception of God as ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself, is fundamental… It draws into a unity all the other attributes and operations of God: simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, immutability, eternity, unity, his character as Prime Mover, as Uncaused Cause, as Sufficient Reason, as Perfect Pattern and as Final End of all things. It involves that, if God does exist, his existence is identical with his essence. It means that he is not merely the ens maximum, the greatest being that exists, but the maxime ens, that which completely is.” — He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism, 1945, 13.

This is somewhat more helpful, if also a tad more contentious. One could argue that Mascall’s reliance on a specifically Thomistic conceptual framework might render his definition less than perfectly applicable when examining the thought of, say, Athanasius or Ibn-Sina. Nevertheless, Mascall’s account has in common with all of classical theism its emphasis on God’s simplicity, perfection, immutability, and eternity, as well as (most crucially of all) his status as “subsistent being itself” (ibid., 13).

More recently, classical theism has been discussed and defined by a number of analytic philosophers of religion. One prominent example is Edward Feser, who defines classical theism—in contrast to neo-classical theism—as follows:

“[Classical] theism famously insists that God is simple or non-composite, impassible, immutable, eternal in the sense of atemporal, omniscient in a sense that entails complete knowledge of the future, and omnipotent in the sense that there can be nothing that exists or occurs independently of his causal power. Classical theists hold that these attributes follow from God’s being the ultimate reality in the order of being and the ultimate explanation of things in the order of discovery. Hence, it is claimed, to deny any of them is at least implicitly to deny God’s ultimacy.” — “What is Classical Theism?” in Classical Theism: New Essays in the Metaphysics of God, 2023, 11.

From the above-cited passages, it seems that we can derive a workable, rough-and-ready definition of classical theism: it is that form of theism which affirms that God is simple, timeless, immutable, and impassible, and which claims that God is to be regarded, not as a “being-among-beings,” but rather as Being itself.¹

The Apophatic Method

It is important to note that classical theism does not differ from non-classical theism merely in its insistence on a particular array of contested divine attributes; rather, it is also characterized by a particular way of thinking about God, which is typically called “negative” or “apophatic” theology. As Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart notes:

“[All] the major theistic traditions insist at some point that our language about God consists mostly in conceptual restrictions and fruitful negations. ‘Cataphatic’ (or affirmative) theology must always be chastened and corrected by ‘apophatic’ (or negative) theology. We cannot speak of God in his own nature directly, but only at best analogously, and even then only in such a way that the conceptual content of our analogies consists largely in our knowledge of all the things that God is not. This is the via negativa of Christianity, the lahoot salbi (negative theology) of Islam, Hinduism’s ‘neti, neti’ (‘not this, not this’).” — The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 2013, 142.

Indeed, it is helpful to think of classical theism’s theological distinctives as being principally a series of negations, drawn from a conceptual analysis of what the ultimate source and explanation of existence would have to be like. Herbert McCabe, writing about the question of existence—that is to say, of why anything exists at all—put the matter thusly:

“To say that we have a valid question (one with an answer) is to say that God exists; for what we mean by ‘God’ is just whatever answers the question. Apart from knowing this… all we can do is point, as systematically as we can, to several kinds or categories of things that the answer could not be. For one thing, whatever would answer our question could not itself be subject to the question – otherwise we are left as we were, with the same question still to answer. Whatever we mean by ‘God’ cannot be whatever it is that makes us ask the question in the first place. So perishability, decline, dependence, alteration, the impersonality that characterises material things, and so on – all these have to be excluded from God.” — God Matters, 2005, 41.

For the classical theist, then, one’s theology is intimately connected to one’s broader metaphysics. One begins with the question of why anything exists at all, and then proceeds to consider what the answer—indeed, any answer—to that question would have to be like.

Why Does This Matter?

Having discussed what classical theism is, we now find ourselves in the position to ask why we should care. After all, what difference does it make if we think of God as a maximally great being, or as subsistent being itself? There are, as it happens, a number of good reasons to care about this issue. One of these is of interest particularly to religious believers: specifically, if one’s conception of God is not correct, it will wreck havoc with one’s understanding of other doctrines. As Mascall put it:

“[The] doctrine of God is the basis upon which all other Christian doctrine rests, [and hence] any error that has been allowed to creep into a man’s belief about God will distort his understanding of every other Christian truth. If his idea of God is wrong, his idea of Christ will be wrong, since Christ is God incarnate; and his ideas of the Church and the Sacraments will be wrong, since the Church is Christ’s body and the Sacraments are the instruments of his action upon the human soul.” — He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism, 1945, 2-3.

While Mascall himself focuses on the correct interpretation of Christian doctrine, his point may be generalized to Jewish, Islamic, and other philosophical theologies.

Even if one is not currently a religious believer, one should still be concerned about our subject, if for no other reason than that the implications of classical theism for one’s broader worldview will be very different from those of naturalism or non-classical theism. For example, the classical doctrine of God’s identity with Being itself arguably lends itself to a broader Scholastic metaphysic, according to which Being is convertible with Goodness.² In addition, the doctrines of divine timelessness and immutability could have important implications for one's views on the philosophy of time. After all, if God is timeless and changeless, then how could he have knowledge of tensed propositions, of the sort affirmed by presentists? And if there are such propositions, and yet God does not know them, then it is hard to see how he could be called omniscient. Hence, classical theism might push its adherents towards some form of eternalism.³

In addition, one might think that the plausibility of classical theism in particular will impact the plausibly of mere theism itself. For example, Cohoe argues that non-classical theists cannot “fairly claim to have found a fully independent ultimate being” (2020, 202), and hence have no advantage over naturalistic priority monists. If Cohoe is right, then if classical theism turns out to be false—leaving non-classical theism as the only remaining form—it will have a negative impact on the overall plausibility of theism itself. By contrast, Schmid and Mullins (2022) present an argument against classical theism, holding that classical theists cannot consistently affirm all of the divine attributes that they wish to affirm. If they are correct, then if mere theism itself turns out to imply the truth of classical theism, it will enable the naturalist to run a modus tollens and reject mere theism itself. As such, the evaluation of classical theism should be of central interest to all those working in the philosophy of religion.

Having discussed what classical theism is, and why we should care about it, we are now in a position to discuss its role in the history of philosophical theology. This will be our topic in Part 2 of this series.

1. How exactly this final doctrine should be understood—particularly by analytic philosophers of religion—is a topic for later discussion. For the time being, I direct the enthusiastic and/or impatient reader to Miller (1996), Vallicella (2002, 2019), Kovacs (2018), and de Ray (2022).

2. For discussion, see Clarke (2001) and Oderberg (2014, 2021).

3. It is a question of some dispute whether such classical theistic luminaries as Anselm and Aquinas were presentists or eternalists. For discussion of Anselm’s views, see Rogers (2007, 2009) and Leftow (2009). For discussion of Aquinas’ views, see Craig (1985) and Leftow (1990). Interestingly, it seems that John Duns Scotus read Aquinas as endorsing what we would now regard as an eternalist theory of time, and later accepted such a view himself; see Cross (1997). For a modern Scotistic perspective, see Gordon (2016, 2019).