Is God a Person? Classical Theism vs Theistic Personalism

Is God a person? The answer depends on which of two unrelated senses of the word is in play, and most of the quarrel about it turns out to be a quarrel about the word. In the trinitarian sense, person names a who, and the church confesses three of them in one undivided essence. In the modern sense, a person is a centre of consciousness with beliefs, desires and a will, and here the schools divide. Theistic personalism, whose God Richard Swinburne defines as a person without a body, answers yes, and Alvin Plantinga's case against divine simplicity is its sharpest weapon. Classical theism, in Brian Davies and Edward Feser, answers no, because God is not one more thing in the world. Paul Tillich withdraws the question. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism indexes the term instead of choosing between them.

Key takeaways

• Two senses of the word are in play, and the trinitarian one does not settle the query. Three persons in one essence tells you how many who subsist in God; it does not tell you what kind of thing God is.
• Theistic personalism answers yes and pays in aseity. Swinburne defines God as a person without a body, and Plantinga argues that divine simplicity would leave God a property rather than a person. The price is a God who is one instance of a kind.
• Classical theism answers no and pays in nearness. Davies holds that a person must have a body and that God is not an inhabitant of the universe, so the personal terms go analogical.
• Tillich withdraws the predicate and pays in agency. A ground of being makes no covenants.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism indexes the term rather than choosing between Swinburne and Tillich. God is not less than personal. He is personal without the composition our word carries.

Is God a person, or three persons?

Both, in two different senses, and the two answers are not rivals. The creed's sense is the older one and the more precise. Boethius supplied the definition the medievals worked from, and Aquinas quotes it: "a person is an individual substance of a rational nature." Aquinas then refines it for the divine case, concluding in the Summa Theologiae that "a divine person signifies a relation as subsisting". Father, Son and Spirit are distinguished by relations of origin, the Father begetting, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding, and by that alone. Nothing is divided and no portion of deity is parcelled out.

John states the grammar in a single breath:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1, NIV)

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With God is the distinction. Was God is the one essence. Three who, one what, and the confession holds both without strain.

The modern sense is a different concept that happens to share a word. Here a person is a subject of consciousness: something with beliefs, desires, intentions and a will, understood in a univocal or near-univocal sense with finite persons like us. It is the sense in which we ask whether a chimpanzee is a person, or whether a corporation is one, and it is the sense the searcher has in mind.

The migration is historical, which is why the confusion is so natural. Persona and hypostasis entered Christian usage to answer a question about the one God and the three, centuries before anyone used the word to mean a self with an inner life. When the modern sense arrived it took the older word with it. English now carries both, and the creed and the search query are using different ones.

Run them together and the mistake is immediate. Answer "is God a person" with "no, three" and you have replied to a question about number when the question was about kind. The reader wants to know what sort of thing God is. The creed tells him how many who subsist in the one God, which is a true answer to something he did not ask.

So the live question is the modern one, and three schools answer it three ways. Each is holding something worth holding, and each is paying for it somewhere.

Volume Four works the doctrine of God out at length in Resolving Immutability & Interaction.

What is theistic personalism?

Theistic personalism treats God as a personal agent whose personhood is understood in a univocal or near-univocal sense with that of finite persons, minus our limitations, and it therefore rejects divine simplicity. The label was popularised by Brian Davies, who framed the contrast in order to argue against the position. Those who hold the view are not bound by a critic's name for it.

Richard Swinburne states it without hedging. In The Coherence of Theism he defines God as "a person … without a body", and builds outward from there: eternal, free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, the creator and sustainer of all that is not God. The method is to begin from what we already know a person to be, remove the limits one at a time, and show that no incoherence appears along the way.

The appeal is the God of the narrative. Scripture's God speaks, decides, commands, relents, is grieved, and sends. Exodus puts it as directly as it can be put:

"The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend." (Exodus 33:11, NIV)

A being that cannot be the subject of those verbs is not the God Moses met at the tent of meeting, and the personalist declines to trade the narrative for a metaphysic.

Then comes the sharpest argument on the personalist side. In Does God Have a Nature? (1980), Alvin Plantinga turned divine simplicity against itself. If God does not have His properties but is them, then, in the sentence the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes, "if God is identical to his properties, then he is a property, and they are a single property, in which case God is a single property."

Properties are abstract objects and abstract objects are causally inert, which yields the conclusion Plantinga draws: "If God is a property, then he isn't a person but a mere abstract object; he has no knowledge, awareness, power, love or life." He presses the point: no property could have created the world, and no property could be omniscient, or know anything at all.

That is not a quibble about terms. It says the doctrine meant to exalt God has emptied Him instead, leaving something nearer to a Platonic form than to the God who hears. If the argument holds, simplicity has to go, and the classical doctrine of God goes with it.

The cost falls on aseity, the doctrine that God depends on nothing outside Himself. Davies's counter, as Elizabeth Burns reports it in Think, takes one sentence: were God a person like us, he would be just another inhabitant of the universe whose existence would need an explanation. A God who is one instance of the kind person, marked off from us by degree, is a very large item inside reality rather than its source, and the question of what accounts for Him stays open.

The framework's own statement of the position sits at FICT.

What does classical theism say instead?

Classical theism holds that God is absolutely metaphysically ultimate: simple, immutable, impassible, eternal, and not an instance of any kind at all. It is the position of Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, and in our own time of Brian Davies and Edward Feser, who puts the contrast in those terms. The theistic personalist conceives God as a person comparable to human persons without our limitations; the classical theist denies that God is comparable to anything.

Davies's argument against divine personhood is short, and Burns reports it in a sentence: a person must have a body, and since God is not usually thought to be embodied, God cannot be a person. The positive version carries more weight: God is not a thing in the world, He is the reason there is a world at all. Paul says as much to the philosophers of Athens:

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else." (Acts 17:24–25, NIV)

Not served by human hands, as if He needed anything. The classical conception was not read off that verse, but it sits comfortably beside it.

Divine simplicity is the doctrine underneath. God has no parts: no physical parts, no composition of essence and existence, no unrealised potential. He is pure act, actus purus, and His justice, wisdom and mercy are one undivided act named under several heads, rather than components assembled into a deity. The biblical idiom at its most exalted speaks the same way. John does not write that God possesses love: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8, NIV).

How, then, does the classical theist answer Plantinga? By denying his ontology rather than his logic. The medieval defenders were not working with abstract objects. In the constituent ontology they used, a nature is as concrete as the thing whose nature it is, so saying that God is His nature does not turn Him into an abstraction; it makes Him the most concrete particular there is. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy records the reply in those terms, following Nicholas Wolterstorff.

The answer is sound, and it leaves something unfinished. It shows that Plantinga's conclusion does not follow. It does not explain why the argument reads so naturally to modern readers, and an objection that returns in fresh dress is usually tracking something real.

The position has a cost of its own. Once God is not comparable to anything, the personal terms become analogical: God knows, but not as we know; God loves, but not as we love. The tradition answers with divine incomprehensibility and the apophatic theology built on it, which is honest and also a cost, and the believer who kneels to pray to pure act feels it before he can name it.

Volume One is free to download, and it is where the series begins.

Is God being-itself rather than a being?

Paul Tillich answered that God is not a being at all. "For Tillich, God is being-itself, not a being among other beings," as the Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology states his position, and "God is the ground of being, the ground of the structure of being." The ground of being is not an item in the inventory of things that exist; it is that in virtue of which there is an inventory.

On personhood he is explicit, and the sentence deserves quoting whole: "'Personal God' does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal and that he carries within himself the ontological power of personality." What he refuses is God conceived as "a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind."

The appeal is Davies's instinct pressed one step further. A being among beings is one more thing, and one more thing is the sort of thing that has a cause. Tillich declines to let God be counted at all, which closes the question of what accounts for God before it can be opened. Paul at the Areopagus comes nearer to this than modern readers expect: "For in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28, NIV).

What the position pays is agency, and with agency most of the creed. Gaskin's objection, as Burns reports it, gives the general form: there is no analogy between psychokinetic acts and the actions of a disembodied God. A ground of being does not make a covenant, answer a prayer, or send a Son. The objection presses theistic personalism too, but it lands hardest here, where there is no agent left to defend. Withdrawing the predicate rather than indexing it rescues God from the inventory and costs Him the verbs.

Volume Four takes up divine action in full.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. It is the Many Beings Framework's position, and its own statement sits on this site. It enters this dispute where theistic personalism, classical theism and Tillich's ground of being converge.

The grounding is one claim. Beings whose natures differ in kind apprehend reality in structurally different ways, so a term whose content involves modality, temporality, agency or value carries with it the mode of the being it is said of. Terms of that class are analogically non-univocal across the divide: one reality, truly known on both sides, never substitutable without an index. The Many Beings Fallacy is predicating such a term univocally across it.

"Person" belongs to that class, because its content is agency. Swinburne predicates the term univocally and arrives at a God who is one instance of a kind. Plantinga, working with the same univocal concept, correctly sees that a simple God could not be a person in that sense, and concludes that simplicity must go. Tillich watches the univocal reading fail and withdraws the predicate. Davies and Feser refuse both moves and reach the right conclusion without the mechanism that says why it is right.

Plantinga's argument requires God to occupy one of two slots: a thing that has properties, or a property that things have. Both slots were cut for composite creatures, which acquire qualities, lose them, hold them in degrees, and share them with others. God is neither a bearer nor a borne. To conclude that a simple God must be an abstract object is to find the edge of a creature's taxonomy, not an absurdity in God. The conclusion inverts the truth it reaches for: an abstract object is causally inert, while pure act is maximal causal vitality, the act by which all else is held in being.

The positive claim is the part the rivals have no room for. Simplicity removes composition and unrealised remainder. Those are the very things that keep a creaturely person from being wholly present in what he does: we are divided, distracted, half absent from our own acts, and forever holding in reserve what we have not yet become. Take them away and nothing personal has been subtracted. God is not less than personal. He is personal without residue.

The many perfections we name in Him, justice, wisdom, mercy, are the one undivided act reaching a bounded receiver, as one light reaches an eye as a spectrum, and Duns Scotus was right that something genuinely distinct is found there, though he located it on the divine side rather than ours.

What the framework gives up should be said with the same directness. It cannot tell you what personhood is like from God's side; the index marks that there is a difference in kind, never what the difference feels like from within. It owes a ground for that index, since an index with nothing beneath it is analogy wearing a subscript. And it has no doctrine of the Trinity and offers none. The three persons are real in God, not a spectrum thrown by a finite eye; the life of God with God crosses no boundary between natures, so the machinery has no jurisdiction there and says so rather than improvising.

Set against all three rivals at once: Frame-Indexed Classical Theism keeps Swinburne's God who acts and sends, keeps Davies's and Feser's God who is not an inhabitant of the universe, keeps Tillich's refusal to count God among beings, and denies all three the univocal "person" that generated the quarrel.

Volume One is free, and the shortest way into the argument.

If God is not a person like us, what is Jesus?

In Christology the word carries its most exact sense. The person of Christ is the hypostasis: the one who acts, speaks, suffers and prays, the single "I" of the Gospels, and that "I" is the eternal Son. The human nature He assumed is real and complete, and it has no independent personhood of its own; its "I" is the Son's. That is what keeps two natures from becoming two subjects.

"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14, NIV)

One Person, possessing the divine nature throughout and living a genuinely human life through the nature He took, with the finite mode of apprehension that nature carries. That is why "nor the Son" in Mark 13:32 can be literally true of Him with nothing subtracted from His deity, and the argument for it, set against the kenotic alternative, is worked out under kenoticism and in Volume Four.

The Incarnation is therefore the one case in which God is a person in a sense near to ours, and it is so because a human nature was assumed, not because deity had been that sort of thing all along. Exodus supplies the counterweight in the same chapter as the friendship: "But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live" (Exodus 33:20, NIV). The God who spoke with Moses as a man speaks with his friend is the God no one may look upon, and both sentences stand.

The full Christology is argued in Volume Four.

The four answers compared

Each position answers the same question, and they differ over what the word "person" is being asked to mean.

Frequently asked questions

Is God a person or a being?

Put more sharply, is God a being at all? On classical theism He is not, in the sense the question assumes: God is not one more item in the inventory of things that exist, so He is neither a being alongside other beings nor a person alongside other persons. Paul Tillich presses that further and calls God being-itself. Richard Swinburne takes the opposite road and defines God as a person without a body. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that both words are said of God and of creatures analogically, which is why the either-or has no good answer as posed.

Is God a person or a spirit?

"Spirit" answers a different question from the one being asked. When Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that "God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth" (John 4:24, NIV), the dispute in front of Him is about where worship belongs, Mount Gerizim or Jerusalem, and His answer takes the location away. The verse tells us what God is not made of. Whether the modern sense of the word applies to Him is left open, and that is the question classical theism, theistic personalism and ground-of-being theology divide over.

Does divine simplicity make God impersonal?

That is Alvin Plantinga's objection in Does God Have a Nature?: if God is identical with His properties then God is a property, and no property knows, loves or creates. The classical reply, which Brian Davies and Edward Feser both press, is that the medievals did not treat natures as abstract objects, so God being His nature makes Him concrete rather than abstract. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism adds the step that reply leaves out. "Property-bearer" and "property" are categories built for composite creatures, pure act belongs to neither, and simplicity therefore subtracts nothing personal.

What is the difference between classical theism and theistic personalism?

Brian Davies put the contrast into circulation. Classical theism holds God to be absolutely ultimate, simple, immutable and eternal, not an instance of any kind, and it is the position of Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas. Theistic personalism conceives God as a person comparable to us without our limitations, and gives up divine simplicity in order to do it; Swinburne is its clearest defender and Plantinga supplied its strongest argument. The dispute is over whether "person" means the same thing when said of God and when said of us.

If God is not a person like us, how can He hear a prayer?

Because the creature's act genuinely fixes what is true of the relationship, and nothing in God has to alter for that to hold. Had the prayer never been offered, the eternally known story would have been a different story. Open theism secures that reciprocity by putting God inside time, and process theology by letting God be altered by the world; Frame-Indexed Classical Theism secures it without either, by locating the change where change belongs, in the creature. Volume Four argues prayer and providence at length, and Volume One is free.

Where to go from here

The argument has run since 1980 because both sides agreed on the one thing that needed questioning: that "person" means a single thing wherever it is used. Grant that, and either Swinburne's God is too small or Tillich's God is too silent, with nothing available in between. Refuse it and the question opens again.

Volume One, Resolving The Free Will Dilemma, is permanently free on Kindle and sets out the framework itself; the free copy is here. Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, carries the divine attributes, the doctrine of God and the Christology, and engages kenoticism and open theism among its rivals. The series argues one position straight through rather than collecting essays that talk past each other between two covers.

Related reading

• Nominalism
• Haecceity
• Hylomorphism