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"Attributes of God"
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Divinity and Maximal Greatness
This book examines the divine nature in terms of maximal greatness. It investigates each attribute associated with maximal greatness - omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, eternity, and beauty, arguing that maximal greatness is necessary and sufficient for divinity.
Daniel J. Hill teaches philosophy at the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester. He is the author of the forthcoming Christian Philosophy: A-Z .
1. Introduction 2. Omniscience 3. Omniscience and Freedom 4. Middle Knowledge 5. Omnipotence 6. God and Value 7. Eternity and Omnipresence Bibliography
eBook
God’s Moral Perfection as His Beneficent Love. Comment on Craig
William Lane Craig insists that I am wrong in reducing God’s moral goodness to his beneficent aim of drawing all people to himself. For Craig, God’s moral goodness, best conceived in terms of righteousness, must also include God’s retributive justice toward the wicked, who deserve the punishment they receive. My response is that Craig’s argument rests on two assumptions about value, neither of which, I argue, Christian theists have good reason to affirm.
Journal Article
Why Sacrifice? - Early Confucianism's Reinterpretation of Sacrificial Rites and Human - Guishen
This paper examines how early Confucianism reinterpreted sacrificial rites and reconstructed the relationship between humans and spirits through the lens of qing (情, sentiment). Traditional scholarship often views the Confucian reinterpretation of sacrifice as a shift from religious belief to a human-centered framework of rationality, morality, and humanism—emphasizing its role in moral education and social governance and thereby marginalizing or even denying the existence of guishen (鬼神, spirits and deities) and the transcendent realm they represent. Although some scholars have emphasized the religious dimensions of Confucianism, few have addressed how Confucians managed to affirm the existence of spirits while simultaneously endowing sacrificial rites with moral and humanistic meaning—that is, how they navigated the inherent tension between the human and the divine realms. Against this background, this study argues that early Confucians neither denied the existence of spirits nor reduced sacrifice to a purely ethical or political instrument. By contrast, they regarded human sentiment as the universal foundation of sacrificial practice and, through a profound and creative transformation, redirected the meaning of sacrifice toward the human world (rendao 人道), thereby establishing a new model of human–divine relations—one that affirms human agency and dignity while preserving the sanctity of the spiritual. Drawing on close readings of classical Confucian texts such as The Analects , The Book of Rites , and Xunzi , this paper identifies three core dimensions of sacrificial sentiment: remembrance, gratitude, and reverence and awe. Together, these sentiments form a relational structure between humans and guishen that enables communication and interaction while maintaining clear boundaries. In this way, Confucian sacrificial rites become a space for emotional expression without degenerating into a “carnival of emotions” or transgressing the proper separation between the human and the divine. Confucian sacrificial thought thus affirms human dignity and moral agency while upholding the transcendence of the sacred.
Journal Article
God-Perfecting Man: Theurgical Elements in the Mysticism of Muhyi I-Din Ibn al-'Arabi and Their Historical Significance
The following article aims at highlighting the theurgical tendencies in the teachings of the great Andalusī Muslim mystic Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (560/1165–638/1240). By “theurgy” is meant the influence of man on Divinity in its manifest external dimension, that is to say, the dimension of God that creates beings and is involved with their lives and fortunes, as opposed to His hidden essence. The category “theurgy/theurgical” is adopted from the modern academic study of Kabbalah, and is ultimately derived from Late Antique Neoplatonism. The bulk of this article is dedicated to analyzing relevant texts from Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre and elucidating the theurgical elements reflected in them, while the last two sections (5–6) present preliminary observations on the relevant links between Ibn al-ʿArabī, Kabbalah, and Late Antique Neoplatonism. It is argued that these three traditions should be studied together, as they shed light on one another.
Journal Article
Wrath among the Perfections of God's Life
Late-modern theology is marked by persistent and widespread uncertainty as to how the wrath of God can be taken up as a legitimate theme within dogmatics.Rather than engage the most fundamental task of clarifying the inner logic by which God's identity is revealed in scripture, privilege has been ceded either to cultural and textual criticism, to.
eBook
Thanks Be to God: Divine Gratitude and Its Relationship to Well-Being
Gratitude is a pivotal concept in the psychology of religion because it is one of the most frequently experienced emotions toward God. The authors developed a trait measure of Gratitude to God (GTG-T) and investigated the association between Gratitude to God and psychological and spiritual well-being in four studies. Study 1 provided evidence for the validity of the GTG-T as Gratitude to God was associated with overall well-being and predicted increases in spiritual well-being over time. Study 2 used a prospective design to show that Gratitude to God predicted increases in general gratitude. In a third study, results showed that Gratitude to God predicted increased grateful emotion and increased confidence in the existence of God over time. In Studies 2 and 3, mediation analyses supported the model that Gratitude to God enhances well-being by promoting generalized gratitude. Study 4 provided further valid evidence for the GTG-T and also showed that gratitude to God is much more strongly related to one’s heartfelt conception of God as loving than to their doctrinal conception of a loving God. Gratitude to God deserves additional scientific scrutiny in the psychology of religion and spirituality than it has received to date.
Journal Article
Goodness and Godness in Cosmic Agapism
This paper concerns itself with postulating the necessity of God for Good, in answer to the titular question posed in this edition: “Is an Ethics without God Possible?”. To achieve this end, I consider a specific pantheistic ethic centered on Murdochian love and evaluate a potential contradictory element to this brand of ethic, while also highlighting several important terminological considerations integral to the debate concerning objective moral realism. I tentatively provide a demonstration of moral goodness without a ‘capital G’ God while examining and demystifying the underpinning concepts of goodness and ‘Godness’ (the nature of God).
Journal Article
Seeing the Beauty of the Lord: Mystics on Nature as Theophany
Mystics are often thought to have little interest in the natural world, given their concern with the inner self. Many mystics, however, have had a profound sense of the beauty of creation. Their interest is not in nature as such, but in the world as a manifestation (theophania), a veil in which and through which God reveals and conceals Godself. This essay will sketch the line of “theophanic mysticism” in three figures. In several texts (e.g., Confessions 9.10; City of God 22.24), Augustine meditates on natural beauty as revealing God. In his “Canticum Solis” (Hymn of Brother Sun), Francis of Assisi presents a distinctive view of the natural and human worlds as praising God in a “familial chorus.” John of the Cross, who at times seems to reject the world, insists that when the soul is emptied of all false attachments, it will finally be able to see and love the beauty of creation. The essay concludes with a look at Pope Francis’s “Laudato Si’” as a contemporary revival of theophanic mysticism and an important ethical option in the midst of the current ecological crisis.
Journal Article
Does God Comfort You When You Are Sad? Religious Diversity in Children’s Attribution of Positive and Negative Traits to God
Children actively construct their understanding of God in early childhood, an understanding that incorporates affect-laden mental representations often referred to as God images. To explore religious variations in children’s association of positive and negative traits to God, 254 preschool-aged children from Protestant Christian, Catholic, Muslim, and Non-Affiliated religious backgrounds indicated their certainty that God scares them, punishes them, is angry at them, loves them, comforts them, and helps people. Parents indicated the frequency of children’s religious engagement. Older children were more certain than younger children that God did not scare or punish them and that God loved and comforted them, and helped people. Moreover, religious affiliation differences emerged in children’s attribution of both positively and negatively valenced properties to God, and more frequent religious engagement was related to a higher degree of certainty that God loves, comforts, helps, and becomes angry, but was unrelated to the certainty that God scares or punishes. The findings suggest that religious engagement plays an important role in children’s developing God image.
Journal Article