God and the Issue of Being

There is a long tradition in Western philosophical theology of conceiving God as ‘a being’. It dates back to the Hellenistic period, more particularly to the conjunction of Greek philosophy and the Hebrew religion in Alexandria with Philo, and it became orthodox in the Christian tradition through Augustine. In our time most aspects of this religious tradition have been subjected to a salutary re-examination, but in this the concept of God as ‘a being’ has been relatively neglected. After such a long acceptance of so fundamental a doctrine, it is liable largely to have sunk to the status of a presupposition, entailing a loss of intellectual awareness of what precisely it implies. Even where the Augustinian philosophical argument upon which this concept is based is recognized, as it has been in the long Neoplatonic tradition, it has come to appear as essentially self-evident and thus has not been subjected to fundamental critical examination. Significant of this is that even where the personalistic conception of God has been abandoned, e.g. by the idealist philosophy of the Absolute, the conception nevertheless persists of God as ‘a being’

Absolute (philosophy) · Argument (complex analysis) · Doctrine · Epistemology · Presupposition · Theology · Augustinian Studies and Theology · Medieval Philosophy and Theology · Philosophy · Theology and Philosophy of Evil

• Apophasis in Plotinus

  Open Access•Michael Sells, Michael Anthony Sells•Harvard Theological Review•1985

  Add to list

• The Verb ‘Be’ and its Synonyms

  Open Access•John W M Verhaar•The Verb ‘Be’ and its Synonyms•1972

  Add to list

• A History of Greek Philosophy

  Open Access•W K C Guthrie•A History of Greek Philosophy•1962

  Add to list

• The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers

  Werner Wilhelm Jaeger•The Theology of the Early Greek…•2002

  Add to list