5 - One Means Not One

Summary

In the Bible, “YHWH is one” meant to praise YHWH, not to deny that other gods exist. In Jewish Platonism, “God is one” meant not that there are no other divine beings but that these are at best secondary to God. To some Christian trinitarians, “God is one,” meant that there is one Godhead that is, even so, internally diverse. To the rabbis, “God is one” meant that there is an unbridgeable gap between God and all other beings. Medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers constructed yet another conceptualization: “God is one” means that God is somehow ontologically one. This in turn led to “negative theology”: that God could not be described through positive attributes that suggest diversity, but only though negative predicates. This innovation led to troubling questions. If “God is one” means that God’s unity is entirely unlike the diversity of everything else, how is knowledge of God possible?