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Monism, Pluralism, and Personalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

John Wright Buckham
Affiliation:
Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California

Extract

Two philosophical conceptions of God are now contesting the field with the theology of Christianity—Monism and Pluralism. It will be the endeavor of this paper to show that neither of them offers so rational, adequate, and comprehensive a conception of God as does Christianity, for the reason that neither is so true to that category which is coming to be more and more clearly recognized as the supreme interpretation of deity, namely, personality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1908

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References

1 “I abhor all religious conceptions which personify God, and regard them as unworthy of a reasonable being,” said Fichte, although by this he probably meant personify in the sense of anthropomorphize.

2 Hegelianism and Personality.

3 Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 59.

4 The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, p. 388.

5 The ontological argument, that is, in the true form is valid; but we are not dependent upon it for our knowledge of the existence of God. That comes through personal recognition.

6 The World and the Individual, II, 268.

7 Ibid. I, 466.

8 Ibid. I, 468.

9 Ibid. II, 398.

10 The World and the Individual, II, 419.

11 The Limits of Evolution, second edition, p. 355.

12 Transcendence and immanence are here used in the common, if not altogether appropriate, sense of “the doctrine that God in his proper and essential nature is prior to and above the world, or that he has reality in himself apart from his works,” and “the indwelling or inworking of the Deity in nature and man.” See Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology.

13 “There is nothing that can come closer, nothing that can penetrate a person more than another person. Bodies and objects are insuperably exterior to one another; not so persons.” Gaston Frommel, Études morales et religieuses, p. 358 (quoted in The Expository Times, December, 1907, p. 111).

14 W. R. Boyce Gibson, Hibbert Journal, January, 1907, p. 44.

15 Sacred Books of the East, VIII, 74.

16 De incarnatione, § 17.

17 Weber, History of Philosophy, p. 189.

18 See Caldecott, The Philosophy of Religion, p. 189.