Absolute personality theism [1]

The God of the Bible is not the only God of the ancient or modern worlds who is personal. The Greeks and the Romans had as many personal gods as you could shake a stick at (and, as Paul discovered in Athens in Acts 17, even more that you couldn’t!) What is unique about the biblical God is not simply that he is personal, but that he is personal and absolute, where absolute means 1) self-existent, self-sufficient and self-contained, not relying on anything outside himself for his existence, and 2) fundamental, not able to be broken down into more basic parts. Van Til explains this uniqueness in the following way:

God is absolute personality. The attributes themselves speak of self-conscious and moral activity on the part of God. Recognizing that for this intellectual and moral activity God is dependent upon nothing beyond his own being, we see that we have the Reformed doctrine of the personality of God. There were no principles of truth, goodness or beauty that were next to or above God according to which he patterned the world. The principles of truth, goodness, and beauty are to be thought of as identical with God’s being; they are the attributes of God. Non-Christian systems of philosophy do not deny personality to God, at least some of them do not, but, in effect, they all agree in denying absolute personality to God.[2]

The compound of absolute personality (being absolute and also being personal and having a personality) is unique to the biblical God. Many religions of the East, for example, know of absolute deities: principles, life-forces, world souls, and Aristotle has his absolute Prime or Unmoved Mover. But these absolute deities are not personal. In Apologetics to the Glory of God, John Frame sketches a triangle of options comprising pantheism, polytheism, and the biblical account:

The major religions of the world, in their most typical (one tends to say “authentic”) forms, are either pantheistic (Hinduism, Taoism) or polytheistic (animism, some forms of Hinduism, Shinto, and the traditional religions of Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc.). Pantheism has an absolute, but not a personal absolute. Polytheism has personal gods, but none of these is absolute. Indeed, although most religions tend to emphasize either pantheistic absolutism or personal nonabsolutism, we can usually find both elements beneath the surface. In Greek polytheism, for example, the gods are personal but not absolute. However, this polytheism is supplemented by a doctrine of fate, which is a kind of impersonal absolute. Similarly, behind the gods of animism is Mana, the impersonal reality. People seem to have a need or a desire for both personality and absoluteness, but in most religions these two elements are separated and therefore compromise one another, rather than reinforcing one another. Thus, of the major religious movements, only biblical religion calls us with clarity to worship a personal absolute.[3]

One needs to hold the absolute and the personal together in order to see the wonder of the biblical account of God, for neither God’s absoluteness nor his personal nature is more ultimate than the other, and neither of them acts as a foundation for the other. They are equally radical, equally basic and inseparable.

[1] The term, once again, is from Frame, The Doctrine of God 26–7. Frame, as we shall shortly see, derives the term from Van Til.

[2] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, fourth edition, ed. K. Scott Oliphant (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008) 10.

[3] John M. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God: An Introduction (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1994) 38–39.