theism
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
theism, the view that all limited or finite things are dependent in some way on one supreme or ultimate reality of which one may also speak in personal terms. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this ultimate reality is often called God. This article explores approaches to theism in Western theology and philosophy.
Theistic views of God
Theism’s view of God can be clarified by contrasting it with those of deism, pantheism, and mysticism.
Deism
Deism closely resembles theism, but for the deist God is not involved in the world in the same personal way. God has made it, so to speak, or set the laws of it—and to that extent he sustains it in being. But God, as the deist sees him, allows the world to continue in its own way, subject to this final and somewhat remote control. This view simplifies some problems, especially those that arise from the scientific account of the world: one does not have to allow for any factor that cannot be handled and understood in the ordinary way. God is in the shadows or beyond, and, though people may still in some way centre their lives upon him, this calls for no radical adjustment at the human or finite level. The deist proceeds, for most purposes at least, as if there were no God—or only an absent one. This approach is especially true of humans’ understanding of the world. This is why deism appealed so much to thinkers in the time of the first triumphs of modern science. They could indeed allow for God, but they had “no need of that hypothesis” in science or in their normal account of things. Religion, being wholly superadded, was significant only in a manner that involved little else in the world or in human life. The theist, on the other hand, questions this view and seeks in various ways (as noted below) to bring humanity’s relation to God into closer involvement with the way he understands himself and the world around him.
Theism, pantheism, and monism
Theism sharply contrasts with pantheism, which identifies God with all that there is, and with various forms of monism, which regards all finite things as parts, modes, limitations, or appearances of some one ultimate Being, which is all that there is. Some types of absolute Idealism, a philosophy of all-pervading Mind, while regarding every finite thing as comprising some limitation of the one whole of Being, seek also to retain the theistic element in their view of the world. They do this normally by stressing the role of unifying finite centres, such as self-conscious human beings, in the way the universe as a whole functions. But there is no recognition here of the finality of what is technically known as “the distinctness of persons.” The theist, by contrast, considers the world to be quite distinct from its author or creator, human life being thus in no sense strictly the life of God, while also making room for a peculiarly intimate involvement of God in the world and in human life.
Theism and mysticism
Mysticism in practice comes close to theism, but mystical thought and much of its practice have often involved a repudiation of the proper reality of finite things and sometimes tends to dismiss all of the finite manifold or multiplicity of things as some wholly unreal phantasm that has no place in the one undiversified Being, which alone is real. Theism is very far removed from ideas of this kind.
The personal God and the world
The idea that the world, as humanity understands it in a finite way, is dependent on some reality altogether beyond human comprehension, perfect and self-sustained but also peculiarly involved in the world and its events, is presented with exceptional sharpness and discernment in the Hebrew Bible, whence it became a formative influence in Jewish history and subsequently in Christianity and Islam. Behind the creation stories, behind the patriarchal narratives, like that of Jacob at Bethel (Genesis 28) or wrestling with his strange visitor at Penuel (Genesis 32), and behind the high moments of prophecy, like Isaiah’s famous vision in the Temple (Isaiah 6), and of moving religious experience in the Psalms, in the Book of Job, and (with remarkable explicitness) in some well-known passages, like the story of Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3), behind all these there lies a sense of some mysterious, all-encompassing reality by which human beings are also in some way addressed and which they may also venture to address in turn. Moses wished to see God, to have some explicit sign that could convince the people and establish his own authority, but he was shown instead that this is just what he could not have. All that he could be assured of was that God is real and is bound to be: “I am who I am,” he was told. On the other hand, in the throes of this humbling and staggering experience, Moses began to learn also what was expected of him and how his people should live and be led. The God who was so strange and elusive was somehow found to be a God who “talked” to him and with whom people could “walk.” The same seemingly bewildering claim of remoteness, almost to the point of unreality, linked with a compelling explicitness and closeness, is also found in other cultures, as illustrated below. This claim presents the reflective thinker with the twofold problem of theism: how can a reality as remote and mysterious as the God of theism—the “wholly other,” in the famous words of the German theologian Rudolf Otto—be known at all and how, if it can be known, can it be spoken of in precise and intimate ways and encountered as a person?