Jared Michelson

The postliberal genealogies of John Milbank, Brad Gregory, and Patrick Deneen refuse to disaggregate liberalism and thus denounce it wholesale. Likewise, these narratives are not sufficiently ambivalent in describing both modern liberalism and pre-modern politics. I respond to these narratives by disaggregating liberalism into various forms. I note how a certain version of political liberalism, rooted in the freedom of conscience, has important precedents in pre-modern Christianity. In view of this, I defend the plausibility of a historical interpretation positing a more positive, yet nonetheless ambivalent relation between important trends in Christianity and versions of modern liberalism, thereby calling into question the indiscriminate denunciation of liberalism posited as the ‘moral’ of these postliberal narratives.

Michelson traces contemporary debates on the doctrine of God back in time to the philosophical critiques of Hume and Kant. Charnock, Schleiermacher and Barth each offered accounts of the doctrine of God. This book offers a critical evaluation of these accounts and demonstrates how they were responding to early modern critiques of the possibility of knowing God. Indeed, this work also highlights how these critics built their arguments on faulty interpretations of classical theological tradition. In doing so, this book carves out a provocative, construct path forward for contemporary theological reflection on the doctrine of God.

I evaluate three of the most widespread analytic objections to the doctrine of divine simplicity: that it fails to cohere with the application of accidental predicates like ‘creator’ or ‘lord’ to God, problematically entails that God is identical to an abstract object, and is inconsistent with the freedom and contingency of God’s acts in creation resulting in modal uniformity/collapse. In dialogue with Thomas’s account of the doctrine, I suggest that each objection is either the product of a misinterpretation or is addressed by Thomas himself. This defence of Thomas’s view of divine simplicity further unearths the way his account of divine simplicity is, according to Thomas, necessary to secure divine aseity and ultimacy. This places a burden upon analytic objectors to divine simplicity, questioning whether their neo-classical conception of God offers an adequate account of divine ultimacy, aseity, and even goodness.