Logan J. Anderson

This review critically examines David Bradshaw’s Eastern Orthodox account of divine simplicity in Contemplating Divine Simplicity: Five Views. While affirming the force of his objections to identifying the divine essence with the divine will, it argues that his appeal to the essence–energies distinction relocates rather than preserves simplicity. If the energies are genuinely divine realities distinct from the essence, the account admits intrinsic plurality whose compatibility with absolute partlessness requires explanation. If they are merely manifestations or effects without intrinsic divine distinction, the account approaches the framework Bradshaw rejects. His explicit restriction of simplicity to the divine essence consequently leaves unresolved whether God, considered with reference to the persons and energies, is simple without qualification. The review further questions whether an appeal to shared essence and energy sufficiently explains divine unity among distinct self-subsisting persons. Finally, it examines the analogies of the sun and its rays, natural elements, and computer programs, arguing that their explanatory force depends upon the composition or internal structure they are invoked to reconcile with simplicity. The review concludes that Bradshaw offers resources for understanding divine unity and responsive activity, but does not establish that these are compatible with an absolutely partless God.

The minimal facts method has become one of the most influential historical approaches to defending the resurrection of Jesus, largely because it restricts itself to data that are strongly evidenced and widely granted by critical scholarship. This paper argues that the method is epistemologically valuable but often overextended. By examining the stated aims of the method, its acknowledged limitations in the work of Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, and the distinction between event-level, causal, and theological explanation, the paper contends that the minimal facts method can establish a strong historical foundation for the death of Jesus and the postmortem experiences of his followers, but it cannot by itself establish the theological claim that God raised Jesus or that Christianity is true. Rather than rejecting the method, this paper situates it within a broader cumulative case for Christianity. When properly constrained, the minimal facts method functions as a historical anchor that secures key resurrection-related data and creates the need for further metaphysical and theological explanation. Its strength is preserved precisely when it is not asked to bear more argumentative weight than historical inquiry can sustain.

This critical review evaluates R. T. Mullins’s case against divine simplicity in Contemplating Divine Simplicity: Five Views. It argues that Mullins correctly targets the historically robust strict-identity account and presents powerful objections concerning divine freedom, modal collapse, and the Trinity. His biblical argument, however, sometimes presents philosophical classifications as though they were the explicit teaching of Scripture. Scripture depicts God as creating, redeeming, judging, and entering new relationships, but it does not classify these realities as accidental properties. Mullins also appears to grant properties or unactualized possibilities some form of abstract ontology, although his underlying objection requires no such commitment. God’s actual power to create or refrain from creating can ground his ability to act otherwise, while possible worlds remain coherent mental descriptions. The review concludes that Mullins’s arguments obtain most forcefully against strict identity, whereas the volume’s other defenders escape them only by adopting revised accounts whose ability to preserve traditional divine partlessness remains questionable.

Contemporary accounts frequently describe divine simplicity as a multivalent doctrine encompassing substantially different metaphysical positions. This study investigates whether the Christian tradition nevertheless preserves a stable minimum meaning of simplicity. It distinguishes between two claims: the anti-assembly thesis, according to which God was never produced by combining prior elements, and the stronger partlessness thesis, according to which God possesses no intrinsic constituents at all. Through a survey of representative Christian theologians from the second through the fourteenth centuries, including both orthodox and heterodox participants in major theological controversies and across distinct traditions (such as seen in Duns Scotus and Gregory Palamas), the study examines how simplicity functioned in discussions of divine attributes, Trinitarian distinctions, generation, Christology, formal distinctions, and the divine energies. The sources consistently treat simplicity as excluding both assembly and intrinsic parthood. Their disagreements concern which distinctions constitute parts and how real distinctions can be affirmed without introducing composition into God. Divine simplicity is therefore not multivalent at the level of its minimum metaphysical commitment. Across otherwise divergent accounts, it remains governed by a stable prohibition: God is not constituted by parts. This finding clarifies both the historical meaning of simplicity and the requirements facing contemporary theologians who claim continuity with the Christian tradition.

This article evaluates Steven J. Duby’s claim that the biblical text not only permits but “infers and requires” divine simplicity. Because Duby connects robust simplicity inseparably with strong immutability, the analysis concentrates on the exegesis by which he derives immutability from Scripture. Reading Duby’s principal passages within their broader literary and canonical contexts, the article argues that they establish God’s constancy in covenant, purpose, and moral character rather than a metaphysical incapacity for change. Numbers 25 and 31 qualify the force of Balaam’s declaration in Numbers 23; the narrative of Saul resolves the apparent tension between divine regret and non-regret in 1 Samuel 15; and Psalm 102, Malachi 3, Hebrews, and James likewise fail to establish absolute immutability. Jeremiah 18 and the incarnation place further pressure on the claim that all apparent change occurs exclusively in creatures. Methodologically, Duby either concludes his exegesis once a passage appears favorable to immutability or extends beyond the text by interpreting it through an antecedent Thomistic Reformed metaphysic. The article therefore concludes that Scripture affirms divine faithfulness and constancy while also portraying at least relational change in God. Because Duby’s robust account of simplicity requires strong immutability, the failure of his exegetical case undermines his claim that Scripture requires divine simplicity. His project is better understood as a dogmatic account of how Thomistic Reformed theology interprets Scripture in light of simplicity.

Thomas H. McCall’s Divine Simplicity offers a valuable analysis of the diverse positions now gathered under the doctrine of divine simplicity, but its preferred appeal to Scotistic formal distinction and its treatment of modal collapse remain insufficient. This article develops two related objections. First, it argues that formal distinction has not been shown to constitute a coherent middle position between strict identity and real composition. If distinctions among the divine attributes, persons, or acts are intrinsically and objectively grounded in God, they introduce a plurality of nonidentical ontological realities and therefore threaten simplicity. If they are not objectively grounded in God, they are merely conceptual and collapse into strict identity. Appeals to numerical sameness, necessity, or inseparability do not escape this dilemma. Second, the article argues that McCall’s reconstruction of the modal-collapse objection omits the identity premises that give the argument its force. A strengthened reconstruction shows that, if God is necessarily identical with his one intrinsic act, and the determinate character of creation is grounded in the content of that act, then God could neither have created a different universe nor refrained from creating this one. Divine simplicity therefore conflicts with the Christian affirmation of divine freedom. McCall’s analysis ultimately leaves defenders of simplicity with a dilemma: real distinction introduces composition, while strict identity threatens both Trinitarian distinction and contingent divine action.

This review evaluates Ross D. Inman’s introduction to Contemplating Divine Simplicity: Five Views. While Inman provides a clear map of the contemporary debate, the volume’s framework reveals two significant weaknesses. First, none of the four defenders of divine simplicity affirms strict identity, raising the question of whether their accounts preserve simplicity rather than some form of divine unity. Second, R. T. Mullins is structurally disadvantaged as the sole critic, particularly because the volume restricts sustained engagement to modal collapse and the Trinity. The review further challenges the standard inference from divine aseity to simplicity and argues that biblical warrant and the incarnation may present deeper difficulties for the doctrine than those emphasized in the volume.

This review examines Paul Scott’s Identity and Coherence in Christology: One Person in Two Natures (Routledge, 2024), a philosophically rigorous treatment of the Incarnation. Scott surveys traditional and analytic strategies—including reduplication, specification, and mereology—before proposing a renovated habitus theory in which Christ’s humanity functions as a relational adjunct to the Word, akin to a garment. While Scott’s analytic clarity and engagement with semantic solutions are commendable, his model ultimately reduces the Incarnation to mere association rather than ontological assumption. By making Christ’s humanity external to the divine person, the framework risks undermining both scriptural witness (John 1:14) and the coherence of Christ’s real suffering, drifting toward Nestorian or Docetic tendencies. The review concludes that although Scott’s work is a valuable and necessary contribution to contemporary Christological debate, its proposed solution fails to secure the metaphysical unity required for a robust doctrine of the Incarnation.

This article argues that natural theology is not a neutral or self-contained method for establishing theological conclusions but is inherently shaped by prior metaphysical and epistemological commitments. Using Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica as a case study, it examines how Aristotelian metaphysics undergirds the Five Ways and leads to the doctrine of divine simplicity. While the transition from an unmoved mover to simplicity is logically coherent within this framework, the article contends that the First Way itself does not necessitate these conclusions. By critically evaluating key premises—particularly those concerning the impossibility of self-motion and the requirement of pure actuality—it argues that the presence of agent causation and free will undermines the universality of Aquinas’s argument. In response, a revised form of the First Way is proposed, preserving its core insight while allowing for a first mover characterized by self-actualizing agency rather than pure actuality. Additionally, contra Anselm, the Greatest Actual Being framework is introduced. The article concludes that natural theology must be understood as part of a broader, interdependent system in which epistemology, metaphysics, natural theology, and theology proper mutually inform one another, rather than as an independent foundation for determining the nature of God.