ABSTRACT
New Testament in stories about Jesus. When Philip asks Jesus to show God the Father to the disciples, Jesus tells Philip that in seeing Jesus Philip is seeing God. e personal presence of Jesus to Philip is apparently somehow also the personal
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presence of God to Philip. at is why Jesus maintains that, in knowing Jesus, his disciples are also knowing God.4 Biblical stories in both the Old and the New Testaments, then, portray God as
able to be known directly and immediately by human beings and as able to be personally present to them. is portrayal is in sharp contrast to the theological picture sometimes thought
to be entailed by the doctrines of divine eternity and simplicity. In fact, some philosophers and theologians have rejected these doctrines, basic in the medieval Christian tradition, just because they suppose that these doctrines undermine or overturn the biblical portrayal of God’s relations with human beings.5 If God is eternal and so timeless, then in the view of the objectors to the doctrine of God’s eternityGod cannot be present to human beings, because human beings are in time. And if God is simple, then in the view of the objectors to the doctrine of God’s simplicity God is unknowable by human beings; and because God is incomprehensible to human knowledge, God cannot be personally present to human beings either. Onemajor reason for the rejection of the doctrines of eternity and simplicity on the part of some philosophers and theologians is therefore that they take these doctrines to imply a religiously pernicious disconnection between God and human beings. In this paper, I will argue that these doctrines have no such implication. I will
begin by looking more carefully at what it is for persons to be present to one another.en I will consider and argue against an attempt to show that the doctrine of divine eternity rules out such personal presence between God and human beings. Next, I will consider the challenge posed by the doctrine of divine simplicity. I will give reasons for thinking that the doctrine of divine simplicity does not in fact entail the agnosticism frequently associated with it. I will also argue, however, that there is another kind of knowledge ofGod, which is compatible with the doctrine of simplicity even if, contrary to my arguments, that doctrine did imply a kind of agnosticism about God’s nature. In my view, this alternative kind of knowledge of God is su›cient for God’s being personally present to human beings in the way the biblical stories describe. Finally, I will show that omas Aquinas, one of the main medieval proponents of the doctrines of divine eternity and divine simplicity, recognizes this alternative kind of knowledge of God and supposes it is available to all Christians in this life. For all these reasons, I will claim, neither the doctrine of eternity nor the doctrine
of simplicity rules out God’s being personally present to human beings.
