ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Richard Swinburne’s and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s analyses of the concept of God, in particular their rejection of many elements of the classical concept of God, such as divine simplicity, immutability, and timelessness, in favour of something like a concept of God as a greatly extended human being. This anthropomorphism, as well as the libertarianism concerning the human will that underlies it, is contrasted with the concept of God deployed in the classical Protestant tradition, in particular in the writings of John Calvin, Francis Turretin, Jonathan Edwards, and Herman Bavinck, where nuanced accounts of divine simplicity and eternality are upheld.
It is concluded that the classical theistic tradition sees the coherence of the idea of God in much tighter fashion than do Swinburne and Wolterstorff; simplicity entails aseity, infinity, eternality, immutability, and impassibility, which features may be said to provide a grammar arising from the nature of God and his distinctness from his creation.
