Ultimates, The Ultimate, and the Quest of a Personal God: On Robert C. Neville’s Philosophical Theology

I. Introduction

On his website, Robert Cummings Neville makes an interesting remark:

My serious intellectual life began in 1944 at the age of five when a kindergarten classmate told me that God is a person. I checked with my father about this, and he said, “No, Jesus was a person but God is more like electricity or light.” This seemed reasonable and triggered in me a decisive love of God. Electricity makes things go, like my electric train, and my father explained that God makes everything go, which remains my theology to the present day (albeit in ways even my father could not imagine).¹

The question I want to discuss in this paper goes back to the very early beginnings of Neville’s outstanding academic career. Over time and throughout his intellectual life, right up to Ultimates, the first volume of Philosophical Theology, Neville has continued examining the problem of God thoroughly, and with it the conception of a “personal God” in particular. As early as his first major book, God the Creator,² Neville dealt with the problems of personal theism from a Tillichian perspective of the “Unconditioned” (among other perspectives). Neville's thinking has changed little between the 1960s and 2014. And to be honest, today, taking philosophical arguments and scientific results seriously, it seems no longer reasonable even to ask for a justified version of personal theism, though many people in Western religious traditions, especially in the United States, still hold to the view of God-as-person.³

I will not refer to these possible tensions between current religious worldviews and their intellectual credibility directly. Rather I want to discuss some aspects of Neville's philosophical theology, looking for the deeper reasons he has for rejecting personal concepts of divine reality. As far as I can see, Neville's skeptical attitude toward personal taxonomies of God—at least on a strictly metaphysical level—has increased considerably during the last decades.⁴ Is it just because of the danger of taking broken symbols as literally true?⁵ Or are there deeper reasons? Perhaps personal theisms challenge more fundamentally some general aspects of Neville's own metaphysics and theology. My own suggestion moves in this direction. Neville's critique of personal theisms is, to some extent, just the negative side of his own concept of an almost literally true God-talk that centers in formulations like God as the “ontological act of creation/creating” or “the ontological creative act.”⁶

While Neville is not arguing for the supremacy of one of the three basic models of God, in Ultimates he maps the traditions of great world religions—that is, the models of “person,” of “consicousness,” and of “sponteneous emergence.”⁷ His own metaphysical approach nevertheless relies on the Western tradition, with its classical sharp mono“theistic” distinction between God and Creation, dealing with the contrast of finite/infinite, or to be more precise, of the world of determinate and determining realities on the one hand, the indeterminate ontological pure “divine” act on the other hand.

II. Basic Elements of Neville's Metaphysics of the Ultimate(s)

As early as God the Creator, Neville outlined his main argument against any literal personal theism by following a Tillichan ontological model of God as Being Itself,⁸ that is, God has to be understood strictly as the “Unconditioned Conditioner”—as we can also say. In consequence, any true determination of God besides its reality as ontological creative act is misleading, in Neville’s view, “God creates all determinations of being and because the creator must be ontologically prior to his creation, God must transcend all determinations as beings . . . even the nature he has as creator. . . . Therefore, God in himself must transcend the character of being something like a person.”⁹

It is for this reason that attributions of mind, intentionality, and subjectivity to God as Creator are deeply problematic. Thus, when Neville is talking about God as creative act or ontological act of creation, no “agent” can be indiciated. And consequently, one cannot seperate...