A Christian Understanding of Modality

Possibility. Actuality. Contingency. Necessity.

These four categories are quite essential to our understanding of the world. We may not use these terms exactly, but we constantly refer to the concepts they describe in our speech. Words like “could”, “may”, “must”, “can’t”, etc. can be used to loosely refer to these categories. If we wanted to be philosophically precise, we’d call them modal categories. Modality is an aspect of metaphysics/linguistics dealing with the mode in which things exist, a...