All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism

by James E. Dolezal

The label “theistic personalism” appears to be the coinage of Brian Davies. See An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2–16. I have chosen to use the term “mutualism” instead of “personalism” simply for the sake of clarity. Davies’s objection to theistic personalism is at its heart an objection to the mutualism that seems to be entailed in all univocist understandings of the term “person.” David Bentley Hart calls the mutualist conception of God “monopolytheism” since, as he explains, it seems to involve a view of God not conspicuously different from the polytheistic picture of the gods as merely very powerful discrete entities who possess a variety of distinct attributes that lesser entities also possess, if in smaller measure; it differs from polytheism…solely in that it posits the existence of only one such being. It is a way of thinking that suggests that God, since he is only a particular instantiation of various concepts and properties, is logically dependent on some more comprehensive reality embracing both him and other beings.

Very insightful!