The Question of God’s Perfection

Book Description

Philosophers have often described theism as the belief in the existence of a “perfect being”—a being that is said to possess all possible perfections, so that it is all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent, among other qualities. But such a theology is difficult to reconcile with the God we find in the Bible and Talmud. The Question of God’s Perfection brings together leading scholars from the Jewish and Christian traditions to critically examine the theology of perfect being in light of the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic sources. Contributors are James A. Diamond, Lenn E. Goodman, Edward C. Halper, Yoram Hazony, Dru Johnson, Brian Leftow, Berel Dov Lerner, Alan L. Mittleman, Heather C. Ohaneson, Randy Ramal, Eleonore Stump, Alex Sztuden, and Joshua I. Weinstein.

How It Connects To Hebraic Thought

The Christian theological tradition has wrestled with how to reconcile the description of God as perfect with the raw description of God in the Old and New Testaments. The Jewish and Christian authors of this book push readers to think about how much we can claim about God’s nature and His qualities from the logic and description of the biblical texts first. Some think the biblical God can be reconciled to Scripture, others are less convinced, and some think we are beginning with the wrong categories dictated to us by the Greek philosophical traditions. In working out this issue of God’s perfection, we are actually seeing scholars wrestling with the nature and extent of philosophical tradition within Scripture.