A New Existential Model of God: A Synthesis of Themes from Kierkegaard, Buber, Levinas, and Open Theism

Abstract

The Standard Anselmian Model of God conceives perfection as a static state that cannot improve, and thus interprets divine attributes as fixed maximal states of a being that is impassible yet still personal. This paper argues that a coherent alternative view, labeled the New Existential Model, can be collected from several alternative traditions, including Existential personalism, Process theology, Panentheism, and recent work on Open Theism. The new model is unified by the central idea that the divine is distinguished by two attributes or features: being the free creative genesis of reality, including creatures that enjoy derivative alterity, and being the source of eschatological possibilities in which the good is completely fulfilled in the culmination of time. The eschatological idea, which is the core of Kierkegaard’s conception of God as the object of existential faith, implies that God’s perfection is processive – growing rather than static – and that divine greatness is enriched rather than diminished by relation to free beings who add to reality through their own initiative and who enter into free relation with God. This model has several interesting implications for the problem of evil, foreknowledge, and providence.