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God As The Most And Best Moved Mover: Charles Hartshorne's Importance For Philosophical Theology, Donald W. Viney

Faculty Submissions

The work of Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) may be the single most important factor in dissolving the consensus among philosophers that an entirely absolute deity should be considered normative for theology. What Hartshorne calls classical theism holds that God creates the universe ex nihilo, that God alone has the power to create, thereby entailing that the creatures are wholly uncreative. Classical theism is an anomaly in the sense that the Bible portrays God and the creatures in dynamic interaction with each other. Classical theism also presents various antinomies of how a God with no contingent properties could know a contingent …