Talk:Monotheism

Are these personal definitions, or do theology and philosophy texts use these terms? I have not seen these words used this way before. RK

Well, they are used by Encyclopedia Britannica, for one thing. -- SJK

Question: Christianity (and Islam?) believe in the existence of a force that is opposed to God ("the Devil"). Doesn't this mean that these religions believe in "inclusive monotheism"?

I think the belief in two roughly equal but opposing forces is called dualism; this is clearly not what Jews, Christians and Muslims believe, as they generally agree that the Devil is a finite being created by God, not an equal or even near-equal "arch-enemy". But I think that that dualism at least comes close to describing Zoroastrianism. --Wesley

Many Jews, Unitarians and Muslims look at Christians as dualists. Christians believe in a supernatural being called God and in a similarly powerful supernatural being called Satan. True, one is the father of the other, and one is weaker, but nonetheless they both exist. They have nearly the same relationsip to each other as the two gods of Zoroastrianism (which everyone agrees is dualism). Despite the belief in both of these deities, and despite the belief that one of these deities is also a trinity with three distinct persons in it, its adherents nonetheless claim to be monotheists. Many Jews, Unitarians, and Muslims find this claim of monotheism to be incomprehensible. In fact, that is one of the main reason that people left Christianity to create Unitarian-Universalism.

I have never met a Jew, Christian or Muslim with such a belief, nor have I ever read a book written that proposes such beliefs. The number of Jews, Christians or Muslims who have such beliefs is likely very small. The only group I know of that had a widespread adoption of what the writer terms "inclusive monotheism" are Hindus. RK

A lot of (mostly Christian, though some may be Jewish) liberal theologians and philosphers of religion, especially those who study issues of religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue, support some kind of view similar to inclusive monotheism. It also occurs in some branches of Sufism, I believe. -- SJK

I doubt even half of one percent of Christian laity have such beliefs. I have never met a Christian, Jew or Muslim in my life with such views. What you refer to is the province of academic ivory tower theoology, which is fine, but is not representative of real-world Christianity in any statistically meaningful sense. RK

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Are you sure you really mean "God" and not "god"? In this article it doesn't refer to the god known as "God" by many people. It refers to any god.

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I have a question about this sentence:

The Christian belief in the Trinity is traditionally considered a form of monotheism, although many Muslims and non-Trinitarian Christians (and a few Jews also) would question this classification.

I understand that Muslims and Jews may look at the doctrine of the trinity and see three separate gods, and therefor claim that Christianity is polytheistic. But wouldn't non-Trinitarian Christians deny the Trinity but continue to claim to be monotheistic and deny the Trinity, just like Jews and Muslims? Any specific examples of a Christian group that doesn't claim to be monotheistic? Maybe the Latter-Day Saints???? --Wesley

Both Jehovah's witnesses and Mormons explicitly deny trinitarianism. Jehovah's witnesses believe in one God, and believe that Jesus was a human being that was the son of God. Jesus, for them, was not part of God Himself. Mormons believe in millions of Gods, literally. (Their religion teaches that when a Mormon dies, he or she literally becomes a god of another planet in our galaxy.) However, Mormons only pray to one god, and thus they consider themselves monotheists. They draw a distinction between belief in millions of Gods, and their loyalty and service to one god. Many Jews and Muslims see Mormons as polytheists. The rule of thumb is this: Chrisitians always claim to be monotheists, no matter how many godlike heavenly supernatural deities they believe in. Jews and Muslims believe that any recognition of more than one godlike heavenly supernatural being is, by their definition, polytheism. RK

Your last sentence is fair enough. :-) Your description of Mormonism sounds a lot like henotheism: lots of gods, but one is better than all the others and therefore is the only one worshipped. How would Jews classify Hinduism, and I wonder how Hindus would classify themselves? In practice, you can observe that they seem to pray to lots of different gods, but I think they would say they're all part of one god, and further that all that exists is ultimately part of Brahman. From one angle it looks polytheistic, from another it might look vaguely monotheistic, and from another more pantheistic. Terminology is tricky. :-) --Wesley

Actual Mormom theology differs from how it is popularly represented (and derided) in that Mormons do _not_ "believe" in multiple G|gods. Any given individual is the creation of (and is under the stewardship of) one God called the Father. Mormons do not hold that other Gods populate our galaxy as drawn from the faithful ranks of those who have gone before. Without bogging the discussion down with the semantics of sequence and the nature of Time (cyclical, linear, &c: seen as x by man and y by God ....), consider the following statements regarding the nature and plurality of God(s):

* One title for God is "Holy Man" or Exalted Man.

* God developed divine attribute progressively in a repeateable process.

* God's activities of creation (the physical universe; the organization of spirits, or premortal man) occur in a space (time?) distinct from the activities of any other God. Gods other than the Father are "out of scope."

* Mormons are not moon-eyed imbeciles laboring away to be "Emerald Ring" members of some great MLM spiritual sham. However, moon-eyed imbeciles are invited to participate in a religion that aknowledges the divine potential of everyone.

The assertion is often found that because Mormons beleive God is a perfected Man and Men may become like God, Mormons believe in a pantheon of which God the Father is merely paramount. Not so. Mormons have no dealings, literature, stories, fables, or sermons relating to any God other than God the Father. No human being is said to be a child of any other God. Let us not read too much into a doctrine of human progression and posibility. --BrantEaton

Ok, I think I sort of understand the human progression and possibility part. Do I understand you to be saying, though, that God was not always fully God, i.e. omnipotent, omnipresent, etc. etc.? How can the creation of the universe take place in any space or time, when space and time are properties of the universe, or are themselves something that would need to be created or somehow come into existence? To put what is basically the same question another way, if God was once a man, how did he come into existence? I'm not trying to be argumentative, just trying to clear up my understanding while I have the chance. Thanks, --Wesley

On the origin of God: An early Mormon leader delivered the following couplet: As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become. This is where I mention a desire to avoid the semantics and speculative theology of _sequence_ and concepts of time, space, and the universe. I think of God as an agent or principle that transcends my understanding of space and time. In the Venn diagram of creation, I see Time and Space as subset attributes of the Universe, not necessarily as definitional(did I just make up that word, or is limit of my vocabulary evident?) elements. It is reasonable to assume that God the Father once was the mortal creation of his own Divine Parent. Perhaps this is a linear relationship extending "back" infinitely. Not exactly a testable hypothesis :) --BrantEaton

I've heard that couplet before, but have never been able to nail down the source. Is the notion of God the Father having his own Divine Parent standard Mormon doctrine? That would be new to me, but it does seem to sort of logically follow from that view of God... --Wesley

An excerpt from a 1997 San Fransisco Gate (web site of the San Fransisco Chronicle) interview with Gordon Hinkley, current President of the church (see http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1997/04/13/SC36289.DTL) :

Q: There are some significant differences in your beliefs. For instance, don't Mormons believe that God was once a man?

A: I wouldn't say that. There was a little couplet coined, "As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become." Now that's more of a couplet than anything else. That gets into some pretty deep theology that we don't know very much about.

Q: So you're saying the church is still struggling to understand this?

A: Well, as God is, man may become. We believe in eternal progression. Very strongly. We believe that the glory of God is intelligence and whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the Resurrection. Knowledge, learning, is an eternal thing. And for that reason, we stress education. We're trying to do all we can to make of our people the ablest, best, brightest people that we can.

[Emphasis mine] In the set of all public and semi-public utterances of prominent church members since Joseph Smith, some statements are considered doctrinal, others are statements of personal belief, and others are simply speculative. Doctrine can usually be found in multiple sources, and is usually based on scripture. Here, Hinkley acknowledges the statement but places it outside the category of doctrine. The topic is really "out of scope" for any individual's personal relationship with God. --BrantEaton

I think Hindus (or at least most Hindus) are simultaneously polytheists, inclusive monotheists, and pantheists (or more accurately monists). A big problem with Hinduism though is that, historically at least, there are lots of different groups with lots of different views, especially on the relationship between God and the universe... (lookup a list of the main schools of Hindu philosophy and you will see what I mean.) -- SJK

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I believe that there is a difference between saying "there is one god" and "there is one God", because in theory a single lower-case "god" could just be a finite immortal being with great powers, whereas a monotheistic "God" is frequently lly seen as (depending on the variant of monotheism you subscribe to, of course) an infinite source or ground of the universe. To me there is a fundamental qualitative difference between a lot of conceptions of a monotheistic God and polytheistics gods, rather than just a quantitative difference in the number of gods you believe in. So, to avoid the controversy in the opening sentence, I rewrote it slightly, avoiding the use of either god or God (and instead using "deity"), and trying to emphasize the qualitative aspects of the way monotheism frequently differs from polytheism.

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Suggest the following concluding passage to replace the final two paragraphs.

The three main Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are monotheistic. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is understood by Christians to represent a monotheistic view. Some others see the trinity as representing a polytheistic (three gods).Ed Poor

Most Jews and Muslims see the Trinity as a sincere attempt to be monotheistic. Thus, most Jewish and Muslim critics of the Trinity don't claim that it is the worship of three separate Gods; rather, they say that Chrisitians attempt to worship one god, but at the same time acknowledge three distinct persons within that god. Given Mulim and Jewish definitions of these terms, the resulting Christian worship has the appearance (to Muslims and Jews) of cognitive dissonance. The way that Jewish law deals with this is by saying that such worship is legally considered monotheism, as long as gentiles are doing it; however, this type of worship is forbidden by Jewish law to Jews. (The law itself is an example of cognative dissonance, but the rabbis were well aware of this. They are trying to legally find a way to hold onto their beliefs, without condemning Christianity. For this issue, they were not looking for philosophical clarity.) I am not sure how Muslims or other strict unitarian monotheists formally deal with this issue. RK

It's a very interesting question for me, because I was a Unitarian/Univeralist for a couple of years before becoming a Unificationist. Being obsessed with math puzzles, I set myself the task of counting (or taking a census of) the Christian Trinity. I found the answer of "one God in three persons" hard to quantify as an integer; this frustrated me, and I figured there had to be a mistake somewhere in the doctrine. However, as long as they are not worshiping three discrete beings (or even two), I can respect their desire to consider themselves monotheists. Ed Poor

Here's an analogy that may or may not help: picture three burning matches held with the burning match heads in close proximity, so that there is just one flame. You can't say that one match is burning and another is not, or that one is burning more than another. Yet the match sticks can still be identified as three distinct match sticks. This is very roughly comparable to the distinction drawn between one divine essence (homoousios) and one divine nature, existing in three Persons (hypostases) who are God. But be aware that any analogy breaks down if you push it too far. RK, I'm glad to learn how Jewish law deals with it, and appreciate the compassion and understanding shown. --Wesley

Another analogy that I was taught (in a liberal Catholic school) was that God the Father is the sun, the source of everything, Jesus the Son is the rays that carry the light to the world and are in the world, and that the Holy Spirit is the warmth emanating from the sun and warming the world. The analogy implies that there is one entire "thing", but three parts of the "thing"...does this help? Dreamyshade

I think I remember reading that in one of the Church Fathers... might have been a Saint Gregory somebody. Good analogy in any case. Wesley

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I agree with RK's earlier observation that few if any Jews today subscribe to "inclusive monotheism." But there is an argument that some Biblical Jews (really, Hebrews) did -- one passage in the Torah asks "Who among the gods is like you, Lord?" suggesting that there are other gods (i.e. that other nations have their own gods) but that those other gods are inferior to the God of Abraham. Some scholars have argued that within the book of Job is a creation myth that is strikingly different from the one that ended up in Genesis; in Genesis God is alone and creates the cosmos; in Job God battles with other gods. In other words, over time there was a shift from Hebrews who believed that each people had their own god, to the belief that there is one God who has different relationships with different nations. -- SR

Scholars agree that polytheism predated monotheism. Obviously, the Tanach (Hebrew Bible) is making oblique references to fact that some of the Israelite ancestors were indeed polytheistic (by today's definition of the word), and only later came to the modern concept of monotheism. Certain parts of the Midrash also imply this. Conservative and Reform rabbis have no problem with recognizing that the Bible has traces of the pre-historical belief of the earliest Jewish ancestors. But Judaism as faith from Biblical times onward was strictly monotheistic. As for Job, it is seems likely that just as Genesis is a midrash on one set of pagan creation stories, Job is also a midrash on a pagan creation story. Perhaps Genesis and Job both drew from the same original material, and emphasized different parts, or perhaps they were responses to different creation stories. In either case, that might be worth mentioning in an entry on detailed higher biblical criticism, and academic studies of how the Bible's text was created. But I just want to note that this wouldn't belong in an entry on Judaism and Jewish philosophy; it just isn't what Jews have ever believed from Biblical times to the present. RK

The following was removed - The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) traditionally subscribed to exclusive monotheism, though an increasing number of adherents of these religions today subscribe to the inclusive monotheist view.

The reason for removal was that this is just plain wrong. Jews, Christians and Muslims do not believe in the existence of multiple gods (i.e. "inclusive monotheism"). I would be shocked to see any studies which affirmed such a view. With the exception of a handful of university professors who have no following in any organized religion I have ever heard of, people in the Abrahamic faiths see this view as polytheism or paganism, and do not accept it. RK

Thanks for fixing that. --Wesley

Being the ignorant person that I am, I don't want to just change what appears to me to be an obvious typo, so I'll just post it here. In the sentence "Recently some people have termed these beliefs inclustive monotheism (i.e. the belief in many gods, but the worship of just one of them.)", should there really be a 't' in the middle of 'inclustive'? -- jtoomim

Judging from a Google search, there isn't any significance to the extra t. Dreamyshade

I removed (and some Jews). In fact, most medieval Jewish halachic authorities, most notably Maimondies, argues that Christianity could not be monotheistic because of its belief in the Trinity. In practical terms, many Orthodox Jews will not pray in a church, though they have no problem praying in a mosque. Danny