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Necessary Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

John H. Hick
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Extract

Necessary being' is one of the terms by means of which Christian thought has sought to define the difference between God and man. The notion of necessary being, applied to God and withheld from man, indicates that God and man differ not merely in the characteristics which they possess but more fundamentally, in their modes of being, or in the fact that they exist in different senses of the word ‘exist’.

That such a distinction, however it may be best expressed, is essential to the Christian concept of God is agreed virtually on all hands. Paul Tillich in our own day emphasises the distinction to the extent of using different terms to refer to the reality of God and of man respectively. Human beings and other created things exist; God, on the other hand, does not exist, but is Being-itself. This is the most recent way of formulating a discrimination which has been classically expressed in the history of Christian thought by the idea of the necessary being of God in contrast to the contingent being of man and of the whole created order. There are, however, two importantly different concepts which may be, and which have been, expressed by the phrase ‘necessary being’. ‘Necessity’, in a philosophical context, usually means logical necessity, and gives rise in theology to the concept of a being such that it is logically impossible that this being should not exist. But this is not the only kind of necessity referred to in philosophical literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , December 1961 , pp. 353 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1961

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References

page 355 note 1 Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 2nd edn. (1920), ch. 16.Google Scholar

page 356 note 1 Whether or not this notion occurs prominently in Christian thought it does apparently have a place in Muslim theology. Apparently the ports asinorum which the theological novice must cross is the distinction between the necessary, the possible and the impossible; and the necessary is defined as that the non-existence of which cannot be thought. (Macdonald, D. B., Aspects of Islam (London, 1911), p. 121.)Google Scholar

page 356 note 2 Meditations, V.

page 357 note 1 Rtsponsio editoris, ch. IV. Cf. Proshgion, ch. XXII.

page 357 note 2 Ch. VI.

page 358 note 1 Summa Theologica, bk. I, q. 2, art. 3.

page 358 note 2 cf. Norman Malcolm, ‘Anselm's Ontological arguments’, Philosophical Review, January 1960.Google Scholar

page 359 note 1 ‘Necessity and Contingency’ in Essays in Thomism, edited by Brennan, Robert E. (New York, 1942).Google Scholar

page 360 note 1 Mind, 1948. Reprinted in New Essays in Philosophical Theobgy, edited by Flew, and Macintyre, (London, 1955).Google Scholar

page 361 note 1 New Essays, p. 49.

page 361 note 2 op. cit., p. 55.

page 364 note 1 ibid., p. 52.

page 367 note 1 Exodus 3.14.

page 368 note 1 Church Dogmatics, vol. II, pt. I, ch. VI, § 28, 3.

page 368 note 2 op. cit., p. 307.

page 369 note 1 ibid., p. 307.

page 369 note 2 ibid., p. 305.

page 369 note 3 It should be noted that Barth has developed his position further, in IV/1, ch. XIV, § 59, 1, in the direction of holding that the self-other relationship is already present within the triune Godhead, so that creation does not involve the problem of the inherently unrelated entering into relations.

page 369 note 4 cf. Terrence Penelhum, ‘Divine Necessity’, Mind, April i960.