Glossary

Philosophy of religion glossary

Short, citable definitions for the philosophy-of-religion terms that come up most often in arguments about God, faith, and belief. Theodicy, fideism, kenosis, natural theology and more — with sources and cross-links to the thinkers who use them.

Apophatic theologyalso: Negative theology, Via negativa: Apophatic theology is the approach of describing God only by what God is not, on the grounds that positive descriptions inevitably distort an infinite and incomprehensible being.
Aporia: Aporia is the state of productive puzzlement reached at the end of a Socratic dialogue, when the interlocutor realizes they don't actually understand what they thought they understood and stands ready to learn.
Aseityalso: Self-existence: Aseity is the classical theological doctrine that God exists from himself, dependent on nothing outside himself for his existence — the property of being self-sufficient, uncaused, and the source of everything else's being.
Cessationism: Cessationism is the Christian view that the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit — prophecy, tongues, healing, and other sign gifts — ceased with the apostolic age and are not normatively operative in the church today.
Classical theism: Classical theism is the philosophical picture of God developed by Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, and al-Ghazali — a God who is simple, immutable, atemporal, impassible, and omnipotent, and whose existence is identical to his essence.
Deism: Deism is the view that a god created the universe and established its laws but does not intervene in it afterwards, ruling out miracles, revelation, and ongoing providence.
Divine simplicity: Divine simplicity is the classical theological doctrine that God has no parts, no distinct properties, and no composition of any kind — God's essence, attributes, and existence are all identical to one another and to God himself.
Elenchusalso: Elenctic method, Socratic method: Elenchus is Socrates's method of cross-examination: asking a series of questions that expose contradictions in his interlocutor's beliefs, forcing them to recognize their own confusion without being told what to think.
Eschatology: Eschatology is the branch of theology concerned with the ultimate destiny of individuals and the cosmos: death, judgment, heaven, hell, resurrection, and the end of the world.
Felix culpaalso: The fortunate fall, Happy fault: Felix culpa is the theological idea that the original sin of Adam and Eve — their fall from grace — was in some sense a happy or fortunate event, because it made possible the greater good of divine redemption through the incarnation and passion of Christ.
Fideism: Fideism is the view that religious belief does not need — and sometimes cannot receive — rational justification, because faith is either prior to reason or operates on a different plane from it.
Imago Deialso: Image of God: Imago Dei is the Christian and Jewish doctrine that human beings are created in the image of God, traditionally used to ground claims about human dignity, rationality, and moral worth.
Inclusivism: Inclusivism is the position on religious diversity that holds one's own tradition has the complete or highest truth, but acknowledges that other religions contain partial truth and can mediate salvation or enlightenment to sincere adherents who never encounter the full version.
Kenosisalso: Self-emptying: Kenosis is the Christian doctrine that in becoming human, the Son of God voluntarily emptied himself of some or all of his divine attributes, based on a passage in Paul's letter to the Philippians.
Molinism: Molinism is the sixteenth-century Jesuit framework developed by Luis de Molina that tries to reconcile divine foreknowledge with libertarian creaturely freedom through a doctrine of divine "middle knowledge" — God's knowledge of what every free creature would do in every possible circumstance.
Natural theology: Natural theology is the project of using reason and observation — without appealing to revelation or scripture — to establish conclusions about the existence and nature of God.
Noncognitivism: Noncognitivism about religious language is the view that statements like "God loves us" don't make factual claims at all — they express attitudes, emotions, or commitments rather than describing states of affairs that could be true or false.
Occasionalism: Occasionalism is the view that created things have no genuine causal powers of their own — every event in the world is a direct act of God, and what looks like cause and effect in nature is just God regularly bringing about a second event on the occasion of the first.
Open theism: Open theism is a minority Christian position holding that God does not know the future free choices of creatures — not because God is limited, but because future free choices are not the kind of thing that exist to be known in advance.
Panentheism: Panentheism is the view that the universe is contained within God but God is more than the universe — a middle position between pantheism (God = universe) and classical theism (God is entirely separate from creation).
Pantheism: Pantheism is the view that God is identical with the universe: the natural world and the divine are one and the same.
Presuppositionalism: Presuppositionalism is a Christian apologetic method that argues the existence of the Christian God must be assumed at the outset, because without that assumption no reasoning — including the atheist's — can get off the ground.
Skeptical theism: Skeptical theism is the view that we are not in a position to judge whether any given instance of suffering is pointless, because God may have reasons beyond our cognitive reach.
Soteriology: Soteriology is the branch of theology concerned with salvation: what it is, what it saves from, how it is achieved, and to whom it is available.
Theodicy: A theodicy is an attempt to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God.
Theological compatibilism: Theological compatibilism is the position that divine foreknowledge or predestination is compatible with genuine creaturely free will — distinct from philosophical compatibilism, which addresses the compatibility of free will with natural determinism.