This thread is in response to a question about 'Christian monism' by @The Hammer, and I've entitled this thread thus, because the 'Christological' establishes my frame of reference with regard to what otherwise might be a somewhat loose and nebulous term.
In the following, I'll treat first of the monistic aspect, so this is a kind of general metaphysics, and then if there's interest, we can dig into the Christological later.
I've picked the bones from an essay, Monolatry, Monotheism, Monism, by David Armstrong on his Substack, as he and others helped shape my understanding. I'm going to skate a bit for brevity. Armstrong deals with his subject at some length. I'll fill in details if required.
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Humans seem to be naturally polylatrous, worshiping many divine forces and beings, of many kinds, in many places, and in many ways.
Over time, for various reasons, some peoples chose to worship one and only one God. This is monolatry, in that it admits others Gods, but we worship this one. It is the beginning of monotheism, but it's not there yet. In the journey from there to monotheism, there is a shift from our God among alien Gods, to our God and no others. It is usually the case that a monotheistic deity has an entourage of attendant divinities, and this is the process by which those other Gods are eliminated, or more often adopted, absorbed and repurposed into a divine hierarchy. This, fortuitously, leaves room to absorb or appropriate all the stories about the Gods – their mythologies – to the particular monotheistic framework, in which they are treated as subsidiaries of one ultimate divine force.
Thus monotheism’s enduring form is what M. David Litwa and other scholars have called "summodeism", a belief in one God as the source and origin of all, a one God who sits at the summit of the other Gods, and of divine power generally, an idea for which we have multiple attestation in the Ancient Near East (and many other places).
Summodeism is not quite monotheism the way we mean it. In part, that's because 'monotheism' is not really the best term for what we mean by monotheism.
When we talk about monotheism philosophically, we talk about the God of classical theism, the God of the Greek Presocratics, of Plato and Aristotle, and of the Stoics and Platonists of the 'Middle' and 'Later' periods: a God that is one, simple, absolute and infinite, wholly transcendent and wholly immanent, a God that is eternal, immutable, and in whom all things subsist, who is beyond comprehension, depiction, or determination.
The risk, of course, is such a God retreats into philosophical abstractions, and for this reason summodeism has its purpose, it is upaya, as the Buddhists say.
Monotheism properly becomes monism only when we conceive of "God" as something that fully transcends the natural and preternatural orders. Such a God is not that which stands at the apex of any hierarchy or order, nor as its fullest and most complete expression. Such thinking is still within the idea of monotheistic summodeism, replete with Divine Natures, archangels, powers, dominions and principalities, angels and daimones, fairies and elementals.
But by that token, once here, what we call 'God' no longer really has much to do with what 'God' language typically refers to, the divine qualities and divine attributes. English speakers are reliant on a word, 'God', that etymologically does refer more to a man in the sky, but that semantically it should not mean some kind of anthropomorphic, anthropopathic, or intracosmic entity. Hence the philosophical distinction (which I have until now obscured by capitalising God in every sense) in modern theology, between 'God' and 'god' or 'gods'.
'God' means the supreme reality itself, not a supreme being within reality, while 'god' and 'gods' can refer to subsidiary principles within the order of reality, higher than humans but lesser than God.
In the following, I'll treat first of the monistic aspect, so this is a kind of general metaphysics, and then if there's interest, we can dig into the Christological later.
I've picked the bones from an essay, Monolatry, Monotheism, Monism, by David Armstrong on his Substack, as he and others helped shape my understanding. I'm going to skate a bit for brevity. Armstrong deals with his subject at some length. I'll fill in details if required.
+++
Humans seem to be naturally polylatrous, worshiping many divine forces and beings, of many kinds, in many places, and in many ways.
Over time, for various reasons, some peoples chose to worship one and only one God. This is monolatry, in that it admits others Gods, but we worship this one. It is the beginning of monotheism, but it's not there yet. In the journey from there to monotheism, there is a shift from our God among alien Gods, to our God and no others. It is usually the case that a monotheistic deity has an entourage of attendant divinities, and this is the process by which those other Gods are eliminated, or more often adopted, absorbed and repurposed into a divine hierarchy. This, fortuitously, leaves room to absorb or appropriate all the stories about the Gods – their mythologies – to the particular monotheistic framework, in which they are treated as subsidiaries of one ultimate divine force.
Thus monotheism’s enduring form is what M. David Litwa and other scholars have called "summodeism", a belief in one God as the source and origin of all, a one God who sits at the summit of the other Gods, and of divine power generally, an idea for which we have multiple attestation in the Ancient Near East (and many other places).
Summodeism is not quite monotheism the way we mean it. In part, that's because 'monotheism' is not really the best term for what we mean by monotheism.
When we talk about monotheism philosophically, we talk about the God of classical theism, the God of the Greek Presocratics, of Plato and Aristotle, and of the Stoics and Platonists of the 'Middle' and 'Later' periods: a God that is one, simple, absolute and infinite, wholly transcendent and wholly immanent, a God that is eternal, immutable, and in whom all things subsist, who is beyond comprehension, depiction, or determination.
The risk, of course, is such a God retreats into philosophical abstractions, and for this reason summodeism has its purpose, it is upaya, as the Buddhists say.
Monotheism properly becomes monism only when we conceive of "God" as something that fully transcends the natural and preternatural orders. Such a God is not that which stands at the apex of any hierarchy or order, nor as its fullest and most complete expression. Such thinking is still within the idea of monotheistic summodeism, replete with Divine Natures, archangels, powers, dominions and principalities, angels and daimones, fairies and elementals.
But by that token, once here, what we call 'God' no longer really has much to do with what 'God' language typically refers to, the divine qualities and divine attributes. English speakers are reliant on a word, 'God', that etymologically does refer more to a man in the sky, but that semantically it should not mean some kind of anthropomorphic, anthropopathic, or intracosmic entity. Hence the philosophical distinction (which I have until now obscured by capitalising God in every sense) in modern theology, between 'God' and 'god' or 'gods'.
'God' means the supreme reality itself, not a supreme being within reality, while 'god' and 'gods' can refer to subsidiary principles within the order of reality, higher than humans but lesser than God.
