I have a confession to make: for a long time in college, I tried to resist Platonizing as a Christian. In fairness to me, I was trying to be faithful to the world of the Bible as I was studying it critically at university: a world where YHWH was a corporeal and anthropomorphic god that, yes, did sometimes deeply problematic things but, also, was available, present, and ready to do something for the people that mattered to him. I was attached to the divine body that I read about in apocalyptic and mystical texts, to the apparitional god of theophanies and dreams and visions and cult, the god whose positively physical intimacy is evident in the Torah and the Prophets and the Psalms and the apocalypses. I did not want the incorporeal God that, for example, Origen opens De Principiis articulating. He struck me as somehow less real than the biblical god, who was susceptible to at least some kind of philosophical description by reference to the popular Stoic physics that the New Testament makes use of.
It was a doomed enterprise for various reasons—it simply took more serious reading in classics for me to see as much. For one thing, if the YHWH of ancient Israel and Judah and the Hebrew Bible is really reducible to his literal depiction therein and in what survives archaeologically of his cult, then Julian the Apostate was right to dismiss him as simply a parochial god, a god with a theogony and a place in the divine hierarchy, yes, but not God in the superlative or transcendent sense. For another, the way I was trying to think of God ignored the way the Hebrew Bible’s own internal evidence of theological development—YHWH’s ascent from El’s viceregent to El himself, from national god of Israel and Judah to king of all the gods, from superhuman king of all the gods to supracosmic god suffusing all heaven and earth with life, etc. The God of later Jewish literature—the postexilic prophets, the Kethubim, the pseudepigrapha, the apocalypses, the philosophical literature written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—is not wholly discontinuous with his depiction by earlier generations, but he is noticeably expanded in his scope and reach. The Platonized God, who is simple, infinite, and purely actual, is already prefaced in the more exalted pictures of God one finds in the Hebrew Bible, which is why so many educated Greek-speaking Jews and Early Christians found the two compatible in antiquity. Why settle for an outmoded theology within the tradition itself? And, finally, my position diminished the importance of the incarnation, and so ignored the way that Christians had already made room for God’s embodiment in the person of Jesus Christ. The Platonized God wasn’t here to take away what I wanted to preserve: actually, he guaranteed its very possibility as the ultimate theophany, rather than as a purely physical monstrosity.
While intellectually I am a bit embarrassed now to have at one point felt so strongly about divine corporeality, the benefit of this phase of my life of faith, I think, is that I learned from the inside why trying to abide by the literal description of God in the Scriptures doesn’t quite work, at least not anymore. The biblical YHWH may well walk, talk, eat, copulate, fight, grieve, laugh, and live large; he may for that reason have a kind of relatability, and it may be in some sense simpler to believe in him. And, indeed, the Platonized Christian theology of late antiquity was able to salvage something of the biblical YHWH, whether by making him a real manifestation, however poorly understood, of the Logos, Jesus Christ, whose deified humanity, ascended to the right hand of the Father, exists beyond space and time, suffusing each, just as the very act of the Incarnation itself is, from God’s eternal vantage, always already accomplished. And so from the Christian point of view, the incarnate and glorified Christ is in some sense the one who already, pretemporally, is seen by the patriarchs, people, and prophets of Israel; and perhaps, then, as a divine condescension to the conventional norms of an ancient people, Christ was happy to appear to them in a way that would have made sense to them for a god to act. Or, perhaps, as is often the case, the extrapolation of a genuine apocalyptic event or experience into ritual and myth requires a philosophical exegesis in order to lead one back to the true logos of that which was originally transmitted in each, bypassing perhaps the literal sense of each without thereby dispensing with the necessity of either; perhaps indeed the literal sense itself is where the room for human error that goes into receiving a revelation lives.
My mind has drifted back to this time in my life recently because of an argument I have had with an acquaintance about eschatology. In the same way that the Platonized God is, simply put, both more philosophically compelling as well as capable of retaining the reality of the corporealized deity in Scripture, the more philosophized eschatologies of Christian late antiquity are both worthier of God and capable of retaining multiple senses of their biblical foundations. In both cases, too, the reverse is not true, and sticking to the literal sense would require the abandonment of Scripture, at least if reason were treated as a genuine rudder of one’s theology. David Bentley Hart recently did a series on eschatology and republished a piece about the literal sense, the fruits of neither of which labor I desire to simply reproduce, but the reader may want to go there to familiarize herself with what follows.
The eschatological argument is with a Thomist acquaintance and therefore, of course, around universalism, whether it is dogmatically acceptable from the position of mainstream Christian bodies and whether it has any internal, rational coherence. The argument is not just between he and I: in a public online forum, it has included many others, and I am at best one among other interlocutors. But where I have found his answers most wanting have been in response to what seems to me plainly obvious, that the relevant issues were solved as early as Plato’s Euthyphro.
The Euthyphro is the first dialogue of Plato’s corpus, and it introduces the dialogues covering the end of Socrates’ life that also include familiar entries like the Apology (Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense before the Athenian boulē, which is a hoot, if you have not read it), Crito (Socrates’ argument for why staying in prison and suffering his execution is the only philosophically defensible decision), and the Phaedo (Socrates’ dialogue on the immortality of the soul and its transmigration). The Euthyphro in some sense sets the tone for the Platonic question by focusing on a fundamental question at issue between Socrates and his friend the Athenian prophet Euthyphro, who is prosecuting his father for binding and leaving a laborer to die. Euthyphro’s family are angry with him, but he insists he is in the right, and this leads to a conversation between the two about whether goodness is simply what the gods command, or what they are, which is to say, whether goodness is a metric of divine fiat or divinity.
There are generally three options for solving the so-called Euthyphro Dilemma; the Euthyphro itself does not settle on the only one that really works. The first solution is that the Good is something exterior to the gods to which they conform, in which case they themselves are not really good but only potentially good through something analogous to what we think of as virtue; the second, that goodness is simply what the gods say it is, which would just be voluntarism. In either case, the gods are either not the ultimate principles of reality (more on this below) or they rule simply by power rather than by genuine wisdom, in which case obedience or resistance to their instruction is a matter of pragmatism rather than a really philosophical way of life. The third solution—which the Euthyphro does not arrive at but which later readers of Plato, reading his corpus as a whole, conclude—is that God simply is the Good himself, such that the highest principle of reality is also the divine source of goodness and therefore also of truth, beauty, being, unity, and the like. This is the reading of the Middle and Neoplatonists. Lesser gods may well conform to greater or lesser degrees to the One, the Form of the Good that God is, and may well present what they say as good because they say it in their own ignorance of ultimate reality, but there is an absolute Good at the highest level of ultimate reality, which is nothing other than God himself. God, being Good, only does what is Good; what we can recognize as evil when our own ethical sensibilities are sufficiently developed is therefore either misattributed to God himself by myth or mistaken as evil when it is really just against convention.
Core to Socrates’ argument in the Euthyphro is that the answer to this question is to be found partially in how we choose to understand myth. The exegesis of myth was of enormous concern to ancient philosophy, as whether to attend to the literal sense (ad litteram) or the allegorical sense of a text could mean the difference between vastly polarized theologies. On the one hand, a literalist way of reading Greek mythology in its traditional, authoritative sources, like Homer, Hesiod, the Athenian dramatists, and the like left one with gods who behave badly but who must be considered good by virtue of being gods, such that one’s own moral wisdom accessible to the conscience must be abandoned to protect the divine integrity. Never mind that it is obvious to anyone of even neutrally competent moral awareness that the mythological Zeus is an unfaithful rapist and manipulative tyrant over the universe: if the gods are good because they are gods, or if goodness is simply the measure of what the gods do or say, then goodness is not a meaningful category and morality becomes, for the creature, a matter of utilitarian conformity to authority or fideism. But for most Greeks, at least, denying the authority of the traditional texts was a bit too much to stomach: Homer and Hesiod and their heirs were, after all, beautiful poets, and their work was foundational for paideia. They also shaped ritual experience of the gods in public (in the temples staffed and supported by the local poleis and the empire) and private cult (i.e., mysteries of varying origins): and as relatively few philosophers advocated abandoning state religious practices (but were often critical of the anthropomorphism of cultic imagery taken literally), it was therefore impossible to be rid of mythology. Instead, then, the allegorical sense allowed one to reinterpret divine actions away from the literal meaning of the text and towards meanings and significance that was both more morally and metaphysically satisfactory. And this meant, too, dispensing with or at least relativizing traditional beliefs about the afterlife. There might, for example, be an imaginally experienced Hades, perhaps even in some sense cosmographically keyed to the literal chthonic space beneath the earth, but the myths do not do it full justice, and mysteries and philosophy alike can help a soul pass through it unscathed to new lives or higher station. Or, perhaps, Hades is a metaphor for the sublunary realm itself (some philosophers could not see the point of a postmortem hell given how mutable and conditioned life here is) and Dis or Pluto is really Zeus of the underworld, simply the local archon over we souls who have descended too far down the cosmic ladder. (Perhaps, as the gnostics imagined, he is our jailor, and the daimones are his prison guards.)
Hellenistic Jews living in the Greek Diaspora, especially the intellectual powerhouse of Alexandria, could not avoid the intellegentsia’s position on these things. They also could not afford to ignore it: theirs was a cultural mission to present Judaism as a philosophy to Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans in a cosmopolitan society where they were sometimes othered. Their kinsmen in Judea and Galilee had experienced the consequences of an unprincipled engagement with Hellenism under the Antiochene persecution, and so never produced the likes of an Aristobulus or Philo as we find in the Alexandrian tradition; but that is not to say that Judaism did not have its own challenges in Alexandria, where it had to articulate a justification for its own peculiarism and cultic reservations about pluralism to a society where multiple religious and philosophical belonging were normative. The balance they struck was to justify Jewish ritual exclusivism by appeal to a philosophical universalism: ethical monotheism was the true universal religion, and Jewish Law spoke allegorically of the universal principles of God’s oneness and goodness and the good, rational life, which allegory Jews themselves maintained by practicing the laws according to the letter without assuming thereby that their literal fulfillment was the extent of what God wanted from them. Covenantal monism was not there by displaced, merely surpassed: Jews and philosophically minded gentiles could see themselves as mutual worshipers of the same God, albeit under different ritual restrictions. Reflecting their differing circumstances, instead of such a tolerant, cosmopolitan, pluralistic monotheism, Judea’s unique literary productions in the same period were prophetic and apocalyptic texts envisioning God’s future destruction, subjugation, or assimilation of the gentile world into Israel, whether through tribute or conversion after an eschatological war.
It would be a mistake to say that Judeans were simply scriptural literalists while Diaspora Jews were simply allegorists. Judean literature of the later centuries BCE and the first century CE showcases a complex process of reinterpreting, and hermeneutical debates about, the images of God, covenant, Israel, law, and future, national and personal, postmortem and cosmic, that one can find in the earlier portions of the Hebrew Bible. The exilic and postexilic prophets, as well as the sapiential authors of Proverbs, Job, and Qoheleth, and the authors of Ruth and Esther, are all dealing with a much bigger, more transcendent God than the preexilic texts are; they are also dealing with crucial questions about what God’s fidelity to and consummation of his covenant with Israel, and his responsibilities to the righteous, will look like in this era of disappointed hopes, unfulfilled promises, ongoing subjugation to foreign powers, and corruption of the institutions of Judean leadership both cultic and political. Apocalyptic texts seek to explain the various levels of dissonance by casting a wide net backwards to protology, forwards to eschatology, upwards to heaven, and downwards to hell, trying to find Israel’s place in the cosmic drama, sometimes concluding that what most Jews were invested in at the time is at best marginal to the real story of things (this is basically the argument of the Enoch texts), sometimes concluding that Israel as a whole has forgotten the true law (the position or the Qumran covenanters), sometimes concluding that the ordinary, faithful Jew will find postmortem rest and reward and perhaps swift changes in worldly fortune. Each of these strategies is one of bypassing a strict literalism about inherited texts in favor of a more complex and rational vision of things that takes account of ongoing experience (including revelatory experiences in the cases of those who experience visions and altered states of consciousness). The New Testament is born from both streams of Jewish appropriation of traditional texts and themes, Judean and Diasporan, in the wider context of Greco-Roman philosophical exegesis of ritual and myth, and as such, it both includes apocalyptic imagery and futurism as well as more cosmological and metaphysical vantages on the ultimate fate of things. Sometimes these occur in the same texts. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, both offers a very apocalyptic account of Christ’s future conquest of the universe and its rebellious gods at the parousia, and then concludes with a reference to Aratus’ Phaenomena I.5, suggesting that at the conclusion of the apocalyptic process God will be “all in all,” almost as though in a new ekpyrosis or restoration of the primordial state of divine indwelling. The glorious denouement of Revelation 21-22 could be read, just as all heavenly temple texts could be read, both as a description of a future transformation of the world as well as of an ideal temple or world already extant somewhere in the heavens.
The point is that when early Christians came along insisting that the literal sense of Old and New Testaments could not always be accepted as either historically or eschatologically true in every detail, that not everything attributed to God could be literally believed, but might even in certain instances be given explicitly to awaken our own moral consciences through outrage, they were standing in good company and a long tradition of prioritizing what reason can know of God and the Good as a necessary check and balance on the content of revelation given in the apostolic kerygma, the liturgy, and the scriptures. Some Early Christians, like some Early Jews and some pagans, were fideists; the most influential and important for the development of the Christian Tradition were not. They were too aware that in a Hellenistic culture where intellectualism was a primary value, a fideism about a particular revelatory tradition that made no effort to demonstrate its internal rational coherence, sometimes at the expense of the literal sense, and no effort to connect that tradition’s logos to the universal experience of the logos concerning God, cosmos, and self, was bound to fail to convince. Sure, Christians argued that Christian appeals to Scripture were not inherently less rational than, say, Plotinus or Porphyry or Julian’s appeals to Plato; as early as Clement’s Stromateis and Origen’s Contra Celsum, attempts are made to articulate what is particular to a Christian apodeixis, and what is justifiable given that it is a specifically Christian one. But Christians generally accepted that they would have to play by the rules of ancient epistemology, logic, exegesis, ethics, physics, and metaphysics if they were going to successfully convince the pagan world of Christ, even and especially when they rhetorically rail against pagan learning in these areas. The Fathers, in other words, did philosophy, not just theology (if we understand the two as separate): their worked out and evolving positions are part of broader Hellenistic conversations about reality. Resistance to that insight from both historical theologians (especially Western 20th century theologians) and classicists (who also once upon a time would exclude things like “Christian Greek and Latin” as though they were not authentic exempla of the language) reflects more about the prejudices of each than the historical reality of the situation.
And with regard to eschatology, it is clear that the need to present a rational faith prevailed in many cases over the literal sense of Scripture. Quite prior to the distinctions between annihilationists, infernalists, and universalists, who were all present in late antique Christianity, this is already true in the New Testament itself, where the need to explain the eschaton’s delay or continually push the horizon of ultimate fulfillment, beyond Jesus’ ministry to his crucifixion and resurrection, beyond that to some imminent time in the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh decades of the first century CE, beyond that to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, and beyond that to some indefinite future, is already an exercise in exceeding the literal sense of inherited texts (oral and scriptural) to save the revelatory core of the tradition by presenting a more reasonable point of view. Later generations of Christians who did the same with the apocalyptic narrative itself are simply continuing the practice at a somewhat higher level of review: Origen’s transmutation of Christian apocalypticism from an intrahistorical expectation of universal consummation to either a contingent parousia or, really, a vertical, cosmic ascent to the divine pleroma is different in degree rather than in kind from Irenaeus’ rereading of Revelation and 2 Baruch to predict an indefinitely long terrestrial messianic kingdom that precedes the eternal state in which a cosmic ascent or the saints takes place (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. V; Origen, De Princ. II.11, III.4-6). In both cases reason, experience, and context motivate the author, taking prophecy seriously, to rethink what the text means from their own vantage, in ways that end up relativizing the text’s literal meaning as of secondary importance.
The same possibility opens up, then, when one discusses the fate of the wicked as scripture narrates it. There is a philological, a hermeneutical, and a philosophical dimension to any conversation about ultimate reconciliation. Philologically it must be squarely faced that the language of the New Testament is at most ambiguous: no eschatological punishment is described as eternal directly, but with language that can be read as implying irresolution in some cases because no reversal is afterwards narrated or with language that can be read as suggesting a contingent, finite temporality of aeonic duration as opposed to an infinite stretch of time. Hermeneutically, one must also consider that scripture contains texts that are annihilationist, infernalist, and universalist in character, and that if one is to read all of scripture as a canon of a sort, together mutually providing some kind of authority for Christian philosophy or theology, then the question becomes which set of texts is capable of explaining the others and providing something of a unified narrative. Here it is clear that the universalist texts alone provide such a metanarratival possibility: if the wicked are destroyed, their imprisonment and ultimate salvation are exaggerated; if they are tortured forever, the mercy of their destruction or rehabilitation is as much unintelligibly imagined as it is cruel. Only if all are finally saved can the destruction and corrective punishment or restorative justice of the wicked be preserved and explained, either as insufficient vision or as some form of pedagogical preface to final salvation. And beyond philology and exegesis—which are properly attendant to the literal sense, and therefore do also involve using the contemporary tools of literary and historical criticism at our disposal—there is the philosophical question of which position is the most internally rational and the most externally credible, which is also the question of what is most worthy of God (dignum Deo) and of what is most worthy of the infinite dignity of the human person intermingled with her intimate connections to all other persons and finite realities. Universalism is the obvious winner there, too: it is the only take where, in the final analysis, it is both the case that Goodness is what God is rather than what he merely conforms to or arbitrarily decides and where his final purpose in creation is realized, and no good is therefore left unattained or evil left unaddressed. Annihilationism rests on good metaphysical instincts—being and goodness are ultimately synonyms, and so to choose evil is to move away from being and become ontologically weakened, either provoking God’s move to destroy the wicked or his passive acceptance of their destruction—but it creates the problem that God, for whom there is no time and who therefore from eternity wills the creature to be, ends up either contradicting his own will that the creature exist or consenting to the creature’s rejection of God’s command for the creature to be, both of which are unacceptable. A creature may reduce itself back to nothingness or be actively uncreated, but God’s word speaking the creature forth into existence is irrevocable, so the creature will return once more from nothingness into the realm of becoming by the enduring power of that creative word no matter how many times it chose submersion back into the nothingness of evil. Infernalism is therefore metaphysically superior to annihilationism only insofar as God neither initiates nor consents to the creature’s de-creation: he does not change his mind about wanting his creatures to exist, or suffer to want them to exist but fail to realize that desire, nor does he join in assisted metaphysical suicide. But infernalism is a theological travesty in other ways. It implies that God, who is the Good himself, would be able in the final analysis to fill all things without healing creatures of their evil, in which case God can either fill the evil creature without its evil being healed (in which case God is partially evil and such creatures simply manifest God’s evil) or God does not really become “all in all,” and simply concentrates all the evil of creation into some place or state where it is never finally resolved, leaving his final victory always incomplete. Again, whether God is understood as active agent of eternal infernal punishment or passive accepter, unsustainable contradictions with what God must be to be God ensue. And so universalism is the only eschatology that ensures that God, as the Good, both creates and consummates all things from and to himself, in and through Christ the Judge and Savior of All, by the power of the Spirit who is both “Lord and Creator of Life” as well as “everywhere present filling all things.” Universalism also allows for annihilation of false selves and restorative justice for the wicked, both of which preserve the moral urgency of the present life as an arena of co-creation with God, the consequences of which we will neither escape nor be able to hide behind to avoid what God really wants of us (that we become gods). Philological and hermeneutical errors of any particular Christian institution or lineage, and the philosophies that emerge around them, cannot logically, rationally undermine the truth that apokatastasis in the metaphysical sense is the only way to maintain the synonymity of God and the Good. No matter how literally one reads Early Jewish and New Testament texts about postmortem and eschatological punishment (and it must be stressed that most infernalists have only a pretense, not the reality, of doing so, given how few dogmatic theologians are trained in biblical studies; an otherwise respectable Thomist once told me in earnest that philology was irrelevant to theology), it does not save one from the accusation (pointedly made by Julian and the gnostics alike) that the god who emerges from the literal sense of Scripture is in most instances a parochial deity of limited intelligence and moral ability or, at best, a demiurgic cosmic tyrant. The rejoinder may be made that the same could be said of Zeus, but that’s exactly the point: educated late antique pagans were not foolish enough to confuse the literal portrait of Zeus in ritual and myth with the philosophical understanding of him that any rationally sane person ought to hold to. Christian theologians have all too often failed to meet this basic standard of ancient philosophy of religion.
That this is true is doubly interesting, of course, because theologians of all stripes until the last century were perfectly willing to ignore the literal sense when it supported Jews and Judaism and undermined Christian perspectives. Jerome, for example, held that it could not possibly have been the case that Peter and Paul had a real argument about whether Christ-following Jews could break bread with Christ-following gentiles, since, he believed, neither were Torah observant. Augustine countered that this was obviously false: the New Testament is clear that Christ and the apostles were fully Torah-observant Jews, even after Christ’s ascent. Augustine holds—irrationally, to my mind—that such an intersection of Jew and Christian is no longer possible or appropriate, so he still begrudges or avoids the obvious import of the literal sense here, which is that the heart of the Christian Church is supposed to be a Torah-observant Judaism to which gentiles are joined as gentiles, rather than the tertium genus that Christians usually posited themselves as. Origen, before him, crafted his eschatology of ascent precisely by way of objection to the “Judaic” sense of the New Testament’s own eschatology, which is self-evidently derived from Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic hopes for the future renewal of Israel, a final reckoning and reconciliation with the gentiles, and a cosmic renovation. It is not that Judaism is dependent on biblical literalism. Far from it: the halakhic and aggadic logic of Rabbinic literature is about making the biblical letter serve the spirit of the present moment, not about a constant antiquarianism of looking to live in a series of dead worlds. This leads to the interesting situation that in the modern day, Christians are often more interested in long dead realities from Jewish history, like messiahs and Temples, than most practicing Jews are. Ironically, Jews who embrace progressive, egalitarian, and universalist eschatologies, cosmic and personal, are more committed to the Pauline dictum that “The letter kills, but the Spirit makes life” (2 Cor 3:6) than are Christians whose theological, moral, and eschatological principles are apparently incapable of evolving on the grounds that they have basis in some (but not all) scriptural texts. And the problem is one of an imbalanced historical consciousness: the pretense that, somehow, what Jesus himself teaches about Israel’s restoration is metaphor or allegory, but what he says about Gehenna and Hades is somehow not culturally conditioned by his time and place and subject to higher kinds of review. This translates also into inconsistent attention to the literal sense in exegesis: because some things are arbitrarily determined to be context-bound, and others are characterized as somehow abstract from the flow of time, scriptural interpretation simply becomes eisegesis to fit whatever doctrine one has decided ahead of time.
At any rate, the paradigm shift in a method that moves from ritual to myth (or text) to philosophy can be a liberating one. It does not depreciate cult or mystery, still less the value of traditional scripture and story, but it does free us from fideism without absolving the bonds of revelation. But it requires some degree of bravery that can be difficult to find as a student of theology. Many such students go to the study of the Bible or theology not to dive into the mystery of God but to find a comfortably static set of beliefs to adopt—an excuse from the task of thinking faithfully and critically about reality as we experience it with and in God. They memorize scripture, sometimes even learn great quantities of information about the contexts and processes by which it was written and received, the ways it has been read, and sometimes do the same with the Fathers and Councils and Liturgies and what have you. But they never progress beyond this, to join the actual work of the people they study, as though they were students who master grammar but never proceed to attain logic and rhetoric, much less the quadrivium. It is one thing, and a very important thing, not least in our day, to know the Tradition; quite another thing to be part of it. One needs courage to do so—above all, the courage not to retreat into institutionally convenient fideisms at the expense of reason. The source of that courage comes from realizing that the God who reveals is also the God who is the indwelling Nous and Logos of all things: that divine apocalypse summons us forward, not backward, the long way round to that point originally glimpsed by theophany. Gaze long enough into the eyes of that embodied god, and one will find them gates to an endlessness no rites or texts would dare to fathom.
Wow. This was inspired. Blessings on you for the spiritual work this required.
As always, the trick with getting people to abandon the pretense of scriptural or theoligical literalism is making them realize that they already have. It's interesting that a discussion with a Thomist inspired this essay, since it was in the writings of a Thomist (the notorious Ed Feser, in fact) that I first encountered a Christian that made no bones about believing in a God that was higher and more philosophical than the god that appears in popular piety and even in Scripture (read literally, of course). As my experience with Thomism has been mostly philosophical (rather than theological), I always find it odd that they have such a reputation for theological dogmatism, especially when the influence of Thomism in the evangelical world has been inspiring a theological showdown between the more literally-minded personalists and a new generation of classical theists, armed with the philosophical arguments of Aquinas.