Book Review Essay: Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics

Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 231pp. $35.00 hardcover.

Let me hazard a risky way of introduction: this is not the book Hinlicky should have written.  Such a claim is typically the perennial shelter of the lazy review, and as I write this, no doubt any author having suffered a similar claim raised at them have now lit their torches against me (normally I would join this mob myself); but hear me out. 

The doctrine of divine simplicity (hereafter DDS) is a contentious doctrine, especially in the modern period.  As Robert Jenson put it over thirty years ago: “rejection of the dominant tradition just at this point [divine simplicity] is endemic in contemporary theology.”[1]  Yet even radical criticism of the doctrine by those like Eberhard Jüngel in his God as the Mystery of the World do not, as one commentator put it, jettison simplicity but search for new ways to formulate it.[2]  As I have argued at length elsewhere, simplicity (quite ironically) indexes a whole gamut of complex theological sensibilities in itself—ranging from ontology, to epistemology, to soteriology and beyond to the whole array of systematic theology.  Thus, changes to the doctrine are not merely modifications to an attribute of God, but in fact register wider shifts in networks of theory and practice.  As such given the cascade of related concepts, we need to have as honest conversation about it as we can—it’s strengths, weaknesses, original contexts—in order to evaluate it, to understand why it was in various forms axiomatic through most of the church tradition, and why it is now doubted in many quarters.  This is not that book. 

Here, beneath the covers of a beautiful metal-cut depicting the crucified Christ crafted at the hands an anonymous 15^th century artist, lay the pages of what I can only charitably describe as a deeply ambiguous piece of scholarship, one that swings wildly between ostensible fairness to the so-called received doctrine of “strong simplicity” (Hinlicky’s term), into rampant jeremiads featuring heady historiographical generalizations and broad-stroke heresiology cutting hip and thigh through theological history.  For example: “the tendency toward modalism in Western theology correlates with a Nestorian tendency in Western Christology” (107); “In order to escape this dead end [of strong simplicity] what is needed is a critique of the one-sided simplicitas of the supposedly divine essentia nudia, the ghostly idol devouring the richness of God” (179); in Augustine and Aquinas there is a “de facto quaternity” where the divine essence is reified and turned into a quasi-agent (105) where the Western tradition sanctifies “muddle … as mystery” and God is “swallowed up in a pseudo-apophatic fog” (105); or a real howler: in Hinlicky’s version of simplicity “Easter is not simply discarded” as in Thomas’ protological simplicity (99); or, just a few pages later: “If one is looking for a harmonization that defangs the religions under the benign imperium of political sovereignty, protological simplicity [one of Hinlicky’s shorthands for the received doctrine] appeals” (100).  I’m not even really sure what to say to that last one.  But it gets worse: DDS demands that whatever happens is God’s will (as there can be no alternate possibilities, which would be potencies in God), this then means strong DDS must at some level affirm the gulags, or even (one assumes) Auschwitz (156-157).  I could keep quoting nearly indefinitely.

Hinlicky’s Position

"Ow. Cut it out."

So what does Hinlicky offer to counter Augustine and Aquinas’ “grim paternity” (to quote a phrase from Michael Hanby)?  Hinlicky offers up what he terms “weak simplicity” that amounts to affirming Duns Scotus’ formal distinction along with his doctrine of univocity by way of Richard Cross and Colin Gunton’s rehabilitation of it, which Hinlicky, quite entertainingly, gleefully wields to poke Radical Orthodoxy in the eye any chance he gets. (While I will hold off on my on specific criticisms until the next section, I feel at this point it does behoove me to mention it seems inconsistent to say the least for Hinlicky to repeatedly condemn a “modalistic” Western tradition and then “save” it by citing a major figure in that same Western tradition.  But c’est la vie).

This entails that Hinlicky, with Gunton, wants to affirm “Divine simplicity” but it “is to be affirmed positively rather than negatively—that is, not by the protological definition of perfect being as indivisible … but rather as the theological qualification of the revealed God as unified in the diversity of His attributes” (14).  Hinlicky, in addition to calling his position “weak simplicity” also calls it the “rule” theory of simplicity:

The proposed rule is this: so speak of the one true God as the Father of the Son, who in the Spirit infinitely gives such that we and all creatures are spoken of as gifted. … Abstractly put, in terms of a characterization of the singularity of the divine nature, the freedom to love wisely is divine—the whatness of the one true God in the act of His being, also for us, when the eternal act of God’s being is understood as the Father’s generation of the Son, on whom He breathes His Spirit (xxi-xxii).

As such, Hinlicky explicitly commends a social model of the Trinity (in fact he frequently refers, not just to social trinitarianism, but to “the gospel’s social Trinity of persons” (45, emphasis added)), declaring (again explicitly) that he is a nominalist when it comes to essence: “the nominalism I am articulating in denying that essences are anything real except as concepts useful to humans … is theologically warranted by strong Trinitarian personalism, where the one divine essence is nothing other than the ways in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are, as persons in community, the one true God” (69n53) so that “oneness” is personal perichoresis (178) and “nature” is merely a shorthand to refer to clusters of possible actions available to an agent. This is combined with what Hinlicky terms “eschatological simplicity,” which is a variation on Robert Jenson’s theology of God’s narrative completion in the eschaton.  For Hinlicky, then, reminiscent also of Wolfhart Pannenberg, God’s simplicity (or more broadly, his unity) is something only God can demonstrate at the end of time:

Here we have … a very different take on what it might mean to say God is one, namely, that a certain God who appears as a figure in history as proclaimed by His prophets is, claims to be, and will prove to be the incomparable one true God. … What makes God one within this biblical framework is not that God in heaven above is indivisible and hence by nature invulnerable.  Rather, what makes God one is His Word, which in His spirit returns to Him not in vain (Is. 55:11), which for us is an exclusive claim to save (7).

In this positive formulation of Hinlicky’s constructive thesis lay the two or three major reoccurring complaints throughout the book against strong DDS.  The first is that Hinlicky believes (as we saw above) that strong DDS in line with Aquinas and company locks God into his own perfections and destroys His freedom.  Here in particular he relies on an essay by R.T. Mullins (19ff). He is so convinced of this that he can in essence argue: God is free, therefore strong DDS is false (23), or strong DDS necessarily leads to Spinoza’s “modal collapse” in which, again necessarily, there is only one possible world—this world—because God could create no other, there being no “potencies” for other worlds within God’s perfect actuality.  In the background to this lingers Hinlicky’s high admiration for Gottfried Leibniz—there is a straight path from Scotus to Leibniz, says Hinlicky, in which modal arguments helpfully illuminate divine action (61).

Along the same lines, Hinlicky, secondly, dislikes strong DDS because it disallows that God can gain relative attributes in relationship to creatures.  This, he thinks, mitigates the incarnation (which is why he accuses the West of tacit Nestorianism) and the biblical narrative: “Such divine becoming [in the incarnation] and acquisition thereby of extrinsic properties to the extremity of assuming the death of sinful humanity under the curse of divine law violates strong simplicity, so that one or the other must bend and give way” (147; cf. also 66f). 

In addition, thirdly, Hinlicky’s critique trades on forcing us to decide between a few fairly binary positions: Strong DDS necessitates we end up in strong apophaticism, he claims (41).  This leads to an unstable dialectic in Aquinas where he smuggles in kataphatic (or positive) terms that are nonetheless ultimately bleached by simplicity: “how is this ‘something’ [Aquinas’ God] different from nothing at all, from the reification of No-Thing?” (43) he asks, again and again. This apophatic elevation of substance also causes the West to “forget” (Hinlicky’s term) the distinction of nature and persons elaborated upon in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (16) because Latins emphasize substance over person (25).  At one point he says explicitly that Aquinas’ timelessly simple identity of God’s essence and existence excludes the “God from God, light from light” sung of in the Nicene Creed (50).  (Admittedly, that last claim struck me as so absurd historically speaking I closed the book at that point and had to wait a day to come back to it.) Here Hinlicky explicitly affirms the validity of the so-called “de Regnón paradigm” of the supposed differences between Eastern trinitarianism (that “begin” with the persons) over the essentializing Latins (24-26; 117-118; 120; 132 et. al.).  As we have already seen as well, Hinlicky continuously plays his own “eschatological” simplicity over against Aquinas and company’s supposedly purely “protological” simplicity, motion over stasis, relation over invulnerability, positive simplicity over negative simplicity.  These binaries clutter the book from top to bottom.

Critiques

To many who have read the literature of Trinitarian theology published especially in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Hinlicky’s work reads something like a book written out of time, by a man who made up his mind quite a while back.  This is, I think, foreshadowed a bit in the introduction: Hinlicky opens with a somewhat charming anecdote: “I think it was Stanley Hauerwas whom I once heard say that his ‘method’ in theology was to read a lot of books, think hard, and then write his own book.  Whether or not Stanley deserves credit for that bon mot, I have made it my own” (x). Hinlicky uses this tale, as he says in the next few sentences, to justify “a definite selectivity in the authors and treatments of the topic engaged in this book.”  In one sense it is hard to fault him for this caveat: he did not set out to write an exhaustively researched book on the history and recent developments touching upon divine simplicity.  Fair enough I suppose, even though this does seem a tad strange prefacing a monograph literally devoted to the topic.  Regardless, Hinlicky’s “definite selectivity” is stretched to the point of irresponsibility to the subject matter at hand.  Moreover, what Hinlicky does cite often feels oddly disjointed and cobbled together.

In the opening I said both that this is not the book Hinlicky should have written, and that I thought this was so because it is so deeply ambiguous in how it might further the conversation about divine simplicity.  I stand by that.  I am not critiquing this book because I subscribe to a strong version of DDS and Hinlicky does not.  At points he does bring up interesting difficulties such as God’s freedom, or how one is to envision the novelty (or not) of the incarnation to God’s own life.  Moreover, I agree with his judgment that simplicity is not itself a totally monolithic doctrine.  As the Medievalist Russell L. Friedman puts it (I think rightly): “simplicity can be something of an elastic concept, admitting of degrees …”[3] The problem is rather than discuss these calmly, charitably, and in any detail, these few interesting and discussion worthy points are surrounded by a storm of bluster, seemingly willful misunderstanding or misrepresentation, all wrapped in a doughy layer of unsupportable historical generalizations.  We have already seen much of the bluster.  Let us turn to the historical generalizations and misunderstanding.

History?

Ostensibly Hinlicky engages with four major recent figures he considers to be important counters to his thesis: David Burrell, Lewis Ayres, Fergus Kerr, and James Dolezal.  And yet “engage” here is a bit euphemistic.  To be sure from both Kerr and Burrell, for example, Hinlicky acknowledges that a lot of what people decry of Thomas is actually birthed by later commentators (34; 68; 144 et. al).  He notes somewhat sympathetically that this is very similar to the difference between Luther and later Lutheranism (Hinlicky being Lutheran himself).  But then he continues on as if almost nothing happened, and worse, quickly gears back onto the warpath.

Take Hinlicky’s repeated accusation of Western trinitarianism’s tendency toward modalism, which Hinlicky wants to correct by turning to the East, regaining the Father as arche of the Trinity and a robust “social” trinitarianism.  Against Lewis Ayres’ attempt at correction of the so-called “de Regnón” paradigm (where, as it is popularly represented, the West “starts with” the one substance of God, while the East “starts with” the person of the Father) Hinlicky openly embraces it to reinforce his criticisms of strong DDS erasing “the richness of God.”  The problem here is that (and I am not exaggerating) he literally nowhere supports this large-scale claim of modalism with any evidence aside from the occasional secondary source. 

His refutation of Ayres amounts to citing Maarten Wisse’s study of Augustine, Trinitarian Theology Beyond Participation: Augustine’s ‘De Trinitate’ and Contemporary Theology, in which Wisse argues (admiringly) that Augustine’s radical use of simplicity “de-functionalizes” the Trinity (121).  And so Hinlicky concludes: “Because Wisse’s defense of strong simplicity in the name of Augustine is radical, he in effect undoes the synthesis that Ayres attempts and thus, from the opposite direction of my overarching argument, confirms the de Regnón thesis [emphasis added]” (120).  This is of course not an argument but in effect a choice for one secondary work over another.  Again, on one level there is no harm in this (and certainly Ayres’ interpretation is not uncontroversial among Patristic specialists)[4] but this represents a tendency in Hinlicky’s work to simply decide for the interpretations he has taken and interpret others from that position (which he often—not wrongly—accuses Thomists of doing to Scotus).

His support for the “de Regnón” thesis is, ultimately, incorrect (or so broad as to be vacuous).  Whatever Augustine’s focus on DDS, he does not deviate from the “Eastern” emphasis on the Father as arche.  For example see: De Trinitate, IV.20.39: “The Father is the principle of the whole divinity, or to speak more precisely, of the whole Godhead.”  Conversely, those in the East like Gregory of Nyssa,[5] and (startlingly enough) Gregory Palamas,[6] utilize psychological analogies.  Indeed, recent research has revealed that in many instances Palamas is textually dependent upon Augustine’s de Trinitate.[7]  And Aquinas of course drew on many Eastern Fathers such as ps. Denys and John of Damascus, and, as recent research by those like Marcus Plested has shown, cross-fertilized with Aquinas receiving a remarkably positive reception initially among Byzantines.  Plested does an excellent job of relaying in his study that the East was not as “East” and the West not as “West” as we believed for so long—not even according to their “archetypes” in Aquinas and Palamas.[8] Such a modern systematic idea such as “starting with” one point or another makes hash of understanding ancient sources, which were often more organically connected. 

Augustine, disappointed

Hinlicky also repeats the canard (again without context) that Augustine admits he does not understand the distinction the Greeks want to draw between nature and hypostasis, as evidence that Augustine (and later Aquinas) reduce person to nature, destroy the incarnation “and in the distance, sirens” etc. etc. ....  But here, as Richard Cross’ recent article points out, we need to be careful remarking on what exactly Augustine does not understand.  Augustine is confused about hypostasis because it cannot be a category common to the three persons as it is precisely what distinguishes them from one another, in distinction from ousia which they do have in common.  As such Augustine concludes famously we use the word so as to not remain silent, though no one knows what it means.[9] 

Despite learning from Kerr and Burrell that later Thomism often misrepresented Thomas himself, for example, Hinlicky ignores that Aquinas did not himself draw a distinction between de deo uno and de deo trino, rather these headings were inserted later.[10]  Both unity and trinity are two mutually reinforcing perspectives on God that need to, in theory, be understood at the same time and in light of each other, but can only be elaborated sequentially due to human limitations (called “redoublement”).[11]  Hinlicky’s ridiculous (though not uncommon) accusations of “substance metaphysics” creating a “quaternity” are for this reason and others, completely off base.  Augustine (on the basis of DDS I might add, ironically) denies that God is a substance: for then “God subsists, and is a subject, in relation to his own Goodness” (De Trinitate VII.5.10). Aquinas notes that—in opposition to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215 A.D.), Augustine appears to state that the divine essence generates, rather than the person of the Father (de Trin. VII.3), a position Aquinas himself adamantly rejects since generation and relation are proper to persons alone, which might surprise Hinlicky (ST I. q.39. a.5, c).  Far from condemning Augustine for “substance metaphysics,” however, Aquinas opts for a more charitable route of interpreting Augustine as a whole: what Augustine means, says Aquinas, is that “the Son, who is the essence … is from the Father, who is the essence …” (ST I q.39 a.5 ad.1).  Whether the Son proceeds from the essence or from the person is still a live debate today, for example it was part of the scuffle between T.F. Torrance and John Zizioulas, neither of whom can be accused of “substance metaphysics”!

Hinlicky admits (again indebted to Kerr and Burrell at this point) that Aquinas is not “grounding” his theology in philosophy, yet in his criticism of simplicity Hinlicky functionally ignores Thomas’ Christology.  There is not a single mention of it.  This is because—I’d wager—Hinlicky’s assumption is that the way strong DDS should work leads to a Nestorian Christology that bifurcates between history and metaphysics.  And since Christ is the “crisis of metaphysics” for Hinlicky he can just pare off the last third of the Summa as unrelated to the first part. 

Reinforcing this “philosophical” Aquinas (despite some of Hinlicky’s caveats) is a strange review of divine simplicity in the Greeks that then directly leads into a discussion of the Muslim philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Gifford Lectures on DDS, at which point Hinlicky concludes aha! “It is the protological metaphysics of divine simplicity speaking in its own voice for our times” which shows its “necessary trajectory,” but then completely neglects to say why this has any relevance for how it is used in Christian theology, and even more specifically in particular thinkers (60-68).  Hinlicky is so fixated on using his category “protological simplicity” to describe what is going on at all times, that it essentially becomes an a priori construct—somehow—reinforced by citing usage in Greek and Muslim philosophy.  And this damns Aquinas how?  Moreover as I pointed out above, Hinlicky uses Scotus positively while critiquing “The West.”  It is hard for me to see “the West” as being used in any other manner than opportunistically when it suits Hinlicky’s polemical agenda.  It does not seem to represent anything real.

It is not even that Hinlicky is beholden to the so-called “Hellenization thesis” either.  In an interesting (but ultimately jarringly out of place) aside, he devotes a chapter to show how theology can use philosophy by examining in detail Clement of Alexandria, of all people.  Yet Hinlicky here systematically ignores the extreme apophatic elements in Clement that he is so loathe to find in Augustine and Aquinas.[12]  Frankly, though I love Clement, I was just baffled by this section.  If he can be so charitable to Clement, why not Augustine or Aquinas?  The polemic of “the West” remains unscathed in his narrative.

Finally, ironically enough, it does not appear to be the case that Hinlicky actually knows what the de Regnón thesis is—for de Regnón was not in fact arguing for an incompatibility between East and West but between two mutually reinforcing styles that de Regnón saw as needed within the emerging rigidity of the neo-Thomist environment in which he wrote, which did, in fact, “start with” a unity philosophically conceived and then moved on to a Trinity known only by revelation.[13]  Thus when Hinlicky declares himself for the de Regnón thesis because of the West’s modalism, this is in fact not de Regnón at all.

Conclusions: The Coherence of Strong DDS?

As I stated above, Hinlicky does touch upon some real challenges to strong DDS, such as God’s freedom.  But here, amid an interesting critique, Hinlicky hardly tries to finesse these arguments and overplays his hand, as he does throughout the book.

For one, he takes the typically modern route of interpreting kataphatic and apophatic predicates in purely epistemological terms.  “Unknowing” here as the result of strong DDS, results in merely a sort of cognitive agnosticism (or as he is wont to point out, something akin to atheism).  There are several misunderstandings that I think go along with this reduction of naming God to mere epistemology. Briefly, first, it is to miss that apophaticism actually “presumes a way of life” among Christians in relation to God.[14]  Second (and related), it is to miss, as Denys Turner puts it, that the kataphatic and the apophatic intertwine at all moments.  Hinlicky represents the apophatic as being the final destination, the final, hollow rung on the kataphatic ladder we climb, but this is to miss the interconnections that occur at all stages of our eternal stretching toward God in Christ through the Holy Spirit:

It is our purpose [in this chapter] to demonstrate that within ey representative theological sources of the high Middle Ages—in Bonaventure in one way, in Thomas in another—it is far from the case that this architectonic dialectic [of kataphatic and apophatic] finds its justification principally in any philosophical doctrine of ‘God’, Platonic or otherwise, but that it arises first and foremost out of strictly Christian theological, and above all, Christological, necessities. … In Christ we learn how to speak of God; but in Christ we discover that speech to be broken open into brilliant failure—a knowing unknowing, a ‘brilliant darkness.’ … [We will be] diverted from this account  in so far as we suppose that there is some such discourse as ‘apophatic discourse’.  The apophatic is not given in some negative vocabulary which takes over from the affirmative when we get a mystical urge; it is not engaged in by means of some negative chasing game with the affirmative up the ladder of speech about God, thus at the top either to win or to lose out to the affirmative.  Rather it is that the tensions between affirmation and negation within all theological speech are, precisely, what determine it to be theological speech …[15]

Third, as we see in this quote, Hinlicky can certainly deny that strong DDS ultimately works with the doctrine of incarnation, but what he should not do (as he, unfortunately, does) is treat Aquinas’ doctrine of DDS apart from Christology (or, really, the rest of theology).  Finally, as Stephen Holmes suggests as a gloss on the tradition: the kataphatic and apophatic features of DDS are not for themselves, but ultimately about encounter with God’s personal reality, one that ultimately exceeds our categories, both positive and negative.[16]  Simplicity is about a union of grace that far exceeds our capacities, much as music presses our words to at turns be prolix and searching, and at other times fall silent, but at all times only flit the edges of a reality they touch for a moment only to slide off of in both assertion and denial.  Simplicity is, as David Bentley Hart reminds us of Gregory of Nyssa, the grounds for his concept of epektasis or stretching-forth, our continuous growth in God.[17]

At the end of the day, Hinlicky has a few good points against simplicity (and for his own positions) that would be worth discussing, were they not lost in the sound of furious hammerstrokes falling almost indiscriminantly on a tradition that Hinlicky apparently decided quite some time ago he did not like.  Worth discussing as well would be weaknesses in Hinlicky’s own position which are curiously absent from the book even as hypotheticals to overcome—for example Philip Clayton’s critique of Leibniz’ doctrine of “weak” simplicity (to continue Hinlicky’s terms) as being torn apart in the modern period,[18] or Francesca Aran Murphy’s critique of narrative theologies, and in particular Robert Jenson’s eschatological doctrine of God’s unity (which, ironically, she accuses of being modalistic, which would undoubtedly be a peculiarly irritating charge for Hinlicky’s similar construal).[19] Perhaps those conversations can happen in the future, and maybe this book will evoke them—but if it does it will only be in spite of itself.

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[1] Robert Jenson, "The Triune God” in Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten, eds., Christian Dogmatics 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 1: 166.

[2] Paul DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God: Trinitarian Faith and Philosophy in the Thought of Eberhard Jüngel (Atlanta: American Academy of Religion, 1999), 15.

[3] Russell L. Friedman, Medieval Trinitarian Thought: From Aquinas to Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 100.

[4] See the symposium between Lewis Ayres, Sarah Coakley, John Behr, and Khaled Anatolios in The Harvard Theological Review 100:2 (2007).

[5] Michel René Barnes, “Divine Unity and the Divided Self: Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology in its Psychological Context,” Modern Theology 18:4 (2002): 475-496.

[6] Jeremy D. Wilkins, “’The Image of This Highest Love’: The Trinitarian Analogy in Gregory Palamas’ Capita 150” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 47:3-4 (2003): 383-412.

[7] Christiaan W. Kappes, J. Isaac Goff, and T. Alexander Giltner, “Palamas Among the Scholastics: A Review Essay Discussing D. Bradshaw, C. Athanasopoulos, C. Schneider et al., Divine Essence and Divine Energies: Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy (Cambridge: James and Clarke, 2013)” in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies Vol. 55 (2014) No.1-2: 175-220 at 183f.

[8] Marcus Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).; Cf. also A.N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[9] Richard Cross, “Quid Tres? On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand in De Trinitate V and VII,” Harvard Theological Review 100 (2007): 215-232.

[10] Timothy L. Smith, “Thomas Aquinas’ De Deo: Setting the Record Straight on His Theological Method,” Sapientia, vol.53 no.203 (1998): 119-154: “One of the most disastrous developments in the commentaries of the late nineteenth century was the labeling of the first two sections De Deo Uno-De Deo Trino.  These titles are foreign to the text and distort Thomas’ own words, yet they became almost synonymous with the text well into our time.  The titles De Deo Uno and De Deo Trino grew naturally out of the early commentaries of Cardinal Cajetan and John of St. Thomas, even though they did not actually use these terms” (134).

[11] Gilles Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas?” The Thomist 64 (2000): 521-563.

[12] For Clement’s apophaticism, cf. as an example Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 38-67.

[13] Kristin Hennessy, “An Answer to De Regnón’s ‘Accusers’: Why We Should Not Speak of ‘His’ Paradigm,” Harvard Theological Review 100, no.2 (2007): 179-197.

[14] Martin Laird, “The ‘Open Country Whose Name is Prayer’: Apophasis, Deconstruction, and Contemplative Practice,” in Modern Theology 21:1 (2005): 141-155.

[15] Denys Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2004), 51, 59, 61.

[16] Steven R. Holmes, “Something Much Too Plain To Say: Towards A Defense of the Doctrine of Simplicity,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie. 43 (2001): 147.

[17] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003), 187-211.

[18] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000), 183-263.

[19] Francesca Aran Murphy, God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 27-81, 237-293.