The God of Abraham, Isaac, and (William) James

I came across an interesting paper by David Paulsen about some of the work of William James. I find it interesting as it is in agreement with my thoughts on classical christian theology for pretty much the same reasons.

My own thinking is summarized by the Savior's command:

"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. "
Matthew 5:48

How can we be perfect, like the father, if God is as taught by classical christianity?

Paulsen's paper is found at the link following:

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and (William) James
by David Paulsen, "The Journal of Speculative Philosophy" 13.2 (1999) 114-146

From the paper:

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has often been distinguished from the god of the philosophers. 1 The latter is allegedly only a human conception--a product of rational theologizing, with no explicit basis in biblical revelation. While the philosophers' God is variously conceived, it is usually said to be, among other things, absolutely unlimited in all respects, wholly other, absolutely simple, immaterial, nonspatial, nontemporal, immutable, and impassible. 2 By way of contrast, the biblical record describes the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as "the living God" 3 who created man in his "own image and likeness" (Gen. 1:26), who spoke with Moses "face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Exod. 33:11). He is the loving God who is profoundly "touched with the feeling of our infirmities" (Heb. 4:15) and salvifically involved in our individual and collective lives.

Not all philosophers have accepted the philosophers' God. Some reject this God on strictly logical grounds. For instance, Anthony Kenny argues that the God who is the product of rational theologizing is, ironically, irrational--an incoherent concept, a logically impossible being (1979, 121-22).

One of the more articulate dissenters from the God of the classical theistic tradition is William James, the American pragmatist. For James, there was a sharp contrast between the God of the Bible and the God of orthodox theology. He drew this contrast in a letter to Henry Rankin dated 10 June l903: "[T]he Bible itself, in both its testaments . . . seems to me by its intense naturalness and humanness, the most fatal document that one can read against the orthodox theology, in so far as the latter claims the words of the Bible to be its basis." But James rejected the god of orthodox theology, not because he thought the concept unbiblical and not because he thought it logically incoherent, 4 but because he found it devoid of significant practical meaning. In this paper, I set out by clarifying James's criterion of pragmatic meaning, then sketch his arguments against the God of the philosophers based thereon, and, finally, show that the God who survives James's critique seems very much like the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."