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What is it for there to be a God, and what reason is there for supposing him to conform to the claims of Christian doctrine? In this pivotal volume of his tetralogy, Richard Swinburne builds a rigorous metaphysical system for describing the world, and applies this to assessing the worth of the Christian tenets of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Part I is dedicated to analyzing the categories needed to address accounts of the divine nature--substance, cause, time, and necessity. Part II begins by setting out, in terms of these categories, the fundamental doctrine of Western religions--that there is a God. After pointing out some of the different ways in which this doctrine can be developed, Swinburne spells out the simplest possible account of divine nature. He then goes on to clarify the implications of this account for the specifically Christian doctrines of the Trinity (that God is "three persons in one substance") and of the Incarnation (that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ). Swinburne finds that there are good reasons to believe the Christian additions to the core Western idea of God. The Christian God builds upon Swinburne's acclaimed previous work to form a self-contained text which will no doubt become a classic in the philosophy of religion.

This book offers original essays by leading philosophers of religion representing these new approaches to theological problems such as incarnation.

According to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the Son of God is truly but only contingently a human being. But is it also the case that Christ’s individual human nature is only contingently united to a divine person? The affirmative answer to this question, explicitly espoused by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, turns out to be philosophically untenable, while the negative answer, which is arguably implicit in St. Thomas Aquinas, explication of the Incarnation, has some surprising and significant metaphysical consequences.

According to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the Son of God is truly but only contingently a human being. But is it also the case that Christ’s individual human nature is only contingently united to a divine person? The affirmative answer to this question, explicitly espoused by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, turns out to be philosophically untenable, while the negative answer, which is arguably implicit in St. Thomas Aquinas, explication of the Incarnation, has some surprising and significant metaphysical consequences.

1 Proponents of the ST strategy include Timothy Bartel, “Could There Be More Than One Almighty?” Religious Studies 29 (1993): 465–95, and “Could There Be More Than One Lord?” Faith and Philosophy 11 (1994): 357–78; David Brown, The Divine Trinity (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985), and “Trinitarian Personhood and Individuality,” in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, ed. R. Feenstra and C. Plantinga (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 48–78; Stephen Davis, “A Somewhat Playful Proof of the Social Trinity in Five Easy Steps,” Philosophia Christi 1, no. 2 (1999): 103–5; Peter Forrest, “Divine Fission: A New Way of Moderating Social Trinitiarianism,” Religious Studies 34 (1998): 281–97; C. Stephen Layman, “Tritheism and the Trinity,” Faith and Philosophy 5 (1988): 291–8; Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., “Gregory of Nyssa and the Social Analogy of the Trinity,” Thomist 50 (1986): 325–52, “The Threeness/Oneness Problem of the Trinity,” Calvin Theological Journal 23 (1988): 37–53, and “Social Trinity and Tritheism,” in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, 21–47; Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); and C. J. F. Williams, “Neither Confounding the Persons nor Dividing the Substance,” in Reason and the Christian Religion: Essays in Honor of Richard Swinburne, ed. Alan Padgett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 227–43. The position is also commonly attributed to the Cappadocian Fathers. See especially Brown, Divine Trinity; Plantinga “Gregory of Nyssa and the Social Analogy of the Trinity,” and H. A. Wolfson, Faith, Trinity, Incarnation, vol. 1, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).