The above is a short clip by William Lane Craig in which he tries to justify his advocacy of “perfect being theology,” originally proposed by St. Anselm apparently. Here is the transcript (emphasis added):
“It is very interesting that St. Anselm did not in fact define God as the ‘greatest conceivable being’. That is the gloss that Christian philosophers usually put on it; but Anselm himself said God is ‘greater than what we can conceive’. He is beyond our conceptions. And so his definition of God was that God is a being than which a greater cannot be conceived. That is an awkward locution, but it is hard to rephrase it any other way. God is a being than which a greater cannot be conceived. In other words, Anselm would say, You cannot conceive of anything greater than God, but nevertheless God is greater than anything you can conceive. And that is perfectly consistent. So yes, God is even greater than the greatest of our conceptions.”
That is philosophy, not theology. True theology is based on the revelations of God—on scripture. And in scripture, God has given us all the information we need about himself to be able to believe in him, trust him, exercise faith in him, keep his commandments, repent of our sins, and be saved. Philosophy has zero contribution to make to the development of Christian theology. God either reveals himself, or he remains unknown. We can only know God, or about God, to the extent that he has chosen to reveal himself in scripture. “Perfect being theology” is purely a philosophical innovation, and therefore can provide us with no true information about God. It is an attempt at defining God as man imagines him to be, rather than as God has chosen to reveal himself to man. I prefer to know about God as he has chosen to reveal himself, rather than as man has chosen to speculate about him—according to man’s own intellect and imagination. God can only be known on the basis of his own revelations to man, rather than on man’s philosophical speculation about God. There is no such thing as “perfect being theology;” or if there is, it is man-made; it is not based on the revelations of God—or on how God has defined himself to be. True theology can only be based on the revelations of God to man, which includes the Bible; and in the case of Latter-day Saints, also the modern scriptures of the restored Church—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My advice to him is to abandon his philosophical speculations, and stick with the word of God instead. No true Christian theology exists, or can exist outside of, or independent from the revelations of God.
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