Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 77:1 (Spring 2015)
Article: Review Article Review Of "God And Necessity", By Brian Leftow
Author: Nathan D. Shannon

WTJ 77:1 (Spring 2015) p. 135

Review Article
Review Of God And Necessity, By Brian Leftow

Nathan D. Shannon

Nathan D. Shannon is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Torch Trinity Graduate University in Seoul, South Korea. He reviews God and Necessity, by Brian Leftow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 575. $110, cloth.

Brian Leftow, Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford, is no lightweight, and his God and Necessity is a formidable treatise on a topic of enduring significance for Christian theism. In Leftow’s own words, the text addresses “the challenge that necessary truths (and ‘modal’ truths more generally . . .) pose for the claim that God is the sole ultimate reality.” The book’s “basic question is ‘How do bodies of necessary (or modal) truth relate to God?’” (p. 27).

Modality deals in necessity and possibility, what is the case and what might be. Modal logic focuses on such sub-disciplines as logical definitions, varieties of necessity and possibility, and the nature of logical truth; modal metaphysics on the nature of thingness—what makes a thing the thing that it is and so what it might be or cannot be (without being something else instead). Modality is an elusive subject matter, surely, particularly for the uninitiated. It is, we might say, a distinctly twentieth-century approach to the tri-partite relation between mind, language, and reality. Accounting for the modal status of worldly things, of all that is not God, constitutes the core of the theist’s interest in the topic. At the end of the day, the question of the relation of God to modality is an important way of probing the nature of God’s relationship to all that is not God.

The principal issue is this: By all accounts, “some truths are absolutely necessary,” but this seems to conflict in one way or another with the idea that “God is the ultimate reality” (pp. 1, 3). In terms of divine ultimacy, we have the general notion that God is “first in duration” (FD):

FD. Before all else existed, God existed, alone, or God and only God did not begin to exist. (p. 4)

And also the notion that “God is the source of all” (GSA):

WTJ 77:1 (Spring 2015) p. 136

GSA. For all x, if x is not God, a part, aspect or attribute of God . . . God makes the creating-ex-nihilo sort of causal contribution to x’s existence as long as x exists. (p. 20)

Conflict with divine ultimacy is evoked by three assumptions:

1. Some strong necessary truths are not about God [“secular” truths, for Leftow] and are not negative existentials. (p. 23)
2. It is always the case that if...
   
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