Theopedia

Theism

Definition

Theism is the doctrine that one personal God exists: the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of all things, who is exalted above his creation and yet genuinely present and active within it.1 Any position that denies such a God is, by definition, anti-theistic.1 Theism is not distinctively Christian, since Judaism and Islam also hold it, but Christianity affirms it as the ground every other Christian doctrine depends on: a God who does not exist, or is not personal, or has no real relation to the world he made, could not be the God the rest of Scripture goes on to describe.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession opens its doctrine of God with theism’s own claim: “The Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of himself, infinite in being and perfection… who is immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute.”2 The confession then states God’s relation to creation in immanent terms: he is “the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things.”3 The Westminster Confession and Larger Catechism follow the same pattern, stating the same basic theism before any distinctively Christian or Reformed doctrine follows.

Biblical Basis

Scripture states theism’s most basic claim, God’s oneness, as a creedal confession Israel repeated: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. 6:4).4 At Athens, Paul preached to Stoic philosophers who held that a divine reason pervades the whole created order, a view close to pantheism.5 Rather than accept their framework, Paul quoted a line from their own poets, “in him we live and move and have our being,” to make a different point: creatures depend entirely on God, not the other way around, so that living “in” God does not mean God lives in us as one more part of the created world.5 The same speech states theism’s other half: the God who “made the world and everything in it” is not confined to temples or represented by idols of “gold or silver or stone,” yet he “is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:24-29). Jeremiah holds transcendence and immanence together as a single question God asks his people: “Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God afar off?… Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord” (Jer. 23:23-24). Paul elsewhere argues that God’s existence and “eternal power and divine nature” are evident enough in what he has made that no one has an excuse for denying him (Rom. 1:19-20).

Opposing Views

Charles Hodge classified every alternative to theism, whatever its detail, as a species of one error: denying that an extramundane, personal God exists and governs all things.1 Three alternatives recur often enough to name individually.

Atheism denies God’s existence outright. Hodge treats it as essentially negative, a claim with no positive content of its own beyond the denial: “It simply denies what Theism asserts. The proof of Theism is, therefore, the refutation of Atheism.”1 See Atheism for the position’s own history and arguments.

Deism affirms a Creator but denies his ongoing involvement in the world he made. Bavinck describes deism as a system in which “the primary cause is restricted to the original creation,” leaving no room for real, continuing divine action afterward.6 See Deism.

Pantheism identifies God with the universe itself rather than distinguishing Creator from creature. Where deism removes God too far from the world, pantheism collapses the two together: on Bavinck’s account, pantheism treats all apparent secondary causes as identical with the one primary cause, God, so that “there are only phenomena, representations,” with God alone as the underlying reality.6 Bavinck states theism’s advantage over both errors in a single sentence: “Unlike pantheism which denies creation, or deism which denies providence, theism maintains both and attempts… to elucidate both the unity and the distinction between the two.”6 See Pantheism.

Theism is also usually paired with monotheism rather than polytheism, the claim that many gods exist. Hodge traces polytheism historically to a departure from an original monotheism, as nations lost the knowledge of God as Creator and began worshiping the created order instead.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Anti-Theistic Theories,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 241: “As Theism is the doctrine of an extramundane, personal God, the creator, preserver, and governor of all things, any doctrine which denies the existence of such a Being is anti-theistic. Not only avowed Atheism, therefore, but Polytheism, Hylozoism, Materialism, and Pantheism, belong to the class of anti-theistic theories.” On atheism as purely negative: “It simply denies what Theism asserts. The proof of Theism is, therefore, the refutation of Atheism.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 2. ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VI. The Trinity,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 444: “There is one only living and true God, or divine Being. The religion of the Bible stands opposed not only to Atheism, but to all forms of polytheism. The Scriptures everywhere assert that Jehovah alone is God.” ↩

  5. Samuel G. Parkison, The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God, ed. Matthew Barrett, Contemplating God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2026), chap. 2, “Creation’s Independent Creator,” 25-26: “When Paul was at the Areopagus in Athens, he addressed the Stoics, the philosophical school that believed that the divine logos (or ‘reason’) runs through all of creation (similar to what we today call pantheism, the belief that all of creation is God)… Rather than pamper the Stoics in their puny portrayal of God as radically connected to and contained within creation, Paul baptized a Stoic phrase to reinforce the independent transcendence of God.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Anti-Theistic Theories,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 243: “Monotheism was the original religion of our race… The first departure from monotheism seems to have been nature worship. As men lost the knowledge of God as creator, they were led to reverence the physical elements with which they were in conflict.” ↩