In God, Purpose, and Reality, John Bishop and Ken Perszyk set out to defend a non-personalist understanding of theism. They call their version of theistic non-personalism ‘euteleological theism’. According to euteleological theism, God cannot be identified with ‘any entity in fundamental ontology’ (p. 174). Rather, for reality to be ‘the God-way’ is for reality to be directed towards ‘a supremely good overall purpose’ (p. 2).

Before getting into the details of Bishop and Perszyk’s proposal, there are two important things to note about their overall project. First, they do not intend to make a case for the truth of euteleological theism – they simply aim to defend it as a viable metaphysical framework for practitioners within the traditions of Abrahamic theism. That is, they argue, euteleological theism is at least on par with the alternatives. Second, as to these alternatives, the main opponents of Bishop and Perszyk are those analytic philosophers of religion who subscribe to what the authors call ‘personal omniGod theism’. According to personal omniGod theism, God is – more or less, anyways – a disembodied person who has such properties as omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience.

What, according to Bishop and Perszyk, makes euteleological theism – or any theistic metaphysic – a viable framework for practitioners of Abrahamic religions? While they recognise that philosophical coherence is one requirement, their main focus is on the religious adequacy of metaphysical frameworks: a theistic metaphysics should be such that it coheres with existing religious practices and attitudes (petitionary prayer, worship, trust and love towards God, holy living). This is an interesting and not so often made argument that deserves serious attention.

Based on this, Bishop and Perszyk motivate their quest of seeking an alternative to personal omniGod theism by arguing that personal omniGod theism is religiously inadequate, especially when it comes to answering a version of the problem of evil. They argue that to ‘be the proper object of worship a personal God must have perfect, flawless, personal goodness’ (p. 30). That is, God’s goodness is subject to similar standards as the goodness of other personal agents. What’s more, if God is conceived in personal terms, then human beings, too, should be capable of relating to God in the second-personal mode, person to person, and this relation should be marked by such as attitudes as trust and love. However, a personal God who

As Bishop and Perszyk see it, the only workable way out of this dilemma for the theist is to deny that God is a personal being who relates to creatures person to person; there’s no one ‘out there’ who would fail to be good to us.Footnote ² This need to reconceptualise God in non-personal terms motivates the euteleological position.

But what exactly is the euteleological conception of theism that Bishop and Perszyk argue could avoid their version of the problem of evil? It is, it seems, an account that has two central components. First, there is a claim about the nature of reality as a whole. This claim is that ‘the world has, and exists for the sake of achieving, some ultimate unified purpose or unified set of purposes’ and this unified purpose is the supreme good (p. 61). Bishop and Perszyk develop this claim in a distinct manner. For them reality is not given an ultimate purpose or existence by something or someone we call God but rather its existence and purpose are inherent to the nature of the real itself (p. 67). ‘According to euteleology, the essence, or “what-it-is”, of “being real” is existing for the sake of making the supreme good concretely real.’ (p. 67) The universe, in other words, exists ‘because it does what it’s for’: its inherent purpose is the reason for its existence (p. 70). Concrete existence, in other words, explains itself and is in no need of an explanation that stands apart from it (p. 75).

One might wonder how to make sense of this type of causality that brings things into being via an ultimate telos without any reference to an efficient cause. How could anything come into existence by the virtue of its end? Well, Bishop and Perszyk argue that their view is no worse than the others: any attempt to explain why there is anything at all will have to stretch our metaphysical imaginations. ‘The actuality of the entire Universe is a unique kind of explanandum, so a unique kind of explanans must surely be in order’ (p. 71).

This gets us to the second central component of euteleological theism, e.g. the theism part. For one might wonder where is God in all this: is God simply a way of referring to reality as this kind of inherently teleological entity? That would seem to court atheism, cancelling the theistic component of Bishop and Perszyk’s account. The authors recognise this. Is God, then, to be identified with the ultimate purpose itself or some ‘energy’ that directs things towards it? No, say Bishop and Perszyk, for that would be to identify God with some discrete ontological category, thus rendering God thing-like, a being among beings. What is God then? The answer is that we cannot say: God is not to be identified with any ontological entity or category. Whatever God ‘is’ seems to be, as it were, ‘between the lines of the universe’, both nowhere and everywhere. God’s mode of being is utterly ineffable and unique.

Hence, although from the start Bishop and Perszyk market their brand of theism as a non-personalist account of God, during the course of the book it turns out that actually the central theistic claim is not about divine personalism as such. Rather, it’s about the complete otherness and ineffability of the divine being. Specifically, the distinct euteleological theological commitment seems to be the refusal to identify God with any discrete ontological category or entity, even analogously.

On analogy, then. Bishop and Perszyk make much of it, arguing that euteleological theism allows us to preserve our religious language about God more or less intact on the surface level as long as we keep in mind that it is ‘radically analogous’. Bishop and Perszyk seem to think of their view of analogy as radical because in their use ‘the very thought of God as an entity amongst entities is itself possible only by a process of extending by analogy our mundane “thing-property” schema to apply to ultimate reality itself’ (p. 103). I must admit that I struggle to see why this makes Bishop and Perszyk’s view radical, for it seems like a claim that most so-called classical theists who think of theological language in analogical terms would agree with.

Perhaps, then, the radical character of Bishop and Perszyk’s proposal, if it really is radical, stems from their refusal to identify God in ontological terms. For them there is no ‘final destination’ terminology that would allow us to make the ontological claim, even analogously, ‘and that’s what everyone calls God’. God as a concept and a thought is always on the move; theological negation goes on and on – God is ‘not this’, ‘not that’, ‘not this either’ – without, perhaps, ever quite reaching the via eminentiae. This leaves open the question as to how we know what makes our statements about God true, since, as Bishop and Perszyk argue, we cannot specify ‘the truth-makers in basic euteleological ontology’ (p. 111). However, the authors argue that this is not a deficiency for the euteleological view since analogous use of language, even with radically unspecified truth-makers, is sufficient to ground the truthfulness of theological claims in practice (p. 112).

Having clarified euteleological metaphysics and their radical take on analogy, Bishop and Perszyk spend the last chapters of their book defending the religious adequacy of euteleological theism. The problem of evil is dissolved because God is not a personal agent, although euteleological theism still needs to explain where evil comes from. Bishop’s and Perszyk’s explanation follows along the lines of standard accounts of evil as metaphysically nihil. This nihil of evil is not permitted by anyone called ‘God’ but rather emerges quite inevitably – although not necessarily in the logical sense – from ‘any finite natural processes capable of yielding instantiations of the agapeistic supreme good’ (p. 151). Since God is not to be identified with any ontological category, God’s actions, too, are not to be identified as distinct from the actions of created agents. Rather, in acting in accordance with agapeistic love, created agents align themselves with – indeed, become – God’s salvific work in the world toward reaching reality’s ultimate supreme good.

As to religious practices and attitudes – such as worship and petitionary prayer – Bishop and Perszyk argue that these can be left more or less as they are, as long as we keep in mind the radically analogous character of theological language. They write:

Once again this seems quite close to classical theistic conceptions, but the difference seems to be lodged in what exactly this is taken to mean. Here we come back to God and personhood. In Bishop’s and Perszyk’s understanding worship cannot be a matter of second-personal encounter with someone we call God. At best, language of second-personal encounters is radically analogical to the extent, it seems, that it’s best conceived not so much as analogical as metaphorical.

Bishop and Perszyk might resist this characterisation. For they do say that denying that God is a person is not the same as saying that God is impersonal (p. 112). God transcends the whole dichotomy; we negate the negation. Once again, quite standard. However, traditionally this via negativa is then coupled with via eminentiae – the perfections of personhood subsist in God super-eminently in a mode that is appropriate to the divine being. We do not know how for we do not know what God is. However, this does give quite robust metaphysical grounds in saying that God is, indeed, someone that human persons can encounter as a ‘you’. God is as it were ‘capable’ of second-personal encounters, although we cannot specify how. Bishop and Perszyk seem to deny this – indeed, they must deny it, because otherwise they end up facing a modified form of their own version of the problem of evil that motivated much of the whole quest for an alternative to a personalist understanding of God.

However, denying that God is someone to whom we can relate in second-personal terms seems to many practitioners within the Abrahamic traditions religiously inadequate. Indeed, it seems like denying some of the most central elements of their spirituality. In addition, it remains unclear how some tradition-specific claims – such as Christological claims God’s specific actions within history – fit into Bishop’s and Perszyk’s euteleological theism. Hence, contrary to what Bishop and Perszyk claim, their euteleological theism does seem to require some rather radical re-engineering of at least the meaning of religious practices, if not their surface level content.

Bishop and Perszyk set personal omniGod theism as their main opponent in the book. It provides a clear contrast but perhaps not the kind that best illuminates what euteleological theism is about. The decision to focus on personal omniGod theism is, of course, justified by the fact that it is quite popular amongst certain circles of analytic philosophy of religion. Nevertheless, I can’t help wondering if disagreeing with the Thomists would be even more interesting and illuminating. Perhaps such disagreements are something the authors will take up in books yet to be written.