Theology for Equivocators

Abstract

This essay concerns glut-theoretic theology. Glut-theoretic theists hold that God exists and that some statements about him are both true and false at once. Thus, glut-theoretic theology rejects the principle of semantic bivalence—that every statement is either true or false, never both—a pillar of classical propositional logic. Good theology, they argue, may require maintaining that a statement about God both is and is not the case. Though initially shocking, this view has ancient roots and new advocates in analytic theology. I offer two arguments here for a specific form of glut-theoretic theism: one novel, addressing paradoxes of classical metatheology; the other medieval, examining Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s glut-theoretic response to divine ineffability.