Theological confusion

[Entropist]

Heard a radio broadcast today where a theolgian (can't recall their name) claimed that "god does not exist, he is existence.". What does that mean? It seems impossibly incoherent and formally invalid. Sounds like newage mumbo jumbo.

Its just word games. But it isn't new, but quite old, and in the West, has its roots in Neo-Platonism (especially Plotinus' Enneads). Pseudo-Dionysius (a pseudonymous writer, possibly a Syrian monk) adapted Plotinus' notion of "The One" for his own Christian purposes. A lot of other Christian theologians and mystics ran with it (Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and later Eckhart, the anonymously-written Cloud of Unknowing, and up to the 20th century with theologians like Paul Tillich).

It is usually connected to what is known as the "apophatic method" or "via negativa," where a Yahweh is understood by what he is not: He is not good, but rather "beyond goodness (and evil)" and also "beyond existence (and non-existence)." This is similar to how the Dao de Jing describes the Dao (particularly in chapter 1).

Pseudo-Dionysius' "The Mystical Theology" is a brief document that sums this all up in a few brief chapters.

All of this is ultimately a verbal slight-of-hand however. The idea runs something like this (this is a paraphrase of Tillich in his Systematic Theology, vol. 1): Yahweh is "the ground of all being"-- existence came into being because of him. As a consequence, Yahweh precedes the categories of "existence" and "non-existence." Therefore Yahweh is not a "being among beings" like a chair or a rock or a planet-- rather he is "beyond being" and so in that sense, Yahweh does not exist. And so to argue for or against the existence of this god is missing the point. Its sort of like metaphysical one-upmanship.

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For the theologians I mentioned above, they would have fallen under a theological category called "pantheism" which is similar to, but identical to, pantheism:

Briefly put, in pantheism, "God is the whole"; in panentheism, "The whole is in God." This means that the Universe in the first formulation is practically the Whole itself, but in the second the universe and God are not ontologically equivalent. In panentheism, God is not necessarily viewed as the creator or demiurge, but the eternal animating force behind the universe, some versions positing the universe as nothing more than the manifest part of God. In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "pervades" or is "in" the cosmos. While pantheism asserts that God and the universe are coextensive, panentheism claims that God is greater than the universe and some forms hold that the universe is contained within God.[2] Hinduism is highly characterized by Panentheism and Pantheism[3].

In other words, more sophistry.