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require "logical self-consistency as one of the necessary conditions for the truth of any
assertion."
68
He then gives two examples of what he believes to be hopeless contradictions in
classical theism. First, this tradition has long maintained both that God freely created all things,
and yet that everything he does is a function of his simple, eternal, necessary being which would
seem to exclude all contingent events like a novel creation. Similarly, the classical God has
created humans to serve and glorify him, and yet because this God exists in perfect bliss, he is
completely unaffected by all that we do; our sin or suffering do not touch him, so that he must be
wholly indifferent to our welfare. Ogden terms these "antinomies" and suggests they are
incoherent because "they both deny and affirm that God's relation to the world is real and that he
is relevant to its life because it is relevant to his."
69
Ogden offers another vision of God, what he called in the 60's "a secular faith," which
cuts loose the self-sufficiency notions of God from the relational, offering a God who he says is
genuinely related to our life so that we and our actions make a difference in his actual being. He
goes on to say that it is logically impossible to speak of the significance of human actions
without this kind of God.
70
Notably, he accuses classical theism of onesidedness. Since it
focused exclusively on God's transcendence, it is therefore required to deny that God is really
related to our life at all. Ogden acknowledges that classical theists call God Father and refer to
their relationship with him. But this can be nothing more than appearance, since God's
relationality is logically incompatiable with his aseity, something classical theists themselves
prove when they speak of the "anthropomorophic" qualities of God. "God is not really
relational, he merely looks like he is;" so ultimately God is entirely untouched by us. Instead,
Ogden argues for a "dipolar God," one who is both supremely relative to us (relational) and