I first offer a broad taxonomy of models of divine omnipresence in the Christian tradition, both past and present. I then examine the recent model proposed by Hud Hudson (2009Hudson ( , 2014 and Alexander Pruss (2013)-ubiquitous entension-and flag a worry with their account that stems from predominant analyses of the concept of 'material object'. I then attempt to show that ubiquitous entension has a rich Latin medieval precedent in the work of Augusine and Anselm. I argue that the model of omnipresence explicated by Augustine and Anselm has the resources to avoid the noted worry by offering an alternative account of the divide between the immaterial and the material. I conclude by considering a few alternative analyses of 'material object' that make conceptual room for a contemporary Christian theist to follow suite in thinking that at least some immaterial entities are literally spatially located when relating to the denizens of spacetime.At the heart of many a theistic metaphysic is the view that an exhaustive inventory of reality consists of both material and immaterial entities, and that these two domains interact in some way or other. There is, however, surprisingly little discussion at the intersection of contemporary metaphysics and philosophical theology concerning the precise nature and relationship between the material and the immaterial and its bearing on Christian theology.This was not always the case. Medieval philosophical reflection was replete with discussion on the nature of the relationship between God, angels, and the human soul and the material domain. In fact, according to Robert Pasnau (2011a), the medieval scholastics were largely in agreement that immaterial entities, though lacking in material content are, strictly speaking, spatially located or present in some sense or other when relating to material reality. The question that preoccupied medieval philosophical theologians, then, was not whether such entities were spatially located or present in their dealings with material beings, but rather, how they were located as such. This, of course, assumes an understanding of the material-immaterial divide that is largely foreign to the contemporary context. Yet it is one that is both philosophically interesting, theologically fruitful, and by my lights worthy of serious consideration once again. * For a representative writing sample please consult the introduction, §2, and §4.

Plenitude, roughly, the thesis that for any non-empty region of spacetime there is a material object that is exactly located at that region, is often thought to be part and parcel of the standard Lewisian package in the metaphysics of persistence. While the wedding of plentitude and Lewisian four-dimensionalism is a natural one indeed, there are a hand-full of dissenters who argue against the notion that Lewisian fourdimensionalism has exclusive rights to plentitude. These 'promiscuous' three-dimensionalists argue that a temporalized version of plenitude is entirely compatible with a three-dimensional ontology of enduring entities. While few would deny the coherence of such a position, and much work has been done by its proponents to appease critics, there has been surprisingly little by way of exploring the various forms such an ontology might take as well as the potential advantages of one plenitudinous three-dimensional ontology over another. Here I develop a novel form of plenitudinous three-dimensionalism, what John Hawthorne (2006) has called "Neo-Aristotelian Plenitude," and argue that if one is inclined to endorse an abundant three-dimensional ontology, one is wise to opt for a plenitude of accidental unities. 1 Diachronic Plenitude Let's begin by defining a modal occupation profile as a function from worlds to sets of non-empty regions of spacetime in those worlds: each world w is assigned a set of filled regions of spacetime in w. The modal occupation profile of w, then, is the set of filled spacetime regions in w, call it P w. 1 With this in mind, we can then define the thesis of plenitude as follows:

No abstract

All Biblical quotations in this chapter are from the English Standard Version of the Bible.

No abstract