From God to Matter and Back

Meine Veldman has done us a great service by this reflection on Leibniz's worldview. He takes us by the hand through the thinking of Leibniz and opens it up step by step. First of all he shows that Leibniz intended an all encompassing synthetic vision of God and the world. He distanced himself from Descartes' dualism and Spinoza's monism. The starting point of his thinking is the correlation of God and spirit, a model for the relationship between soul and body. Veldman also...
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Meine Veldman has done us a great service by this reflection on Leibniz's worldview. He takes us by the hand through the thinking of Leibniz and opens it up step by step. First of all he shows that Leibniz intended an all encompassing synthetic vision of God and the world. He distanced himself from Descartes' dualism and Spinoza's monism. The starting point of his thinking is the correlation of God and spirit, a model for the relationship between soul and body.
Veldman also shows, secondly, how Leibniz came to his view that God would have created the best possible world. The consequence of this view is that evil is ultimately necessary to arrive at the best possible world.
These principles lead to a judgment from a Christian perspective. Then it turns out that Jesus is only an answer to human limitations and that God is a magnification of the human spirit. The personal covenant God disappears, as do the radical notions of sin, justification, faith and conversion. The relationship with one's fellowman also disappears.
Anyone who wants to understand our post-modern culture will find a good place in this clear and simply written book.

Dr. Willem van Vlastuin
Chair of Theology and Spirituality of Reformed Protestantism
Faculty of Religion and Theology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Trying to understand our times without G.W. Leibniz and his contributions would mean missing an important link in the development of thought in the West. His determination to articulate a system of philosophy in which he attempted to include the past as well as the present by rehabilitating old philosophical notions and integrating them with modern mechanical philosophy of his own time has been underestimated in its comprehensiveness and contribution. For this reason, it is well worth re-visiting his system of thought in our times, which the author does in the first part of this monograph on G.W. Leibniz.

In the second part, the author shows that some recent attempts to rehabilitate Leibniz as a faithful Augustinian or supporter of genuine Christian theology are, however, examples of a misreading of his system of thought. Although he should be re-appreciated for his contributions to mathematics, logic, and the universal language of the virtual world, his attempt to reconcile the God of Scriptures with the method and spirit of modernity reveals that a synthesis between revelational theology and the God of Jesus Christ with modern human subjectivity and its basic principles ultimately leads to a deformation of the Christian faith and a diminishing of Orthodox Christianity. In fact, this may have contributed to the 'death' of the covenant God of Sacred Scripture in the West.

Meine Veldman is a professor of Systematic Theology in the Reformed tradition at the Faculté de Théologie Évangélique of Montréal associated with the University of Acadia, Nova Scotia, Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has taught courses in theology, ethics, and apologetics since 2004. His engagement with the history of philosophy and its relation to Christian theology stems from his studies at the University of Waterloo (Canada), where he obtained degrees in philosophy, religious studies, and theology.

Meine Veldman has published works on theological issues like the doctrine of justification and modern theologians such as Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He lives in Laval (Québec, Canada) with Esther his wife and their seven children. He has also been a pastor since 2004 and preaches regularly in Reformed and Evangelical churches.