Abstract:
The essence of deities has captured our imaginations for as long as we can
remember. Does a God exist, or is the divine entity just a figment of our dreams, a
projection? Is God what Aribiah Attoe calls a “regressively eternal and material
entity” or what Gericke calls “a character of fiction with no counterpart outside the
worlds of text and imagination”? This paper aims to wrestle with those questions
from a theological perspective and to look at the ontological status of Yahweh and
how that worldview lends itself to African Traditional Religions in conversation
with Attoe's method of inquiry from the perspective of African Metaphysics. This
paper aims to be a part of the larger project undertaken by the author, showing that
philosophy can and should be an auxiliary discipline in Old Testament Studies as
it has been seen, both fields have ways of similar arguing and coming to the same
conclusions. This paper is intended to be an interlocutory exercise or experiment
and does not seek to validate any hypothesis about either view.
