In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading BayleJohn Christian LaursenThomas M. Lennon. Reading Bayle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 202. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95.One of the more philosophically interesting things about Pierre Bayle is the difficulty of interpreting his work. A myriad of interpretations have been advanced, but "the whole is [still] a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery"—to apply David Hume's famous judgment about religion to Bayle's work. This (...) book proposes a Bakhtinian reading of Bayle's philosophical activity, which means that Bayle is understood as letting his interlocutors speak for themselves in an ongoing dialogue over which he does not have full control and in which no one "wins." Bakhtin thought that Dostoevsky was the first major author to do this, but Lennon shows that he was anticipated by Bayle.The discussion is broken up into sections on Bayle's views of integrity, authority, toleration, idolatry, and providence. Integrity turns out to be largely a matter of honesty and fairness in dialogue, and at times it sounds like Bayle is prefiguring Habermas and discourse ethics or recent Anglo-American theories of deliberative democracy.Bayle's view of authority emerges from his analysis of the fact/law (fait/droit) distinction. [End Page 278] This was part of larger debates among Jansenists, Jesuits, and other philosophers such as Arnauld and Malebranche. Here, Lennon's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century philosophy is put to good use. He shows that in Bayle's hands the distinction cannot hold up, as questions of fact and law are always mutually dependent and each can undermine the other. The upshot is that in the absence of truths of fact or law, dialogue is all that we have. That is good, because history cannot be used as a tool of oppression or homogenization if dialogue must go on forever.Some of the claims about Bayle that are advanced here are debatable. That Bayle "treated everyone with dignity" (44) is simply not true of his treatment of millenarians and others that he thought were fanatics. Rather than extending "toleration almost without limit" (74), he was downright intolerant of such folks. Lennon suggests that Bayle may not have fully thought through the question of the conscientious persecutor (85n.). It would have been appropriate to mention Bayle's reflections on this matter in his last work, the Réponse aux questions d'un provincial.The book contains valuable accounts of aspects of Bayle's debates with Pierre Jurieu, in which it often emerges that there was no great gulf of principle between the two arch-enemies. Disagreements with Ruth Whelan and Elisabeth Labrousse add to the interest of Lennon's discussion.Idolatry is one of Bayle's chief targets, and he finds it above all in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Lennon nicely shows how this amounts to Spinozism, which in turn explains Bayle's hostility to both Spinoza and Rome. Both stifle Bakhtinian dialogue.One very interesting section of the book is on lotteries, which have important theological and philosophical significance. Often-forgotten authors like Barbeyrac, Ricotier, and Leti are discussed on this issue. Insights here include the observation that "it is hard to imagine Bayle praying" (146). Indeed it is. Mention of work by I. Hont, T. Hochstrasser, and others on Barbeyrac would have made Lennon's case stronger.One major conclusion is that Bayle's notion of providence and the problem of evil comes down to dialogue as well: evil emerges because God prefers to engage in open-ended dialogue with his creatures, which allows evil even if that is not God's intention (167). On this reading, we have a Kantian Bayle: autonomy is Bayle's most cherished value (182).Lennon's final evaluation of Bayle's fideism is that it is philosophically unsatisfactory. Blind and nonrational reliance on Scripture is, to say the least, undermined by Bayle's inability to establish that God is its author or to found his own beliefs in any way other than education. But if anybody still thinks that Pierre Bayle was merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right, this book and a lot of the other recent... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SCRIPTURAL GROUNDS FOR CONCRETE MORAL NORMS 1. Is JJ1oral Theology Really Theology? 0 BE CHRISTIAN theology moral theology ought to be firmly grounded in the Bible as understood in the living tradition of the Church. Yet the moralist who asks help from the biblicist today is to be met with a host cf objections.1 I will mention eight I have encountered: l) Attempts to develop a biblical theology unified (...) by some central concept such as promise fulfillrnent, salvation history, or liberation have all broken down. The Bible contains many diverse, even contradictory, or at least dialectically opposed theologies and ethical To harmonize them is to distort them.2 1 See Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, S.J., eds., The Use of Scriptures in Moral Theology (Readings in Moral Theology No. 4. New York: Paulist, 1984) for a representative selection of essays, and Robert J. DaLy, S.J. in cooperation with.J. A. Fischer, C.M., T. J. Keegan, O.P., A..J. Tambasco, L. J. Topel, S.J., and F. E. Schuele, Christian Biblical Ethfos Ji'rorn Biblical Revelation to Contemporary Christian Praxis, Method and Content {New York: Paulist, 1984) for a more systematic argument.. In these notes these will be referred to as US and CBE. See also William C. Spohn, S.J., What Are '!'hey Saying About Bcriptiire a,nd Ethics? (New York: Paulist, 1983) ; David Kelsey, Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia : Fortress, 1975); and Bruce C. Birch and Larry Rasmussen, Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life (l\finneapolis: Augsburg, 1976). Valuable hermeneutical suggestions ·will be found in Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Moral Teaching of the New Testarnent (New York: Seabury, 1973) and the two works of Pierre Grelot, Sens Oh1·etien de l'Ancien Testarnent 2nd ed. (Paris: Desclee, 1962) and Problemes de ilforale JJ'ondarnentale: Un eclairar1e biblique (Paris: Cerf, 1982) and the essa\)'s in :M:. Gilbert, J. L'Hour and,J. Scharbet, Morale et Ancien Testament, (Universite Catholique du Louvain, 1976). 2 See H. G. Reventlow, Problems of Old Testament Theology in the Twen· tieth Cent·ury (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985, pp. 44,65; 125-133, and 1 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. 2) The predominant literary form of the Bible which holds it together is narrative. How then can we draw moral principles from such narratives? To treat them as cautionary tales with an obvious moral does great injustice to their psychological richness and moral ambiguity.3 3) The Bible primarily uses not a literal but a symbolic type of language appropriate to the mysteries it reveals. These symbols or images can mold ethical attitudes and affections but they cannot be reduced to literal concrete moral norms without danger of distortion.4 4) Granted that both Testaments contain many prescriptive statements, they are so embedded in their historical contexts and so related to situations that are now obsolete, that it is impossible to believe they oblige us today. Can we really believe that women must be veiled (I Cor 11: 10) or that slaves should obey their masters (Ti 2: 9)? 5 5) The early Church, and perhaps Jesus himself, expected the eschaton within a lifetime. Consequently, the New Testament provides only an " interim ethics " which is useless as a guide in a continuing sinful world.6 6) We read in Ephesians 2: 15 that Jesus "in his own flesh John H. Hayes and Frederick Prussner, Old Testament Theology: Its Nature and Development (Atlanta: John Knox, 1985), especially pp. 254-279 for a discussion of the search for a unifying concept for the Bible and its present status. s James A. Fischer, C.M., "Story and Image", CBE, pp. 156-169. 4 CBE, pp. 289-295. 5 Thus James M. Gustafson, in an influential article, "The Place of Scripture in Christian Ethics: A Methodological Study" (US, pp. 151-177) distinguishes the uses of Scripture as moral law, as moral ideal, as moral analogy, and finally what he calls its "loose" use to inspire reflection on current problems. He is especially critical of the first method and gives preference to the last. s" To put the matter most sharply, Jesus does not provide a valid ethics for today. His... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:324 BOOK REVIEWS Reading in Communion: Scripture & Ethics in Christian Life. By STEPHEN E. FowL & L. GREGORY JONES. Series: Biblical Foundations in Theology. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1991. Pp. ix + 166. $13.95 (paper). This book represents the collaborative attempt of a biblical scholar and an ethicist to determine the precise sense in which scriptural texts can be taken as normative for the Christian (...) moral life. The collabora· tion is a fruitful one, its results illuminating not only the problem of method in ethics, but issues of biblical hermeneutics as well. This re· sult is not serendipitous; for the authors, the question of how one ought to live the Christian life and the question of how one ought to interpret Scripture are inextricably linked. Indeed, perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that, on the account that Fowl and Jones supply, these are different formulations of the very same question. There is no rigid demarcation here between the hermeneutical and the ethical realm, no rigorous sorting out of issues appropriate to each field of inquiry. The authors make good on their introductory promise "to write a single text " rather than simply to generate a series of " alternating perspectives " (p. 3). In the very first chapter of the book, certain typical, even dominant, ways of construing the relationship between Scripture and ethics are briefly reviewed and then rejected. Ethics is commonly perceived as being primarily "concerned with right actions and decisions," the authors contend, while the Bible is viewed as a moral guide for the " particular decisions made by isolated individuals " (p. 5). In contrast, Fowl and Jones argue that " Scripture is primarily addressed not to individuals but to specific communities called into being by God " (p. 8). Moreover, our ethical deliberations ought not to be focused on particular decisions and the formulation of moral principles that bear on those decisions, but rather, on " issues of character and the formation of character in and through socially-embodied traditions" (p. 9). The consequences of such a general position are carefully and sen· sitively explored in this first and in subsequent chapters. The authors reject the assumption that one such consequence must be the conclusion that moral behavior is not, after all, ruled behavior, that one cannot formulate and articulate the principles that govern much of what we do. Their position entails the conclusion, rather, that such principles cannot be meaningfully detached from the communally embodied traditions that engender them. Indeed, they have meaning at all only in· sofar as the individuals describing, interpreting and employing these BOOK REVIEWS 325 principles possess the peculiar habits and beliefs characteristic of the :members of a specific community. In the analysis of any given moral situation, then, the discussion of principles will necessarily presuppose.a discussion of character, of the sorts of persons involved in the situation, their moral beliefs and capabilities. It is important to note that this discussion will often take a narrative form, precisely because the delineation of character is most readily accomplished by telling stories about persons, about their communities, their politics and practices, their interests and aspirations. Thus, moral capabilities are formed in " the friendships and prac-.tices " that constitute communal life. In asserting this, the authors defend an important but not terribly controversial claim. What is especially intriguing and insightful about their account, however, is the reIated claim that moral capabilities are also hermeneutical capabilities, that some of the patterns and habits of action acquired by living in a·Community also function as habits of interpretation. "Well-formed·character," Fowl and Jones explain, is crucial not only to "Christians'.ability to live faithfully in the various contexts within which they find themselves," but also to their " ability to read, speak and perform the word of the Lord " (p. 85). Moral virtue is, on their account, a kind of interpretive skill. (If not identical, character and interpretive skill.are, at the very least, formed in the same process, inextricably linked ;together as aspects of "practical wisdom." See page 31.) This result is especially meaningful once it becomes clear that the authors are employing a usefully broadened concept of " interpreta· tion." To interpret a scriptural text can and often... (shrink)

The Christian life, concerned with both spirituality and doctrine, aims not at rationally defensible truth but at life-transforming love. Greater understanding of the truth will not settle the restlessness in a human spirit; only the redemptive power of relationship with God can calm the soul. The crux of Kierkegaard's presentation of Christianity is not that doctrine is unimportant, but that it is ultimately insufficient for a life lived in relationship with God. In Contemporary with Christ, Joshua Cockayne explores the Christian (...) spiritual life with Søren Kierkegaard as his guide and analytic theology as his key tool of engagement. Cockayne contends that the Christian life is second-personal: it seeks encounter with a personal God. As Kierkegaard describes, God invites us to live on the most intimate terms with God. Cockayne argues that this vision of Christian spirituality is deeply practical because it advocates for a certain way of acting and existing. This approach to the Christian life moves from first-reflection, whereby one acquires objective knowledge, to second-reflection, whereby one attains deeper self-understanding, which fortifies one's relationship with God. Individuals encounter Christ through traditional practices: prayer, the Eucharist, and the reading of Scripture. However, experiences of suffering and mortality that mirror Christ's own passion also enliven this life of encounter. Spiritual progress comes through a reorientation of one's will, desire, and self-knowledge. Such progress must ultimately serve the goal of drawing close to God through Christ's presence. Engaging philosophy, theology, and psychology, Cockayne invites us to join in a conversation with Kierkegaard and explore how the spiritual disciplines provide opportunities for relationship with God by becoming contemporary with Christ. --C. Stephen Evans, University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Baylor University. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Without Buddha I Could not Be a ChristianPeter A. HuffWithout Buddha I Could not Be a Christian. By Paul F. Knitter. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. xvii + 240 pp.Paul Knitter’s contributions to interfaith dialogue and Christian theologies of religions are well known and widely appreciated. Even critics of Christian theories of pluralism, most prominently Pope Benedict XVI, have acknowledged the significance of Knitter’s strategic integration of perspectives from liberation (...) theology into what is sometimes an overly abstract field of inquiry. Colleagues active in Buddhist-Christian studies hold Knitter in especially high esteem as a writer, teacher, translator, [End Page 211] editor, self-described interreligious theologian, and unapologetic person of faith. This book, his first major publication since accepting the Paul Tillich chair at Union Theological Seminary, offers a uniquely first-person reflection on the spiritual fruits of a career profoundly and provocatively shaped by two religious traditions.Written for a popular audience, the book, the author says, has been in the works “for the past forty years” (p. xv). The reader gains valuable insight into the professional and private life of a remarkable “dialogical theologian” (p. xv), whose experience includes a rather conventional upbringing in working-class Midwestern Catholicism, some twenty years of service as a seminarian and missionary priest with the Society of the Divine Word, graduate education in Europe with the likes of Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) and Karl Rahner (1904–1984) during the revolutionary years of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and nearly four decades of pioneering work as a productive scholar-activist in mainstream academic theology. At times Knitter even quotes from his unpublished journals in an effort to document fully his unscripted intellectual and spiritual development.Though highly personal, the book is not primarily an autobiography or conversion narrative. Instead, it is an introspective analysis of the internal dialogue that virtually all participants in interreligious affairs recognize as the heart of the global ecumenical encounter. Knitter’s book serves as something of an apologia for what is known today as dual religious belonging or hyphenated religious identity. The author concludes his text with this intriguing but not surprising spiritual self-portrait: both lifelong baptized Christian and “card-carrying Buddhist” (p. 216). The challenge of accounting for this “both /and” orientation grants the book its distinctive character and its reason for being.Knitter borrows his method from the twentieth-century minor classic The Way of All the Earth: Experiments in Truth and Religion (1978). In that work, Notre Dame theology professor and Holy Cross priest James Dunne suggested that the path to holiness in the contemporary West leads inevitably through intimate engagement with the ancient wisdom traditions of the East. Even a casual review of the spiritual history of the last century or so will confirm how earnest seekers in modernity’s secular city have renewed, rediscovered, or critically redefined their native faith commitment through life-changing contact with the ideas and values of Asian religious traditions. It is a story familiar to anyone acquainted with the extraordinary religious pilgrimages of interfaith saints such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), Thomas Merton (1915–1968), and Bede Griffiths (1906–1993).Dunne dubbed this experience the “spiritual adventure of our time” (p. 2); Knitter passionately agrees. He applies Dunne’s dialectical method and his special terminology to his own spiritual odyssey, “passing over” from Christian questions and problems to possible answers and solutions in the Buddhist tradition and then “passing back” to Christian belief and practice with enhanced purpose and a fresh sense of integrity.The starting point for Knitter’s project is cognitive, moral, even emotional dissatisfaction with some of the fundamental structures of the historic Christian worldview: God as transcendent creator and lord of history, Jesus Christ as incarnate Logos and [End Page 212] universal savior, and salvation as the survival of human personality after death and the eschatological redemption of all finite reality. In essence, Knitter claims, traditional theism and the core myth of Christianity as expressed in scripture, creed, and liturgy appear painfully ineffective and to a large extent incoherent in the context of modern life and the international interface of world religions. What especially drives the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Jewish and Christian Encounters with BuddhismHarold KasimowA thousand years hence, historians will look back at the twentieth century and remember it not for the struggle between Liberalism and Communism but for the momentous human discovery of the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism.—Arnold ToynbeeBeginning in the 1960s many American Jews and Christians have become fascinated with the Buddhist tradition and have immersed themselves in the study and (...) practice of Buddhism. In this presentation I will examine how Christian and Jewish leaders have responded to this phenomenon. Some have been quite suspicious of such interreligious and cross-cultural encounters, claiming that Buddhism is a great threat to their religions. However, others have argued that their encounters with Buddhism have led them to deeper insight into their own traditions and have helped them to become better human beings. Their practice of Buddhist meditation has been a way for them to develop sensitivity to God and greater commitment to their own traditions. Still others have converted to Buddhism; it is estimated that of the three million Buddhists in America, fully one million are converts from Christianity and Judaism.Because of the complexity and diversity within Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism, I will focus on the responses of leading Orthodox Jews and Roman Catholic Christians to Theravada Buddhism and to the Zen school in Mahayana, the two forms of Buddhism to which many Americans are drawn and with which I have some personal experience. I will first examine how members of the Jewish and Christian traditions view other religions, because an individual’s perception of the encounter is shaped by how their religion views the Buddhist tradition. This will help us understand why religious authorities find this fascination with Buddhism so problematic.the jewish-buddhist encounterHistorically, Judaism has largely been interpreted by its thinkers as the only true religion. However, this does not mean that members of other faiths may not attain [End Page 21] salvation. According to the Talmudic Doctrine of the Seven Commandments of the Sons of Noah, “the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come,” that is, all human beings can attain salvation who establish courts of law and who refrain from idolatry, murder, blasphemy against God, incest, theft, and eating the limb of a live animal. Jewish authorities claim that because Christianity and Islam worship God they are not to be considered idolatrous, although some question the monotheistic nature of Christianity because of the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. However, there is no question that members of Asian religions are practicing idolatrous worship, avodah zarah (“strange worship”). They are therefore in violation of the Noahide Law not to worship idols.With some exceptions, Orthodox rabbis in recent times agree with Rabbi Avigdor Miller (1908–2001) that “Buddhism, Shintoism, and all other religions of the Far East are forms of idol worship.”1 For Rabbi Miller the Torah contains all the knowledge that is necessary for Jews, and to even study another religious tradition is an affront to God. That this attitude toward the study of alien texts is common today is evident from the reaction of Rabbi Chaim Zvi Hollander to the suggestion of Rabbi Zalman Schachter that it is permissible to explore Asian forms of spirituality. Hollander charges that “Zalman Schachter’s incredible advice is a direct contradiction of the Almighty’s request that we not seek out and explore the spiritual modes of the Goyim, even if it is for the purpose of enhancing our spiritual experience in the service of our God.”2 He further states that “the practice of any religion other than Judaism is for a Jew an act of Avoda Zara.”3For Rabbis Miller and Hollander, blending Judaism with the Buddhist tradition, which is not concerned with a creator God and which rejects the idea of self, is inconceivable and more dangerous than Jews who convert to another religious tradition. However, even among the Orthodox, there are divergent views. Irving Greenberg, one of the outstanding liberal Orthodox rabbis of our generation, after meeting with the Dalai Lama wrote, “the Dalai Lama taught us a lot about Buddhism, even more about menschlichkeit... (shrink)

Given the civic needs of open Western societies which respect pluralism, democracy and human rights, how should Christians read the Qur’an? I examine four major methods or ways on how Christians do read the Qur’an, and demonstrate that all are inappropriate to the needs of our modern secular democracies. These are often allied to approaches that use the mask of revisionist scholarship to conceal malice and irrational hatred of Islamic values. First, major Christian methods that approach (...) Islam, the Qur’an, and the Prophet Muhammad could be entitled as follows, successively in this chapter: the non/reception method, the externalization method, the rejection method, and the paternalist method. Examples of such methods will be referred to. Second, a further examination of revisionist scholarship and literature shows other methods of approaching Islam and its sacred text and prophet; here, five other methods are outlined, which intertwine with the first four methods; these five are as follows: the Qur’an’s alleged misunderstanding of Christian dogmas method, the radical skepticism of the origins of Islam method, the Qur’an’s half-way to truth method, the Qur’an’s unoriginality method, and Muhammad as a messenger for the Arabs only method. Critical comments follow each of these methods, as a way of overcoming biases and prejudices that nurture Islamophobia and right-wing parties and populist movements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense by William GreenwayVictor AndersonA Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense William Greenway LOUISVILLE, KY: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2015. 170 PP. $30.00This book offers an apology for the reasonableness of Christian belief in the God of love and the gift of God in Jesus, agape, against its secular detractors from early modern philosophy to the late (...) twentieth century. Intentionally apologetic in tone, the argument moves from old-school Evangelical kinds of defenses that characterized early 1970s apologetic revivals by thinkers like Josh McDowell and his "evidences demanding a verdict" or Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason. Greenway, however, incrementally shifts from defense language to affirmation of the face, agape, and the gift. He discloses a philosophical spirituality embodied in Christian belief in the ethical realities of freedom, obligations, justice, and love.The book illustrates how these spiritual realities feed back into Christian substantive beliefs through expositions of scripture and doctrine, especially the parables and life of Jesus. Greenway brings insightful readings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion to bear on these sources. What begins as a strictly philosophical defense of Christian belief movingly invites readers to travel from apologetics, evidences, and warrants to the spiritual sphere where Christians and non-Christians alike may reasonably affirm the priority of agape love. "Agape names the reality of our having been seized in and by love for others," Greenway argues (xiii).This book insightfully and passionately presents the complexities of faith and life in the world of face-to-face human encounters and our planetary ecological and environmental interactions with nonhuman others. Greenway's relational phenomenology provides an ethical pattern for human-to-human reception of divine agape, the gift, which is available to all in our moral struggles with a pluralism of faiths, even as Christians seek to demonstrate the ethical demands of agape, love, which, according to Greenway, is the spiritual essence of the Gospel.Part I, "The Secular Condition" (chapters 1–4), is classically apologetic in tone, mapping the philosophical skeptical terrain where reason and science rob Christian belief in God of any noetic validity. The Cartesian and Darwinian revolutions hold center in the production of the "secular" dismissal of reasonable belief in God, spiritual realities, and what ethical powers they bear on human face-to-face encounters with God. Part II, "The Essence of Reasonable Christianity" (chapters 5–9), draws on the French phenomenology of [End Page 194] Lévinas and Marion to restore, Greenway argues, a "spiritually attuned rationality, an awakened rationality that facilitates the unfolding of a philosophical spirituality" that considers "classic teachings of Jesus in light of this restored rationality, expecting that dimensions of Jesus' spiritual genius will shine forth with renewed brilliance" (xiii). Greenway contends that these renewed spiritual insights, informed by agape, the gift, yield spiritual understanding and appreciation of formidable Christian belief schemes: original sin, the fall, good, evil, grace, forgiveness, koinonia, salvation, faith, eternal life, and resurrection (xiii).Greenway describes his goal as a constructive philosophical spirituality. "The essence of this philosophical spirituality," Greenway argues, "is continuous with the essence of Christian spirituality," when articulated in an explicitly (although non-exclusivist) Christian voice and in accord with "common public standards of what is good and reasonable" (xiii). He concludes, "love is not something we create or do, but awakening and surrendering to that love in and by which we have been seized" (xiii). A Reasonable Belief offers a rigorous and creative engagement of modern and contemporary continental philosophy and science with Christian love ethics that seeks to restore its centrality in our postmodern moment.Victor AndersonVanderbilt UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scriptural AuthorityA Christian (Protestant) PerspectiveReinhold BernhardtThe Sola Scriptura Principle in the Reformation MovementIn curbing the authority of the ecclesiastical Magisterium the Reformation movement brought the authority of the Holy Scripture to the forefront as the normative foundation of Christian theology. One of its basic axioms is the sola scriptura principle, meaning that all one needs to know in order to live in a salvific relation to God can be (...) acquired “by scripture alone.” This constitutes the formal, epistemological principle of Protestant theology up to today, and complements the material principles solus Christus, sola gratia, and sola fide. Whereas these material principles refer to the manifestation of salvation in Christ (alone), to the eternal ground of salvation through the grace of God (alone), and to the gift of salvation by faith (alone), the formal principle of sola scriptura calls upon the Christian to realize that these three principles of material truth are made known to us (only) by the formal principle—by Holy Scripture. “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.” 1On the one hand, the Reformers taught that Holy Scripture not only offers testimony to the Word of God but also is itself of divine origin since the authors wrote under the immediate influence of God. In view of this, God is ultimately the principal author, while the writing humans are only instrumental scribes. It follows from that that the Bible possesses divine authority.On the other hand the Reformers distinguished between the Bible as the Word of God and the Word of God in the Bible. Furthermore they made a distinction between the written word of the biblical books and the “Logos,” the eternal word of God, which speaks through the words of the Bible and addresses the reader here and now, existentially. As a testimony to and a medium of the Word of God the Holy Scripture for Luther is “Christ’s spiritual body,” 2 and thus the authority of the biblical scriptures is a derived and secondary authority. This authority does not rest simply on the sacred text as such but rather on the proclamation of God’s grace-filled Lordship over nature [End Page 73] and history in general and over the individual life in particular. It is not the text as such which is to be regarded as Word of God, but the text’s message. “Message” does not refer primarily to the semantic focus of the text as intended by the human author and as understood by the reader, but to the kerygma, the living and effective word of God. The Reformers stressed the soteriological efficacy of the “Word of God” as witnessed in the Scripture. Not only does this Word bear a specific significance and lead to insight and knowledge, but it also heals the broken relationship between the human and God, imparts forgiveness, incorporates into the community of saints, creates faith, and renews life. The Bible is the instrument of God through which God reveals Godself and opens the way to salvation through faith (which signifies existential incorporation) in Christ.Let us now take a closer look at the differences among the three branches of the Reformation movement—the Lutheran, the Calvinist-Reformed, and the Spiritualist—with regard to their understanding of scriptural authority.LutheranFor Luther there is a normative core message in the New Testament, a gospel within the gospels. It consists in the “good news” of the justification of the sinner sola gratia in Christ, without any contribution on the part of the one justified. God is the author of that “good news,” though it is not expressed in all of the biblical scriptures with equal clarity. As a consequence of this difference between the gospel and the scriptures Luther assesses the relative worth of the various books of the Bible, using the gospel of unmerited and unconditionally granted grace as the criterion for interpreting and evaluating the various biblical texts. The Epistle of James, for instance, he dismissed as a stroherne Epistel—a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Dialogue:Moving ForwardThomas Cattoi (bio) and Carol S. Anderson (bio)The San Francisco Bay Area is an interesting location in which to ponder Buddhist-Christian relations. The website UrbanDharma.org lists more than a hundred institutions affiliated with Buddhist organizations—a density higher than in the Beijing metropolitan area. Some of these centers have a clearly ethnic and denominational character, serving a predominantly immigrant population. Some, like many of the Tibetan organizations, function (...) as cultural centers but also attract a considerable Western clientele. Others, like the San Francisco Zen Center or Spirit Rock in Marin County, belong to the first wave of historical Buddhist centers established in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. A few more are trying to establish new forms of enculturated Buddhist practice that are more suited to Western sensitivities and are only loosely affiliated with the cultures of traditional Buddhist societies. At the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, alongside schools training Jesuit priests, Dominican friars, and Protestant ministers of various denominations, the Institute of Buddhist Studies prepares students from different walks of life to work as Buddhist chaplains in hospitals and educational institutions. Buddhism, in its various forms and manifestations, is no longer an exotic import from a little known “elsewhere,” but is part and parcel of the local spiritual landscape.For students and scholars practicing in such a diverse environment, it is perhaps difficult to imagine that for the greatest part of its history, most of Christendom was largely unaware of the very existence of the Buddhist tradition. While Clement of Alexandria and Jerome do mention Buddhism, and references to its practice can be found in the writings of medieval travelers such as Marco Polo, most European Christians lived in a world where the role of the religious “other” was played by Judaism and Islam. It was only in the early modern era, with the beginning of the European colonization of Asia, that non-Abrahamic religious traditions gradually entered the intellectual horizon of Western intellectuals and scholars. Around the year 1740, a French Jesuit named Jean-François Pons (1688–1752), otherwise remembered as a pioneer of Sanskrit studies in the West, came to the startling realization that many of the religious practices that missionaries and travelers had come across in regions as far apart as China, Japan, Nepal, and Mongolia were actually all parts of the same religious tradition. In his correspondence with his fellow Jesuits in France, he coined the [End Page vii] term Bauddhamatham—teaching of the Buddha—to refer to what would eventually be known as Buddhism. In the early years of the nineteenth century, many Sanskrit and Tibetan texts started to be catalogued and translated into the major European languages, bringing about the first encounter between Europe’s intellectual elites and this utterly foreign religious tradition.The nineteenth century also saw the beginning of a more existential engagement with the Buddhism tradition, albeit one that was limited to intellectual elites who were highly critical of institutional Christianity. In his work The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer found in Buddhism many echoes of his own philosophical insights. Many of the members of the Pāli Text Society, established in London in 1871, had rejected Christianity and thought they would find in Buddhism a moral framework in a society where the normativity of the Christian tradition had already started to be questioned. At the same time, we also see the beginning of the first comparative studies, where Buddhism and Christianity are compared from a speculative and doctrinal perspective. In 1880, Ernest de Bunsen claimed that if one made an exception for the crucifixion, many of the fundamental moral teachings of Buddhism and Christianity were virtually identical. This was just the beginning of a slew of similar studies.While the Christian churches were initially uninterested or outright skeptical about engaging in dialogue with non-Christian religious traditions, this attitude started to shift in the decades following the Second World War. The Second Vatican Council, for instance, marked an important shift in the Catholic Church’s attitude toward other religions. Before the 1960s, Catholic theology departments did not offer courses on other religious traditions or on interreligious dialogue... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 146-149 [Access article in PDF] Gianluca Mori. Bayle philosophe. Paris: Champion, 1999. Pp. 416. Paper, N.P. Stefano Brogi. Teologia senza verità: Bayle contro i "rationaux." Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1998. Pp. 306. Paper, N.P. Why do professional philosophers spend so much time on Descartes and so little time on Pierre Bayle, when Bayle was clearly the better philosopher? I hope that the real (...) answer is not that Bayle wrote too much that is too hard to survey and synthesize, whereas Descartes wrote short works that are easy to teach to undergraduates. Of course, part of any answer will turn on what is meant by "the better philosopher," and [End Page 146] we will return to this issue. If the two books reviewed here get the attention they deserve, Bayle may begin to get more of the attention he deserves.Bayle is well-known for his attacks on Pierre Jurieu, but less well-known are his fights with the 'rationalist' theologian-philosophers Jean LeClerc, Jacques Bernard, and Isaac Jaquelot. They reveal that Bayle was not the automatic supporter of "Enlightenment" of later legend. Stefano Brogi explores these attacks in three of Bayle's last works, the Continuation of the Diverse Thoughts on the Comet (1705; very different from the Diverse Thoughts on the Comet of 1683), Response to Questions of a Provincial (1704-1707), and Conversations between Maxime and Thémiste (1707). Regrettably, none of these—nor any of the works of LeClerc, Bernard, and Jaquelot—have been translated. Greater attention to Descartes may derive from the excellent translations of his work, contrasted with the absence of translations of much of Bayle.Brogi begins with Bayle's reconstruction of "Pyrrho's theology." Faith, in Bayle's hands, is almost completely non-cognitive, accepting the Scripture without understanding it. Rationality, to Bayle, is a second Penelope, unraveling all that it makes. Then Brogi explores what Bayle could have meant by praising Simonides, the ancient Greek who, asked to define God, always asked for more time. He also reviews Bayle's views on euhemerism and the theory of impostorship, and cannot believe Bayle's pretended unawareness of some of the implications of his arguments.The third section, "Ethics against religion," tackles the paradox that Bayle fiercely attacked reason and the argument from consensus for the existence of God, but then invoked reason and consensus as proof of moral claims. In ethics, Bayle's skepticism evaporates. That leads to the further paradox that his rigorous moral evaluation of religion leads to atheism. The ostensible argument is that pagan religions have such immoral gods that it is better not to believe in them; the implication is that the same goes for Judeo-Christianity.It all comes together in Brogi's discussion of "Theology without morality." In his controversies with LeClerc about Origenism (universal salvation) and evil, Bayle brings out the dubious moral consequences of both Origenism and Augustinianism. There is no rational way of saving God's goodness. Then Bayle simply declares his faith in revelation. LeClerc thinks this is bad faith, but he ends up relying on blind faith. Jaquelot argues that God's glory requires the world as it is, but when Bayle asks what glory could come from human suffering, Jaquelot also takes refuge in the inscrutability of God. If anyone thinks these were insignificant controversies, remember that they provoked Leibniz's Theodicy (1710). Austin Farrar once pronounced, exignorantia, that Bayle was "hopelessly confused" ("Introduction," Routledge edition of Leibniz's Theodicy, 1951; now Open Court edition, 35), but Leibniz knew better.Gianluca Mori's book ranges far more widely than Brogi's. It is the best all-around book on Bayle's philosophy in twenty years. Mori begins with a chapter on interpretation, pointing out that everything that Leo Strauss said about encoded language can be found in Bayle. Using Bayle's own claims about such artifices to interpret his work, he explores the writer's ironies, dissimulation, self-censorship, and implied meanings. The interior thoughts of Bayle are unreachable... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue ed. by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph WhiteFrederick Christian BauerschmidtThomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue. Edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2013. Pp. viii + 304. $36.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6976-0.The essays collected in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue are the fruit of a (...) conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2011. As presented in this volume, they form five pairs, one each by a Catholic and a Protestant theologian, focused on the topics of (1) the being of God, (2) the Trinity, (3) Christology, (4) grace and justification, and (5) election, providence, and natural law. Thomas Joseph White provides a lengthy introduction, and Bruce McCormack concludes with a brief epilogue. All of the essays at least touch on both Barth and Thomas, though in varying degrees. It must be noted that, with the exception of the essays by White and Wawrykow, the Catholic interlocutors generally engage Barth less deeply than the Protestant interlocutors engage Thomas. Why this might be the case is a point to which I will return.Under the topic of the being of God, Robert Jenson begins with a brief, reflective essay focusing on the radical implications of Barth’s account of God’s “being” or “reality” as “event,” “I,” and “decision” (Ereignis, ich, Entscheidung), and on the content of God’s essence as “the loving One.” Jenson argues that if we follow Barth’s trajectory, we arrive at the paradoxical view that “God’s being is an implosion of freedom, so sheerly contingent that it is not contingent on anything and so is the one necessity. And it is an explosion of love, so sheerly a commitment to the other that it is freedom” (51). Thomas gets only a brief mention, though presumably he stands as the conventional account of God’s being that provides the background against which the true radicalism of Barth’s account can appear. Richard Schenk offers a Catholic counterpoint, engaging not so much with Barth himself as with Jenson and other post-Barthian thinkers such as Ebeling. His essay responds to Jenson’s paradoxes of imploding freedom and exploding love by educing from Thomas’s writings “a theodicy-capable theology of the cross” (57) that operates within a commitment to God’s impassibility as traditionally understood. Implicit in Schenk’s argument is the wager that a God who is, qua [End Page 301] God, beyond all suffering is a richer resource of hope for suffering humanity than is a God who suffers with us in his divinity.Under the topic of the Trinity, Guy Mansini’s essay launches something of a preemptive strike on Bruce McCormack, who, in a widely discussed essay (“Grace and Being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 92-110) and in subsequent writings, has developed Barth’s notion of Christ’s obedience on the Cross as the manifestation in time of his “intra-trinitarian obedience” to the Father in order to argue against traditional notions of divine being and in favor of something like the view Jenson sketches in his essay. Mansini draws on the patristic and monastic traditions as well as Thomas to explore the humility and obedience of Christ, arguing that obedience can only be a virtue of a created will: “’To obey,’ like ‘to be caused’ or ‘to be moved,’ belongs exclusively to the created order” (82). Thus, Christ is humble and obedient qua human, not qua divine, and therefore one cannot sensibly speak of an intra-trinitarian obedience but only of the obedience of Christ’s human will to the one divine will that is common to the Father, Son, and Spirit. McCormack’s essay, which follows, seeks to show that the position he has developed by way of Barth’s theology can also be grounded in Thomas’s theology of the relation of divine processions and missions, at least as this has been interpreted by Matthew Levering. McCormack reads Thomas with notable ecumenical generosity, seeing in Thomas’s view that the... (shrink)

In a quest for greater coherence between parochial identities, culture and Christianity, there exists an African consciousness which seeks to indigenise and decolonise Christianity. Africans are profoundly religious people who view their faith as part of their way of life, as strengthening their cultures and providing a moral compass for daily living. In efforts to transform society, the Christian religion has played a significant role in the path to African development. Christianity in Africa dates to the very inception of the (...) church. Africans consequently played a crucial role in establishing the doctrines and theology of the early church. While African Traditional religion (ATR) is paramount, it is the purpose of this article to suggest that the Christian faith has and continuous to play a significant role on the African continent in its development. While there are many indigenous African beliefs, these have been to a large extent supported by Christianity in a quest to systematize novel knowledge and promote peace and tolerance across the continent. Many Africans have sought facets of Christianity that are similar to their religious and personal practices and continue to do so. Thus, while there exist numerous similarities and also differences between Christianity and ATR, it is imperative to preserve old-style regional distinctiveness and Christianity as the unifying rudiments in nation building endeavours and in efforts to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. Africans can and should come to comprehend the Triune Godhead as being consistent with their own spiritual consciousness and existential veracities. Indigenization of Christianity requires enculturation and essentially an understanding that it is indeed ecumenical and also embraces diversity and fundamentally requires viewing Holy Scriptures and the truths they propound as being applicable to any context and cultural milieu across the ages. Christians after all espouse a faith in the Ekklesia or body of Christ for all its people who are the Laos of God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Biblical Economic Ethics: Sacred Scripture’s Teachings on Economic Life by Albino BarreraRaymond Kemp AndersonBiblical Economic Ethics: Sacred Scripture’s Teachings on Economic Life By Albino Barrera LANHAM, MD: LEXINGTON BOOKS, 2013. 353 PP. $89.65; KINDLE, $54.49You will not find much direct application of biblical theology to pressing economic issues in this book. Albino Barrera, a Dominican monk who teaches economics and theology at Providence College, gave us that in (...) well-received earlier works on market complicity, political economy, and the evils of scarcity. Keeping to this book’s title, he now gives us a remarkable collation of recent studies on the social and theological contexts of the Bible itself. He seems quite confident that given a comprehensive review, we will intuit modern implications for ourselves and be drawn closer together by our common heritage.Written for a wide audience, Barrera’s clear and readable book compiles fascinating snapshots of the diverse cultural situations and beliefs that unfold across the millennium-spanning canon. Even biblical scholars will enjoy this lively, up-to-date tour of their field.As a monastic, Barrera is careful to show that those New Testament texts that seem to call for divestment of property describe a situation-related special calling and do not make poverty an end in itself. Yet he stresses how the “preferential status of the poor” and the “devaluation of wealth” are prime norms that recur throughout both the Old Testament and New Testament and that he sees backed by both revelation and natural experience.One may find the book limited by the procrustean selectivity that seems inevitable when pre-formed notions (e.g., what is proper to our modern discipline of ethics or to the field of economics) shape our apperceptions of ancient [End Page 205] peoples’ concerns. From Barrera’s viewpoint, ethics has to do primarily with the promulgation and refinement of set norms. So his main goal is to uncover abstract principles and norms for behavior that recur insistently across scripture’s enormous diversity. This, he does beautifully. But in the process, he lets the recurrent trump the emergent.For example, Barrera seems to not fully appreciate the revolutionary impact where Jesus finally declares it impossible for people to bolster their personal stature by pursuing such norms (see, e.g., Mk 10:27). Little attention is given the apostles’ insistence (with Ps 14 and Ps 53) upon this same ethical impasse. For when they find the normative redefined by Christ’s excruciatingly holistic love command, they not only discover their own incapacity but also find themselves catapulted into the totally grace-dependent motivational dynamic described by Paul’s Christian freedom (Rom 3:12, 5, passim, 11:32; Gal 3:22; Jas 2:10).Evidently preoccupied by his quest for the normative, Barrera bypasses the historical priority of Paul and virtually ignores how his grace-responsive freedom pervades the later Gospels and Acts. (He relegates the Paul material to the tail end and accords it but a fraction of the space.)Freedom for Barrera is a social norm—freedom from oppression, slavery, poverty, hunger, and so forth (and he forcefully shows how this is a recurrent theme). But was not Paul, like Jesus before him, hounded and persecuted for his notorious freedom in the use of norms—even those of Mosaic law? Did not the Gospel reduce the normative to a minimum in favor of life-shaping, person-responsive love as the free gift or “fruit of the Spirit”? All of us—the rich and powerful, along with the poor and oppressed—discover our corporate brokenness exposed before God’s grace. Yet in our concomitant response to that same grace, we find our actions newly motivated and gradually reshaped—bonded into covenant community through his judgment of healing re-creation.Again, Barrera does well to stress Sabbath law’s normative force, as mandating times of rest. But one could wish to hear more on how the apostles parleyed this priestly provision into something new, in joyful direct response to a gracious Lord—a freely sabbatic, playfully creative ethic. [End Page 206]Raymond Kemp AndersonWilson CollegeCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The 'Illuminating Modernity' series examines the great but lesser known thinkers in the 'Romantic Thomist' tradition such as Erich Przywara and Fernand Ulrich and shows how outstanding 20th century theologians like Ratzinger and von Balthasar have depended on classical Thomist thought, and how they radically reinterpreted this thought. The chapters in this volume are dedicated to the encounter between the presuppositions and claims of modern intellectual culture and the Christian confession that the crucified and resurrected Jesus is the (...) power and wisdom of God and is the lord of history and of his church. The scholars contributing to this discussion do not assume that Christianity and modernity are two discrete entities which can be readily defined, nor do they presume that Christian wisdom and modernity meet each other only in conflict or by coincidence. They engage with a variety of great figures – Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Rahner, Przywara, Guardini, Karl Barth, and Karol Wojtyla – to illustrate the connection between modernism and Christian wisdom. The volume concludes with a programmatic statement for the renewal of Christian philosophy that has been able to retain the cosmo-theological vision as outlined by Mezei in the final chapter. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 61-66 [Access article in PDF] Retracing Buddhist Encounters Ursula King University of Bristol My aim is a modest one—to retrace earlier experiences of encounters with Buddhism and share my thoughts with others. I am not writing as a "dual practitioner," nor do I philosophize about "double belonging," its possibility or impossibility. Neither do I intend to write in an academic, objectifying mode of thought. It (...) is not even about my ongoing personal journey, as journeys seem to imply participation in a continuing process. What I am going to describe are more unconnected encounters, years apart, rather than an ongoing journey, perhaps more like Grace Burford's "postcards" than any of the other accounts submitted.I first caught a glimpse, no more, of Buddhist thought in my early teens, in one of my school history books, and was both puzzled and intrigued to see Buddhism described as "more of a philosophy than a religion." What could that possibly mean, and how could I find out more about this so very different religious thought from the East of which our teacher spoke so highly? Later I learned more, but not much, in comparative religion classes and philosophy of religion courses during my university studies in the fifties and sixties, and from reading Henri de Lubac's book on the Amida Buddha and his study on the encounter between Buddhism and the West, a pioneering but little known work written in 1952, just before the expansion of Buddhism into the West really took off. I also saw Buddhist monks and rituals in some of the documentary films (with Arnold Toynbee as a narrator) I used in a world religions class taught almost forty years ago. But none of this really prepared me for meeting Buddhist people and Buddhist culture in Asian lands, all unpredictably more diverse and appealing than any description found in Western books.When I lived with my family in New Delhi from 1965 to 1970, I met a Buddhist monk from Cambodia who had founded a vihara outside New Delhi open to people of all faiths, and it is there that I first encountered and took part in Buddhist meditation, worship, and festivals, but what attracted me most and left an indelible impression were the profoundly moving spirit of wisdom and compassion and acts of loving kindness that I experienced again and again and that moved me deeply to the core. Such experiences are so alive and vivid, so rich in texture and memory traces that they can feed thoughts and attitudes for the rest of one's life, but they are never fully captured in clever intellectual and philosophical abstractions, however [End Page 61] powerful the argument in which they are clothed. It is for this reason that I always value and cherish the richness of lived experience and participation, even in its often contradictory and profoundly ambivalent nature, more than any finely honed intellectual points concerning profoundly metaphysical insights about ultimate reality or absolute truth claims. In this sense I am perhaps more a practitioner realizing the relational, contingent nature of any and all positions rather than an absolutist thinker wanting to defend one system of thought over another.Soon my personal contacts with Buddhists in India grew through meeting different Tibetan monks, and some Tibetan nuns too, and through visits to the newly founded Tibet House in New Delhi. But most of all I was deeply touched by an early visit to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, probably in March 1966, in the company of an American Sacred Heart nun, Mother Adele Fiske from Manhattan College, who was fitting in this visit while officially undertaking research on the Ambedkhar Buddhists, the leatherworker converts from an outcaste background, some of whom I also met on different occasions. The personal visit to the Dalai Lama in an intimate setting was a high point of my life, as (with the help of an interpreter) we spent about an hour and a half discussing the Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit in comparison to the Buddhist idea of prajnaparamita, of ultimate wisdom. I wished I... (shrink)

Scripture is somehow normative for any bioethic that would be Christian. There are problems, however, both with Scripture and with those who read Scripture. Methodological reflection is necessary. Scripture must be read humbly and in Christian community. It must be read not as a timeless code but as the story of God and of our lives. That story moves from creation to a new creation. At the center of the Christian story are the stories of Jesus (...) of Nazareth as healer, preacher of good news to the poor, and sufferer. The story shapes character and conduct and enables communal discernment. (shrink)

The Song of Songs was considered as Sacred Scripture before the Christian Era. The Pharisaic discussion in the 2nd century C.E. as to whether the Canticle defiles the hands refers neither to canonicity nor to inspiration; it expresses a doubt as to whether for any reason whatever in the text an exception could be applied to the Song with regard to the general rule that sacred books defile the hands. The copy of Esdras in the Temple was such an exception. (...) The reason for the presence of the Song of Songs in the Canon is not based on its author , nor on any allegorical explanation . The reason for canonicity can be seen in the sapiential character of the Song which shows itself in its literal sense that presents the natural love of a couple in all its amplitude and that by analogy can be referred also to the love of God. (shrink)

This paper defends the persistence of the subjective or self-intimating dimension of experience in non-ordinary and pathological states of consciousness such as non-dual awareness, full absorption, drug-induced ego dissolution, and the minimal conscious state. In considering whether non-ordinary and pathological conscious states display any subjective features, we confront a dilemma. Either they do, in which case there needs to be some way of accounting for these features in phenomenal terms, or they do not, in which case there is (...) nothing it is like to be in them. But the dilemma only arises if we assume that opacity rather than phenomenality is a pervasive feature of these non-ordinary states. However, non-ordinary conscious states are deemed phenomenally opaque only by overly restrictive standards of conceivability that: (i) fail to account for the variety of nonordinary and pathological experience in non-arbitrary ways; (ii) sidestep the problem of the attribution and location of mental content (given intelligibility requirements for experience) or relegate them to illusory constructs; (iii) assume an unproblematic appeal to testimonial evidence. I discuss some cases from contemplative traditions and psychopathology and offer some plausible alternative explanations. (shrink)

As an exercise in the ‘theology of disclosure’, the present essay proposes a kind of phenomenological analysis of the act of reading the Bible as Scripture with the goal of bringing to light the theoretical commitments which it implicitly demands. This sort of analysis can prove helpful for the continuing disputes among Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox insofar as it is relevant for one of the principal points of controversy between them: namely, the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and Church as theological (...) authorities. It proceeds by analyzing both the objective and subjective ‘poles’ of the act, and it illuminates the presence of the Church and her Tradition on both sides. The Church—i.e., the community of God’s people—is both that which is immediately encountered in the text, as well as the factor which enables scriptural reading in the first place. The article terminates with an application of the insights of the preceding discussion to the controversy about icons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics by Lisa Sowle CahillKeith SokoGlobal Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics Lisa Sowle Cahill NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013. 328 pp. £62.00 / £20.99Given this book's title and its cover photo of Catholic Relief Services workers in Kenya, I was expecting an examination of global issues with case studies. But chapter titles such as "Creation and Evil," "Kingdom of God," "Christ," "Spirit," (...) and "Cross" tipped me off that my original expectations were incorrect.Perhaps this is Cahill's summa, an attempt to bring together current understandings of major themes in Christian systematic theology and to show how those are tied to Christian ethics. As the series editor, Robin Gill, notes, as opposed to specific moral issues, Cahill's "aim now is to supply a sustained theological basis for global justice" (xi). Cahill herself explains that she hopes "to give biblical and theological reasons for Christian commitment to justice, to show why just action is necessarily a criterion of authentic Christian theology, and to give grounds for Christian hope that change in violent structures is really possible" (1). This is a bold attempt that I feel works on some levels. Cahill draws from key historical and current theologians, including feminist thinkers and marginalized groups.As an ethicist, much of this was a fascinating read in current systematic theology, while some seemed like an overview. I found the chapter on creation and evil somewhat of a plodding summary, yet the chapters on the Kingdom of God, Christ, and the Cross are interesting reads on current discussions in Christology. I would recommend this book for academics and graduate students. Selected sections might work well for undergrads. Sections such as "Historical Research on Jesus" could be great current summaries for undergraduates. [End Page 190]The chapter on the Spirit was interesting but problematic because Cahill's overall approach could err too strongly on the presence of the Spirit primarily in the church itself rather than the world. The chapter on the Cross illustrates interesting historical and current discussion on the necessity of Jesus' death. At this point (246), I feel we primarily have a summary of Christian systematic theology. She acknowledges this as well: "The chapters thus far have been primarily biblical and theological in orientation, but ethical ideals and standards have played a key part in readings of scripture, doctrines, and theologies" (247).Then the book seems to abruptly shift to traditional ethics. With the chapter title of "Nature," I was expecting an examination of environmental ethics but instead got a helpful read on the natural law and virtue ethics approach of Thomas Aquinas. This chapter includes examples of "War as a Test Case" and "Ecology." The final chapter, "Hope," speaks of the need for hope in working toward just and peaceful societies. It includes the longest and only real case study in the book, describing how "Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee won the Nobel Prize for spearheading a grassroots women's movement against the civil war" there (295). This is a fascinating account of women using their power and perseverance to overcome an unjust regime, noting that "women had become the 'toy of war'" (298). Finally, observing that "peacebuilding practices reflect the vision of Christian politics that has shaped the previous chapters of this project" (302), she offers seven key points that tie previous chapter topics to current Christian ethics. It seems like an abrupt ending, finishing on point seven and not offering an overall reflection on the book itself.Given this structure, I wish that it had been written as a text for undergrads because the systematic topics covered, and their tie to and conclusion on Christian ethics, would be a nice format for an introductory course. But Cahill's work has always been current, progressive, and concerned with global ethics and the common good. This book is no different, and it is a welcome part of the New Studies in Christian Ethics series.Keith SokoSaint Ambrose UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spiritual AuthorityA Christian PerspectiveKarl BaierOne could define spiritual authority as the power to support the opening of the entire universe —and especially of the life of human beings—toward union with the redeeming ultimate reality. Christian tradition knows several holders of this power: God, Jesus Christ, the angels, the saints and priests, spiritual guides, and last but not least each and every Christian and person of goodwill. They (...) all are spiritual authorities and together create a field of liberating power with many interdependent centers. One can conceive of spiritual authority in Christianity as a complex interplay between these various forces. The manifestation of spiritual power through them does not take place for its own sake, or to celebrate the holder of spiritual authority, but to empower other centers. Thus, spiritual power is not private property. It is only real insofar as it is passed on to others. In the field of human spiritual authority, tensions and struggles arise if the flow of authority is blocked by a particular center attempting to monopolize spiritual power for the establishment of an illusionary self-identity.Rather than going into an analysis of the entire field, I would like to take a closer look at one of its facets: “spiritual guides,” those who are acknowledged specialists in helping others to a life in the presence of God. Of course, other centers of spiritual authority will sooner or later also come into the picture, because in the field of spiritual power one authority cannot be understood without the others. Fields of other forms of power and their centers of authority (scriptural authority, political authority, etc.) also influence and partially permeate the field of spiritual authority, but that is a subject for another enquiry.Spiritual Guidance in the History of ChristianityA central socioreligious form of spiritual authority manifests itself within relationships of spiritual guidance, or (to use the common Christian phrase) within spiritual direction. The remaining part of this paper deals with concepts of spiritual direction and ways of understanding the authority of the director in his or her relationship to [End Page 107] the directee within Christian spiritual life. Before looking into the current situation, I will highlight some milestones in the history of Christian spiritual guidance.From late antiquity onward, spiritual authority was accepted within Christian communities as a specific form of authority, quite different from other forms and especially different from the authority of the clergy to lead the Church.The earliest context in which this difference appeared coincides with the beginning of spiritual direction. Spiritual direction in Christianity originated as a monastic concept.1 “Historically it was from the movement of desert monasticism that we received the idea of spiritual direction within the framework of Christian practice.”2 As abba (“father”) and amma (“mother”) ascetics, holy men or women, like the hermits of the Egyptian desert who lived on the periphery of the socioreligious zone controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, functioned as independent spiritual authorities for their fellow monks and nuns as well as for people from further afield who visited the desert to ask for spiritual advice. As one can imagine, the relationship between the two forms of authority was complex, and one can observe tensions and attempts at reconciliation between the authority of the charismatic ascetics and the authority of the bishops, as well as between ascetical ideals taken from monasticism and the pastoral care for lay Christians from the fourth to the sixth century.3The Decretum Gelasianum, an official document dating back to the beginning of the sixth century, assessed that the vitae patrum—the books containing narratives of the lives and the spiritual teachings of the desert fathers—were to be accepted by the Church as valid teaching with all honor (cum omni honore suscipimus). The use of the term “father” in this text indirectly confirms that no ordination was necessary to receive this honorary title and the ministry connected to it. Most of the fathers acknowledged by the Decretum Gelasianum have never been ordained priests.When the desert tradition was superseded by organized monasticism, the charismatic authority of the abba or amma became institutionalized in the form of monastery rules, which functioned... (shrink)

This paper argues that mechanism, occasionalism and finality (the acceptance of final causes) can be and were de facto integrated into a coherent system of natural philosophy by Johann Christoph Sturm (1635–1703). Previous scholarship has left the relation between these three elements understudied. According to Sturm, mechanism, occasionalism and finality can count as explanatorily useful elements of natural philosophy, and they might go some way to dealing with the problem of living beings. Occasionalism, in particular, serves a unifying ground: (...) It will be shown that occasionalism can account for the problems of the source and transmission of motion that mechanism faces, while at the same time explaining the finality of non-rational living beings as designed by God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:REFLECTIONS ON PANNENBERG'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 1 PAUL D. MOLNAR St. John's University Jamaica, New York RADING PANNENBERG leaves no doubt that one is encountering an intellectual giant. His thought is clear, systematic, comprehensive, and fact-filled. In many respects this book is exciting; topics are introduced and developed with details from scripture, from obscure and renowned Protestant theologians, from Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, Duns Scotus, Barth, Jiingel, Moltmann, Rahner, and (...) many others until Pannenberg 's own position is clarified and fully developed. Its six chapters explore : 1) how truth is the foundation of systematic theology; 2) how the concept of God relates to this truth (natural theology) ; 3) how the reality of God is understood in relation to other religions; 4) how to understand revelation; 5) the trinity; and 6) the unity and attributes of God. This last lengthy chapter (337-448) presents a very challenging description of God's attributes arguing that " the trinitarian life of God in his economy of salvation proves to be the true infinity of his omnipotence " (415). Hence the doctrine of the trinity makes it possible to speak correctly about God's immanence and transcendence without falling into pantheism, dualism, modalism, or subordinationism. This book is essential reading for any serious student of theology. Because of its complexity and difficulty, however, we shall focus on the relation of theology and philosophy and briefly explore the roles of experience and faith, natural theology, the 1 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991). 501 502 PAUL D. MOLNAR trinity, revelation, God's being and act, and the person and work of Jesus, with a view toward seeing how Pannenberg's philosophy affects his theology. In spite of his view that Rahner may succumb to " subjectivism " through a consensus theory of truth ( 14, n.22), many of Pannenberg's ideas, e.g., that "Nonthematic knowledge of God" is real and " part of our original situation " ( 115), and that, in the context of modern secularism, the word " God " still reminds us that "the wholeness of human existence has become an unanswered question" (71), would resonate positively with a Rahnerian method. And while he believes Barth did not succeed in grounding the doctrine of the trinity in revelation (327, 296), he contends that Rahner made progress with his thesis of identity, even though by allowing the Father to remain transcendent, he did not go far enough and should have seen that the Father " has made himself dependent upon the course of history " (329, emphasis mine). While Pannenberg deliberately intends to emphasize God's freedom and to avoid subjectivism (36ff., 127ff., 376-7, 391, 419), as when he argues that dogmaticians do not decide what is true, but only God decides (56), fundamental problems do affiict his approach to theology from the beginning. For example: The natural theology of the philosophers had formulated a criterion for judging whether any God could be seriously considered as the author of the whole cosmos, and Christian theology had to meet this criterion if its claim could be taken seriously that the God who redeems us in Jesus Christ is the Creator of heaven and earth and thus the one true God of all peoples (79). The obvious question which arises here is whether it is philosophy or God the creator, known through faith, who determines the meaning of creation and redemption; problems connected with this assertion arise within each chapter. Even though Pannenberg recognizes the problem of establishing our knowledge of God by negating our limited experience ( 184£., 406), he actually attempts to understand God's being in terms of the limits of creaturely experience when he argues that finite knowledge " is grounded especially in the time-bound nature PANNENBERG'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 503 of the knowledge" (54). Thus all of our statements about God, who is not an object in the world, "rest on anticipations of the totality of the world and therefore on the as yet nonexistent future of its uncompleted history " (55, emphasis mine) ; following Descartes, he writes " We attain a sense of the infinite only by negation of the limit of the finite "; while our direct unthematic... (shrink)

Interviewed by Christian Sheppard about Richard Kearney’s book The God Who May Be (2001), and speaking also of Kearney’s On Stories (2002) and Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2002), David Tracy remarks on Kearney’s development of the possible as a major philosophical and theological category. Showing the importance of the idea of the infinite, he speaks of the need for a hermeneutical moment to follow the initial encounter, and of a call for general criteria of judgment of the Other. He discusses, (...) too, the dangers and the rewards of doing both theology and philosophy at the same time. To him the category of the Impossible enters into the possible and is not only positive but desired. In a conversation that ranges widely - Derrida and Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Angelus Silesius, Kierkegaard, Nicholas of Cusa, Heidegger and Ricoeur, and, in the call for plurality, William James - the two speakers discuss both poetic sensibility and the call for justice. Reflecting on fragmentation, Tracy speaks of the need to focus on suffering and the importance of attaining a sense of ‘the entire story, all of the metaphors’. (shrink)

There has been little considered reflection by Catholic theologians on the concepts of gender identity, gender dysphoria and gender transition. Seeking inspiration in the Scriptures, some Catholic thinkers have interpreted the first three chapters of Genesis and especially the text ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:27) as requiring all human beings to live in the gender role congruent with their biological sex, and have viewed the biology of sex as self-evident. This article argues that these chapters constitute (...) an appropriate locus for reflection on theological anthropology but that they need to be taken together with other texts and especially with the explicit teaching of Jesus Christ. In the Gospel according to Matthew, the one occasion in which Jesus invokes this passage from Genesis is when he draws attention to exceptional examples in nature and, in a striking phrase, states that some ‘have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 19:12). If the Genesis text is interpreted in the light of the words of Christ, the binary division of the sexes, while ordained by God and the basis for a vocation to marry and procreate, admits of exceptions both natural and supernatural. (shrink)

Scripture continues to play a very important role in my formative walk with God, yet keeping both “head” and “heart” in my Scripture reading and study has been a challenge. Two helpful insights for me involved, first, identifying two distinct but complimentary approaches to Scripture–-analytical reading and meditative reading–-and, second, intentionally welcoming both approaches as I read and study Scripture. In this reflective essay I describe aspects of my journey and engagement with Scripture, clarifying my understanding of these two (...) approaches to Scripture, and sharing some of the fruit both approaches have yielded for me–-including a meditative poem from an episode in Jesus's ministry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Overcoming Greed:An Eastern Christian Perspective1Valerie A. KarrasAs an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I have chosen to approach the topic of "overcoming greed" from an Eastern Christian perspective, relying particularly on the writings of some of the early theologians of the Greek East. It is not coincidental either that laissez-faire capitalism arose in the Western Christian world, or that the first strongholds of communism developed in Eastern European, traditionally Orthodox, countries. (...) Both phenomena speak to an intrinsic difference in the way in which human beings are conceived as relating to the world and to each other, both personally and communally.The traditional Eastern Christian model of the human person as not simply caretaker of creation, but fundamentally as a mediator uniting all aspects of creation in humanity's own nature,2 has led historically to a general lack of interest in exploiting creation (in fact, the worst environmental problems in the Orthodox world occurred in countries after they came under totalitarian communist domination). Similarly, the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on the relational, and even communal, nature of salvation created an environment hostile to the individualist, exploitative model upon which modern Western economics has been founded (this has been rapidly changing in post-communist Eastern European countries and Russia, however).The Eastern Church identifies this phenomenon of exploitative and abusive relationships toward nature and other persons as a consequence of the fallen condition of humanity, that is, humanity as it currently exists, in a state where our natural communion with God has been ruptured. In this context, Christianity in general and Eastern Christianity in particular recognize greed as one of the passions (equivalent to what Buddhism describes as "cravings") that are part of our fallen human nature, a consequence of our separation from God. Some of the passions are primarily physical in nature, others emotional or psychic, but in fact virtually all passions are a combination of the two.Greed, a passion of both soul and body that is endemic to our current existence, is typical of this understanding. There are two aspects to the vice of greed: (1) the emotional or spiritual dimension, that is, the acquisitive lust that usually betokens either a deep-seated insecurity or, worse, a desire for power and control; and (2) the [End Page 47] external, physical manifestations of greed in the actual acquisition of things, often to the detriment or exploitation of others. Eastern Christian writings attempt to work on both dimensions of the passion of greed, especially the spiritual, while often distinguishing between greed (a moral vice) and wealth (an amoral condition).This article will focus on two early church theologians, Clement of Alexandria and John Chrysostom. In particular, it will focus on their biblical exegeses of two pertinent New Testament passages: Jesus' conversation with a young righteous scholar of the Mosaic Law and the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, respectively. Finally, I will suggest that, for Orthodox Christians, an important key to overcoming greed is disciplined asceticism, to be practiced by all persons and not simply by monks and nuns. Asceticism—the exercise of control over the passions through fasting, prayer, chastity (understood differently for married and unmarried persons), and almsgiving—is the vehicle by which to cultivate an attitude of apatheia or passionlessness, the Christian equivalent of the Buddhist ideal of detachment.Clement was a philosopher-theologian who headed the great Christian catechetical school in Alexandria in the late second century C.E. In his treatise Who IstheRich ManWhoWill Be Saved? 3 Clement mused on the spiritual and soteriological dimensions of greed by reflecting on Jesus' encounter with the wealthy young "lawyer," that is, scholar of the Mosaic Law, who questioned Jesus on how to acquire eternal life. In his response, the young man showed himself righteous in his adherence to the demands of the law, but ultimately unwilling to commit all of himself by giving away his property, even though Jesus said that it was the price to inherit eternal life.Clement pondered whether it were therefore possible for anyone wealthy to be saved, given Jesus' declaration that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 199-203 [Access article in PDF] Lived Time and to Live Time Christian Kupke Keywords time, dimensional time, temporality, dialectics, subjectivity In this paper, I argue that a phenomenological description of temporality is a description of what it is to "live" time, that is, to live time in its three-dimensional aspects: past, future, and present. And it is suggested that this dimensional time can (...) be analyzed on two different levels: on a microstructural level that is part of the subject–object relationship (cognitive–intentional time), and on a macrostructural level that is part of the subject–subject relationship (intersubjective time). In a close reading of Martin Wyllie's paper "Lived Time and Psychopathology" (2005) some implications and consequences of these suggestions are discussed. Conceptual Problems: Personal and Intersubjective Time One of Martin Wyllie's main theses is that to accurately describe suffering one may have to use a conceptual framework of a bipartite structure that includes the embodied temporal subject on the one hand and the temporal world on the other. It is this what the author calls a "dialectical relationship" between the time of the individual person called "personal time" and the time of the world called "world time" or "intersubjective time" (Wyllie 2005, 173).But then Martin Wyllie also deals with another model, another conceptual framework that follows a different logic and that—in contrast to the dualistic model—is usually associated with dialectics: the tripartite structure of past, future, and present. "Now in lived time", Wyllie claims, "is a unity of the past, present, and future, and is more than simply a succession because the immediate 'no-more', 'present', and 'yet-to-come' are ordinarily never sharply separated" (Wyllie 2005, 174).I want first to discuss the conceptual problems that come along with Martin Wyllie's use of these models. It seems to me that the author is dealing with the complexity of the relationship between these models by means of a double strategy: to conceptualize world time as intersubjective time (a), and to focus the analysis on the external, dualistic model of personal and intersubjective time (b).(a) "World time" may be differentiated at least into three categories: physical and cosmological time; natural and biological time; and social or sociocultural time. But the question is: how are these (quasi-) objective time matrices realized (and perhaps even "constituted") by the individual subject? To answer this question it is, also in my view, a good strategy for a psychopathology of time to concentrate on intersubjective [End Page 199] time, for, as Martin Wyllie states, there is indeed no doubt that "the embodied human subject is always already in an intersubjective world" (Wyllie 2005, 177).But what I think might be a severe problem with this focal point of the analysis is the tendency to identify the world exclusively with an intersubjective world. That the embodied human subject is always already in an intersubjective world does not mean that the subject's whole world is nothing more than an intersubjective world. Those temporal processes that are, for instance, necessary to "read"—in an intersubjective world—Martin Wyllie's text and to "write" a comment on it (as I do now) are part of at least a double temporal structure.First, reading and writing are formal processes of an integration of cognitive and intentional activities that are the transcendental basis of any intelligible discussion of semantic questions, namely, to recognize signs, retentionally and protentionally, as integral parts of higher temporal units to enable the subject to understand what is read or written. Without such retentional and protentional acts, as they were generally described by Husserl, any text would be a mere accumulation of signs without any formal or logical order.But, second, reading and writing are also informal processes of an integration of those intersubjective activities that result in an intelligible discussion of semantic questions. Here it is necessary to remember what was read or written, by Martin Wyllie, myself, and others (an intersubjective remembrance that is essential for the... (shrink)

Spirituality connotes praxis informed by religious or faith convictions. This can transform the individual and society at large. Christian spirituality is centered on how a person’s relationship with the God of Jesus Christ informs and directs one’s approach to existence and engagement with the world. The ecosystem concerns humanity and relationship with it is invariably influenced by faith or religious informed praxis. The reality of climate change is convincing many people that humankind’s common homeland needs to be treated with (...) care and respect if created beings are to have a congenial habitat now and in the future. This article avers that Christian spirituality can contribute to eco-friendly behavior through re-formation of the behavior of people and emboldening their goodwill as regards the responsibility of all towards the care of the earth. Finally, this research proffers a three-fold model of eco-spirituality - scriptural, selfcontrol, and sacramental approaches to the earth – as a contribution towards stemming the tide of ecological assaults on creation. Textual analysis is the method used in this research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christian Naturalism: Christian Thinking for Living in This World Only by Karl E. PetersDaniel J. OttChristian Naturalism: Christian Thinking for Living in This World Only. Karl E. Peters. Boston: Wipf & Stock, 2022. xvi + 152 pp. $25.00 paperback; $22.00 eBook; $40.00 hardcover.The number of scholars who would call themselves Christian naturalists and the number of books that think through what it means to be both Christian and (...) naturalist are quite small. Karl E. Peters has been an outstanding figure in this small group for many years. He is a leader in the science and religion dialogue in the United States and has been thinking theologically for a long time about what it means to be a Christian in an age of science. For these reasons, I was eager to read Peters’s Christian Naturalism as it promised to be a concise and systematic summary of his thinking about Christian Naturalist theology. What I found was a book that may have its uses but is not always successful in both its approach and its argumentation.Peters states in the Introduction that the book is “intentionally written for a general audience” (xi), and he maintains an accessible style and vocabulary throughout. Often, the book has an autobiographical quality as Peters weaves in reflection on his own educational journey in both science and theology. Chapters 1 and 3 helpfully lay out a brief comparison of ancient cosmologies and a contemporary scientific cosmology. Chapter 3 is a good example of some of the interesting heuristics that Peters uses throughout as he tells the story of the beginnings of the universe and the emergence of life on Earth in a first-person narrative. The rest of the book proceeds in brief and accessible treatments of categories one would typically find in theology primers: God, Jesus, evil and sin, salvation, ethics, and after death. The remainder of this review will take up two of these categories: 1) evil, sin, and ethics and 2) after death. The former will serve as an example of the book’s relative weaknesses and the latter as an example of the book’s promise and usefulness.“Human Evil,” chapter 4, begins promisingly. Peters builds on an earlier introduction to the idea that we can associate “God” with the creative processes at work in the universe or with creativity itself. Here, Peters argues that being faithful to creativity becomes the norm for Christian faith and morality. “So, being moral means sustaining the well-being of already created dynamic systems and at the same time being open to creativity (God) and the emergence of new systems” (42). Perhaps these arguments would be better positioned at the [End Page 97] beginning of a chapter on morality and ethics rather than the chapter on evil and sin, though, especially since the corollary definition of sin doesn’t come for another twenty-four pages. There, Peters explains that “sin (the Christian term for human evil) is the attempt to limit the work of creativity (God) and to limit what is included in the family of life that arises from the work of creativity (God)” (66). These two definitions taken together offer one of the most theologically pregnant ideas in the book. Unfortunately, they are not pursued and applied in a systematic way throughout the remainder of this chapter and into chapters 7 and 8 on ethics and Christian practice. What we get, instead, is a collection of reflections on various ethical topics including: racism, xenophobia, sexism, and climate change.Perhaps if these sections were retitled “Karl’s Reflections on Wrestling with White, Male Privilege,” the reader would have the right expectation and their usefulness would reemerge. But as they stand they often lose the thread of their connections to his theological definitions and sometimes slip into problematic assumptions. The latter is exhibited when Peters employs the first-person again, this time in reference to certain social histories, as when “you and I” migrated from north Africa to the Caucasus Mountains (47), or when “you and I arrived in America from England in 1630” (58). The assumed “you” seems to be white, male people of anglo origin and therefore cuts... (shrink)

The central question of this conference is whether the media can contribute to high quality social dialogue. The prospects for resolving that question positively in the “sound and fury” depend on recovering the idea of truth. At present the news media are lurching along from one crisis to another with an empty centre. We need to articulate a believable concept of truth as communication's master principle. As the norm of healing is to medicine, justice to politics, critical thinking to education, (...) craftsmanship to engineering, and stewardship to business, so truth-telling is the news profession's occupational norm. Truth-telling is the ethical framework that fundamentally reorders the media's professional culture and enables them to enrich social dialogue rather than undermine it.Historically the mainstream press has defined itself in terms of an objectivist worldview. Centred on human rationality and armed with the scientific method, the facts in news have been said to mirror reality. The aim has been true and incontrovertible accounts of a domain separate from human consciousness. In Bertrand Russell's formula, “truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact” . In the received view, truth is defined in elementary epistemological terms as accurate representation. News corresponds to context-free neutral algorithms, and ethics is equated with impartiality.The attacks on this misguided view of human knowledge had already originated in Giambattista Vico's fantasia and Wilhelm Dilthey's verstehen in the counter-Enlightenment of the 18th century. They have continued with hermeneutics, critical theory in the Frankfurt School, American pragmatism, Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, Gramsci, and in their own way, Lyotard's denial of master narratives and Derrida's sliding signifiers; until the anti-foundationalism of our own day indicates a crisis in correspondence views of truth. Institutional structures remain Enlightenment-driven, but in principle the tide has turned currently toward restricting objectivism to the territory of mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences. In reporting, objectivity has become increasingly controversial as the working press' professional standard, though it will remain entrenched in our ordinary practices of news production and dissemination until an alternative mission for the press is convincingly formulated.The demise of correspondence views of truth has created a predicament for the notion of truth altogether. However, instead of appealing to coherence versions or abandoning the concept, truth needs to be relocated in the moral sphere. Truth is a problem of axiology rather than epistemology. With the dominant scheme no longer tenable, truth should become the province of ethicists who can reconstruct it as the news media's contribution to social dialogue.When truth is articulated in terms of a moral framework, we can mold its richly textured meaning around the Hebrew emeth , the Greek aletheia . In Serbo-Croatian the true is justified as with plumbline in carpentry. In the powerful wheel imagery of the Buddhist tradition, truth is the immovable axle. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa presumes that sufferings from apartheid can be healed through truthful testimony. In Ghandhi's “satyagrapha,” the power of truth through the human spirit eventually wins over force . Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics contends correctly that a truthful account lays hold of the context, motives, and presuppositions involved .Telling the truth depends on the quality of discernment so that penultimates do not gain ultimacy. Truth means, in other words, to strike gold, to get at “the core, the essence, the nub, the heart of the matter” . For Henry David Thoreau – though addressing a different issue – when we are truthful, we attempt to “drive life into a corner and¼if it proves to be mean, why then to get the genuine meanness out of it and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by personal experience and be able to give a true account of the encounter” . For the former secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, “the most dangerous of all moral dilemmas is when we are obliged to conceal truth in order to help the truth be victorious” . In the Talmud, the liar's punishment is that no one believes him.Augustine , professor of rhetoric at Milan and later Bishop of Hippo, illustrates a non-correspondence view of truth. His rhetorical theory is a major contribution to the philosophy of communication, contradicting the highly secular and linear view of the ancient Greeks. As with Aristotle, rhetoric entails reasoned judgement for Augustine; however, he “break[s] away from Graeco-Roman rhetoric, moving instead toward ¼rhetoric as aletheiac act” . Rhetoric for him is not knowledge-producing or opinion-producing but truth-producing . The Epistolae Doctrina Christiana scourges the value-neutral, technical language of “word merchants” without wisdom.Truth is not fundamentally a prescriptive statement. The aletheiac act in Augustine “tends to be more relational than propositional, a dialogically interpersonal, sacramentally charitable act rather than a statement¼taking into account and being motivated by [the cardinal virtues] faith, hope, and charity” . The truth for him does not merely make things clear, but motivates us to belief and action. In truthful communication for Augustine, “it is not enough to seek to move men's minds, merely for the sake of power; instead, the power to move is to be used to lead men to truth”. (shrink)

In the late Middle Ages, Nicholas of Cusa renders human cognition as creative, asymptotic assimilation—humans creatively approach their objects of cognition without ever fully reaching them. Questions about measuring are an important part of Nicholas’ model of cognition in two regards: On the one hand, he explicitly calls human cognition a ‘measuring’, moving the concept into the centre of attention. On the other hand, measuring in the sense of evaluating epistemic activities is an issue for Nicholas. He describes humans as (...) living images of god who ‘enfold’ the ideas of all things within themselves in a specific way. They measure, i. e. judge, their epistemic activities looking at what they enfold. However, Nicholas provides little information about what exactly that means. He is thus threatened with a serious epistemological problem: the lack of a satisfying criterion of epistemic activities. In my paper, I discuss options of how to deal with this problem. After briefly describing Nicholas’ notion of human cognition and what he has on offer regarding a criterion of epistemic activities, I try to clarify what ‘enfolding the ideas of all things’ can mean. Presenting and discussing two plausible interpretations of this expression—a static and a dynamic one—sheds light on possible answers Nicholas can give as well as the limitations these answers are confronted with. (shrink)

Many people believe in angels and evil spirits, and popular culture abounds in talk about encounters with such entities. Yet the question of the existence of such spirits is ignored in the academy. Even the Christian Church, which one might expect to show keen interest in transcendent realities, does not appear to be paying much attention. In this book Phillip Wiebe defends the plausibility of the traditional Christian claim that spirits are real. Wiebe examines descriptions of encounters with both good (...) and evil transcendent beings in biblical times and in later Christian history, along with recent accounts of similar experiences. He argues that invisible beings can be postulated to explain events just as unobservable objects are postulated in many scientific theories. Beyond supporting claims for the existence of lesser spirits such as demons and angels, this empirical approach yields important results for assessing common arguments surrounding the existence of God - a question that has become artificially separated from the question of spirits as such. Grounding his argument in a wide range of phenomena - from near death experiences to demonic possession - Wiebe offers a sophisticated case for belief in God on philosophical and epistemological grounds. (shrink)

This article brings a phenomenological perspective to the question of how bodily and inter-bodily experience is involved in interacting via audio-visual media like videoconferencing platforms. Contemporary discussions in interaction studies point to a certain suspension of bodily involvement in these mediated interactions, which leads to a visible loss of function in the case of gestures. Such observations have led phenomenologists to voice concern as to whether phenomenology is indeed still suited to account for the “digital world” in general. The following (...) article addresses these concerns by first making the case for a phenomenological understanding of gestures, which develops Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality by drawing from an intersubjective reading of Husserl’s threefold analysis of the body (aesthesiological, kinaesthetic and orientational). Subsequently, these reflections are used to describe the modifications, which occur when interacting “through” the screen in videoconferences, by showing that they are not just privative in nature. (shrink)

The encounter between a patient and her surgeon is unique for several reasons. The surgeon inflicts pain upon a patient for the patient’s own good. An operative intervention is irreducibly personal, such that the decisions about and performance of operations are inseparable from the idiosyncrasies of the individual surgeon. Furthermore, there is a chasm of knowledge between the patient and surgeon that is difficult to cross. Hence, training in the discipline of surgery includes the inculcation of certain virtues and practices (...) to safeguard against abuses of this relationship and to make sure that the best interests of the patient are prioritized. The stories in this issue are evidence that in contemporary practice this is not quite enough, as surgeons reflect on instances they felt were ethically challenging. Common themes include the difficulty in communicating surgical uncertainty, patient–surgeon relationships, ethical issues in surgical training, and the impact of the technological imperative on caring for dying patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? By KATHRYN TANNER. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Pp. viii + 196. $39.95 (hardbound). In describing the role of the human will in salvation, Thomas Aquinas remarks that justification indeed requires an act of human free choice, namely one which takes place when God "infuses the gift of justifying grace in such a way that he (...) simultaneously moves the free will (liberum arbitrium) to accept the gift of grace" (Summa theologiae I-II, 113, 3, c). When they encounter this sort of remark in Aquinas-and parallel remarks can he found across the whole ecumenical tradition of Christian theology-contemporary theologians may well be puzzled by two thirig~..One is Aquinas's evident conviction that an utterly robust view of God's power and sovereignty (such that whatever God wills to happen, happens) is fully compatible with the ascription of genuine and ineradicable freedom to human beings. But perhaps even more striking is the fact that Aquinas apparently takes this compatibility, so problematic for much of modern theology, to be obvious: it occasions no visible perplexity, appeal to mystery, or lengthy explanation, but is simply invoked in passing to help deal with the theological issue under discussion. In this powerfully argued and provocative book, Kathryn Tanner undertakes to clear up both of these perplexities. She develops an original and richly textured account of how Christian thinkers could and can maintain uncompromising accounts of both divine sovereignty and creaturely independence and freedom without falling into incoherence, and she also explains how what was once obvious now so easily seems bafHing. Tanner begins by arguing that the coherence of Christian claims about God and creatures can best be displayed by an explicitly secondorder analysis which aims to lay bare the rules governing well-formed Christian discourse, rather than by constructing a first-order ontological and metaphysical account of the relationship between God and the world. The book explicitly concentrates, " not on what theologians are talking about, but on.the way they are saying it " (p. 11). Tanner undertakes this " semantic ascent," which. she articulates with considerable nuance, partly in order to proceed in a way congruent with powerful recent developments in philosophy (European as well as Anglo8 ~1 BOOK REVIEWS American) and theology, but more basically because she thinks the issue itself demands this kind of treatment. However available in their own right, accounts of the relations between God and creatures cast in first-order metaphysical language are, theologians of quite different conviction have often maintained, veiled in a certain inevitable obscurity which limits their explanatory value; one cannot " reconcile God's agency with the creature's active powers through any material explanation of the actual mechanism found in some ' causal joint ' between the two" (p. 26; Thomas's way of putting this point, as Tanner is aware, is to say that we have no modus significandi for descriptions in divinis [see p. 12]). By contrast, the rules for coherent Christian discourse about God and creatures, if we can find any, can be stated with comparative clarity and precision: they will be straightforward directives to speak in certain ways and not in others. Moreover, the problems in speaking coherently about divine power and the contingent independence of creatures are not confined to a particular scheme of firstorder theological concepts and judgments but recur across a wide range of differing schemes; correlatively, if we can isolate second-order rules for Christian discourse about God and creatures those rules " may structure very different theological schemes, schemes distinguished by their first-order claims by vocabulary, philosophical frames of reference etc." (p. 29). Tanner's project, then, is a certain kind of transcendental argument: she wants to show "how it is possible for Christians to affirm certain statements while holding on to others that seem to conflict with them" (p. 20). If rules which govern apparently conflicting statements about God and creatures in Christian discourse can in fact be isolated, and it can be shown how they are followed by Christian theologians, then, Tanner argues, the project will have succeeded; the coherence of Christian discourse about God and creatures will have been displayed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese ReligionWhalen LaiBorrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. By Eric Reinders. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 266 + xvi pp.For a long time, Sinology was dominated by scholars with direct or indirect missionary backgrounds, going all the way back to the founding of the discipline by James Legge. Legge occupied the first university chair in (...) the China field in Britain. Legge's vision of China has recently been placed into historical context by Norman Girardot (The Victorian Translation of China [2002]). There were other early figures whose records of Chinese beliefs and folk customs we still use. Beginning with Timothy Richard, more came around to seeing how China needed more than soul saving for the hereafter. China needed urgent sociopolitical reforms in the here and now. In time, the YMCA and the missionary schools would help chaperone in a whole generation of "modern Chinese"; some of them, though exposed to the Gospel, would, in the May Fourth Movement, pit science and democracy against any and all religions. For all that, scholars still do count on the missionary records for understanding the "old China." By exploring what the majority of these men of God saw in China—or thought they saw, since their perception could well be colored by cultural biases—this book by Eric Reinders proves quite refreshing. Instead of holding up those records as a mirror on a Chinese reality, Reinders (to wit) "reversed the light so that it would reflect upon" the Protestant missionaries themselves. For one thing, these Protestant evangelicals reported on China using rhetoric borrowed from their long-standing complaints against the Catholics. For another, they painted the Chinese "body language" in light of their own proud Victorian manners. These missionaries were no James Legge, who was tutored into classical Chinese by erudite Confucians and who then presented the Confucian Classics with appreciative classical (Latin and Greek) references. They were no Arthur Waley either, Waley being one who could "without leaving the door [as to live in China], know all the affairs of the (Chinese) world." By steeping himself in Chinese language and its written culture, Waley could render the Confucian "chun-tzu" into the familiar English "gentleman," and doing so with due sympathy for two land-owning gentry cultures. There is no such sympathy from the Protestant missionaries who lived among the common people. They purported to know the "real" (rural) China that was opened to the inland mission. The China they reported on was not found in library books, the Confucian classics, or some Mandarin's manicured garden. Theirs is not the Good Earth depicted later by Pearl Buck, either.These nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, flourishing in the heydays of the British Empire, held few illusions about the once fabled Cathay. Their reports sent home served, in the end, both God and country. As means for raising funds for their missionary efforts, the reports probably had to fan high hopes for the Gospel in relation to a very deprecating assessment of the pagan, heathen culture they encountered. The reports also reflected the hard times these zealous missionaries did have [End Page 226] to face. They were living in the backwater, among often illiterate peasants and in isolated enclaves surrounded by what they saw as a huddling mass of faceless humanity. Their frustration at learning the vernacular tongue well enough to communicate with the people led to the still popular joke about the inscrutable Chinese. But the conclusion the missionaries drew, about how the Chinese language is inherently "godless," is more theological than philological. That the many Chinese tongues (local dialects?) were deemed a living Babel assumes somehow that the Queen's English is divinely inspired. This book does not tell us often what China was really like, for so much of that reality is woefully "lost in translation."Above all, "Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies" is about how the Protestants transposed their endless bouts with Rome into seeing the errors of the Chinese way as copies of the Catholic way. The Chinese were mindless in their idolatry; they kept up blindly this ritualistic gesture with little or... (shrink)

In this essay, I offer thoughts on the constitution of images in art, especially as they are constituted in painting and in photography. Utilizing ideas from Gadamer, Derrida and Adorno, I shall argue that representation should be conceived as a performative concept and as an act of formation; i.e., as a process rather thanas something "fixed." My reflections will be carried out in connection with a careful analysis of Gerhard Richter's painting Reader, which is a painting of a photograph (...) that depicts a female who is reading. I demonstrate how a close analysis of this fascinating painting leads us deeper into the problem of painted images, insofar as it enacts what it is about, namely, the constitution of itself as an innige by means of a complex and enigmatic relationship between seeing, reading, memory, inner, outer, gaze and blindness. (shrink)

Peace literacy shows why public philosophy and activism for peace and justice are better together while providing a practical framework designed to make the collaboration stronger and more effective. In this chapter, the authors begin with an overview of peace literacy and then show how it operates as an effective lens through which to read the strengths of various approaches to public philosophy and activism for peace and justice, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and into the contemporary (...) period. Then, they turn to the development of peace literacy themes as we find them in the work of philosophers dedicated to publicly engaged activism for peace and justice, especially in American movements for the abolition of chattel slavery, anti‐war and nonviolence, and civil rights. (shrink)

The question of whether or not God exists is endlessly fascinating and profoundly important. Now two articulate spokesmen--one a Christian, the other an atheist--duel over God's existence in a lively and illuminating battle of ideas. In God?, William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong bring to the printed page two debates they held before live audiences, preserving all the wit, clarity, and immediacy of their public exchanges. With none of the opaque discourse of academic logicians and divinity-school theologians, the authors (...) make claims and comebacks that cut with precision. Their arguments are sharp and humorous, as each philosopher strikes quickly to the heart of his opponent's case. For example, Craig claims that we must believe in God to explain objective moral values, such as why rape is wrong. Sinnott-Armstrong responds that what makes rape wrong is the harm to victims of rape, so rape is immoral even if there is no God. From arguments about the nature of infinity and the Big Bang, to religious experience and divine action, to the resurrection of Jesus and the problem of evil, the authors treat us to a remarkable display of intelligence and insight--a truly thought-provoking exploration of a classic issue that remains relevant to contemporary life. (shrink)

The twentieth century was unkind to classical Reformed theology. While theological conservatives often blame liberals for undermining traditional Protestant doctrines, the staunchest conservatives and neo-Orthodox also revised several key doctrines. Although Cornelius Van Til developed presuppositional apologetics as an attempt to remain faithful to timeless Christian truth as the Reformed tradition expresses it, he sacrificed the catholic and Reformed understanding of the use of natural revelation in theology and apologetics in the process. -/- "The invisible things of him from the (...) creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made...so that they are without excuse," writes the Apostle Paul. Without Excuse seeks to grapple with this indictment and show how Van Til's presuppositionalism fails as an account of natural revelation in light of Scripture, philosophy, and historical theology. It argues that these three sources speak with one voice: creation reveals itself and its God to the believer and unbeliever alike. (shrink)

Within a German sample, the current cross-sectional questionnaire study conducts interreligious and interdenominational comparisons between Catholics, Protestants, free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, Muslims, Spiritualists, i.e., religiously unaffiliated persons who label themselves as “spiritual,” and religious/spiritual “nones.” The comparisons refer to self-ratings of religiosity and spirituality, centrality of religiosity, as assessed by the Centrality of Religiosity Scale, and God concepts. The study is largely exploratory in nature, but also aims at identifying contexts of faith in which the term “spiritual” is typically used as (...) a self-description. The results show that only Spiritualists and free-church Protestants substantially label themselves as “spiritual.” However, they differ in many respects from each other, thus representing two distinct contexts of faith. The results further reveal a medium position of Catholics and Protestants in between the other subgroups, commonalities as well as specific differences between free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, and Muslims, and some religious/spiritual approaches even within the “nones.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 419-420 [Access article in PDF] Martin Mulsow. Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland, 1680-1720. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2002. Pp. x + 514. Paper, € 58.00.This is a marvelous, detailed, textured study of a large number of minor works and minor figures that developed and transmitted many of the elements of modern philosophy in early modern Germany. Many of (...) the texts were written in Latin, and only some were published. One should not teach the philosophy of the Enlightenment from Hazard or Cassirer without attention to these figures, whom they did not know. Now we know where our heroes like Lessing, Hume, and Kant got many of their fundamental ideas.Martin Mulsow ends this book with ten theses. The first holds that most of the authors discussed were radicalized in a multi-layered process, not simply from the reading of Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, or Toland. For example, one could take the role of an opponent in an academic disputation, and bit by bit begin to believe one's unorthodox role. Or one could be provoked by ultra-orthodox opponents to explore the opposite of what they believed. Some authors evolved into and out of radical positions over the course of their lives.Further theses contend that small, trusted circles of friends were often the enabling condition in which unorthodox views were first expressed and then hammered out. Irony, satire, humor, paradox, and ambivalence played key roles. It is often difficult to tell whether some of these texts were serious or intended as jokes, and perhaps the authors did not always know themselves. Some radical ideas were spread simply by curious erudites who assembled collections and bibliographies of radical manuscripts and texts without believing them.Mulsow shows how people wrote on controversial topics in coded scholarly language. Spinozism was discussed under the rubrics of Platonism and Stoicism; the sovereignty of the people was considered in terms of the lex regia; and Biblical criticism became code for the physicians' rejection of the materiality of the soul. Thus philosophical discourse can be found where one might least expect it in legal, philological, historical, and scientific debates. The numerous case studies that the author assembles amount to philosophical microhistory.Substantial chapters deal with various aspects of the intellectual stew that emerged from the bubbling pot of Jews and Socinians and other Christian sects that were semi-tolerated in the Netherlands. Unlike any construction of moderate and radical positions as opposed and at odds, Mulsow shows how they were often intertwined. The destruction of Christian Platonism, the paradoxical development of Enlightenment ideas out of anti-humanism, and the uses of so-called eclecticism in philosophy made possible the assembly of modern philosophical positions.In yet another paradox, many of these writers belong to what has been called the "conservative Enlightenment," intending only to temporize and draw the teeth of the political and philosophical radicals, and yet their writings systematized and transmitted the ideas of the radicals, opening the way to further radicality. It is a perennial weakness of the skeptics and proto-liberals like Gundling that they defended freedom of thought and libertas philosophandi even where it would undermine the ideas and institutions in which they believed.Most of the philosophically radical positions began as critiques of theological positions, and this is one reason why it is ever more apparent that one cannot understand the rise of modern philosophy without a close acquaintance with early modern theology. None of the early modern philosophers we are trying to understand was ignorant of the many levels of theological debate. There are numerous connections to later times: for example, a seventeenth-century debate over political theology anticipated Carl Schmitt's twentieth-century rediscovery of this topos.Mulsow places the Enlightened ideas of Locke and Newton in the context of their basis in the theology of anti-Trinitarian Socinians and Arians such as Samuel Crell. This was as important to many who radicalized it as the Spinozism credited with spawning the radical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vetera Novis Augere et Perficere:Thomas Aquinas and Christian-Muslim DialogueJoseph Ellul, O.P.Pope Leo XIII's encyclical letter Aeterni Patris, issued on August 4, 1879, sought to address many issues that were challenging nineteenth-century Catholic scholarship and academic life. In proposing the thought of Thomas Aquinas as a model of Catholic teaching, the Pope intended, in his own words, "to strengthen and complete the old by aid of the new,"1 not only (...) by reviving the study of the works and teachings of the Angelic Doctor, especially in the realm of philosophy, but also to uphold as perennial his method of engaging with his contemporaries within and without the Catholic faith.2 It is within this context that we are called upon to reflect upon this appeal: "vetera novis augere et perficere."The thirteenth century was indeed a time of intellectual upheaval, following the introduction of Aristotle and, later on, the translations into Latin of the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle by Ibn Rušd (Lat. Averröes; d. 1198). This event was met within the ecclesiastical world with apprehension, if not outright fear. Neo-Platonic philosophy and its interpretation by Ibn Sina (Lat. Avicenna; d. 1037) was already perfectly acceptable to Mediaeval Christian scholars. The latter was in fact considered an essential tool for understanding the illuminationist thought of St. Augustine. Étienne Gilson even spoke of Augustinisme avicennisant (Avicennized [End Page 1231] Augustinianism).3 The problem was Aristotle and his renowned commentator Ibn Rušd: a pagan commented on by an infidel.One must also note, however, that mediaeval Western intellectuals and institutions were able to encounter and adapt the Islamic legacy, because they already possessed a sufficient scientific base (with of course the contribution of translations of Greek together with Latin works) with which to understand, assimilate, and build upon this new knowledge that appeared from the East. In sum, mediaeval Christendom created living, vibrant societies, constantly searching, always discovering something new.In dealing with the specific (and delicate) subject of Aquinas's dialogue with Islamic thought, it would be necessary to reflect in particular upon two key works of his: the Liber de Veritate Catholicae Fidei contra Errores Infidelium (A Book on the Truth of the Catholic Faith against the Errors of Unbelievers),4 popularly known as the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], together with his De rationibus fidei contra Saracenos, Gnæcos et Armenos ad Cantorem Antiochenum, better known simply as De rationibus fidei.At this point it would be necessary to articulate the term "Islamic thought." Of itself it should not be identified with Islam as a religion. Rather, it should be considered as embracing classical Greek philosophy as interpreted by the Neo-Platonic movement and disseminated through Oriental Christian and Jewish schools of thought. Islamic civilization absorbed these teachings and built its own proper ediice upon these foundations.A Model for Interreligious Dialogue?Proposing Thomas Aquinas as a model for engagement with Islamic thought may also raise a few eyebrows. Hence, it would be appropriate to pose an essential question: "What type of dialogue existed in mediaeval times?" One should begin with an a priori exclusion of dialogue as it is understood today, given the fact that there existed neither the motive nor the means to implement it.In fact mediaeval society was aware of only three religions: the pagan, which had been replaced by Christianity; the Jewish, founded upon the precepts of the First Covenant which "Christ fulilled by his actions and [End Page 1232] by his teaching"5 and which was also believed to prefigure the everlasting New Covenant sealed by Jesus on the Cross; and finally, the Christian, which believed in Jesus as the final revelation of God to humanity.6 With such a vision in mind it is obvious that any doctrine that is not situated within these parameters, or which proposes some form of belief or conduct which was different from, if not contrary to, the Christian vision of God, the cosmos, and society, would be considered as heretical and its promoter an impostor.7When Islam made its appearance in the Christian world, it carried with it a book that it considered of divine provenance, and... (shrink)

St. Basil was a towering figure in the fourth-century Church. In the midst of great controversy, he led the charge of those faithful to the doctrine proclaimed at Nicaea. For the bishop of Caesarea, the array of false teachings that plagued the Church was not merely a matter of conflicting opinions or interpretations. It was rather a result of the moral failure of so-called leaders of the Church to look first to the will of God revealed in Scripture as their (...) compass in all things-in matters of both theology and personal conduct. Here St. Basil lays out a consistent theological ethic, rooted in a nuanced appreciation for the supremacy of Scripture. These texts, presented with the Greek on the facing page, are essential reading for anyone interested in early Christian approaches to ethics as well as the right use and interpretation of the Bible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa MonasticismChristian P. B. HaskettIdentity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism. By Martin A. Mills. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 404 + xxi pp. with 12 black and white plates.In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a type of teaching called a dmar khrid, a "red instruction," wherein the lama brings students through (...) a teaching as a physician might dissect a corpse, pointing out and explaining the various parts and organs and their places and functions. In Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism, Martin Mills has done very much the same thing, with the exception that the body he examines is still very much alive, and emerges, to my eyes at least, as a new and wholly vital entity. Mills exposes the subcutaneous and sanguine body of Tibetan Buddhism, the bones and muscles that make up its structure, the blood that flows through it, and the organs that keep it alive, in "a plain and open manner," just as in a dmar khrid.1 The value of such a presentation truly cannot be overstated. An attempt to catalog the contents of each chapter would be both impossible and counterproductive, as the wealth of theoretical material and ethnographic detail is a large part of what makes this book so powerful. Instead, I will identify several topics, several of the vital organs alluded to, that are either not commonly noticed in the academic study of Buddhism, or that are given fresh perspective by Mills's anthropological and sociological methodology, and that are so crucial to understanding how it is that Buddhism lives in a typical Himalayan village. The latter portion of this review explains why I place such high value on this book and its potential place in Buddhist-Christian studies.Identity, Ritual and State is an ethnography of Kumbum Monastery in Lingshed, Ladakh (the eastern half of the Kashmir valley, located in Jammu and Kashmir, India), but its concerns are much more far-reaching than a single remote Himalayan village. The central question of the work is "how we are to understand the nature of religious authority in Tibetan Buddhist monasticism" (p. xiii), although it might more properly be the religious authority of Tibetan [End Page 187] Buddhist monastics. This answer is worked out in three overlapping areas of analysis: local ritual activity, ecclesiastical structure of the monastery, and the ritual foundations of Tibetan political thought (p. xvii).Mills convincingly asserts that there is a framework within which Buddhism happens in the Himalayas. The starting point of this framework is birth itself, which establishes the embodied person. The very physicality of personhood has several implications. First, the body is embedded in a very specific local space and place, and personhood is thus not only embodied, but also chthonic—intimately bound up with the earth or soil onto which it is born. At birth, persons are injected into a complex matrix of relations between people and various spirits, such as household gods and protectors, nāga, and itinerant demons. For example, Lingshed is divided into seven subterritories, each under the jurisdiction of a local deity whose physical abode and reign are well known to all in the village.2 These deities are associated with features of the local geography, and they regulate and influence local agricultural and social production, so birth in one area or another signifies a relation with the deity presiding over it. The land itself is imbued with a notion of personhood and agency. The human body is also the repository for pollution (sgrib), which comes about as a result of violating the established hierarchy of space and place and from bringing about changes to the local matrix of embodied persons. Both bodily pollution concerns and the need for proper relations with local spirit numina mandate definite, ongoing ritual attention. Rituals are occasioned in response to births, deaths, spirit possession, unintentional pollution of places or household objects, and movements within the monastic ecclesiastical structure, or happen regularly according to an astrologically and agriculturally influenced calendar.Rituals are performed by monks not only because they are trained specialists, but because... (shrink)

Jan-Olav Henriksen reconstructs and analyzes Christianity as a cluster of practices that manifest a distinct historically and contextually shaped mode of being in the world. Henriksen suggests that these practices imply a complicated relationship between the tradition in which they originate, the community that emerges from and is constituted by that tradition, and the individuals who appropriate the tradition that these communities mediate through their practices. Thus, to think of Christianity simply in terms of belief is misleading and represents (...) an underdetermination of its distinct character. Henriksen further argues this relationship needs to be described primarily as practices aimed at orientation and transformation. His analysis points to Christianity's similarity to other religions in regard to the functional or pragmatic dimensions it displays. Examining facets such as prayer, the use of scripture, preaching and doctrine, Henriksen emphasizes that the element that makes a practice distinctively Christian is how it relates to and is informed by the Jesus story. (shrink)

Abstract. This article offers one response from within Christianity to the theological challenges of Darwinism. It identifies evolutionary theory as a key aspect of the context of contemporary Christian hermeneutics. Examples of the need for re-reading of scripture, and reassessment of key doctrines, in the light of Darwinism include the reading of the creation and fall accounts of Genesis 1–3, the reformulation of the Christian doctrine of humanity as created in the image of God, and the possibility of a new (...) approach to the Incarnation in the light of evolution and semiotics. Finally, a theodicy in respect of evolutionary suffering is outlined, in dialogue with recent writings attributing such suffering to a force in opposition to God. The latter move is rejected on both theological and scientific grounds. Further work on evolutionary theodicy is proposed, in relation in particular to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. (shrink)