This essay explores the significance and implications of the causal theory of reference for the current debate on the necessity and exchangeability of the divine title ‘Father’ in the discourse of the Church. Identifying ‘Father’ as a vocative term historically grounded in the speech of Jesus and his Apostles, the authors assert that it successfully refers to God, functioning very much like a proper name. They also identify linguistic barriers to its replacement by other terms.

Notwithstanding the protest of contemporary theologians, substantive changes in the language by which the church names God must result in an alienation from the gospel.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE TRINITY AND FEMINISM * GREGORY RoccA, O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Berkeley, California SPEAKING THE CHRISTIAN GOD is a substantial and fundamental theological response to the basic assumptions and conclusions of the burgeoning feminist movement within Christian theology. Its opponent is clearly theological feminism, not that egalitarian feminism which seeks justice for women within church and society. Noting the " paucity of critical response from the (...) theologians of the church " to the challenge of feminism, the editor states the book attempts " to substantively and critically engage specific feminist thinkers " about the doctrine of God and God-talk, and " to offer constructive discussion and analysis of the crucial and often very complex theological issues." With only a couple of exceptions, the individual articles succeed admirably in the second aim, though only about half offer a substantive engagement with specific feminist thinkers (the most frequent debate partners are Sallie McFague and Rose~ mary Radford Ruether, and the single most cited line is Mary Daly's " If God is male, then the male is God "). The editor also warns us that polemic has often not been avoided, for " when the gospel of Jesus Christ is at stake, passion also must enter into theology." However, again with only a couple of exceptions, I found the individual essays to be models of rational criticism and controversy which avoid the kind of emotional attack that delights in sarcasm, personal vituperation, and ad feminam arguments. *Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism. Edited by Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. Grand Rapids, Michigan/Leominster, England: Eerdmans/Gracewing, 1992. Pp. x + 337. 509 510 GREGORY ROCCA, O.P. The book's eighteen contributors (thirteen men and five women) share the fundamentals of Christian belief and span the various Christian confessions, though the great majority are from the Protestant traditions. This collection does not entirely escape the anthological bane of uneven quality (though almost all the essays are excellent), repetition, and lack of focal unity (the common target is feminism but the responses to it are varied). As an aid in discerning the focal unity behind these diverse rejoinders to feminism, I will synthesize the essays under four basic questions : How do we speak the Christian God? Why do we speak the Christian God as Father? What does speaking the Christian God as Father teach us about God and ourselves? Why does theological feminism have trouble with speaking the Christian God as Father? First Question: How do we speak the Christian God? According to different essayists-by simile, metaphor, analogy qualified by negative theology, and personal name. Some point out the differences between these various ways of speaking God and then try to show how, in at least one of the ways, Father is God's ineradicable and eternal name. Thus, they defend Father as the Trinity's nomen primum and critique the feminists for conflating the distinct ways by which we speak God. Roland Frye, Garrett Green, Colin Gunton and Janet Martin Soskice all focus on Father as a metaphorical name for God. Frye maintains there is an essential difference between simile and metaphor, and that Father is God's most fitting metaphorical name. While God is a few times compared to a mother by illustrative simile (mainly in Second and Third Isaiah), he is never named mother or addressed as mother; more positively, the appellative and predicative metaphor Father is said of God directly or vocatively about 250 times in the Old and New Testaments. One might wonder, however, whether the division between metaphor and simile is so airtight. Are not all metaphors immediately translatable back into similes? The answer is No, according to Garrett Green, who explains how contemporary thinkers see metaphor not as atomistic and substitutional (the classical view) but as contextualized and THE TRINITY AND FEMINISM 511 unique. Thus, Father is God's unique metaphorical name which transcends mere simile. Still, one might counter that metaphors are protean and plastic: if Father can be said uniquely of God, then why not also Mother? Gunton addresses himself to this objection in dialogue with Sallie McFague, contending that a realist theological epistemology shows that divine metaphor cannot be totally protean but... (shrink)

Proceedings of the eighth trans-disciplinary symposium on philosophy and medicine held at Farmington, Connecticut, November 9-11,1978.

in a scientific way, and takes the patient and his family into his confidence. Thus he learns something from the sufferer, and at the same time instructs the invalid to the best of his power. He does not give his prescriptions until he has won the patient's support, and when he has done so, he steadilY aims at producing complete restoration to health by persuading the sufferer in to compliance (Laws 4. 720 b-e, [28]). This passage shows the perennial nature (...) of the problems of treating the patient as a person. It shows as well the historical'depth of philosophical interest in medicine. The history of philosophy includes more reflections upon medical ethics than the casual reader might suspect. Many of these reflections are pertinent to contemporary issues such as abortion and population control. Plato, for example, recommends abortion in cases of incest (Republic 5. 461c); and Aristotle argues for letting seriously deformed children die, while forbidding infanticide as a means of popUlation control, suggesting instead the use of early abortions. 'As to the exposure in rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live, but that on the ground of an excess in the number of children... let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what mayor may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation' (Politics VII, 16,335 b20-26, [4]). (shrink)

This collection of essays and excerpts gives a comprehensive overview of Alvin Plantinga's seminal work as a Christian philosopher of religion.

Proceedings of the second trans-disciplinary symposium on philosophy and medicine held at Farmington, Connecticut, May 15-17, 1975.

The unsettling language of blood has been invoked throughout the history of Christianity. But until now there has been no truly sustained treatment of how Christians use blood to think with. Eugene F. Rogers Jr. discusses in his much-anticipated new book the sheer, surprising strangeness of Christian blood-talk, exploring the many and varied ways in which it offers a language where Christians cooperate, sacrifice, grow and disagree. He asks too how it is that blood-talk dominates when other explanations would do, (...) and how blood seeps into places where it seems hardly to belong. Reaching beyond academic disputes, to consider how religious debates fuel civil ones, he shows that it is not only theologians or clergy who engage in blood-talk, but also lawmakers, judges, generals, doctors and voters at large. Religious arguments have significant societal consequences, Rogers contends; and for that reason secular citizens must do their best to understand them. (shrink)

Aristotle, Politics, Books III and IV, trans. Richard Robinson, with a supplementary essay by David Keyt, Clarendon Aristotle Series , pp. xxx + 155; 40.00/$49.95, ISBN 0 19 823591 7 ; 17.99/$24.95, ISBN 0 19 823592 5.

The lyric speaker begins by turning his or her will into words, but begins to be a Browningesque speaker when this conversion leads to a turning of the will against words. This inversion, or perversion, of the will against its own expression requires a reader to entertain a complex notion of the relationship between intention and language—or, more accurately, to hold in suspension two competing versions of that relationship. A reader learns not only to conceive interpretation in the simple lyric (...) sense, as a prevailing assertion of the will, but also to conceive any given assertion of the will, any intention given over to articulation in language, as an interpretation and therefore a potential falsification inviting further refinement. The playful competition Browning urges between these two conceptions of intentionality frees meaning to wander somewhere beyond the ken of each lyric speaker, somewhere in the future of lyric utterance. Meaning is to the dramatic lyric what action is to the drama proper; and much as the curious "action in character" of Browning's dramas defers dramatic action and makes room for play, so Browning defers meaning in the lyrics by enlisting the patterning forces of the self-interfering will.1· 1. Browning remarked in the preface to Strafford that his play turned on "Action in the Character rather than Character in Action".Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, has published articles on Hopkins and Browning. An expanded version of the present essay appears in his Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure. (shrink)

First published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.