This wide-ranging book reconstructs this debate and places within their contemporary contexts the rival claims concerning the nature of the cosmos and the ...

"The book’s contribution to feminist philosophy of religion is substantial and original.... It brings the continental and Anglo-American traditions into substantive and productive conversation with each other." —Ellen Armour To what extent has the emergence of the study of religion in Western culture been gendered? In this exciting book, Grace Jantzen proposes a new philosophy of religion from a feminist perspective. Hers is a vital and significant contribution which will be essential reading in the study of religion.

Mainstream philosophy of religion often seems like a debate between two camps. In one corner, there are the defenders of theism and orthodoxy, out to show that the tenets of Christian belief can be rationally defended. In the other corner, there are the scientific-minded sceptics and atheists. The intriguing thing about Jantzen’s book—and feminist religious thought more generally—is that it elaborates a third position, a relatively fresh and distinctive way of looking at some very old debates.

What could be the meaning of Christianity on this side or beyond its most traditional transmission? This paper suggests that it could be an invitation to deify our flesh instead of despising it. Indeed, the God of Christianity does not remain out of our physical reach but is incarnate in a human body as a sensitive transcendence living among us on this Earth. One of the main challenges for Christians is thus how to care for, transform, transfigure, resurrect and share (...) their bodies, leading them from mere somas or corpses to divine fleshes. Jesus gives many examples of such a behavior towards the body(ies). However, those who are presumed to represent him and ensure his inheritance neither take into account nor pass on, at least sufficiently, this crucial aspect of his teaching, and in reality, Eastern traditions introduce us more to cultivating our sensory perceptions and spiritualizing our bodies. Another Christian path ought to be the respect for the transcendence of the other as naturally different, therefore an education of our sexuate belonging, to pave the way towards the respect for an absolute sensitive transcendence. A surprising thing in the life of Jesus is also the continual presence of nature, nature as cosmos but also nature that humans are and share. Nature, which is generally viewed as a major component in pagan cults, is the most constant factor in the incarnation of the Christian God and in Jesus’s way of speaking and acting. Now, nature can be shared by all as the teaching of Jesus and his commandment regarding love, which makes Christianity a potentially democratic religion capable of crossing cultural boundaries. They are thus elements in a Christlike legacy which deserve to be considered, as well as arts and culture that it has inspired, before giving it up to the benefit of sciences, technique and a life without an absolute sensitive transcendence to which we can resort in our developing and flowering as human beings. (shrink)

In his Encomium of Agatha Patriarch Methodius suggests that a figure appearing to the saint in her prison could be either the Apostle Peter, an angel in the guise of Peter, or Christ impersonating an angel in the guise of Peter. This article has two aims : to show that Methodius offered these alternatives because he was acutely aware of the problems arising from attempts to identify agents from their outward appearances ; and to demonstrate that Methodius could accept the (...) concepts of angelic and divine impersonation without jeopardising the real presence of the saints in dreams and visions because he held the 'Origenist' belief that exemplary human beings can be transformed into 'angels' and 'gods' and therefore concluded that saints could act as their own impersonators. (shrink)

This essay adds a theological voice to the current debate over the legacy of Gilles Deleuze. It discusses Peter Hallward's charge that Deleuze is best read as a mystical, theophanic philosopher who values creativity to the detriment of real creatures. It argues that while Hallward is right to discern a flight from bodies, relations, and politics in Deleuze, this is due not to Deleuze's contemplative mysticism, but rather to his strident rejection of any transcendence. The essay then draws upon Thomas (...) Merton in order to argue that only a fully contemplative engagement with transcendence allows us to save the sort of radical becoming that Deleuze sought but couldn't achieve. (shrink)

In face of unprecedented awareness of religious diversity, as well as the dangers of conflict, interreligious dialogue has become vital. Yet, these authors maintain, it is the commitment to think together about religious faith and our inherited traditions that genuinely moves mutual understanding to new levels. Here is such a religious experiment, an interreligious theological quest, framed in the interests of peacemaking." -- Publisher.

The problem of divine hiddenness has become one of the most prominent arguments for atheism in the current philosophy of religion literature. Schellenberg (Divine hiddenness and human reason 1993), one of the problem’s prominent advocates, holds that the only way to prevent completely the occurrence of nonresistant nonbelief would be for God to have granted all of us a constant awareness of Him (or at least a constant availability of such awareness) from the moment we achieved the age (...) of reason. Now, if that were the case, we might be faced with a difficult obstacle to the development of a proper, meaningful relationship with God: namely, since the experience of God would be so unutterably wonderful (at least for some), we could be at risk of coming to commune with God not from love of Him but for the amazing experience that that communion involves. In other words, given that mystical union with infinite perfection is, qua experience, inconceivably better than that of any drug, we might come to treat God as something analogous to a powerful narcotic, seeking the experience for the pleasure of the experience more than from any devotion. Since God wants to foster genuinely meaningful relationship with Him, He rightly delays granting us such awareness of Himself, even though that leaves open the risk that nonresistant nonbelief could arise. (shrink)

Critics often suggest that Socrates’ portrait of the philosopher’s inspired madness in his second speech in Plato’s Phaedrus is incompatible with the other types of divine madness outlined in the same speech, namely poetic, prophetic, and purificatory madness. This incompatibility is frequently taken to show that Socrates’ characterisation of philosophers as mad is disingenuous or misleading in some way. While philosophical madness and the other types of divine madness are distinguished by the non-philosophical crowd’s different interpretations of them, (...) I aim to show that they are not, in fact, presented as incompatible. Socrates’ pair of speeches demonstrates that madness can be divided into harmful and beneficial kinds, and in Socrates’ key discussion of philosophical madness (249c4-e4), I argue that the crowd correctly recognises that the philosopher is mad on the basis of his eccentricity, but wrongly assumes that the philosopher’s madness is of the harmful type because it fails to realise that the philosopher is enthused. Socrates’ second speech provides information about human souls and gods which shows that philosophical madness belongs to the beneficial type and so falls under the heading of divine enthusiasm after all. Importantly, human souls and gods are shown in the speech to be roughly isomorphic. Both philosophical and other kinds of divine madness involve having something divine inside a human body (entheos): in the former a human soul has become godlike; in the latter a human soul has been displaced by a god. Because of this, I propose that philosophy is presented as a genuine form of divine madness alongside the other more conventional examples. (shrink)

John Foster presents a clear and powerful discussion of a range of topics relating to our understanding of the universe: induction, laws of nature, and the existence of God. He begins by developing a solution to the problem of induction - a solution whose key idea is that the regularities in the workings of nature that have held in our experience hitherto are to be explained by appeal to the controlling influence of laws, as forms of natural necessity. His second (...) line of argument focuses on the issue of what we should take such necessitational laws to be, and whether we can even make sense of them at all. Having considered and rejected various alternatives, Foster puts forward his own proposal: the obtaining of a law consists in the causal imposing of a regularity on the universe as a regularity. With this causal account of laws in place, he is now equipped to offer an argument for theism. His claim is that natural regularities call for explanation, and that, whatever explanatory role we may initially assign to laws, the only plausible ultimate explanation is in terms of the agency of God. Finally, he argues that, once we accept the existence of God, we need to think of him as creating the universe by a method which imposes regularities on it in the relevant law-yielding way. In this new perspective, the original nomological-explanatory solution to the problem of induction becomes a theological-explanatory solution. The Divine Lawmaker is bold and original in its approach, and rich in argument. The issues on which it focuses are among the most important in the whole epistemological and metaphysical spectrum. (shrink)

In recent years the doctrine of divine simplicity has become a topic of interest in the philosophical theological community. In particular, the modal collapse argument against divine simplicity has garnered various responses from proponents of divine simplicity. Some even claiming that the modal collapse argument is invalid. It is our contention that these responses have either misunderstood or misstated the argument, and have thus missed the force of the objection. Our main aim is to clarify what the (...) modal collapse argument in fact says, and explain why the recent responses do not succeed. In order to argue our case, we will proceed in several steps. First, we aim to systematically articulate the doctrine of divine simplicity. Second, articulate the Christian conviction that God is free to create any feasible world or no world at all. Third, argue that divine simplicity suffers a modal collapse and thus undermines God's freedom. Fourth, respond to potential objections to modal collapse. Fifth, we offer some concluding remarks. (shrink)

Six "divine conjectures" frame the place of Theóne (The One to Whom we pray) in the creation of our universe and for its continuing development in five subsequent stages into a loving universe. The first stage, the cosmological universe, establishes the laws of nature, understood by scientists as the "standard model". The second stage introduces life and death into the universe by a process we are only now beginning to understand. Stage 3 requires certain life forms to become conscious (...) with a subset of those life-forms acquiring language that results in that subset becoming self-conscious. The next stage, Conjecture 4, identifies certain persons who become addicted to learning in their unrelenting effort to learn as much of what can be known as possible. The fifth conjecture requires individual persons to act as agents of Theóne in achieving Conjecture 6—a universe that is both loving and lawful. During the course of the exposition subsidiary discussions of the concepts of conjecture and hypothesis explicate the function of each in the advancement of knowledge and understanding. There are brief discussions of prayer and purpose in relation to the Divine. (shrink)

The discipline, Christian Spirituality, evokes a new interest in Early Christian spirituality. What conceived spiritualities were fostered when the early Christians read the documents that were written to them and how did it influence them? According to Wolfgang Iser, a ‘reader often feels involved in events which, at the time of reading, seems real to him’. This article looks into how John describes and explains the divinity of Jesus. It also attempts to determine conceived spiritualities (lived experiences) fostered when the (...) early Christians read John. The article starts with a brief orientation of what it means when a reader becomes entangled in the reading of a text. Then some mechanisms, as proposed by Waaijman and Iser, that can foster spiritualities are employed to examine the text, including the interaction between the text and the reader; the creation of images; the dialectic between retention and pretension and the filling of gaps. (shrink)

The problem of divine hiddenness has become one of the most prominent arguments for atheism in contemporary philosophy of religion. The basic idea: we have good reason to think that God, if He existed, would make Himself known to us such that His existence could not be rationally doubted . And since He hasn’t done so, we can be confident that He does not actually exist. One line of response that has received relatively little attention is the argument that (...) God justly refrains from granting us all a rationally indubitable belief in Him because we are unworthy of such belief, and in fact deserve exclusion from communion with God. John Schellenberg dubs this the “Just Deserts Argument.” Here I consider several possible versions of the argument and subject one of them to further development and defense. (shrink)

Purpose. Reconstruction of Empedocles’ doctrine from the point of view of philosophical anthropology. Theoretical basis. Methodological basis of the article is the anthropological comprehending of Empedocles’ text fragments presented in the historical-philosophical context. Originality. Cognition of nature in Ancient Greece was far from the ideal of the objective knowledge formed in modern times, cognition of the world as it exists before man and independently of him. Whatever the ancient philosophers talked about, man was always in the center of their attention. (...) I proposed an anthropological version of the interpretation of the doctrine of Empedocles, within the framework of which various elements of his concept fit into a consistent model. Conclusions. Empedocles’ anthropology is based on the recognition of several fundamental things. First of all, there is no death. Second, there is no fundamental difference between human and celestial. This line is conventional and under certain conditions one can overcome it. Cod can become a human, and a human can become God. Teaching of evolution is also double. Not only physical shell evolves, keeping only the most adapted species, but the soul too. The latter can both ascend to the gods and go down to the bushes and fish. Purification of the soul and mastering the magic of the elements gives an impetus for a correct direction of evolution. Empedocles is an anthropologist-practitioner, who shows by his example that a human can cope with all the elements and reach divinity. He chose the elemental ingredients for penetrating the Fortunate Isles, leaving the instructions on how to become God. (shrink)

Next to the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness has become the most prominent argument for atheism in the current literature. The basic idea is that if God really existed, He would make sure that anyone able and willing to engage in relationship with Him would have a rationally indubitable belief in Him at all times. But as a matter of fact we see that the world includes nonresistant nonbelievers. Therefore God doesn’t exist. Here I propose a (...) reply to the problem that shifts focus from the nonresistant nonbelievers to those who are resistant. I claim, Howard-Snyder, and others) that for many such people, having God’s reality forced upon them unwillingly might result in significant spiritual/moral harm, inhibiting their ability to develop a positive relationship with God. general critique of any strategy that references the notion of God’s proper non-revelation to the resistant.) If this is true, it could help explain why God refrains from revealing Himself in a rationally indubitable manner not only to the resistant, but even to the nonresistant. Why? Because it may be that under present circumstances God is actually more concerned about the welfare of the resistant than of the willing; and revealing Himself to all of the willing could actually result in the truth of theism being forced on the resistant. (shrink)

Divine revelation as a subject matter cannot be properly considered in the framework of theology, as theology already presupposes revelation. In order to conceive revelation in a non-theological way, we need a philosophical approach. Thus we can recognize the need for a renewed understanding of revelation as God’s self-revelation. In this paper I argue for the understanding of God’s self-revelation as radical revelation, which is opposed to partial understandings ofrevelation, such as the propositional one. A given notion of (...) class='Hi'>divine revelation goes together with a given notion of human persons; and as soon as it becomes clear that divine revelation is properly understood as radical revelation, the need of a radical understanding of human persons can be recognized too. Human persons can be determined in terms of their ad se or ad aliud dimensions, but it is the former that leads to a proper understanding of human persons as being basically related to the radically self-revealing God. (shrink)

In Slavoj Žižek’s work two forms of violence, mythic and divine, are distinguished from one another by virtue of instrumental ends. In the former case violence serves the establishment of the social order, whereas in the latter case, which is non-instrumental, the violence is an expression of pure justice. It is also important to observe that these two forms of violence respond differently to the singularity of our existence, insofar as the instrumental disavows and neutralizes the inhuman dimension that (...) exists within each of us. But if there is something limitless or immeasurable apropos of the inhuman, then such distinctions between the mythic and the divine become problematic. I will therefore contend in the essay below that the catastrophic predictions derived from such distinctions need further interrogation. (shrink)

Philosophical theologians have been sharply divided with respect to God's relationship to time. This article examines the principal arguments they have offered for divine timelessness and temporality. Based on the discussion, it appears that the grounds for affirming divine timelessness is comparatively weak, but that there are two powerful arguments in favour of divine temporality. It would seem, then, that we should conclude that God is temporal. But such a conclusion would be premature, for there remains one (...) way of escape still open for defenders of divine timelessness. The argument based on God's action in the world assumes the objective reality of temporal becoming, and the argument based on God's knowledge of the temporal world assumes the objective reality of tensed facts. If one denies the objective reality of temporal becoming and tensed facts, then the arguments are undercut. For, in that case, nothing to which God is related ever comes into or passes out of being, and all facts exist tenselessly, so that God undergoes neither extrinsic nor intrinsic change. He can be the immutable, omniscient Sustainer and Knower of all things and, hence, exist timelessly. In short, the defender of divine timelessness can escape the arguments for divine temporality by embracing the tenseless theory of time. It is noteworthy, however, that almost no defender of divine timelessness has taken this route. (shrink)

A central part of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation is that the Son of God ‘becomes’ incarnate. Furthermore, according to classical theism, God is timeless: He exists ‘outside’ of time, and His life has no temporal stages. A consequence of this ‘atemporalist’ view is that a timeless being cannot undergo intrinsic change—for this requires the being to be one way at one time, and a different way at a later time. How, then, can we understand the central Christian claim (...) that the Son of God ‘becomes’ human? This paper examines one such explanation, drawn from a brief remark by Brian Leftow: the Word takes on flesh by exhibiting modal variation with regards to the incarnation. On this account, a timeless God ‘becomes’ incarnate simply due to variation across logical space: at some possible worlds He is incarnate and at others He is not. Modal variation need not, therefore, require temporality: it only requires variation across possible worlds. I draw out the problems with Leftow’s modal claim under the heads of Ersatzism and Genuine Modal Realism about possible worlds, respectively. I argue that in both instances, Leftow’s desired cross–worldly variation of the Son’s incarnation cannot be achieved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Divine Person" as Analogous NameDylan SchraderThe position of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic school that human beings cannot name God and creatures univocally is well-known.1 This includes the term "person," which is predicated of the Trinity, of angels, and of human beings truly but analogically. In contrast, it might seem that, when speaking of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in respect of one another, "divine (...) person" must be univocal.2 [End Page 217]The seventeenth-century Discalced Carmelites of Salamanca (the Salmanticenses) thought otherwise. They argued that the ratio3 of "divine person" is common to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit not univocally, but analogically, and that this follows from established Thomistic principles.4 Their position makes for an interesting case study in religious language, as the Salmanticenses apply a highly developed material logic to the central mystery of Christian faith.Words, Concepts, and ThingsIn On Interpretation (Peri hermeneias), Aristotle explains that words immediately signify concepts and, by means of concepts, things.5 This so-called "semantic triangle" makes it easy to misunderstand univocity and analogy if we do not first determine how a particular thinker conceives of the relationship among words, concepts, and things. To discern how the Salmanticenses understood this relationship, it is most helpful to look to their counterparts, the Discalced Carmelites at neighboring Alcalá de Henares outside Madrid, commonly called the Complutenses.6 The Complutenses' Artium cursus [End Page 218] serves as philosophical handmaid to the Salmanticenses' Cursus theologicus, and is therefore essential for correctly interpreting the latter's claims about grammar, logic, and metaphysics.7To begin with the verbal element, this is how the Complutenses, following a fairly typical account, explain the difference between a vocal sound, a name, and a term: A vocal sound (vox) is speech considered simply as an audible phenomenon, the pure sound wave. A name (nomen) is a vocal sound that signifies something. A term (terminus) is a name insofar as it serves as one end of a proposition.8 Terms may be purely mental (as when a proposition is conceived of in the mind alone), or they may be spoken or written.Names and terms are useful precisely because they signify. The Complutenses define "signifying" (significare) as "representing to the knowing power something other than [the signifier] itself."9 A name or term points beyond itself so that something else can become known to the mind through that name or term.When it comes to spoken (or written) terms, a term is "common" (communis) if it signifies more than one thing. Common terms may be "non-transcendent" (non transcendens) or "transcendent" (transcendens). Common terms are non-transcendent if they are predicated of certain things (such as "man" or "animal"). They are transcendent if they are predicated of all things. Six terms are usually acknowledged to be transcendent: "being" (ens); "thing" (res); "true" (verum); "good" (bonum); "something" (aliquid); and "one" (unum).10 [End Page 219]Here it is necessary to distinguish first and second "intention" (intentio).11 The Carmelites take "first intention" properly to be the act whereby the intellect knows things in accord with what is in them as realities.12 This act of the intellect is the "formal first intention," while the thing known is the "objective first intention." A name signifying a thing in this way is a "name of first intention."But the intellect can also attend to those things not in accord with what is in them from their own perspective as realities, but instead with reference to their character as acted upon by the intellect itself. This act is called "second intention."13 An example of first intention is the intellect's knowing that "man is an animal," whereas an example of second intention is its knowing that "'animal' is a genus."The Complutenses stress that first and second intention are, properly speaking, acts of the intellect—distinct ways of attending to what it knows—even though logicians often use "first intention" and "second intention" as shorthand to refer to the objects of these acts.14 In fact, because objective second intentions (the objects of the intellect's second-intentional acts) are beings of reason... (shrink)

What is the relationship between divine commands and ethical duties? According to the divine command theory of ethics, moral actions are obligatory simply because God commands people to do them. This position raises a serious question about the nature of ethics, since it suggests that there is no reason, ethical or non-ethical, behind divine commands; hence both his commands and morality become arbitrary. This paper investigates the scriptural defense of the divine command theory and argues that (...) this methodology is wrong as any interpretation of the text stands on a complex web of ethical and non-ethical presuppositions and as these presuppositions change so does the interpretation. (shrink)

What is the relationship between divine commands and ethical duties? According to the divine command theory of ethics, moral actions are obligatory simply because God commands people to do them. This position raises a serious question about the nature of ethics, since it suggests that there is no reason, ethical or non-ethical, behind divine commands; hence both his commands and morality become arbitrary. This paper investigates the scriptural defense of the divine command theory and argues that (...) this methodology is wrong as any interpretation of the text stands on a complex web of ethical and non-ethical presuppositions and as these presuppositions change so does the interpretation. (shrink)

Is power the essence of divinity, or are divine powers distinct from divine essence? Are they divine hypostases or are they divine attributes? Are powers such as omnipotence, omniscience, etc. modes of divine activity? How do they manifest? In which way can we apprehend them? Is there a multiplicity of gods whose powers fill the cosmos or is there only one God from whom all power(s) derive(s) and whose power(s) permeate(s) everything? These are questions that (...) become central to philosophical and theological debates in Late Antiquity (roughly corresponding to the period 2nd to the 6th centuries). On the one hand, the Pagan Neoplatonic thinkers of this era postulate a complex hierarchy of gods, whose powers express the unlimited power of the ineffable One. On the other hand, Christians proclaim the existence of only one God, one divine power or one 'Lord of all powers'. -/- Divided into two main sections, the first part of Divine Powers in Late Antiquity examines aspects of the notion of divine power as developed by the four major figures of Neoplatonism: Plotinus (c. 204-270), Porphyry (c. 234-305), Iamblichus (c.245-325), and Proclus (412-485). It focuses on an aspect of the notion of divine power that has been so far relatively neglected in the literature. Part two investigates the notion of divine power in early Christian authors, from the New Testament to the Alexandrian school (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius the Great) and, further, to the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa), as well as in some of these authors' sources (the Septuagint, Philo of Alexandria). The traditional view tends to overlook the fact that the Bible, particularly the New Testament, was at least as important as Platonic philosophical texts in the shaping of the early Christian thinking about the Church's doctrines. Whilst challenging the received interpretation by redressing the balance between the Bible and Greek philosophical texts, the essays in the second section of this book nevertheless argue for the philosophical value of early Christian reflections on the notion of divine power. The two groups of thinkers that each of the sections deal with (the Platonic-Pagan and the Christian one) share largely the same intellectual and cultural heritage; they are concerned with the same fundamental questions; and they often engage in more or less public philosophical and theological dialogue, directly influencing one another. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of KnowledgeSteven P. MarroneLydia Schumacher. Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. xiii + 250. Cloth, $119.95.Lydia Schumacher has written an ambitious book. Among the many things she tries to accomplish in the volume, three stand out to this reviewer. First of all, she proposes (...) to reexamine Augustine’s theory of knowledge. She argues that Augustine’s philosophy is grounded in theology. For his theory of knowledge this means, by Schumacher’s reading, that the aim of cognition is to enable the human being to regain its original status as “image of God,” which latter state is manifested in knowing God and making God known. It is the mental, and by extension ethical, process of becoming God’s image that Schumacher says we should, in the Augustinian context, take the phrase ‘divine illumination’ to signify. For Augustine, Schumacher insists, this process is an entirely internal phenomenon constituted by a self-correcting series of intellectual reflections on the part of the mind. In holding to this view, Schumacher emphatically rejects the understanding, common in scholarship, that “divine illumination” for Augustine had to do with mental reference to what she labels an “extrinsic” standard such as the eternal ideas in God’s mind. [End Page 293]Second, Schumacher argues that the Augustinian project, epitomized in his theory of knowledge, was carried out by most of the thinkers of the Latin Middle Ages, particularly by Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. These latter two individuals are therefore divine illumi-nationists of the first order. What historians often designate as an Augustinian current, evident in the high Middle Ages among scholastics from the Franciscan Order, represented instead a deviation, a turn to an entirely novel theological-philosophical project. Here, mind’s work was conceived of as “the immediate and totalized knowledge of an individual essence.” And for this, recourse to an extrinsic standard filled the bill. Consequently, high-medieval Franciscans were the actual propounders of the theory of knowledge Schumacher tells us has wrongly been associated with divine illumination. Moreover, this Franciscan current of thought, once severed from its original theological underpinnings, provided the historical inspiration for modern philosophy, thereby acting as a kind of catalyst for the modernist philosophical problems—as Schumacher receives them—of rationalism and fideism, skepticism as well.Third, Schumacher sounds the call for a contemporary return to the authentic Augustinian project. By starting philosophy, as she claims Augustine did, with theological assumptions, she wants to fashion a “faith-based concept of knowledge” and with it, most importantly, to escape the modernist dilemma of the incompatibility of faith and reason. Grounding philosophy in theology—Christian theology, she maintains—will restore a lost integrity to our procedures of thinking, ultimately redeeming philosophy itself.How much of this program has Schumacher managed to achieve? Since this reviewer is marked out as the key spokesperson for the interpretation of both divine illumination and the history of medieval thought against which Schumacher inveighs, perhaps he should not be the one to answer the question. Still, the reader forewarned, I lay out my opinion. With regard to her first goal, Schumacher makes good on her promise to render Augustine as a theologian bent on working from his assumptions to designate a process whereby philosophy and mankind can be simultaneously restored. She is not so convincing in her attempt to equate this program with divine illumination. For Schumacher, the process of divine illumination is correlative to the idea of God as source of the mind’s power to act. Yet Augustine often plainly associates what he describes as illumination with turning to God and conceding his ideas an important role in the mental processes of judgment and concept formation. It is hard to see how one can honestly exclude this extrinsic element of what Augustine intended.Regarding her second goal, Schumacher does an excellent job of reminding us how Augustinian were almost all medieval scholastics, Thomas included, and warning us not to take the high-scholastic recourse to Aristotle as a sign of opposition to Augustinian modes of thought... (shrink)

In what sense, if any, does the dominant conception of the traditional theistic God as disembodied inform our embodied experiences? Feminist philosophers of religion have been either explicitly or implicitly preoccupied by a philosophical failure to address such questions concerning embodiment and its relationship to the divine. To redress this failure, certain feminist philosophers have sought to appropriate Luce Irigaray’s argument that embodied divinity depends upon women themselves becoming divine. This article assesses weaknesses in the Irigarayan position, (...) notably the problematic move from a woman’s subjectivity to divinity. In the light of these weaknesses the author looks for a better alternative. Drawing on the work of feminist and nonfeminist philosophers, a feminist-friendly conception of theism is sketched in terms of incarnation and intersubjectivity. Philosophical accounts of the ethical formation of gendered subjects by way of bodily practices offer new concepts for con. (shrink)

In what sense, if any, does the dominant conception of the traditional theistic God as disembodied inform our embodied experiences? Feminist philosophers of religion have been either explicitly or implicitly preoccupied by a philosophical failure to address such questions concerning embodiment and its relationship to the divine. To redress this failure, certain feminist philosophers have sought to appropriate Luce Irigaray’s argument that embodied divinity depends upon women themselves becoming divine. This article assesses weaknesses in the Irigarayan position, (...) notably the problematic move from a woman’s subjectivity to divinity. In the light of these weaknesses the author looks for a better alternative. Drawing on the work of feminist and non‐feminist philosophers, a feminist‐friendly conception of theism is sketched in terms of incarnation and intersubjectivity. Philosophical accounts of the ethical formation of gendered subjects by way of bodily practices offer new concepts for confronting and transforming the discursive tradition of philosophy of religion. With these concepts, the formation of women’s collective historical experience within a tradition mediated by philosophical texts takes on new significance for feminist philosophy of religion. (shrink)

John Foster presents a clear and powerful discussion of a range of topics relating to our understanding of the universe: induction, laws of nature, and the existence of God. He begins by developing a solution to the problem of induction - a solution whose key idea is that the regularities in the workings of nature that have held in our experience hitherto are to be explained by appeal to the controlling influence of laws, as forms of natural necessity. His second (...) line of argument focuses on the issue of what we should take such necessitational laws to be, and whether we can even make sense of them at all. Having considered and rejected various alternatives, Foster puts forward his own proposal: the obtaining of a law consists in the causal imposing of a regularity on the universe as a regularity. With this causal account of laws in place, he is now equipped to offer an argument for theism. His claim is that natural regularities call for explanation, and that, whatever explanatory role we may initially assign to laws, the only plausible ultimate explanation is in terms of the agency of God. Finally, he argues that, once we accept the existence of God, we need to think of him as creating the universe by a method which imposes regularities on it in the relevant law-yielding way. In this new perspective, the original nomological-explanatory solution to the problem of induction becomes a theological-explanatory solution.The Divine Lawmaker is bold and original in its approach, and rich in argument. The issues on which it focuses are among the most important in the whole epistemological and metaphysical spectrum. (shrink)

The dispute between two of Princeton Theological Seminary's leading Barth scholars concerning theological ontology invites engagement from the contemporary Thomistic tradition. On the one hand, McCormack argues that, in a fully Barthian theological ontology, divine triunity is constituted by the pretemporal election of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, Hunsinger contends that this election is expressive of an antecedent trinity. In the light of scholastic disputes between Dominican and Franciscan theologians, McCormack's proposal is seen to resemble aspects of the (...) Bonaventurean account of triune relationality, particularly the account of procession as constitutive of personal distinction and the affirmation of a primordial ‘primity’ adhering to the Father's innascibility. Whilst McCormack seeks to avoid an undetermined originary plenitude, his treatment of the divine attributes as logically consequent to election risks attributing to pretemporality a status akin to originary primity. Affirming, with Hunsinger, an eternal trinity antecedent to election, the Thomistic tradition nonetheless contains the resources necessary to prevent this antecedence becoming a dissociative antecedence. As such, Thomism preserves divine aseity whilst equally safeguarding against the disconnection of logos asarkos from logos incarnandus that McCormack regards as an unwarranted metaphysical speculation that bypasses the particularity of revelation in Jesus Christ. (shrink)

Describes a Platonic personal spirituality based on reason that is readily accessible to people today. Michael LaFargue presents an important and accessible aspect of Plato’s legacy largely overlooked today: a variety of personal spirituality based on reason and centered on virtue. Plato’s Virtue-Forms are transcendent in their goodness, ideals that Platonists can use to improve character and become like God so far as is humanly possible. LaFargue constructs a model of inductive Socratic reasoning capable of acquiring knowledge of these perfect (...) Virtue-Forms, then scales back claims about these Forms to what can be supported by this kind of reasoning. This is a critical theory, but also a pluralistic one that accommodates modern cultural diversity. A how-to chapter provides detailed descriptions of the rules of Socratic reasoning basic to this spirituality, which any interested individual can practice today. LaFargue supports his interpretation by a close reading of the Greek text of key passages in Plato’s dialogues. The work also undertakes a broader philosophical consideration, discussing the philosophical foundations proposed for this Platonism in relation to the thought of G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Rorty. (shrink)

The essential companion to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenom of Man , The Divine Milieu expands on the spiritual message so basic to his thought. He shows how man's spiritual life can become a participation in the destiny of the universe. Teilhard de Chardin -- geologist, priest, and major voice in twentieth-century Christianity -- probes the ultimate meaning of all physical exploration and the fruit of his own inner life. The Divine Milieu is a spiritual treasure for (...) every religion bookshelf. (shrink)

The starting point for thinking about divine command is the reality of God, the initiating and effecting word of God and the character of God, reflected in Scripture especially in regard to goodness and justice.The necessity of social interaction as context for divine command is reflected in several ways; among those mentioned here are the divine council, the covenant, and the incarnation, the word made flesh and living among us. The covenant is central to thinking about (...) class='Hi'>divine commands as they are reflected in Scripture. It presumes a relationship between God and those commanded and is a voluntary association. Obedience to the divine commands results from the goodness of God and is only to the Lord. As such the ethic of command becomes also an ethic of response. Rather than being commands to be obeyed without reason or thought and only because they are commanded by God, the divine commands of Scripture and the law generally involve rationality and persuasion, teaching and interpretation. They chart a way of freedom. (shrink)

In this text the author takes up Luce Irigaray’s call upon women to image their ‘God’: a quality or attribute that makes them divine women when they realize it in their lives. She presents ‘human dignity’ as such a ‘divine’ quality and as a value that is understood by many to be the ultimate of our human being. Inspired by Ina Praetorius’ expression that seven billion dignitaries walk the earth, the author connects the different aspects of the concept (...) of human dignity with the image of the dignitary, arguing that this image evokes the idea that the subject is free to move and is meant to flourish according to their capabilities. The author also discusses the difficulties of the idea of human flourishing as an ideal for humanity, especially in the context of disability and illness. She offers the notion of ‘becoming, infinitely’ as an alternative for flourishing. (shrink)

From a social science perspective, a major purpose of religion is to organize the behavior of the community of believers in order to maximize its success as a collective. The underlying premise of this lecture is that religious authority will sanction violence and aggression when they are assessed to be an effective means of realizing the goals of the collective. Conversely, when violence and aggression become unhelpful or counter- productive for realizing community goals they are forbidden. This phenomenology of religion (...) and violence is applied to the history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to demonstrate that none of these religions is inherently more or less apt to engage in violence. Their use of belligerent and irenic behaviors are more profoundly influenced by historical context and social needs than by theology. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are seven stages, or orientations, of thought about divine madness (initially understood by Plato as eros) with each stage offering claims, or critiques of claims, about its nature. Moreover, each orientation offers a claim, or a critique of a claim, about a relation to the Good that comes through divine madness. My account of the stages is greatly indebted to, but divergent from, the work of William Desmond. Hence, my thought is (...) metaxological and the discussion of the stages takes its bearings from the "between" of eros and agape. I make reference to Desmond's work in order to develop and contrast my own view of the Good as both agapeic and erotic. I argue that the agapeic activity of the Good has an erotic aspect. This aspect of the Good is not an incompleteness or need; rather, it is an absence that "contains" the Good's agapeic activity of creation. Further, this aspect serves not to realize the Good but to ground the becoming in creation (including the movement of our eros through the seven stages of divine madness). I develop how in the seventh stage our eros dynamically images the erotic aspect of the Good's activity by consciously intermediating its relations to the other. (shrink)