Philosophy and Theology

This article addresses the issue of why God would sanction, via the Old Testament Law, less than ideal practices such as slavery, polygamy, and excessively harsh punishments for certain crimes. I appeal to two concepts (the idea of a supererogatory good, and the idea of Molinism) to explain why God sanctioned these practices. I explain that God’s sanctioning these practices may have been necessary in order to create the world with the most possible good.

The Preface to Part 4 of Spinoza’s Ethics claims that we all desire to formulate a model of human nature. I show how that model serves the same function in ethics as the creed or articles of faith do in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the function of allowing the imagination to provide a simularcrrum of rationality for finite, practical human beings.

In recent years much attention has been devoted to Hegel’s interpretation of Greek tragedy. To be sure, authors dealing with Hegel’s understanding of tragedy have adopted different perspectives. However they do share one common basic assumption, namely, that tragedy plays a crucial role in shaping some key features of Hegel’s philosophy. This article pursues along these lines, and demonstrates that tragedy, or some aspects of tragedy, reinterpreted and reformulated, inform Hegel’s theory of ethical agency. It performs this task on the basis of a reading of Hegel’s early essay The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate.

This article has a historiographical and a philosophical aim. The historiographical and most difficult objective is to provide a comprehensive presentation of F. W. J. Schelling’s doctrine of the potencies (Potenzlehre) for the English-speaking philosophical community as found in his, for the most part yet to be translated, late lectures on the positive philosophy of mythology and revelation. The philosophical objective is to show how this same doctrine provides a modern response to the assertion that thinking and Being are the same, sometimes rendered as “Thinking and Being belong together” or “Where there is Being, there is thinking.”

What does it mean for an individual (a one) to come to be? This question has been close to the center of attention throughout the history of metaphysics. St. Thomas Aquinas’s contributions to a defensible response to this question (in terms of esse) are well documented. Not as well known are the responses to this question offered in the past decade by two learned Jesuit Thomists who have also been heavily influenced by the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead: James Felt and Norris Clarke. It is the purpose of this article to examine carefully and criticize their responses to the above question.

This interview with Charles Taylor explores a central concern throughout his work, viz., his concern to confront the challenges presented by the process of ‘disenchantment’ in the modern world. It focuses especially on what is involved in seeking a kind of ‘re-enchantment.’ A key issue that is discussed is the relationship of Taylor’s theism to his effort of seeking re-enchantment. Some other related issues that are explored pertain to questions surrounding Taylor’s argument against the standard secularization thesis that views secularization as a process involving the ineluctable fading away of religion. Additionally, the relationship between Taylor’s religious views and his philosophical work is discussed.

Rahner's Mariology and theology of the saints exemplify his respect for the universality of the Catholic ethos. The article’s three parts substantiate this claim. First, it analyzes Rahner's placement of Mary outside his theology's center, while he resists marginalizing her. This analysis involves contrasting Rahner with Hans Urs von Balthasar. Second, it reads Rahner's theology of Mary's Assumption as an exercise in fundamental-eschatological theology. He takes a similar approach in his theology of the saints. Third, it considers Rahner's thoughts on devotion to Mary and the saints, relating these practices to his fundamental-eschatological theology. Rahner’s contextualization of Mary and the saints within the wideness of all history, to which eschatology attests, reflects his holding open of the universal Catholic ethos. This sets him apart from other Catholics, who fix Mary and the saints firmly at Catholicism’s center, thus potentially restricting the Catholic ethos. Today’s Catholics must learn from Rahner’s holism.

Throughout his life Karl Rahner wrote on saints in the church, both official (canonized) and unofficial. This essay first considers his major essays from the conciliar period, focusing on the question why and how we can existentially venerate the saints and drawing on his theology of God as Holy Mystery, Christ as redeeming Mediator between humanity and God, and the unity of the love of God and of the neighbor. A second section recalls earlier writings such as “The Church of Sinners’ (1947) and “The Church of the Saints” (1955) that anticipated his mature position. Later developments in his thought are then considered, with special attention to his fuller use of the concept of solidarity in its ontological and theological depth. Finally Rahner’s original diagnosis of the relationship of believers to their saints is tested against more recent developments in devotion to the saints.

In his 1959–1960 seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan states that one can only fully understand the intellectual (philosophical, ethical) problems Freud addresses when one recognizes the filiation or cultural paternity that exists between him and a new direction of thought represented by Luther. In this article Lacan’s interest in Luther’s theological voluntarism, his conception of God, his articulation of what Lacan identifies as the modern crisis in ethics and his view on the law in relation to desire is presented and analysed. It is argued that Lacan is primarily interested in Luther as a religious author radically expressing the problem of the foundation of moral law and addressing the question how and where a person finds moral orientation after the break with the medieval Aristotelian-scholastic universal order and given man’s sinful desires.

This essay examines Lévinas and Ricoeur’s criticisms of the project of theodicy and analyzes their attempts to figure an approach to God that survives the end of theodicy in terms of ethics (Lévinas) or hope (Ricoeur). In conclusion, it is argued that while both thinkers engage in the important task of disassociating God from the justificatory practices of theodicy, Ricoeur’s hope in the God of the future offers more ample resources for theological appropriation than Lévinas’s approach to God within the limits of ethics alone.

In the letters written to the Thessalonians, Paul’s teaching appears to be irreconcilably divided between a still influential Judaic apocalyptic eschatology and (due to Timothy’s considerable influence in the development of the gospel), an emphasis on Hellenistic self-transformation and, in particular, how the philosophy of Epicurus contributed to the psychological health of recent converts. By interpreting the rhetoric of wrath, quiet, sleep, and childbirth, Paul’s teaching as it emerges in 1 and 2 Thessalonians reveals how the gospel must necessarily encounter, agonistically, two foundations of thought. During the early composition of the letters to his churches, Paul struggles ambivalently between the persistence of a Judaic past and its metaphysical promise of a parousia and eschaton, and the realization that Hellenistic philosophy, and Timothy’s Epicurean pastoral care, provides immediate comfort to the well-being of others.

This paper strengthens an argument from Alvin Plantinga against versions of the doctrine of divine simplicity which identify God with each of his properties. Plantinga shows that if properties are causally inefficacious abstracta, then God cannot be one of them—since God is surely causally efficacious. Here I argue thatGod cannot be even a causally efficacious property. The argument is an important complement to Plantinga’s work, since in the years following the publication of his essay many metaphysicians began to think of properties as causally efficacious entities for reasons quite independent of the doctrine of simplicity.

This interview with John Cottingham explores some major themes in his recent work in moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion. It begins by discussing his views on the task of philosophy and focuses particularly on philosophy’s role in achieving an overall view of the world and for understanding and achieving the good life. It also discusses some ‘limits of philosophy’ with respect to understanding and achieving the good life; i.e., some ways in which philosophical reflection on the good life needs to draw on insights found in other domains such as psychoanalysis and religious faith and spiritual practice. The role of philosophy and spiritual practice in coming to religious faith and supporting it is also discussed.

This article provides a detailed examination of Bernard Lonergan’s nuanced understanding of experience and proposes his philosophical stance of critical realism as a foundation for interreligious dialogue. The article begins by acknowledging the existent tension between philosophers and theologians and suggests the problematic of interreligious dialogue as one field of possible collaboration. Critical realism is discussed in comparison to other, and indeed contrasting, positions, and is ultimately defended as the stance that provides correct answers to the so-called ‘three basic questions’ of cognitional theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. The notions of patterns of experience and bias are particularly emphasized in order to highlight the complexity of experience. By way of conclusion, suggestions are made as to how philosophers and theologians might enhance their collaboration by furthering their understanding of religiousexperience and employing it as a category in interreligious dialogue.