Amid the Arian dispute, opponents of Arius object to his Christology by arguing that if the Son came into being, then the Son is a creature; he is mutable; he is corruptible; his goodness is non-essential; and he cannot give life to humanity. These charges consistently appear in the writings of Arius’s contemporaries, the councils to follow, and the Eastern Church fathers in the centuries after the dispute. In this essay, I flesh out the metaphysical foundation of Eastern anti-Arian polemics and what this foundation tells us about how the Eastern pro-Nicenes understand the basic metaphysical differences between God and creatures.

This article offers a general “immanent” critique of Derrida’s Deconstructionism, whose positive outcome is an argument for the continuing viability of a Hegel-oriented idealistic metaphysics. Derrida’s thought is construed as an unspokenly skeptical and nihilistic development of Heidegger’s existential ontology and of the sensu latiori “structuralist” trend of contemporary human sciences. The main difficulties pointed out hinge on (§ 1) the relationship deconstructionism establishes between thought and language, speech and writing, and phonetic and non-phonetic writing, (§ 2) its paradoxical concept of “transcendental writing” as the “origin” of empirical writing and of the “trace” as more “original” than original reality; and, finally, (§ 3) its specification of the alleged “radical other” to metaphysical thought as writing, difference, and literature.

Central to Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of Martin Heidegger is his assessment that Heidegger’s phenomenology delimits the possibility of dealing with ethical questions in any sincere way. According to Levinas, Heidegger ontologizes these questions, reducing them to mere means to a deeper understanding of Being. Levinas, by contrast, attempts to forge a phenomenology which can providea metaphysical account of ethics which goes beyond being. In this paper we will explore the nature and validity of Levinas’s critiqueof Heidegger by comparing his approach to the question of evil to Heidegger’s as presented in his 1936 lecture course on Schelling’sFreiheitschrif.

The aim of this paper is to show that for Aristotle god is, and is not, virtuous. I consider first the arguments of the EN to show that the gods do not have virtue---beginning with an account of the divisions of the faculties of soul, and of the virtues that belong to those divisions. These arguments suggest that nous is a divine virtue, and so in the second section I consider nous, as a faculty of soul and as a virtue, and examine the differences between nous as a human virtue, and nous as a virtue which is also a substance, and with which the first divine principle is identified. In the third and final section I ask what kind of difference Aristotle takes the difference between human and divine nous to be---and in particular whether this is a difference in kind or in degree.

The aim of this article is to contrast Hegelian insights about the secret with Derrida’s literary account of the secret in the story of Abraham. Derrida outlines two kinds of secret in “Literature in Secret,” one revealable and the other apophatic. I propose that the first kind of secret is Hegelian in nature because a productive concept of contradiction underlies it. On the other hand, the second kind of secret is Derridean because it withdraws from all revelation. Through an analysis of the role of contradiction in Hegel’s Logic and Derrida’s distinction between revealable and unrevealable secrets, I aim to explore the logical and structural components of the concept of the secret.

In this essay, I criticize John Caputo’s deconstructive analysis of the nature of mystical union. Using the works of St. John of the Cross, I show that the notion of mystical union does not belong to “the metaphysics of presence.” I also discuss the true significance of deconstruction for the study of mysticism.

Throughout his career as an academic theologian, Karl Rahner never explicitly set himself the task of working out a theory of language. Nonetheless, the seminal insights for such a theory were formulated in his extensive corpus as functions of other, more properly theological concerns. These consist chiefly of the development of religious doctrine and the cult of the Sacred Heart (See DD, BH, ST, TM, ULM). Other important insights appear in his treatment of the hermeneutics of eschatological statements and the relation between Christianity and poetry (See HES, PC, PP). All these theological concerns have received scholarly attention (See Barnes 1994, Bonsor 1987, Callahan 1985, Corduan 1978, Doud 1983, Hines 1989, Phan 1988, Thompson 1992, Walsh 1977). As for Rahner’s theory of language, scholarship has shown how a coherent system can be constructed from the disparate sources that contain it (See Masson 1979, 224–33; and 1980, 266–72). In developing this previous work, the present article will ex plain how Rahner’s theory is derived from his distinctive meta physics of the symbol. Scholarship is only beginning this discussion, although the centrality of symbolism in Rahner’s thought has been well treated. [See Callahan 1982, Fields 2000 (esp. 6–16, 92–97), Motzko 1976, H. Rahner 1964, Wong 1984.] In addition, this paper will also suggest that an origin of Rahner’s symbolic view of language lies in Heidegger’s aesthetics. Bringing this origin to the fore will lead to a concluding discussion about the debt that Rahner owes his mentor at Freiburg University.

In order to make sense of Scotus’s claim that rationality is perfected only by the will, a Scotistic doctrine of truth is developed in a speculative way. It is claimed that synthetic a priori truths are truths of the will, which are existential truths. This insight holds profound theological implications and is used on the one hand to criticize Kant's conception of existence, and on the other hand, to offer another explanation of the sense according to which the existence of things is grasped.

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.

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.

The point of departure of this article is Martin Heidegger’s relation to two core problems of theology today: representation and transcendence. Concerning the first issue, it is known that Heidegger provided a thorough critique on representation as ontotheology. But as for the second problem, transcendence beyond representation, Heidegger remains ambiguous. His concept of Ereignis can be considered as both a transcendent and an immanent event. In the second part of this article, I try to ‘resolve’ this ambiguity in confronting it with Deleuze’s purely immanent ontology. What comes out is a redefinition of transcendence in Heidegger and Deleuze as a ‘transcendence within immanence.’

Darwinian atheists ridicule the “God of the Gaps” argument, claiming that it is theology and/or metaphysics masquerading as science.This is true as far as it goes, but Darwinian atheism relies on an argument which is equally metaphysical, which I call the “No Gaps,No God” argument. This atheist argument is metaphysical because it relies on a kind of conceptual necessity, rather than scientificobservations or experiments. “No Gaps No God” is a much better metaphysical argument than “God of the Gaps,” because the latteris based on a clearly false conditional inference. However, there are also good, but not decisive, arguments against the “No Gaps NoGod” argument. Because metaphysical arguments never resolve as decisively as scientific research questions, there will probablyalways be a legitimate controversy at the metaphysical level on this topic, even though there is no serious controversy about Darwinianscience itself. If this fact were more widely acknowledged, it could help to defuse the controversy over teaching Darwin in the public schools.

This essay shows why Karl Rahner’s “Chalcedon: End or Beginning?,” also titled “Current Problems in Christology” (1954), stands as a breakthrough in contemporary Catholic Christology. After describing the Neo-Thomism and Neo-Scholasticism of the early twentieth century, it examines one instance of this body of thought: Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s “Christ the Savior” (1946). Then, the essay reviews the argument of “Chalcedon: End or Beginning?” Finally, it contrasts Garrigou-Lagrange’s literal Thomism and Rahner’s transcendental Thomism.

Karl Rahner’s transcendental Christology examined the conditions for the possibility of faith in Christ and presented human nature as developing in response to God’s grace. This article affirms Rahner despite the critiques of Michel Henry, Roger Haight, John McDermott, Patrick Burke, and Donald Gelpi. Rahner’s Christology is not a phenomenology (Henry) but a theology that affirms God’s presence in history. To be sure, some critics have attacked Rahner for emphasizing God’s initiative and diminishing human responsibility (Haight) and for uncritically accepting Greek metaphysics (Gelpi). Yet Rahner rightly depicted Christ as a sacrament of the Father’s will, an event in history with consequences for all time. Other critics have accused him of obscuring the distinction between God and humanity (McDermott) and suggesting that there are two conscious subjects in Christ (Burke). This article accepts Rahner’s view of Jesus as both the presence of God’s Word and the human response to it.

In Spirit in the World, Karl Rahner contends that the existence of an Absolute Being is affirmed. However, such an affirmation is beyond the scope of his own methodology. Since the questions that characterize the philosophical theology of Rahner are also those that occupy postmodern thought (structures of knowing, the status of ontology, and the constitution of the subject) , this essay attempts ta read Rahner through the insights of philosophers such as Derrida and Taylor. The thesis is that Rahner’s method does not lead to Absolute Being; rather, God can be understaod as the restlessness that drives the human heart.

The defects and blank spaces of language are a challenge for any theology that sees itself as a linguistic reflection of faith. If theology pretends to speaking with any philosophical relevance, it must respect these gaps. Hermeneutics and deconstruction offer philosophical ways of analysing these linguistic gaps present in theology. In this way, they can integrate the linguistic turn of philosophy into theology. The hermeneutical theology of the twentieth century is at an impasse. Insofar as deconstruction carries critically different elements of the linguistic philosophy of hermeneutics forward, it provides theology with new opportunities to reflect on its own linguistic structure.

This study calls for a re-evaluation of Schleiermacher’s relevance and contemporaneity, with special emphasis on his account of consciousness and his theory of religion. Through a critical examination of Hegel’s critique of Schleiermacher, the author argues that Schleiermacher suceeeded in overcoming the paradigm of subjectivity in some ways, and failed in others.

This paper extends Jean-Luc Nancy’s engagement with St. Anselm. Specifically, while Nancy is primarily concerned with Anselm’s Proslogion, this paper brings Nancy’s deconstructive protocols to bear on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo. Of particular interest is Nancy’s treatment of the semiological association of economics and metaphysics. Ultimately, the “supplemental logic” developed here allows us to read Anselm’s dependence on the category of debt in the context of prayer. Finally, by stressing Nancy’s reception of French literary theory and poststructuralism, this paper offers an intervention into the burgeoning theological reception of Nancy, which generally sees him as a basically anti-Christian philosopher of Heideggerian, not Derridean, immanence.

The aim of this paper is to apply the metaphysics of John Duns Scotus in constructing a new conception of matter which does not stand in opposition to the mental realm, but is rather composed of both physical and mental elements. The paper is divided into four parts. Section one addresses Scotus’ claim that matter is intelligible and actual in itself. Section two aims to show that matter can be seen as a deprived thinking being. Section three analyzes Scotus’ conception of place. The final section brings together the conclusions of the three preceding parts to confront the Cartesian psycho-physical problem anew and to suggest a viable solution.

After responding to several misreadings of Milbank’s project in Theology and Social Theory—e. g., that it dispenses with “truth” or “reality”, is sectarian, reads a social theory off the Bible, is ecclesially absolutist—the authors highlight several strands of Milbank’s argument to stress the resolutely theological character of this work. In Milbank’s narrative, modernity is defined as a theological problem in which forms of modern secular thought have usurped theology as the “ultimate organizing logic”; his theological response to this involves a broadly Augustinian account of the relationship between nature and grace which requires a theology which can only be true if it is enacted: it is necessary for the Church to make an actual historical difference in the world.