Philosophy and Theology

I evaluate two claims; that (a) Jesus’s message as recorded in the gospels implies exclusivism with respect to salvation and that, correspondingly, (b) Christians should be exclusivists with respect to salvation. I evaluate these claims through a cataloguing and evaluation of the logical condition involved in each of the claims regarding conditions for salvation made by Jesus in the Gospel of John. As a result, I argue that (a) is false and that, correspondingly, so is (b).

John Henry Newman's theological arguments against the mixture of liberal philosophy and Christian religion have drawn a great deal of scholarly attention. Comparatively underappreciated is Newman's rebuttal of liberal ideas on the philosophical plane. In this line of argument, which runs parallel to his more purely theological critique, Newman uses some of liberalism's own foundational philosophical premises to undermine the conclusions put forth by the exponents of liberal religion. This immanent critique of liberal religion is important not merely because it shows Newman's capacity to engage his opponents on their own terms, but also because it provides an argument against liberal religion that merits consideration even for those who reject Newman's particular theological beliefs.

This essay attempts to describe some basic aspects of the political logic of religious belief by reference to some recent work of Sarah Coakley. It does so in two parts. First we examine two models of God, the model of “competition,” shared by pop atheism and religious fundamentalism, and the model of “cooperation,” as espoused by classical religious belief. As an explication of this latter model, in the second part we examine what I term the “doxological feminism” of Sarah Coakley as it appears in her recent major work God, Sexuality and the Self. Coakley’s specific insight concerns the intrinsic connection between her religious practice of contemplative prayer and her theoretical reflection on the nature of desire, which is interrogated by reference to the thought of Jean Daniélou.

According to Plantinga, both the theistic and the Christian belief can be affirmed basically, namely, without proofs. Such a position—he tells us—traces back to Aquinas and Calvin. Here I intend to revisit Plantinga’s view of the relation between his own position (as inspired by Calvin) and Aquinas’s. I shall argue that the type of harmony the Reformed philosopher believes to have with Aquinas is only partially present, and that there is a different type of affinity between the two thinkers—though Plantinga is not aware of it. My aim is to show that Aquinas’s thought is really fruitful and inspiring to contemporary philosophy of religion, and that an outstanding thinker of our time such as Plantinga takes it as a reference point although does not entirely capture all its intellectual and spiritual depth.

This essay argues that Locke’s presentation of justification and the soteriological framework in which it is placed in The Reasonableness of Christianity is broad enough to encompass all “Christian” views on the topics except antinomian ones. In other words, the focus of the treatise is not Locke’s personal views of justification and the broader doctrine of salvation but an ecumenical statement of them. Locke’s personal conclusions on certain theological issues discussed in the opening pages of The Reasonableness of Christianity has led most to assume that the soteriological discussion that follows reveals Locke’s own personal theological position despite clear indications of his ecumenical intent in The Reasonableness of Christianity and elsewhere.

The nephew of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger was ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church for the Archdiocese of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Heinrich Heidegger, born in 1928, was the son of Fritz Heidegger (1894-1980), the younger brother of the philosopher. Soon after the ordination of a Roman Catholic to the priesthood he celebrates his First Mass, and after that special Eucharist there follows a dinner and reception enhancing the day. The following pages give a translation of the remarks made in 1954 by Martin Heidegger at the dinner after the First Mass of his nephew Heinrich. There are then some reflections on themes from this brief discourse relating to Heidegger’s thinking, motifs like the disclosure of Being, the centrality of individual existence, and the pervasiveness of history. In 2002, Fr. Heinrich Heidegger responded to an inquiry about the priest’s close relationship to his uncle, and that essay gives a further context for information on Heidegger and faith and church.

This essay argues that Heidegger’s theological thinking, best expressed by his “last god” from his 1930s Contributions to Philosophy, is a radicalization of his early Pauline phenomenology from the 1920s. I claim that Heidegger’s theological thinking, including his onto-theological critique, is in no way incompatible with Christian philosophy, but in fact furthers the Christian philosophical endeavor. The tenability of this thesis rests on disputing three critiques of Heidegger’s theology put forth by John D. Caputo, Richard Kearney, and Jean-Luc Marion, all of whom argue that Heidegger and Christianity are incompatible.

Gilson became familiar with American academic life and language during the summer of 1926 when he first visited the United States and taught two summer courses at the University of Virginia. His international renown as well as his popularity at the University of Virginia resulted in a second visit in 1937 to present the Richard Lectures on Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, which focused on the challenging theme of attempting to bring faith and knowledge into an organic unity. His dissection of three main philosophical traditions in the Middle Ages constituted an important step in Gilson reaching a satisfactory understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology within the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

This article proposes to elaborate aesthetic judgment. The context is John Dadosky’s call for such an elaboration in light of the theological and philosophical import of a recovery of beauty. Following Dadosky’s suggestion that this be set within Lonergan’s appeal to interiority, the article signals two points in Dadosky’s program: patterns of experience and the role of cognitional operations. The article turns to Mikel Dufrenne’s work on the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Based on this work, data is presented on behalf of configuring a pattern of cognitional operations that is specific to aesthetic experience and that exemplifies Lonergan’s general empirical pattern of cognitional operations: experience, understanding, judgment.

This article responds to the article by R. R. Reno that appeared in the May 2013 issue of the journal First Things. In that article, Reno calls Rahner a restorationist, an integralist, and the “ultimate establishment theologian,” who reassured but failed to challenge the mind-set of the Church before Vatican II. Reno also claims that Rahner had a negative impact on the Church, blaming him for the many deficiencies Reno sees in contextual, feminist, liberation, and revisionist moral theology. The first part of this current article looks at the term intégrisme, and rebuts Reno’s suggestion that Rahner is an integralist. The second section explores Reno’s charge that “Rahner’s time has passed.” The third part examines the ecclesiologies of Reno and Rahner, highlighting the differences between the two and the implications for theology. The article concludes with a brief discussion of Rahner’s contribution to theology in his own right.

Rahner’s work offers several starting points for Catholic theology’s necessary conversion on gender issues. His theology of the symbol sets the stage for an analysis of how “woman” functions in theological anthropology, and for a discussion of how “male” and “female” should be understood in the light of the critique of feminist thought. In short, how do we understand symbols, theologically, as expressive? Linking Rahner’s day and ours, I will then consider how Marian themes were treated by Lumen Gentium and Sacrosanctum Concilium, and how ecclesial questions since then further illustrate the ongoing struggle over the symbol “woman.” Finally, Rahner’s approach to conversion will be employed, as a way of illustrating the intimacy and ubiquity of sexism, given his sense that conversion engages not only isolated actions, but “the whole human being.”

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.

A contrast is developed between the educational views of van Schurman and Astell, revolving around their sense of Christian piety and their stance on women’s place in the social and political sphere. The work of Irwin, Hill, and others is cited, and it is concluded that important differences between the views of the two thinkers can be delineated, and that doing so helps us to understand the intellectual and philosophical milieu of the seventeenth century. In addition, the debate sheds light on today’s gender-essentialism controversies in education, and the extent to which intellectual rationality is a general human virtue.

Among theologians and philosophers in the American tradition, the idea of Hell is understood best through the works of Jonathan Edwards and William James. Both Edwards and James understood the idea of Hell as part of a worldview in which humans were humbled by their fallible nature. There are important differences between the views of Edwards and James, however, and these differences involve how each of them apprehends the suffering of other people. Edwards remains aesthetically aloof regarding the suffering of others, while James remains tragically tied to such suffering.

In this article, I draw on Kierkegaard’s often over-looked work, The Concept of Anxiety, to gain deeper insight into the tenor of melancholy. We discover that Kierkegaard labels anxiety, due to its connection to hereditary sin, as the source for melancholy. Thus, contrary to the usual interpretation of Kierkegaard, I argue that melancholy is more than an individual’s struggle with existence, but is intimately tied to the historical environment, because it is steeped in an ever-increasing, ever-deepening anxiety. This link be­tween anxiety and melancholy clears away misunderstandings about Kierkegaard’s description of melancholy and suggests implications in psychology, philosophy, and theology.

This article reconstructs and evaluates Josiah Royce’s treatment of the problem of evil. I begin with an explanation of how Royce understands Job’s situation in the biblical account to be representative of the human predicament with respect to God and evil (§1). Next, I assess Royce’s account of three relatively familiar responses to the problem of evil he means to reject (§2), and then I provide an analysis of his own proposal for addressing the problem (§3). In the final section of the paper, I raise four objections to Royce’s idealist theodicy (§4).

Advances in scientific study of the brain now enable the examination of nature and grace in human rationality’s embodiment in the brain’s biological processing. I model the brain’s biology using the dispositional tendencies of nature—characterized by Jonathan Edwards, C. S. Peirce, and the Jesuit philosophical theologian Donald Gelpi—to examine gracing of the mind’s habit formation (habitus) in terms of memory, learning, and decision making. This turn to tendency suggests a shift from understanding soul as Aristotelian act to instead emphasizing the potentiality informing the body and clarifies a scientifically plausible Rahnerian interpretation of obediential potency.