Philosophy and Theology

The topics related to the creation of man and to the death of human being are, undoubtedly, the most interesting issues facing the human mind. In explaining them, Christian Philosophy is strongly supported by the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, but there is also an attempt of explanation with referring to the process of evolution. In this article we present such an attitude elaborated by Polish Philosopher Fr. Tadeusz S. Wojciechowski. According to him the resurrection of Human Body takes place in the moment of one’s death. The death is the highest degree of biological evolution in which Man reaches the eternal life. Achieving the aim of biological evolution is not equal with the reaching spiritual evolution; at least not in case of every human being. Thus, the Purgatory helps to accomplish the task of spiritual self-fulfillment, unless one’s life led him to the eternal condemnation.

This article describes the origin in 1991 of the Karl Rahner Society, which meets every year within the annual convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America. The Rahner Society’s origins include the role of William M. Thompson-Uberuaga as Founding Coordinator, the contributions of the earliest members of the Coordinating Committee, and the relation between the KRS and the CTSA. Society members found a vehicle for publication in the Marquette University journal Philosophy & Theology whose founding editor was Andrew Tallon. The journal continues to publish the society’s “Rahner Papers” annually.

This essay traces the history of the Karl Rahner Society between the years 1998 and 2019. It lists the achievements of the society’s coordinators, many of the books and articles about Rahner published by members of the society, and the role played in the society by Presidents of the Catholic Theological Society of America. The essay also identifies three persistent themes of the society: Rahner and his contemporaries, Rahner and the Catholic Church, and Rahner and ecumenism.

Karl Rahner completed his in 1951 but did not receive permission to publish it from his Jesuit superiors. The work appeared in 2004, twenty years after Rahner’s death. This essay examines his work on the Assumption and the censors’ objections. Rahner’s publication of 1947, “On the Theology of Death,” was appended to the Marian treatise as an “excursus” but laid the foundation for the later work. Rahner interpreted the Assumption as an anticipation of the resurrection of the dead. This essay focuses on three speculations by Rahner: on the relation of the soul to the body, on the maturation of the soul after death, and on the final resurrection as the world’s transformation. The censors criticized Rahner’s theology of death as too speculative and his Mariology as too minimal. Yet ’s treatment of Mary as a sign of hope until the second coming vindicated Rahner.

This article describes the presence of Karl Rahner in philosophical, theological, and propagandistic works published in the Soviet Union or published outside the USSR and distributed within it. Some references to Rahner appeared in self-published works without the approval of Soviet censors. These included the works of Orthodox theologians such as Sergej Želudkov and Alexander Men’. Other references to Rahner appeared in anti-religious propaganda and in works by Marxist-Leninist philosophers such as Bronislavas Juozas Kuzmickas. By 1992, the year following the collapse of the USSR, Rahner began to receive a more favorable reception in the writing of philosophers such as Elena B. Timerman.

Karl Rahner had a powerful influence on Vatican II for four well-known reasons: his fluency in Latin, his intellectual brilliance, his strenuous work ethic, and his wide knowledge of Catholic theology. Rahner’s contribution as a peritus was surpassed only by Gérard Philips and Yves Congar, all three of whom advised the key conciliar fathers such as Cardinals Suenens, König, and Frings. This essay traces the influence of Rahner on the four Vatican II Constitutions, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Lumen Gentium, Dei Verbum, and Gaudium et Spes. It concludes with a reflection on the pastoral care that infused his work.

Christian thinkers in the patristic era were not reluctant to integrate classical philosophy with biblical theology as they addressed the seeming incompatibility of free will and determinism (fate). This paper compares and contrasts Tertullian and the Stoics as they explain three issues relating to freedom and fate: 1) The operation of the Logos, 2) Theological Anthropology, and 3) Teleology. While in agreement with the Stoics on several key points, Tertullian crucially departs from them as he argues it is not by necessity—but rather by voluntary collaboration between humanity and the Logos—that the Creation arrives at its determinate end.

Martin Luther has given little explicit influence on philosophy, and in 1950 Jaroslav Pelikan called for further work into investigating a ‘Lutheran philosophy.’ The beginning of this work lies in Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, in which he attacks the method of scholasticism and counters with the method of truly Christian theology, a theologia crucis. Such counter, this article argues, entails a shift in Christian philosophizing, a shift that sharply distinguishes between God and man and yet, through this distinction, as Luther asserts, allows one to “call the thing what it actually is”—and thus leads to a truly Christian philosophy.

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 article, I focus on the circular relationship that, in his 1998 encyclical, Jean Paul II argued there is between faith and reason. I first note that this image of circularity needs some explaining, because it is not clear where exactly the circular process begins and ends. I then argue that an explanation can be found in Aquinas’s reflection on the gift of understanding. Aquinas referred to the virtue of faith as caused by God, which promotes human reason, and this in turn strengthens the certainty of faith.

Computational functionalism assumes a synonymy between abstract functional processes in the central processing unit of a typical digital computer and the human brain, hence the conclusion that an appropriately programmed computer is a mind. Arguably, the point is that neural firings are synonymous with the transfer of electrical currents. Both are accountable and susceptible to a physicalist’s explanation. But, the reason they both worked is ultimately premised upon a causal relationship with nature. However, to understand why nature works raises some problems. Nature is either a self-propelled machine or is propelled by another force. The paper submits that, much as the discourse implies some form of “theism,” the only consistent construal is functional-theism. This, again, raises further problems.

The central thesis of this essay is that the relation imagined to hold between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit corresponds quite closely with the triadic relationship that holds between object, sign, and interpretant, respectively, within C. S. Peirce’s conception of semiosis. Section 1 introduces Peirce’s conception of semiosis. Section 2 supports the main thesis through examination of descriptions of the Trinitarian relations in two classic Christian texts: The New Testament and The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Section 3 reviews two alternative explanations of this surprising correlation: Andrew Robinson’s vestigia Trinitatis explanation and a naturalistic alternative.

Habermas argues that religious reasons can enter the public sphere so long as they undergo a translation that meets the standards of public reason. I argue that such a translation may be either unnecessary or impossible. Habermas does not sufficiently consider the possibility that religious reasons are already publicly accessible such that there no translation is required. Moreover, Habermas entirely fails to consider the possibility that, if he is right about religious reasons not being publicly accessible, these reasons may be of a kind such that they cannot be translated into a publicly accessible idiom as he supposes they can be.

Karl Rahner is not usually thought of as a feminist. Though feminist theology has often made recurs to his theological anthropology, Rahner is assumed to offer feminist theology little in terms of an analysis of sex, gender, and human nature. While Rahner’s explicit writings on women appear fragmentary and ambivalent, an investiga­tion of the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Rahner’s theological anthropology shows that Karl Rahner’s understanding of human nature is imbued with a conception of sex and gender that constitutes an important contribution to an understanding of sex, gender, and human nature in theological anthropology in general and feminist theology in particular.

Bernhard Deister’s book Anthropologie im Dialog is a comparison of aspects of Karl Rahner’s theology with the psychology of Carl Rogers. Here the dialogue partner of the German philosophical theologian is an American psychologist of influence. The author begins: “These pages present two exemplary pictures of the human person, from theology and psychology. They unfold their approaches in an interdisciplinary dialogue.” The following pages summarize this comparison. Both thinkers see the human being as an active subject living in the tensions between individuality and relation­ship, and then between immanence and transcendence. Building on this, Rogers’ psychology centers on the dynamics and emotions accompanying life with social groups, while Rahner is frequently involved in drawing particular theological disciplines like moral theology or ecclesiology forward into creative reflections on tradi­tion, spirituality, and praxis amid church and society.

Contemporary Roman Catholic considerations of church reform are often impeded by the worry that any acknowledgment of systematic or properly ecclesial failure calls Jesus’s promise of the church’s indefectibility into question. This makes honesty about such failure, and therefore true reform, impossible. At best, in this way of thinking, blame can be shifted onto a few “bad apples.” Karl Rahner’s engagement with a quite different problem—how Roman Catholics can account for the fruits of the Spirit in Protestant Ministries—can provide tools for a renewed ecclesiology capable of honestly reckoning with sin in and by the church.

This article explores Karl Rahner’s conception of the “Liturgy of the World” in light of the theme for the 2019 Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, “Another World is Possible: Violence, Resistance and Transformation.” Employing Rahner’s hermeneutics of worship, violence can be conceived as a denial of this cosmic liturgy, transformation as conversion to it, and resistance as the stance opposing the denial. Resistance entails solidarity with all humanity in liturgical participation and in action for social justice. Metz’s political-theological critique of Rahner, with assistance from Bruce Morrill’s analysis of Metz’s work for liturgical theology, and Rahner’s reference to Teilhard’s “Cosmic Mass,” taken today in light of contemporary cosmology with assistance from Roger Haight’s non-dualistic approach to models of God, are among the implications to be considered for engaging Rahner’s vision in ongoing efforts at liturgical renewal.