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221. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
David McPherson, John Cottingham

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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.

222. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
John R. Friday

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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.

223. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 24 > Issue: 1
James South Orcid-ID

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224. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Kenneth A. Bryson

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Genesis 1:26 announces that God made us in His image and likeness. The paper examines the connection between the divine image and likeness. The love that exists between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit must be in the image. However, we cannot understand the Trinity so we make use of the divine likeness as a road to the divine image. The dual nature of Christ makes this pilgrimage possible. Christ as God is the divine image whereas Christ as man teaches us how the divine likeness leads to the Father. The love inscribed in the human heart connects the finite to the infinite. The divine Persons exist in relationships. Salvation takes place through a person-making process in the likeness of divine relations. Salvation is the output of relationships taking place at the level of a social self, an environmental self, and an inner self. These processes function as gateway to the structure of the divine image.

225. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Clint I. Barrett

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Although philosophers have long agreed that Anselm’s PROSLOGION contains what is often called the ontological argument (but not by Anselm himself), they do not agree about just what that argument is. In this paper, I do two things: (1) I set out a careful, precise statement of the argument in the PROSLOGION, taking due account of the historical, personal, philosophical, and theological contexts of Anselm’s thought. (2) Having disembarrassed the argument of some common misunderstandings and placed it in its proper setting, I argue that it is more complicated and much stronger than all but a very few philosophers have realized.

226. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Antonio Calcagno

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Edith Stein’s early phenomenological texts describe community as a special unity that is fully lived through in consciousness. In her later works, unity is described in more theological terms as participation in the communal fullness and wholeness of God or Being. Can these two accounts of community or human belonging be reconciled? I argue that consciousness can bring to the fore the meaning of community, thereby conditioning our lived-experience of community, but it can also, through Heideggerian questioning, uncover that which remains somewhat hidden from consciousness itself: its own ground or condition of possibility, namely, being—a being that is both one and many, unified, communalised, and very diversified. If my reading of Stein is correct, the traditional understanding of the split between Stein’s strictly Husserlian/phenomenological period and her later Christian philosophical period must be renegotiated, at least when it comes to the philosophical problem of community or human togetherness.

227. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Sarah L. MacMillen

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This article discusses the definitions of faith of three twentieth-century Jewish-Christian mystic philosophers: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Gillian Rose. Weil’s “attente de Dieu” (waiting for God), Arendt’s “natality,” and Rose’s immanence each reflect an attention to the world in understanding the workings of faith. In this context, faith and hope are not cheap optimisms or escapisms into the transcendent, but a patient reckoning with the pains of the world and human relationships.

228. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Bernd Irlenborn

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Hick’s religious pluralism has been a matter of philosophical de­bate for more than two decades. Until recently, the philosophical framework of Hick’s pluralism has elicited a wide range of philosophical criticism. In this paper, I specify three core claims of Hick’s concept pertaining to the philosophical framework of his pluralism that have been under intensive discussion so far: Firstly, the epistemological claim that all exclusive religious truth claims have to be de-emphasised. Secondly, the methodological claim that Hick’s pluralism must be understood as a meta-theory and not as a first-order theory such as, for example, exclusivism. Thirdly, the metaphysical claim that no substantial properties can be ascribed to the noumenal and therefore transcategorial divine reality. I examine these three claims and reconsider Hick’s responses to philosophical objections to these claims. I argue that Hick is not successful in his defense. A reconsideration of these problems shows that all three pluralist claims remain neither compelling nor consistent.

229. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
James B. South Orcid-ID

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rahner papers

230. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Richard Penaskovic

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This essay provides an analysis of Karl Rahner’s book The Shape of the Church to Come and comments briefly on the context of this book, namely, the German Synod at Würzburg, Germany in 1971. Rahner was prescient in thinking that it may only be a single occasion that may precipitate a huge crisis in which many Catholics will leave the Church, refusing to pay the church-tax, as is happening in Germany today. Although Rahner sharply criticizes the Church as institution, his passionate loyalty to the magisterium also comes through loud and clear in all his writings. Rahner, the consummate theologian, cannot be pigeonholed into neat categories like “conservative” or “liberal” because his theology knows how to do a balancing act. Finally, Rahner is such a trailblazer in theology that it may take another fifty years for the institutional Church to catch up with his thought.
231. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Shannon Craigo-Snell

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This essay develops a Rahnerian view of kairos and proposes its contemporary utility in addressing the multiple prophetic calls to action in our media-saturated environment. In Rahner’s theology, kairos is the time of grace and opportunity, inaugurated by the event of Jesus Christ, in which each human person must accept or reject God’s loving self-communication. Because the chronos of daily life takes place within the kairos of Jesus Christ, there is kairos in every moment of chronos. Thus, the typical depiction of chronos and kairos is inverted. Instead of occasional moments of kairos interrupting the ongoing stream of chronos, Rahner portrays chronos as set within the larger reality of kairos. Our chronos takes place within the kairos of Jesus Christ. Such a view does not mitigate or prioritize the many prophetic calls contemporary Christians receive. It can, however, place them in appropriate theological context of the history of God that succeeds. Kairos is a reality created by God’s salvific activity and an opportunity to participate in the salvific love of God.
232. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Peter Joseph Fritz

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This article argues that Karl Rahner’s theme of “eschatological ignorance” should be retrieved to facilitate and to fortify the enactment of Catholic theology’s prophetic commitments in a U.S. context. First, the article presents and defends Rahner’s famous distinction between eschatology and apocalyptic. Second, it characterizes Rahner’s distinction as representative of his conviction of a need for docta ignorantia futuri, which stems from his theology of God as Absolute Mystery, and which, though Rahner recommends it to twentieth-century Europeans, seems particularly well suited for theological application in the twenty-first-century United States. Third, it suggests how Rahner’s eschatological ignorance might make a prophetic impact on the American socio-religio-political climate.
233. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 2
Ann R. Riggs

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234. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
T. Allan Hillman, Tully Borland

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The primary goal of this essay is to demonstrate that Leibniz’s objections to theological voluntarism are tightly connected to his overarching metaphysical system; a secondary goal is to show that his objections are not without some merit. Leibniz, it is argued, holds to strong versions of the imago dei doctrine, i.e., creatures are made in the image of God, and imitatio dei doctrine, i.e., creatures ought to imitate God. Consequently, God and creatures must possess similar structures of moral psychology, and must be motivated in similar ways. Yet, Leibniz argues, a thoroughgoing voluntarism would obstruct both doctrines in philosophically unsettling ways, impeding the possibility for creatures to genuinely imitate God.

235. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Tyler Tritten

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This article responds to Merold Westphal’s assertion that Paul Tillich suffers from “ontological xenophobia.” Westphal 1) subverts Tillich’s Augustinian/Thomistic typology into a Neoplatonist/Augustinian one and 2) critiques Tillich via Levinasian alterity. In response I show that 1) Westphal has misunderstood Tillich’s notion of Augustinianism insofar as he minimizes the role of estrangement in this viewpoint and that 2) Tillich’s notion of personhood and responsibility are anything but incompatible with Levinasian Ethics as First Philosophy. Tillich’s endorsement of theonomy in contradistinction to autonomy and heteronomy overcomes both the arbitrariness of pure autonomy and the tyranny of pure heteronomy.

236. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Angelo Caranfa

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This essay tries to demonstrate two distinct but complementary visions to a central theme of Christian faith: humanity’s redemption in the crucified Christ. It will attempt to show how the poetics of Simone Weil (1909–1943) and the poetic art of Georges Rouault (1871–1943) embody different understandings of Christian faith. Considering faith from a philosophical approach, Weil detaches the sufferings of Christ from the totality of salvific history. Viewing faith from the artistic approach, Rouault places the crucified Christ in the context of the history of salvation, including Mary and the Church. Though different from one another, these two visions reveal to us a light in the midst of our dark or suffering existence that makes audible or perceptible the silence of God’s love in Christ that is its source.

237. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Niamh Middleton

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Karl Rahner believed that orthodox Christology is too often perceived as mythology, irrelevant to the lives of contemporary Christians. As a result, he felt, the role of conversion as the gateway to an authentically Christian morality has been neglected. Influenced by existentialist philosophy and life-stage theories that were popular during his lifetime, Rahner established a basis for a new ethical system that would integrate psychological theory and techniques into his theological existentialism in order to provide a cohesive structure within which individuals can be guided towards conversion. It is the purpose of this article to suggest a theoretical framework for Rahner’s proposed “Existential Ethics” and to make some suggestions for its concretization.

238. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Yossi Nehushtan

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This paper explores two main arguments. The first argument is that religious persons—because they are religious persons—are likely to be more intolerant than non-religious persons. This argument is supported by decisive empirical evidence. The second argument is that there are meaningful, clear and unique theoretical links between religion, or, more precisely, certain types of religion, and intolerance. It is submitted that the special links between religion and intolerance are the result of seven characteristics of religion which are specified in the paper. Both arguments should encourage us to re-evaluate the proper place that religion should have in the legal and political sphere.

239. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Jasper Doomen

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In this article, it is inquired which reasons are decisive for acting in accordance with divine commands, and whether these can be regarded as moral reasons; the emphasis lies on Christianity. To this effect, the position of God as a—basic—lawgiver is expounded, with special attention to the role His power plays. By means of an account of the grounds given (in the Bible) to obey God, the selfish motives in this respect are brought to light. It is questioned whether any other elements can be discerned, particularly from a meta-ethical perspective.

240. Philosophy and Theology: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1
Simon Beck

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While theories about interpreting biblical and other parables have long realised the importance of readers’ responses to the topic, recent results in social psychology concerning systematic self-deception raise unforeseen problems. In this paper I first set out some of the problems these results pose for the authority of fictional thought-experiments in moral philosophy. I then consider the suggestion that biblical parables face the same problems and as a result cannot work as devices for moral or religious instruction in the way that they are usually understood to work. I examine a number of influential theories about interpretation of the parables which might appear to deflect the problems, and argue that none of them are ultimately successful in doing so.