William James undertook to steer his way between a rationalistic system that was not empirical enough and an empirical system so materialistic that it could not account for the value commitments on which it rested. In arguing against both the absolutists (gnostics) and the empiricists (agnostics), he defined a position of pluralistic moralism that seemed equally distant from both, leaving himself vulnerable to the criticism that he had rescued morality from scientism only by reducing religion to morals. Such criticism, however, (...) ignores distinctions James made between religion and theology and between monistic theology and dualistic theology. When these distinctions are taken into account, it becomes evident that James can be criticized for reducing religion to morality only from the point of view of either absolute monism or religious humanism and that radical empiricism not only embraces a significant number of nonmoral religious experiences but also leaves open the possibility of belief in the particular historical God of traditional Christianity. (shrink)

This is Bosanquet's review of Balfour's book, Foundations of Belief.

Prepared by editors of the distinguished series The Works of Jonathan Edwards, this authoritative anthology includes selected treatises, sermons, and autobiographical material by early America’s greatest theologian and philosopher.

Highlighting the distinct approaches to behavior guidance employed by law and aspirational religious institutions like Buddhism, focusing on the work of Lon Fuller. There is importance to both baseline or duty-centered rules such as found primarily in criminal law and deontic morality, as well as aspirational guidance principles that are found in religious law, virtue ethics, and sometimes seen in civil law. However, the specific assumptions and aims of these two modes of guidance must be harmonized to be effective.

justification. This essay attempts to provide a philosophical foundation for midrashic interpretation by placing it in the context of the idea (vaguely neoplatonic) that God is only fully realized as the result of a certain process, a process of which midrashic interpretation is an essential part. The essay is not genuinely historical, in that the explanation offered as a basis for rabbinic hermeneutics is not ascertainably a tenet of Jewish thought, and therefore cannot be assumed to underlie the practice of (...) midrashic interpretation in actual cases. On the other hand, it is not completely unhistorical in so far as the materials used to provide the foundation are, as already indicated, a part of Jewish thought, and also in that the foundation itself finds many echoes, of varying intensities, within the Jewish tradition. In the final section I attempt to spell out some connections between the specifically Jewish question of rabbinic hermeneutics, and some more general ideas in philosophy and psychoanalysis, and I hope that this will make the essay of interest to more than just students of Jewish thought. (shrink)

Theology involves inquiry into God's nature, God's purposes, and whether certain experiences or pronouncements come From God. These inquiries are metaphysical, part of theology's concern with the veridicality of signs and realities that are independent from humans. Several research programs concerned with the relation between theology and science aim to secure theology's intellectual standing as a metaphysical discipline by showing that it satisfies criteria that make modern science reputable, on the grounds that modern science embodies contemporary canons of respectability for (...) metaphysical disciplines. But, no matter the ways in which theology qua metaphysics is shown to resemble modern science, these research programs seem destined for failure. For, given the currently dominant approaches to understanding modern scientific epistemology, theological reasoning is crucially dissimilar to modern scientific reasoning in that it treats the existence of God as a certainty immune to refutation. Barring the development of an epistemology of modern science that is amenable to theology, theology as metaphysics is intellectually disreputable. (shrink)

This book argues that the best way to understand the stories of the Old and New Testaments is to consider them as human stories with sophisticated narrative techniques at play. God is a character in these stories from the beginning, and considering god as a character in a narrative proves fruitful in responding to the human voices of these stories. -/- Although many readers go to the Bible to find the revealed word of Yahweh or of the Christian God, what (...) they find there is always an interpretation of the text through the filters of a religious dogma which exists prior to the reading of the text. Reading the Bible suggests another way of reading the texts, a way of reading which concentrates not on "what does it mean?" but on "what does it say?" and "what do I see there?" The result is a fresh approach to the reading of these biblical texts, an approach which celebrates human storytelling while investigating myth, language, and the act of reading a text. (shrink)

Disputing the common misconception that nihilism is wholly negative and necessarily damaging to the human spirit, John Marmysz offers a clear and complete definition to argue that it is compatible, and indeed preferably responded to, with an attitude of good humor. He carefully scrutinizes the phenomenon of nihilism as it appears in the works, lives, and actions of key figures in the history of philosophy, literature, politics, and theology, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, and Mishima. While suggesting that there ultimately is (...) no solution to the problem of nihilism, Marmysz proposes a way of utilizing the anxiety and despair that is associated with the problem as a spur toward liveliness, activity, and the celebration of life. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the apparently distinctive outlooks indicated by the mystical thought of Jewish kabbalah and Hindu tantra as they aim at realizing the scope of divine awareness. It is a profound horizon of light that beckons to them, which shows them to be on the verge of touching God. For both traditions there is a demonstrative reflective consciousness by the practitioner in realizing and recognizing the place of God’s being, as a supernal and mundane reality. It is (...) an attempt to grasp that which is otherwise unreachable and unknowable, by pointing to a sublimely felt reality. I argue that there are some phenomenological similarities to the way in which approaching the divine is understood in these two systems, especially in regard to the role of specularity in apprehending and discriminating the place of God. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the way in which divinity is realized through an imaginary locus in the mystical thought of Jewish kabbalah and Hindu tantra. It demonstrates a reflective consciousness by the adept or master in understanding the place of God’s being, as a supernal and mundane reality. For the comparative assessment of these two distinctive approaches I shall use as a point of departure the interpretative strategies employed by Elliot Wolfson in his detailed work on Jewish mysticism. He (...) argues that there is an androcentric bias embedded in the speculative outlook of medieval kabbalah, as he reads the texts through a psychoanalytic lens. In a similar way, I will argue that there is an androcentric bias to the speculations presented in medieval Shaiva tantra, in particular that division known as the Trika. Overall, my aim is to suggest some functional and perhaps structural similarities to the characterization of divinity in these two traditions, through brief analyses of the erotic understanding of the nature of the Godhead. (shrink)

This paper explores the way in which God as the infinite ground of existence is discerned by the imagination and understanding. The representation of the apophatic divine is facilitated by the working of the human mind, which means that the manifold nature of thinking establishes the presence of God. In the metaphysical speculations of kabbalah and tantra the singular light of Ein Sof and Paramashiva intersects with the human imagination, and is refracted into a multiple display of understanding. So the (...) mind acts as a prism through which God is conceptualized and delineated. It constitutes a mediated envisaging of the Absolute, and the corollary of this perception is the engendering of the divine presence, notably as the feminine Shekhinah and Shakti. In short, in these two apparently different traditions—of kabbalistic and tantric thought—there is a detectably common theme of the notions of activity and force in creation as betokening a feminine representation of God’s being. (shrink)

A discussion of how making a decision about religious belief places this kind of belief in a category which distinguishes it from 'belief in other minds' or 'belief in an external world'. This has important consequences for a philosophical approach to religious belief.

In this paper, the authors evaluate the ontological argument they developed in their 1991 paper as to soundness. They focus on Anselm's first premise, which asserts: there is a conceivable thing than which nothing greater is conceivable. After suggesting reasons why this premise is false, the authors show that there is a reading of this premise on which it is true. Such a premise can be used in a valid and sound reconstruction of the ontological argument. This argument is developed (...) in precise detail, but the authors show that the conclusion, the formal version of which is a reading of the claim that "God exists", doesn't quite achieve the end Anselm desired. (shrink)

On February 28, 2002, John Dominic Crossan gave a very well-organized and entertaining presentation for the Annual Mary Olive Woods Lecture and was well received by the large audience. His talk should spark continued interest in who is likely the most influential person ever to walk the earth. He condensed three lectures into one as he spoke of the materials, methods, and results of his historical research into the life of Jesus. The materials mentioned were the canonical Gospels of Matthew, (...) Mark, Luke and John. (Although throughout his research, Crossan relies very heavily on other texts such as the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas, he did not mention these as material resources; see related comments below.) The bulk of his talk focused on the methods, in which he described an idealized version of what an anthropologist, an historian, and an archeologist would have to say about the early First Century Palestine, especially Galilee, if they knew nothing of the four gospels. The results are the ideas that Jesus taught primarily about the kingdom of God and used that as a basis for nonviolent resistance to the Roman Empire. The primary ministry of the historical Jesus is that of a social reformer, with political overtones. Pilate saw the threat that Jesus posed to the authority of the Romans, and had him executed because of that threat. Jesus brought “sociosomatic” healing to individuals, and encouraged his companions (not disciples) to do likewise. For an idea of what Crossan has in mind when he speaks of sociosomatic healing, think of the maturation of the main character in Good Will Hunting. With humor and a lively presentation, Crossan provided much useful and interesting information in his lecture and the discussion that followed. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that changes in academic philosophy in the twentieth century reflected a process in which a discipline that had been earlier closely tied to institutional religion became increasingly laicized and secularized.1 In line with this idea, the idealist philosophy that had flowered within British philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century can look like the last and ill-fated attempt of a Victorian religious sensibility to guard itself against a post-Darwinian God-less view of the world and ourselves.2 (...) Such a view generally represents, I believe, the attitudes of many contemporary philosophers to British philosophy prior to the transforming work of Russell and Moore of about one hundred years ago. Against the luxuriant and mystical metaphysics of the idealists, fuelled by religious longing, the “new philosophy”, it is thought, affirmed the brute materiality of the world and its independence from mind, be it divine or human. A similar development is commonly understood as carrying from Hegel through the “<span class='Hi'>young</span> Hegelians” to the mature Marx. Thus for Feuerbach, for example, Hegel’s idealist doctrine that “nature or reality is posited by the idea” was “merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God”.3 Hegel’s philosophy had thus provided a “last place of refuge and ... rational support of theology”, and escaping from this condition (more prison than refuge) required rejecting idealism and confronting the fact that “the true relation of thinking and being is simply this. Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a predicate such as.. (shrink)

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Wilhelm Dilthey, in his reflections on the nature of history as a “Geisteswissenschaft”—a science of “spirit” as opposed to “nature”—appealed “to Hegel’s notion of “spirit” (Geist). Attempting to extract Hegel’s concept from what he considered the unsupportable metaphysical system within which it had been developed, Dilthey, a neo-Kantian, gave it a broadly epistemological significance by correlating it with a distinct type of “understanding” (Verstehen) that was foreign to the Naturwissenschaften, concerned as they were (...) with explanation (Erklären) of phenomena in terms of laws of nature. Moreover, the paradigm of such an anti-naturalistic approach to history was not Hegel’s philosophical approach to history, but the strongly empiricist practice of the romantic “historical school”, found paradigmatically in the work of Leopold von Ranke. (shrink)

In the last decade there has been a pragmatic turn in the work of those doing Christian ethics, especially as represented by the work of Jeffrey Stout and Franklin Gamwell. The pragmatic turn represents a critique of the highly influential work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, which argues for a strongly intra-church ethics. The pragmatists are correct in arguing that Christian ethics must engage the public sphere. However, I argue that they are deeply mistaken in their claim that this (...) engagement must rest on a weak or non-existent theology. I show that the claim that robust theology adds nothing to ethics, and that we can get along without it, is unsustainable. (shrink)

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian. His work as a whole is an expression of two themes — the absolute sovereignty of God and the beauty of God's holiness. The first is articulated in Edwards' defense of theological determinism, in a doctrine of occasionalism, and in his insistence that physical objects are only collections of sensible “ideas” while finite minds are mere assemblages of “thoughts” or “perceptions.” As the only real cause (...) or substance underlying physical and mental phenomena, God is “being in general,” the “sum of all being.” -/- Edwards' second theme is articulated in accounts of God's end in creation, and of the nature of true virtue and true beauty. God creates in order to manifest a holiness which consists in a benevolence which alone is truly beautiful. Genuine human virtue is an imitation of divine benevolence and all finite beauty is an image of divine loveliness. True virtue is needed to discern this beauty, however, and to reason rightly about “divine things.”. (shrink)