Online research in philosophy

The struggle that prompted Bonhoeffer’s “unconscious Christianity” offers a concrete illustration of the commonsensical in Rahner’s “anonymous Christian.” Thus Rahner’s theory adds theological coherence to what Bonhoeffer intuited. While Bonhoeffer faced the seeming ineffectiveness of Jesus’ teaching for the majority of Christians in Germany, Rahner faced his church’s view of Augustine’s “massa damnata” through a reexamination of church mission and theological categories. In both theologians, Jesus the God-man is the symbol of God’s communion with “the human” in God’s care for all peoples. The article concludes by asking whether the advent of such Christologies signals an approaching time of greater humility with regard to the Christian path to salvation.

Libertarians such as J.R. Lucas have abandoned traditional Christian doctrines because they cannot reconcile them with the freedom of the will. Traditional Christian thinkers such as Augustine have repudiated libertarianism because they cannot reconcile it with the dogmas of the Faith. In Free Will and the Christian Faith, W.S. Anglin demonstrates that free will and traditional Christianity are ineed compatible. He examines, and solves, puzzles about the relationships between free will and omnipotence, omniscience, and God's goodness, using the idea of free will to answer the question of why God allows evil, and presenting arguments that link free will to eternal life and to the nature of revelation. Topics covered include the meaning of life, the soul and Lesbegue measure, and strategies for discerning the voice of God.

Recent defenders of the Christian doctrine of eternal damnation have appealed to what I call the “No Guarantee Doctrine” (NG)—the doctrine that not evenGod can ensure both (a) that every person who is saved freely chooses to be saved and (b) that all are saved. Thomas Talbott challenges NG on the groundsthat anyone who is truly free will have no motive to reject God and will infallibly choose salvation. In response to critics of Talbott , I argue that in order toavoid Talbott ’s critique of NG, its defenders must adopt a view of human freedom in which there is a random element in choice. And if free choice involvessuch an element, then it is within God’s power to achieve a mathematical guarantee of freely chosen salvation for all. Thus, NG must be rejected.

Locke was a libertarian: he believed in human freedom. To be sure, his conception of freedom was different from that of many philosophers who call themselves libertarians. Some such philosophers maintain that an agent is free only if her action is uncaused; whereas Locke thought that all actions have causes, including the free ones. Some libertarians hold that no action is free unless it proceeds from a volition that is itself free; whereas Locke argued that free volition, as opposed to free action, is an impossibility. On the other hand, Locke agrees with the typical professed libertarian that free actions depend on volitions - or, as he often puts it, that an agent is free only with respect to the actions she wills, to those that are voluntary. And he also refuses to make voluntariness sufficient for freedom, whereby a free action is merely one that is willed. The free agent, Locke insists, must also be able or have been able to do something other than she does or did. Thus both Locke and the libertarian professor require indifference as well as spontaneity for freedom. But Locke’s freedom is not contra-causal; and he denies that it extends to volition. In this paper I want to focus on just this last component of Locke’s view of freedom: that freedom in willing, far from being required for free agency, is not even possible. I call this ‘the thesis of volitional determinism’. Locke presents an argument for this thesis in the Essay, but scholars have never paid much attention to it: I want to examine it.

Challenges of interpersonal harm for a theology of freedom and grace -- Karl Rahner's theological anthropology -- The role of freedom and grace in the construction of the human self -- The vulnerable self and loss of agency -- Trauma theory and the challenge to a Rahnerian theology of freedom and grace -- The fragmented self and constrained agency -- Feminist theories as correctives to a Rahnerian anthropology -- Response to the challenge -- Rahner's theology revisited -- Ethical directions -- Implications of a revised theology of freedom and grace.

According to prevailing opinion, if a creaturely act is caused by God, then it cannot be free in the libertarian sense. I argue to the contrary. I distinguish intrinsic and extrinsic models of divine causal agency. I then show that, given the extrinsic model, there is no reason one holding that our free acts are caused by God could not also hold a libertarian account of human freedom. It follows that a libertarian account of human freedom is consistent with God’s being the source and cause of all being apart from himself, including the being of free human actions.

In response to Lynne Rudder Baker’s intriguing paper, “Why Christians Should Not Be Libertarians,” I suggest that, even if a Christian simply lets the chips fall where they may with respect to the dispute between libertarians and compatibilists, a Christian should not be a determinist. I also offer for consideration a rather controversial non-Augustinian explanation for the near universality and seeming inevitability of human sin.

In a recent issue of Faith and Philosophy, Lynne Rudder Baker voices her bewilderment at the “surprising number of Christian philosophers today [who] take it to be obvious that human beings have free will as libertarians construe it. Not only do they take us to have free will, but they also take a libertarian conception of free will to be important for Christian practice and theology.”1 Baker finds this tendency to be surprising for two reasons. First, she thinks that a “rejection of libertarian accounts of free will would make the solutions to certain philosophical problems for Christians very easy” (461). Among the problems that she thinks a compatibilist account of free will would help, she mentions the traditional doctrine of divine providence and the problem of the compatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. The second reason Baker gives why the prevalence of libertarianism among Christian philosophers is surprising is that “there is a lot of room for the denial of libertarian accounts in the Christian tradition, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant” (462).2 In contrast to what she takes as the dominant tendency among contemporary Christian philosophers towards libertarianism, Baker advocates a compatibilist understanding of free will.

The prevailing view of Christian philosophers today seems to be that Christianity requires a libertarian conception of free will. Focusing on Augustine’s mature anti-Pelagian works, I try to show that the prevailing view is in error. Specifically, I want to show that---on Augustine’s view of grace-a libertarian account of free will is irrelevant to salvation. On Augustine’s view, the grace of God through Christ is sufficient as weIl as necessary for salvation. Salvation is entirely in the hands of God, totally independent of anything that any human being might do. And faith, the human response to salvation, is best understood in terms of a compatibilist account of freedom.

I have defended the view that God’s complete sovereignty over the universe, which requires that he be creatively responsible for our decisions, is compatible with libertarian free will. William Rowe interprets me as holding that this is entirely owing to God’s being timelessly eternal, and argues that God’s decisions as creator would still be determining in a way that destroys freedom. His argument overlooks an important part of my view-an account of creation according to which God’s will as creator does not stand as an independent determining condition of our own. I try here to clarify that account, and to show that Rowe’s criticisms leave it untouched.