Christianity

The theology of the (Hebrew) Bible, as set out in the Torah’s foundational parts, answers the question “What am I?” not the question “Why is there a world?” So the principle that the Bible’s deity, God, represents, the principle of a category of being not recognized in the pagan thinking whose basic elements Greek philosophy systematizes, first enters “In the day that . . . the Lord God formed [the] man,” not “In the beginning when God created the heavens and (...) the earth.” The admonition to place God first doesn’t therefore exclude the impersonal principles of being with which the other gods are associated, only denies their adequacy to making sense of your being and of mine, of his being and of hers. (shrink)

Rowan Williams has consistently given expression to Christian faith in surprising and genera-tive ways, especially through the language of ‘excess’ and through contemplating the excess in the narrative and identity of Christ. By attending to the grammar of excess, this essay draws out elements of the metaphysics of holiness in dialogue with Williams. I ask how creaturely being can be sustained by the holiness which generates all things without leaving holiness so ubiq-uitous as to be either trivial or hidden. I (...) respond to this problem by arguing that holy lives and communities make visible the ontological dependence of all things on God. Finally, this pro-vides a way of recognizing the value of the metaphysical imagination in the pursuit of holiness. (shrink)

According to one influential narrative, a significant root of our ecological crisis is to be found in the Christian appropriation of teleology, undergirding the anthropocentrism endemic to Western thought. This article challenges this argument in three steps. First, I present the Aristotelian understanding of teleology, which is intrinsic to living organisms, and which has been suggested as a resource for ecological ethics. Second, I argue that the rejection of intrinsic teleology in favour of an extrinsic teleology first occurs with modern (...) philosophy, in tandem with a new pragmatic conception of knowledge. Third, I provide an alternative construal of the early Christian understanding of teleology, through the figure of Maximus the Confessor, arguing that his understanding of the contemplation of nature is a key resource to be recovered for ecological ethics. I end with a sketch of such a recovery, as articulated by Thomas Merton. (shrink)

In this chapter, I attempt to do three things in the hope of making some progress toward fostering greater collaboration between contemporary atheists and traditional Christians in addressing contentious moral problems. First, I argue that there is little hope, in our current cultural climate, that contemporary atheists and traditional Christians can come to consensus on principles that will help us resolve our differences regarding contemporary hot-button social issues. Second, I argue that despite this fact, contemporary atheists and traditional Christians can (...) and ought to form pragmatic alliances to work for the common good, at least on those moral projects in which we can roughly agree on what we ought to do, even if we can’t ultimately agree on why we ought to do it. Third, I conclude by offering a few final thoughts on “true religion,” “true philosophy,” and an alternative vision of the future for contemporary atheists and traditional religious believers. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to help develop the groundwork for greater dialogue on ethical issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and the neptic tradition of Orthodox Christianity. My efforts towards this end proceed in three steps. In the first section, I offer some preliminary conceptual clarifications concerning the field of ethics. In the second section, I explain the Orthodox tradition in light of these conceptual clarifications and show that the Orthodox Christian way of life embodies a type (...) of virtue ethics. In the third section, I suggest the significance of Orthodox Christian virtue ethics for a contemporary debate concerning evidence from social psychology. (shrink)

The aims of this volume, Twelve Great Books that Changed the University, are to introduce a dozen great books to non-specialists and to explain the impact of these texts both on the academy and on Christian life. In this chapter, I attempt to do three things in order to provide a helpful introduction to Plato's Republic. I begin by providing an overview of the work. I continue by explaining the enduring significance of the text for the university itself, for philosophy, (...) and for related disciplines. I then conclude by explaining the enduring significance of the text for developing a greater understanding both of Christian doctrine and of the Christian way of life. (shrink)

Critiques the political theory articulated in and evidently presupposed by Rorty's Achieving Our Country. Argues for greater political radicalism and theological realism.

Examines issues in ethics and philosophical theology raised by the attempt to understand the relationship between particular creaturely loves and love for God.

Examines the distinguished philosopher Richard Swinburne's project in philosophical theology.

This article focuses on Bretherton’s treatment of Pentecostalism and Black Power and how they conceive and challenge notions of democracy, citizenship and capitalism. Recognising the ‘tensional’ relationship between democracy and Christianity, I explore his treatment of Pentecostalism and capitalism. I am sympathetic to Bretherton’s analysis of the socio-political transformation Pentecostalism offers, but point to regressive influences associated with the ‘prosperity gospel’. Relating his treatment of Black Power to the wider ‘Black radical tradition’, I conclude with reference to political activism in (...) the UK. (shrink)

In this article I try to introduce the overall structure of Bretherton’s book Christ and the Common Life by showing how each chapter displays how talk of God and talk of politics are mutually constitutive. In particular I try to show how Bretherton’s ‘case studies’ are arranged to develop his constructive thesis. My paper was not meant to be critical, though I raise the question of whether Bretherton’s project is not a very sophisticated form of Constantinianism—a question that very much (...) asks Bretherton to make clear for whom he has written this extremely impressive book. (shrink)

The peculiar and particular manner in which freedom of religion is promoted and protected in the United Kingdom owes much to the nation’s history. This article offers a highly selective consideration of some of the incidents of history which have shaped or foreshadowed the lived reality of freedom of religion in Britain today. It traces key episodes over past centuries, crudely categorised as the Seven Ages of Religious Liberty.

In this article, I aim to do two things. I offer an assessment of religious establishment according to liberal standards. I then ask how this analysis bears on Nigel Biggar’s defence of Anglican establishment. I argue that only some features of Anglican establishment are compatible with the liberal standard of what I call minimal secularism.

Luke Bretherton wishes to encourage informal political activity, and asserts a contrast between two complementary and alternative ways of doing politics, formal and informal. But the tendency in his descriptions is to replace formal with informal politics, which is then in danger of being left without responsibility to the structures of political society.

The eighteenth-century American founders believed that religion is special and deserves special constitutional protection, and that all peaceable faiths must be drawn into the constitutional process and protection. The founders introduced six constitutional principles for the protection of religious freedom: freedom of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, religious equality, separation of church and state, and no state establishment of religion. Since the 1940s, the United States Supreme Court has upheld these religious freedom principles in more than 170 cases, (...) albeit unevenly of late. Moreover, in recent years religious freedom has come under sharp popular and academic attack, particularly as religious pathologies have come to light and religious freedom claims have clashed with sexual liberty claims. This article calls for a return to the first principles of religious freedom for all, at home and abroad, and for a new balance between religious freedom and other fundamental rights claims. (shrink)

This article critically assesses an account of religious liberty often associated with several legal and political philosophers: Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager. Calling it the Religion as Comprehensive Doctrine approach, the author contrasts it with an account often attributed to John Locke and the American Founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Two Sovereigns approach. He argues that the latter provides an important corrective to RCD’s chief weakness: RCD eliminates from our vision those aspects of (...) religious belief and practice that most conventional religious believers would consider essential to their faith. (shrink)

This article argues that the kind of religious establishment that currently obtains in England is sufficiently liberal in the sense that it accommodates rights to religious freedom and is compatible with political equality. What is more, insofar as it expresses a Christian anthropology, established Anglicanism can generate the ‘thick’ set of virtues necessary to make citizens capable of respecting liberal rights. In the course of defending its thesis, the argument disputes John Rawls’s description of the ‘overlapping consensus’ as one that (...) stands free of its supporting comprehensive doctrines; and it reads Martha Nussbaum as, ironically, confirming that an established orthodoxy of some sort is inevitable. (shrink)

This article is a response to Hauerwas’s, O’Donovan’s and Muir’s engagements with Christ and the Common Life. Three distinctions that operate in the book are clarified, namely that between formal and informal politics, bottom-up forms of democratic politics and top-down forms of statecraft, and social and political relations. In setting these out, the distinction between public and private is critiqued and two, interrelated moves made in the book are defended. First, that democratic politics precedes and sustains a liberal polity. And (...) second, that human law and the state should serve the antecedent and superordinate good of association. (shrink)

A crucial, but often overlooked, dimension of the human and constitutional right to religious freedom is the autonomy of religious institutions, associations and societies with respect to matters of governance, doctrine, formation and membership. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed this autonomy in the context of American constitutional law, it is vulnerable, and even under threat, for a variety of reasons, including a general decline in the health of civil society and mediating associations and a crisis (...) of confidence and authority caused by clerical sexual abuse and churches’ failure to respond to it. (shrink)

A series of cases, some of them with a high media profile, suggest that freedom of religion or belief in the United Kingdom is being undermined by the operation of new equality laws. This article outlines the constitutional context for liberty and equality rights as well as the main ways in which religious liberty is secured by and within equality law. However, British equality law puts pressure on religious liberty in four ways: it confines the relevance of ‘religion’ to limited (...) social contexts; it creates a priority for equality-perspectives over liberty-perspectives on social conflict; it generates new social assumptions about what individuals have to believe and say if they are to be trusted to uphold the law; it provides legitimation for the imposition of contested comprehensive equality doctrines, some of which are inimical to civil liberty. In response, it is important to emphasise the role of equality law as a tool to secure mutual toleration and equal rights in the face of religious and ethical disagreement. (shrink)

This introduction surveys the contributions to this issue, which were originally delivered at Oxford University in 2018. By exploring the interconnections and shared motifs, this article suggests that the answer to this symposium is a tentative ‘yes’, but that the sources of those threats arise from the background culture within which these papers are situated.

This article explores humanity’s ontology of relationality and telos of the common good as not only inseparable but mutually constitutive, drawing on the work of Thomas Aquinas and looking into the debates between Charles De Koninck and Jacques Maritain.

'People travelled for numerous reasons,' so J.W. Drijvers submits at the beginning of his piece on travel and pilgrimage literature. Be it ‘commerce, government affairs, religion, education, military business or migration,’ people ‘made use of the elaborate system of roads and modes of transport such as wagons, horses and boats’ to traverse the far-reaching stretches of the Roman Empire. And for 4th century Christians in particular, participating in religious festivals as well as interaction with holy sites, sacred artifacts and clergymen (...) had become greater a reason to travel still. Motivation to travel, in other words, was aplenty. But what exactly allowed for Christian religious travel in the 4th century AD to develop as quickly as it did? (shrink)

This is a review of Teresa Obolevitch's Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought, which provides an intellectual history of the collaboration between fides and ratio in the course of the development of Russian thought, from its Byzantine origins to the twenty-first century. Obolevitch examines various approaches to combining faith and science in such eighteenth-century thinkers as Mikhail Lomonosov and Gregory Skovoroda, the nineteenth-century thinkers Victor Kudryavtsev-Platonov, Dimitrii Golubinsky, Sergei Glagolev, the Schellingian Peter Chaadaev, the Slavophiles Alexei Khomyakov and Ivan (...) Kireevsky, the writers Fedor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Soloviev, the twentieth-century philosophers Nikolai Lossky, Pavel Florensky, Semen Frank, Nikolai Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, Sergius Bulgakov, Alexei Losev, the Russian Cosmists Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Vladimir Vernadsky, and the Orthodox priest Georges Florovsky. The book ends with considerations on the Neo-Patristic synthesis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the present review, I situate the book in the context of the author's works, I summarize it, editorializing occasionally, and I discuss the thesis of the book in the wider context of world religions. (shrink)

Emily Paul has recently argued that Brian Leftow’s account of why the import of God’s becoming Incarnate is not temporal but modal fails. She argues that Leftow’s required modal variation is not satisfied. That is, we do not have the required variation across logical space concerning the Incarnation. Paul examines her argument on two possible worlds theories: theistic ersatzism and (what I call) Lewisian theism. She thinks that both possible worlds theories face difficulties. I argue that Paul fails to provide (...) a compelling argument against Leftow because, firstly, her defence of one her premises fails, and, secondly, she misjudges what is required for some of Leftow’s claims to be true. I also argue that some of the problematic consequences that Paul raises for theistic ersatzism and Lewisian theism either are not problematic or can be avoided. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to clash the problem of forgiveness as formulated in contemporary secular and Christian ethics with Kierkegaard’s considerations concerning this issue. Kierkegaard’s thought is increasingly used in the modern debate on forgiveness. It is therefore worth investigating whether Kierkegaard’s considerations are really able to overcome in any way contemporary disputes concerning this problem or enrich our thinking in this area. The main thesis of this paper states that there is a fundamental, ontological difference between Kierkegaard’s understanding (...) of forgiveness and that of modern thinkers. While the Danish philosopher refers to the transcendent reality of spirit, where the act of forgiveness is always performed by God, in contemporary ethical and Christian thought, forgiveness is first and foremost formulated from an immanent point of view that appeals to the world of human values. This difference is demonstrated by analyzing the four main themes corresponding to the most important issues taken up in the contemporary debate on forgiveness. These are: the victim-offender relation, the conditionality and unconditionality of forgiveness, the issue of condonation, and the problem of the unforgivable. As a result of the analyses presented herein, the impossibility of directly applying Kierkegaard’s transcendent theses to ethical thought of the immanent variety will be shown. (shrink)

Pascal’s wager has to face the many gods objection. The wager goes wrong when it asks us to chose between Christianity and atheism, as if there are no other options. Some have argued that we’re entitled to dismiss exotic, bizarre, or subjectively unappealing religions from the scope of the wager. But they have provided no satisfying justification for such a radical wager-saving dispensation. This paper fills that dialectical gap. It argues that some agents are blameless or even praiseworthy for ignoring (...) all but one religion as they face the wager. The argument leads us to multiple Pascals: a Jewish one, a Christian one, a Muslim one, and more. (shrink)

While there has been considerable interest in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky, both of whom are considered seminal existential thinkers, relatively little has been said about similarities in their thought. In this paper, I propose to read their philosophical and literary works together as texts that offer an elaborate model of an existential religious transformation. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky sketch a path leading from the inauthentic, internally fragmented and egotistic self to the authentically Christian, humble and loving (...) individual. By examining the underlying structure of this transformative process, I try to show that its portrayal is in many ways similar in the account of both writers. Furthermore, I maintain that they set out not only to describe the inner workings of the existential religious transformation, but that their effort constitutes a direct appeal to the reader to initiate the transformative process herself or himself. (shrink)

Critiques of transhumanism from Christian theologians and philosophers often focus on the movement’s disdain for the human body. These criticisms are expressed in a number of different ways. Some argue that the transhumanists’ disdain is a new form of Gnosticism, while others argue that it leads to real violence against real human bodies. When such criticisms turn to identify the particular sin of which transhumanism is guilty, they sometimes identify vainglory as the besetting sin, but more often than not pride (...) is the sin named. After all, what is transhumanism – with its various proposals for bringing about the posthuman, which is some future being with capabilities so far beyond the human so as to border on godlike – but the latest iteration of the primal sin of humans wanting to become God on their own terms? -/- While such criticisms are valid, they do not capture the depth of transhumanism’s offense from a Christian perspective. Pride and vanity are indeed two of the deadly sins of transhumanism, but there are others at play as well. Moreover, pride is the root of all sin, so saying that pride is the problem is not necessarily helpful. We must find the particular ways in which pride manifests itself. I will argue that the sin of acedia (sometimes spelled accidie), found in ancient lists of the deadly sins, is a primary sin of transhumanism. In so doing, I hope to contribute to a more complete diagnosis of the transhumanist project from a Christian perspective, and I hope to further show why transhumanism is at odds with Christianity, contra the claims of the Christian Transhumanist Association. It should also be stated up front that this article may raise more questions than it answers. Accordingly, it should be seen as an invitation for further research, not as a definitive assessment of acedia in transhumanism. (shrink)

В монографии представлены несколько смысловых блоков, связанных с восприятием и интерпретацией человеком исторического бытия. Ранние греческие мыслители пытались получить доступ к исходникам (началам) бытия, и эти интенции легли в основу научного знания, а также привели к появлению метафизики. В классической (и в неклассической) метафизике за основу была принята догма Пифагора и Платона о неизменности подлинной реальности, из чего следовало отрицание бытийного характера времени. Автор монографии отказывается от этой догмы и предлагает стратегию обновления метафизики и перехода ее к новому — постнеклассическому (...) — этапу. Поскольку трансформационный потенциал реальности наиболее явно представлен в историческом становлении, авторская стратегия реализуется в метафизике истории. При этом выявляются начала истории, в каком качестве выступают «дух», «культурно-историческая матрица» и «метафизический проект организации бытия» («онтологический проект»). Исследуются формы и механизмы «работы» человека с прошлым, обсуждаются вопросы, связанные с постижением логики исторического процесса, а также с ролью (творческой) личности в истории. Анализируются причины цивилизационных кризисов и очерчиваются возможные пути их разрешения, предлагается метафизическая интерпретация социальных и военных конфликтов. Завершает исследование рассмотрение трансформации человеческого естества под влиянием информационных, био- и нанотехнологий. (shrink)

Ideology is an important part of the political mechanism that helps to ensure the loyalty of citizens to the state and give it a moral basis and justification. Roman patriotism was deeply religious. The community was the subject of faith, but also faith was a state duty, a testimony of trustworthiness. Personal religiosity was res privata, but loyalty to the state cult was res publica. Roman ideology was based on respect for ancestors, respect for the institution of the family and (...) the promotion of fertility, the Christian community initially opposed all this paganism, offering a completely different paradigm. From the concept of the race as the sacred connection of generations follows the cult of ancestors, especially the cult of the leaders of the family, its “patriarchs”. The latter have always been to some extent political leaders, and political leaders, in turn, turned out to be the leaders of the race. The deification of the emperor after death was based on the cult of ancestors, which had a great significance for the Romans. A person feels comfortable in the ancestral world, where he clearly represents his place in the connection of generations, honoring his ancestors and the land of his ancestors. The clan religion quite organically fits into this paradigm, being its ideological justification. Paganism unites “us”, opposing them “alien” on the basis of belonging to the race, contact with the land. Christianity was formed as a non–ethnic religion, rejecting the cult of ancestors as such. Everything that is important to the state turns out to be devoid of meaning for a person who takes the teaching of Christ seriously and considers it as a guide to action. But such extreme forms of religiosity, being the choice of individuals, can not act as a social standard; there can not be a state if all its members abandon their worldly affairs and will search for the Kingdom of Heaven. Early Christians had a plan to fight the world, but there was no plan for its reorganization. When this new power won, it became obvious that without cardinal rebirth, it is doomed, because Christianity in its original sense could not become the basis of any state. It had to adapt to the tasks of state building, but at the cost of this was a complete transformation, distorting the original message beyond recognition. With the establishment of Christianity as a state religion, the conditions for the transformation of Christianity into a civilizational factor began to take shape. The foundations of Christian civilization were laid by the first Christians, but Christian civilization was created by the “second” who were able to reconcile two sworn enemies – the state and the church. (shrink)

Fleming, Daniel J On 19 June 2019, Victoria's 'Voluntary Assisted Dying' Act came into effect. The Act makes legal two interventions at the end of life. In most cases, it allows a doctor to prescribe a patient who meets certain criteria with a lethal substance, which it is supposed a patient will take at a time and place of their choosing to end their life. In rarer cases, where a patient is unable to ingest the lethal substance, it also allows (...) for a doctor to administer such a substance to the same end. In the Victorian legislation these interventions have been given the umbrella term of 'Voluntary Assisted Dying'. In Catholic ethics, as in most bioethical frameworks, these acts are referred to as physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. (shrink)

Человек – это память. Чтобы понять, что такое человек, необходимо понять, что такое память.

In this essay I aim to illuminate the nature of Christian hope by looking at the tradition’s answers to three philosophical questions and then comparing them to those of contemporary secular accounts. First, What are the possible objects of hope? Next, What are the psychological conditions a person must meet to have hope? Finally, What makes a hope rational and what makes it good for human life? I conclude by suggesting that the role of hope in bringing about social goods (...) (or evils) might be reconsidered in light of challenges presented by recent secular work on the social dimensions of hope. (shrink)