Humanity Divided focuses on the multiple challenges associated with the concept of Israel's divine election, especially as reflected in the thought of Martin Buber and other Modern Jewish thinkers such as Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, David Hartman, Hannah Arendt, and Aviezer Ravitzky. Particular attention is given to the practical application of Israel's chosenness to Jewish nationalism, Zionism, and political Messianism.

Augustine, religion as rereading -- Hobbes, or nature as reason -- Spinoza and the "relics of man's ancient bondage" -- Conclusion: "the infinite separation".

Spinoza’s interpretation of the election of the Hebrews in the third chapter of the Theological Political Treatise enraged quite a few Jewish readers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rise of nationalism, and the demand of loyalty to one’s own genos brought about a certain style of patriotic writing aimed at Spinoza’s “betrayal.” In a series of lectures on the eve of the Great War, Hermann Cohen portrayed Spinoza as a person of “demonic spirt” and as “the great enemy (...) who emerged from our midst.” In a stream of words more akin to shouting than to analytic discourse, Cohen protested against what he took to be the universal complacency regarding Spinoza’s treachery: “When Spinoza, with merciless severity, makes his own nation the object of contempt – at the time that Rembrandt lived on the same street and immortalized the ideal type of the Jew - no voice rises in protest against this humanly incomprehensible betrayal.” Cohen was right in identifying in Spinoza an absence of ethnic patriotism. I, for one, find this absence a virtue rather than a vice, and in this chapter I will argue, inter alia, that in rejecting ethnic normativity Spinoza was consistent with a dominant strand of rabbinic thought. What precisely was so offensive in Spinoza’s words in chapter three of the TTP? A common reading of this chapter suggests that Spinoza presents the election of the Hebrews as merely political and not spiritual in nature, thus downgrading the importance of the election. This reading is not absolutely groundless, but it is highly imprecise, for as we shall shortly see, for Spinoza, God’s (genuine) election of the Hebrews indicates the political weakness of their state, rather than its strength. Apart from pointing out this important corrective, I will also attempt in this essay to evaluate Spinoza’s critique of the election of the Hebrews, the result of which might lead us to some highly unexpected conclusions. In the first section of this chapter I present an outline of Spinoza’s interpretation of the connection between the Hebrews’ belief in being chosen, and the xenophobic nature of their ancient state. In the second section, I discuss Spinoza’s interpretation of the election of the Hebrews in chapter three of the TTP, and show that on Spinoza’s sardonic reading it was nothing but luck which allowed the Hebrew state to survive for a rather long time in spite of its poor political constitution. The third and final part provides a defense of Spinoza’s critique of the notion of chosenness. I will argue, first, that chosenness has never been granted the status of theological doctrine or principle of faith within rabbinic Judaism. I will then point out the significant religious problems with the notion of chosenness, suggesting however two exceptions in which belief in chosenness might still be defensible. I will conclude this section with a discussion of rabbinic views on the conversion of minors, arguing that according to the mainstream rabbinic view, being a Jew is a merit only on the condition that a person is pious, a view which is not far from Spinoza’s own claims in the third chapter of the TTP. (shrink)

Zionism was a body that needed a soul breathed into it. Rav Kook, would provide such a soul in the form of Jerusalemism.

The article deals with the doctrine of the returning of the powers of the Government upon the election of the President of the Republic formulated in the Constitutional Court ruling of 10 January 1998. Attention is focused on the arguments of the Constitutional Court upon which this doctrine is based–these are the arguments regarding the expression of no-confidence in the Prime Minister and the new empowerment of the Government (after more than a half of the ministers are changed). (...) In the opinion of the author, some of such arguments are subject to discussion. The constitutional regulation regarding the returning of the powers of the Government upon the election of the President of the Republic is inexhaustive and unclear. Although the wording of the provisions of the Constitution regarding the returning of the powers of the Government after the elections of the Seimas and after the elections of the President of the Republic is almost the same, there is one essential difference: the Constitution provides that after the elections of the Seimas the Government must return its powers to the President of the Republic and must resign, whereas the Constitution does not provide that the Government must resign after the elections of the President of the Republic as well. (shrink)

Author analyses the teaching of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church over importance of democratic elections. The principles, which Church proposes as background to participation in elections, are explored.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:494 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in the Haller Zeitung; it will probably not appear at all--it has, among other short, comings, the fault to be too long." In a letter to Schtitz, Niethammer writes from Bamberg on 23 March 1807: "I repeat my urgent demand... to send the review of Salat's book submitted by Prof. Hegel as soon as possible to Jena to hand it in to Hofrat Voigt.... " (...) The volume contains almost 1,000 valuable notes which explain the philosophical and historical background of the newly edited material. HENRY WALTERBRANN Takoma Park, Maryland Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev: Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman. Trans. with Intro. by Mary-Barbara Zeldin. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969. Pp. 203. $7.50) Mary-Barbara Zeldin's translation into English of the Philosophical Letters and the Apology of a Madman, by the enigmatic Russian intellectual leader of the early nineteenth century, Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev makes available in English for the first time the thought of this figure whose small corpus of writings circulated mostly in manuscript during his own lifetime and waited over a hundred years after his death for their complete translation in their original French. Historically Chaadayev is important as a mediator between Westernizers and Slavophiles in this initial period of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual awakening. Chaadayev himself remained aloof from either of these parties, was appealed to by both of them and became himself a kind of martyr to intellectual freedom. His own view of Russian-Western relationships incorporates this problem most remarkably into a theological vision of the "education of the human race." Philosophically Chaadayev stands as a unique and somewhat eccentric synthesizer of German idealism with the Christian concept of salvation history. Perhaps the most remarkable insight to be gained by reading these long-buried essays is the ease with which an Eastern Orthodox Christian versed in Patristic hellenism could fuse the ideas of a paedagogy of the human race in Lessing, Herder and Schiller and read this as an expression of an Irenaean doctrine of the progressive development of a mankind through the mediation of the primordial Logos; an Alexandrian idea of the paedagogy of Christ in history and a Eusebian doctrine of Christian universal empire. In so doing this Russian thinker also reveals to what an extent the German idealist movement itself was grounded on much older syntheses of Christian thought. In the process, however, Chaadayev also shows that nineteenth-century men could only appropriate this heritage anew by taking the great credal themes of revelation, Christi, the church and the Kingdom of God and reissuing them in a secularized, humanistic dress, as a philosophy of history. Chaadayev's basic thesis is that knowledge is a divinely-given deposit of certain fundamental primordial ideas, which man would not have arrived at through his own unaided powers, but rather possesses as an imprint upon the mind of the first man implanted by the Creator. Chaadayev weds the western philosophical concept of a fundamental a priori with a doctrine of primordial revelation, revealing the foundation of man himself in the divine Logos. This primordial deposit of ideas existed in BOOK REVIEWS 495 the first man only as a rudimentary 'image' of God. It is only through historical development that man grows to full stature in these truths whereby he attains to the completed 'likeness' of God. These truths, together with their historical development, are passed down by a historical succession, which is not an ecclesiastical succession, but a succession of the human family. These truths are periodically renewed by the advent of certain extraordinary individuals who exemplify them to a high degree, and by certain elect nations who are divinely designated as their culture-bearers. The Jews of the Old Testament were that culture-bearer in antiquity, and, since the time of Jesus Christ, it is Christendom which stands for and bears the development of this primordial truth as it has been renewed and set forth in archetypal perfection by Christ. Chaadayev sharply down grades the role of the Greeks in this development, but does so in a manner remarkably similar to the ancient Christian apologists who stole Greek fire in order to bathe the... (shrink)

This article is the attempt at a dialogue with Bruce McCormack about the position he espoused in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth concerning the relation between God's Election of grace and God's Triunity. I had criticized McCormack's position in my book, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity (2002), but I did not elaborate on it in great detail. To develop the dialogue I will: 1) consider McCormack's claim that in CD II/2 Barth made Jesus Christ (...) “rather than” the Eternal Logos the subject of election; 2) consider what Barth means when he speaks of Jesus Christ “in the beginning”; 3) compare McCormack's thesis that the Father never had regard for the Son, apart from the humanity to be assumed, with Barth's belief that we must not dispute the eternal will of God which “precedes even predestination”; 4) analyze in detail McCormack's rejection of Barth's belief that the logos asarkos in distinction from the logos incarnandus is a necessary concept in trinitarian theology; 5) discuss Barth's concept of the divine will in relation to the concept advanced by McCormack and suggest that McCormack has fallen into the error of Hermann Schell by thinking that God in some sense takes his origin from himself, so that God would only be triune if he elected us; 6) explain why it is a problem to hold, as McCormack does, that God's self-determination to be triune and his election of us should be considered one and the same act; and finally 7) explain McCormack's confusion of time and eternity in his latest article on the subject in the February, 2007 issue of the Scottish Journal of Theology, and his own espousal of a kind of indeterminacy on God's part (which he theoretically rejects). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:494 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in the Haller Zeitung; it will probably not appear at all--it has, among other short, comings, the fault to be too long." In a letter to Schtitz, Niethammer writes from Bamberg on 23 March 1807: "I repeat my urgent demand... to send the review of Salat's book submitted by Prof. Hegel as soon as possible to Jena to hand it in to Hofrat Voigt.... " (...) The volume contains almost 1,000 valuable notes which explain the philosophical and historical background of the newly edited material. HENRY WALTERBRANN Takoma Park, Maryland Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev: Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman. Trans. with Intro. by Mary-Barbara Zeldin. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969. Pp. 203. $7.50) Mary-Barbara Zeldin's translation into English of the Philosophical Letters and the Apology of a Madman, by the enigmatic Russian intellectual leader of the early nineteenth century, Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev makes available in English for the first time the thought of this figure whose small corpus of writings circulated mostly in manuscript during his own lifetime and waited over a hundred years after his death for their complete translation in their original French. Historically Chaadayev is important as a mediator between Westernizers and Slavophiles in this initial period of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual awakening. Chaadayev himself remained aloof from either of these parties, was appealed to by both of them and became himself a kind of martyr to intellectual freedom. His own view of Russian-Western relationships incorporates this problem most remarkably into a theological vision of the "education of the human race." Philosophically Chaadayev stands as a unique and somewhat eccentric synthesizer of German idealism with the Christian concept of salvation history. Perhaps the most remarkable insight to be gained by reading these long-buried essays is the ease with which an Eastern Orthodox Christian versed in Patristic hellenism could fuse the ideas of a paedagogy of the human race in Lessing, Herder and Schiller and read this as an expression of an Irenaean doctrine of the progressive development of a mankind through the mediation of the primordial Logos; an Alexandrian idea of the paedagogy of Christ in history and a Eusebian doctrine of Christian universal empire. In so doing this Russian thinker also reveals to what an extent the German idealist movement itself was grounded on much older syntheses of Christian thought. In the process, however, Chaadayev also shows that nineteenth-century men could only appropriate this heritage anew by taking the great credal themes of revelation, Christi, the church and the Kingdom of God and reissuing them in a secularized, humanistic dress, as a philosophy of history. Chaadayev's basic thesis is that knowledge is a divinely-given deposit of certain fundamental primordial ideas, which man would not have arrived at through his own unaided powers, but rather possesses as an imprint upon the mind of the first man implanted by the Creator. Chaadayev weds the western philosophical concept of a fundamental a priori with a doctrine of primordial revelation, revealing the foundation of man himself in the divine Logos. This primordial deposit of ideas existed in BOOK REVIEWS 495 the first man only as a rudimentary 'image' of God. It is only through historical development that man grows to full stature in these truths whereby he attains to the completed 'likeness' of God. These truths, together with their historical development, are passed down by a historical succession, which is not an ecclesiastical succession, but a succession of the human family. These truths are periodically renewed by the advent of certain extraordinary individuals who exemplify them to a high degree, and by certain elect nations who are divinely designated as their culture-bearers. The Jews of the Old Testament were that culture-bearer in antiquity, and, since the time of Jesus Christ, it is Christendom which stands for and bears the development of this primordial truth as it has been renewed and set forth in archetypal perfection by Christ. Chaadayev sharply down grades the role of the Greeks in this development, but does so in a manner remarkably similar to the ancient Christian apologists who stole Greek fire in order to bathe the... (shrink)

A leader in the Confessing Church, an outspoken opponent of Anti-Semitism, and, late in life, a committed supporter of the state of Israel, Karl Barth was nevertheless a firm and unflinching anti-Judaic theologian. _That Jesus Was Born a Jew _devotes itself to an analysis and description of these two sides of Barth's thought, from the period of the _Römerbrief_ through the Church Dogmatics and later postwar addresses. It places Barth's thought against the backdrop of his contemporaries and the developments in (...) German academic theology Barth at once repudiated and called his own. Though no claim is made to set out Judaic self-understanding, Barth's conception of the people of Israel is understood, in contrast, as specifically Christian: Barth's is a fully dogmatic interpretation of the Jews. Katherine Sonderegger traces the development of Barth's commitment to the integrity of Christian self-description. In the process, she explores the conservation of the Church's theological past that gives Barth's thought its anti-Judaic character and his Christological concentration that makes Jesus the Jew the foundation for Christian opposition to anti-Semitism and Nazism. She analyzes Church Dogmatics as well as the second edition of Romans, focusing on Barth's exegesis of the types of prophet and pharisee; and she provides an evaluation of Barth's work, with constructive proposals for the contemporary reassessment of Judaism. (shrink)

Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness maintains that, although Christianity has superseded Judaism as the one true religion, it is God’s will that the Jews continue to exist because they preserve and authenticate the Old Testament, divinely-inspired texts which foretold the coming of Jesus. Thus, Christian rulers are obligated to protect the religious liberties of the Jewish people, and the church should focus its missionary efforts on pagans rather than Jews. Current scholarly consensus holds that Augustine adhered consistently (...) to this doctrine from its first iteration in Contra Faustum in 398 until his death in 430. However, this essay argues that, when Augustine spoke his last words on the subject in the Tractatus Aduersus Iudaeos, the doctrine was no longer his primary guide in thinking about how Christians should interact with Jews. In marked contrast to his earlier views, here, Augustine passionately urges Jews to accept Christ and encourages his congregation to try to convert them. This reading of the Tractatus Aduersus Iudaeos calls for a re-examination of the development of Augustine’s teaching, particularly in the context of dramatic changes in imperial policy toward Jews in the 420s. (shrink)

Many Christian traditions affirm a doctrine of assurance. According to this doctrine, those who are saved have assurance of their own salvation; that is, the doctrine of assurance tells us that the elect can know their status as elect. In this paper, I explore two developments of the doctrine of assurance by theologians (i.e. John Calvin & Kenneth Keathley) and argue that they fail to accommodate the fallibilistic nature of human knowing. I then develop a fallibilistic (...) doctrine of assurance, which makes such assurance available to most Christians, and respond to an objection from the camp of pragmatic encroachment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism by Matthew LeveringJustin Schembri O.P.Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism by Matthew Levering (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021), 547 pp.Engaging the Doctrine of Israel not only presents an interesting take on an old and complex problem but also is intriguing in its basic thesis and overall (...) development. In this book, Levering attempts, and succeeds, to marry a scripturally grounded dialogue with ongoing Judaism with the necessary presuppositions of Christian dogmatics. He does so in order to understand the central realities of God's biblical people Israel and to shine a light on how these realities must inform Christian thought (3).Such a volume fills a gap in research, since Christian dogmatic studies [End Page 1437] often suffer a lack of appreciating just how important understanding "Israel's covenantal life" is for Christian doctrine (3). Thus, while Levering tells us that this book is "the dogmatic sequel" to his Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage (1), the content of the book cannot be divorced from its scriptural foundation, nor from a contemporary dialogue with Israel.After an ample introduction (1–47), Levering begins his treatment of the matter by explaining the necessary hermeneutical framework in which such an engagement can take place (48–109). This foundational chapter not only provides the grounding for the chapters that follow but also examines the pitfalls to avoid in dialoging with ongoing Israel. In particular, Levering finds a balance in the need for both Christians and Jews to retain core beliefs and a recognition that both sides have suffered from unnecessary and painful biases that have hurt dialogue in the past (52–53).Since Levering is writing from the point of view of a Christian, he is right to point out that a healthy and fruitful dialogue with Judaism in the present moment requires both a solid foundation in Christian doctrine and an acknowledgement of how the New Testament has been misused to reject and subject the Jewish people to injustice over the centuries. Thus, in agreement with the author, I too think that Christian–Jewish dialogue plays a vital role not only in healing such biases but also in bridging needless gaps between the two groups (108–109).This crucial chapter is followed by an examination of six different areas (110–443) in which Levering engages with Israel's doctrine through a Christian lens. In each case, a similar format is found in the sense that Levering first introduces the topic and then engages with different Jewish and Christian scholars in order to elicit a more robust space for dialogue to happen. Each topic of study, then, is brought to a conclusion wherein Levering explicates both the pitfalls to be avoided and what truth can Christians glean.The first area to be discussed is creation (110–46). In this chapter, Levering examines why is it important for both Jews and Christians alike to affirm that omnipotent God created creation ex nihilo. The author is right to point out that if God did not create creation out of nothing, then God is not omnipotent but rather merely a "powerful finite being" (111).While I would have like to see a more robust exegetical analysis on Gen 1:1–2 (especially with regards to bǝrē'šît, since it is not so certain that this prepositional phrase should be interpreted temporally), the author is right to move beyond the metaphysical question of creation ex nihilo, to point out that creation is "also rooted in God's speaking, and thus his Word," since creation must be understood as the way in which God establishes "a dialogic communion" (124) with creation. After all, it is the Word which is [End Page 1438] fundamental; God speaks and practically invites creation to take its place amongst the grooves that God has made.What is more is that this Word, as Levering acknowledges, is both divine and human, since it is the Word of God written in human language. Thus, in Scripture, we cannot escape the "divine–human collaboration" (145) that is willed by... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:iA NOTE ON W. J. HILL'S "THE DOCTRINE OF GOD AFTER VATICAN II" F. F. CENTORE St. Jerome's Oollege, University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario GOD MAY NOT :be dead, hut certamly 1any strictly philosophical, scientific, rational approach to God 'WIOuld seem to ibe derud today. Modern thought, even rumong deeply religious people, seems to J:nwe despaired of ever being ruble to pwve rbhe existence oi God to anyone, (...) even to someone who not 'SO willfully prejudiced against relig~on. that he simply rrefuses to view the evidence in 1an open-minded, calm, am.d rreflective iway. However, this does :not mean that our,apip:voach to God must be strictly emotional and ir.rational. It may >still 1be reasonable rto believe in God, even though we cannot rprove his existence in 'Some strictly r:ationrul way. Rather,than beginning with our ordinary human experience of the real exbramenrtail world and,working our way up to a knowledge o:f the bet that God exists·, we might take a more inner.,directed, psychofogicail, humanistic, phenomenological, historical app1 voach to such knowledge. Such an aiprproach might even 1be more effective and more convincing rto un1believers. Reoent writers on the modern God-question ha1v;e emphasi~ed the notion that rational wgruments :for the existence (and natuire ) of God may :be :a:ll 1weH and :good hut only for ia oomputer or a rolbot. What modern man needs is not 1 so much 1a krrmwledge of God as ;a persona1 relrutionshlp to God. And perhaps the hesit 1w:ay to achieve this is not to throw out completely the role of reason in providing a.scientific support for God'1 s existence ibut to rev;errse the pmcess. We must first come to a personrul ruwaireneiss of God 1 and then proceed to v;alida;te rthfus 531 53~ F. F. CENTORE awareuess via scientific confirmation. After all, how can anyone ever hope even to 1begin the search for God unless he already hais some ·awareness of God's e:ristence? According to John Hick, fo.r inst:mce, this is especially true in the Juda.eo-Christian tradition and, hy extension, in those other religious traiditions 1 which derive f["om it, such as Islam. H " to kno·w " means " to be a1ble to prove hy syllogistic reasoning," then the Jews of the Old 'I1esbament did not know God. Instead of attempting to prove the existence of God they took his existence £or granted. " They thought of God as an experienced reality rather than as an inferred entity." i The ancient £aithful were as sure of the existence of their God as they we:ve of the material wo:rld which surrounded them. There was. no need to :become rationalistic rubout it. In iaddition, even if they had turned ra:tiona1listic it would hav;e been of no use whatsoever to them. F11om the point of view of faith, all of the theistic proofs (none of which is v;ery oompelling or cogent an;}'iway) are completely ir:velevant. They can actually do nothing to move anyone to :feel and act in a religious way. AH such proofs are only for pedants who are content to 1live an empty,and ·sterile rubstract life within their own minds rather than wailking in the living p:vesence of the divine. Although there may well. he a place for the rational development of our intuitive sense of the living presence of God as expressed in revelation, once we are in full possession of such a revelation, it must always hold a place secondary to the experienced fact of £aith. Thus, even though modern religious thinkers reject natuira:l theology, "This modern theofogioal rejection of natural theology is not necessarily motiva:ted ·by an ir:vationaJi.st distrust of reason." 2 There is a :vole :for reason, hut only so long as it comes: after we already know thrut God exists. Since reason ialone can never pirove the existence 0£ God, ·reve1 J. Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1983), pp. 59-60. 2 Ibid., p. 74. A NOTE ON W. J. HILL 533 lation 1 and ·faith... (shrink)

SummaryThis article situates Ernest Renan's representation of the historical Jesus in the author's intellectual, personal and political trajectory. It traces the development of Renan's ideas about Jesus across a variety of texts, from his loss of faith at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in 1845 until the publication of Life of Jesus in 1863. It particularly argues that Renan's best-selling book should be rooted in the cultural aftermath of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 to 1851. The violence of the June Days (...) and the election of Louis-Napoléon bred in Renan a deep disillusionment with democracy and socialism. Where French writers of the 1830s and 1840s had offered a proletarian Christ promising social revolution, Renan therefore depicted a liberal Jesus who offered a non-violent ‘revolution’ of personal morality. This Jesus was an individualist who spurned the temporal realm with ‘transcendent disdain’, preferring instead to pursue a state of inner liberty and perfection. Furthermore, this article argues that this representation of Jesus reflected the self-justification of Second Empire liberals such as Renan, who had retreated from frontline politics into the realm of culture and ideas. Indeed, Life of Jesus was itself a product of precisely this retreat. (shrink)

During the past few decades, Quentin Skinner has been one of the most prominent critics of the ideas about negative liberty that have developed out of the writings of Isaiah Berlin. Among Skinner?s principal charges against the contemporary doctrine of negative liberty is the claim that the proponents of that doctrine have overlooked the putative fact that people can be made unfree to refrain from undertaking particular actions. In connection with this matter, Skinner contrasts the present-day theories with (...) the prototypical liberal account of negative freedom propounded by Thomas Hobbes. The present essay challenges Skinner?s position both philosophically and exegetically. Because an agent can always elect to cease his activity as an agent, the ostensible inescapability of certain actions is not the same as the outright inescapability of certain instances of inaction. Once this point is properly recognized, the way is clear for a re-evaluation of Hobbes (and of Skinner on Hobbes). (shrink)

A myth exists that Jews can embrace the cultural components of Judaism without appreciating the legal aspects of the Jewish tradition. This myth suggests that law and culture are independent of one another. In reality, however, much of Jewish culture has a basis in Jewish law. Similarly, Jewish law produces Jewish culture. Roberta Rosenthal Kwall develops and applies a cultural analysis paradigm to the Jewish tradition that departs from the understanding of Jewish law solely as the embodiment of Divine (...) command. (shrink)

Judaism is one of the oldest religions that has survived to this day. It is a religion of mostly ethnic Jews, a nation that, for many historical reasons, was scattered all over the world and for a long time did not have a permanent place of residence, its state. During the century of its existence Judaism has undergone a number of changes, but its main features - monotheism and the veneration of ancient religious books - have not lost yet.

Augustine’s two-stage explanation of the creation of the universe provided a basis for understanding the divine operations that activated the potentialities of angels and humans by which they attained stable beatitude. God caused their activities of knowing and loving rather than endowing them with natural capacities for the divine. In this context, Augustine’s analysis of the success of the angels as well as the failure of the demons and the first humans clarified the limits of the agency of spiritual creatures (...) and specified the occurrence of sin as its defective exercise. Against this background, he distinguished the divine operations that moved and sustained Christians in faith and charity from the divine governance that insured the fidelity of the elect at the end of their lives and thus brought them to salvation. At the same time, he distinguished the final beatitude that made the angels and saints incapable of failure from the gifts of both charity and perseverance. Preserving the elect did not require a strengthening or expansion of the internal gifts attributed to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the agency of the elect living under the gift of perseverance was distinguished from that of Christians who failed to reach salvation only by its success. (shrink)

Sam Lebens’ The Principles of Judaism is an extraordinary book in its rigor and richness. It is a sophisticated examination of three central propositions, which Lebens maintains, are the fundamental doctrines that “can make sense of continued commitment to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle.” (Lebens, 273). He presents and discusses the following three propositions: 1) The universe is the creation of one God; 2) The Torah is a divine system of laws and wisdom, revealed by the creator of the universe; and, (...) 3) The creator exercises provi-dential care over his creation, manifest in the creator’s continued sustenance of the world, reward and punishment for human action, and in the promise of ultimate salvation. (Lebens, 3).Lebens presents the principles as they were variously explicated and de-fended in key Jewish texts written by the most influential Jewish thinkers; he then turns to search for “the most plausible rendering of this set of prin-ciples...” (Lebens, 274). After so doing, he specifies those doctrinal compo-nents among them, which he deems necessary “for making sense of commit-ment to Judaism” (Lebens, 275), identifying a “commitment to Judaism” with being “faithful to the tenets of Judaism” in the sense of having faith in them:To the extent that these principles are necessary for making sense of commitment to Judaism, I argue that you cannot be considered faithful to the tenets of Judaism without holding an attitude of faith toward some element of each of the three principles... (Lebens 275).The distance between Lebens’ philosophical and religious outlook and pre-suppositions, as they show themselves in his Principles of Judaism, and my own is great. I shall start with a critique of Lebens’ reduction of Judaism to so-called Orthodox Judaism, and argue that Lebens has no justification for characterizing the principles that he identifies, as the “principles of Judaism” without qualification. I shall then turn to argue that there are grounds for questioning whether the principles that Lebens identifies can be understood as the principles that so-called “Orthodox Jews”, too, have faith in. It is, how-ever, clear that the utterances that Lebens discusses do play a central role within the life of committed Jews. I shall end by proposing that we adopt the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical method for making perspicuous their meaning and their different roles. (shrink)

In the midst of the De pace fidei’s imagined heavenly conference on the theme of the possibility of religious harmony, Nicholas of Cusa has Saint Peter acknowledge to the Persian interlocutor that it will be difficult to bring Jews to the acceptance of Christ’s divine nature because they refuse to accept the implicit meaning of their own history of revelation. What is peculiar about this line in the dialogue is not merely that it flies in the face of what (...) Cusanus scholars tend to regard as an ecumenical spirit in Nicholas’ call to interreligious dialogue and mutual toleration. Rather, the statement reveals a peculiar hermeneutic principle at work in Nicholas’ understanding of the tension between truth and doctrine and the way that this tension informs human practice. Accordingly, by grappling with Nicholas’ portrayal of an imagined failure of Jews to practice interpretation correctly, I hope to shed light on Nicholas’ philosophy of religion in a way that neither ignores his anti-Judaism nor reduces the significance of his views to one of its most unpleasant manifestations. (shrink)

The paper is the first of two to be published in Cognitio which explore the hypothesis that the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803- 1882), brilliantly expounded in the generation before Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), anticipated, if not provided the direct provenance of, Peirce’s mature metaphysical ideas. The papers provide running commentaries on Emerson’s later-phase essays, “Poetry and Imagination” (1854, published in 1876) and “The Natural History of Intellect” (1870). “Poetry and Imagination” is shown to contain the seeds of Peirce’s (...) objective idealism — namely, that “matter is effete mind,” or “mind hide-bound with habits,” — set within an evolutionary cosmology that grounds the human mind’s connaturality or affinity with the laws of nature, a doctrine subtending his abductory logic of scientific discovery. Mutatis mutandis, all these components were already present in Emerson’s essay. Peirce spoke of his “buddhisto-christian religion,” which was another name for Emersonian cosmosemiosis. His originality consisted in applying Emerson’s emphasis on the poetic to the scientific imagination, though the seeds of the latter are present in Emerson’s “The Natural History of Intellect” and other essays as well. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Richard Hooker’s sermon A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certaintie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect appears, on the face of it, to be further evidence of his commitment to Reformed theology. History, however, tells a slightly different story as readers have debated just exactly what theological position Hooker was taking. Over the years it has attracted comment from those who have used it both to align Hooker with and to separate Hooker from the Magisterial Reformers. These (...) debates continue. This article, however, does not pursue this particular method of engagement. Instead, through a careful reading of the text, Hooker’s more complex and often startling theology is revealed- as he locates God’s presence in the pivot between doubt and despair, in places where God is thought to be absent. Hooker’s aim seems to be to find God in the darkness and in so doing he transcends the usual questions and debates that surround the doctrine of certainty and offers to present day readers a creative and sensitive approach to the anxiety caused by doubt. (shrink)

The doctrine of karma is a vexed philosophical question and karmic law has often been confused with fatal ism. This article seeks to put forward the author's understanding of this complex concept. It is a cosmic law of action with its inevitable consequence and reaction. Narration of parables—metaphors pregnant with rich meaning—supplemented with instances from real life show a path out of the labyrinth, even the much- debated issue of determinism and free will. The thesis is that karmic law (...) can provide the discerning intelli gence, cultivated through chitta-shuddhi, adequate guidance for making the choice that may help one—if one chooses to—in avoiding decisions for short-term gains that breed long-term misery. (shrink)

This article constructs two responses to Moltmann's critique of Barth's doctrine of divine freedom in Trinity and the Kingdom, a first on the basis of Barth's programmatic treatment of divine freedom in II/1 of the Church Dogmatics and a second on the basis of Bruce McCormack's reading of Barth's doctrine of election. It shows why the Barth of II/1 must dismiss Moltmann's concern for the priority of God's loving relationship to the world while Barth as interpreted by McCormack (...) can accommodate it. Finally it observes the significance of this twofold defense for mapping Barth onto the terrain of modern theology. (shrink)

S. Leyla Gürkan’s The Jews as a Chosen People: Tradition and Transformation is a bold attempt to trace the concept of the election of Israel from its Biblical and early Rabbinic development to the early modern and post-holocaust periods. Written as the history of an idea, the common thread tying the work together is the account and analysis of how this single, sometimes thorny, question of “chosenness” has animated Jewish conceptions of identity throughout its history. The author’s focus on (...) this idea serves as the motivation of the work to describe how “the idea of chosenness . . . is the raison d’être of the Jewish religion as well as the Jewish people” (p. 1). The author describes the question of .. (shrink)

In this subtle but laborious exposition and defense of a difficult doctrine of classical Calvinism, Berkouwer interprets both Calvin and certain classical creedal statements. His defense depends upon the contention that most criticisms of the doctrine rest upon misinterpretations. --F. E. B.

This paper examines the position of international human rights law towards missionary or proselytizing activities with a special focus on the American context. By evaluating UN legal acts such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1960 Arcot Krishnaswami Study and the 1981 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief and the American Convention of Human Rights, it investigates the extent to which such activities fall within the scope of (...) the right to free speech and to freedom of religion for religious organizations. This is exemplified by looking at two Evangelical religious organizations founded for the purpose of luring away groups of believers from their original religious communities: “Mission to Amish People”, targeting the Amish People, and “Jews for Jesus”, aimed at the Jewish community. The clash of one religious community which considers mission a fundamental element of its religion with a religious community who is highly skeptical about mission constitute the extreme test case of the right to free speech and to corporate freedom of religion. Given the highly various importance which mission can play in different religions, the article suggests to solve each case individually by carefully examining the content of each religious doctrine. (shrink)

Manetti's Latin treatise Adversus Iudaeos et Gentes (Against the Jews and Gentiles) offers a polemical defense of the Christian religion. This volume, which includes the first four books,surveys human history from the Creation to the life,teaching, and resurrection of Christ. Book I begins with the creation and fall of man in the Biblical account. There follows a long digression adversus gentes (the Gentiles, i.e., pagans), which reviews central points of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and religion, and censures the (...) ancients for their senseless doctrines and bloody rites. Manetti then returns to the Jews, whose beliefs and practices are praised from Abraham to Moses. During their centuries of "true" piety, Manetti calls the chosen people "Hebrews." But from the time of the Exodus onwards, he censures them as "Jews" because they observe the absurd and cruel practices of Pentateuchal legislation, which he views as analogous to pagan rites. Manetti stresses several themes in Jewish history: the early development of the concept of righteousness, the Exodus, the Mosaic Law and its inadequacy--thus providing a "preparation for the Gospel" in Eusebius' sense. The next three books provide a synoptic biography of Jesus in three stages. Book II describes the life of Christ up to the raising of Lazarus; Book III relates his teaching, and Book IV offers an account of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. (shrink)

The ethical propriety of routine male infant circumcision has been debated in journals of medicine and law for many years. This article explores the issue from historical, medical, and moral perspectives. Two essentially different forms of circumcision (one more drastic than the other) are distinguished. Discussion focuses on the effects of the more radical kind of nontherapeutic surgery on a normal healthy child’s body: whether it constitutes a mutilation, whether it is medically warranted, and whether it is ethically defensible in (...) light of general philosophical principles and Catholic moral doctrine. The conclusion questions the social bias favoring parental choice to circumcise a non-consenting son. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.1 (Spring 2012): 99–128. (shrink)

The essays in this volume are a contribution to this process of reappraisal, focusing specifically on the phenomena of scepticism and millenarianism, especially ...

Karl Barth leaves room by his own principles for further, even different thinking about Jews and gender than he records in the Dogmatics. Now that Marquardt, Klappert, Sonderegger, Soulen, and others have offered sympathetic critiques from a generally Barthian point of view, and Eberhard Busch has exhaustively laid to rest any biographical questions of Barth’s relation to the Jewish people in his 1996 book, Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes: Karl Barth und die Juden 1933–1945, the way lies open (...) to carry forward Barth’s theological critique of nineteenth century theology and of abstraction further into the areas of Jews and gender, and to propose constructive pneumatological and exegetical supplements to his thinking. Barth’s thinking on women and men, like his thinking on Jews, labors, for all its promise in its time, under a defect he calls abstraction. Barth faulted Calvin for abstracting both elect human beings and the electing God from Jesus Christ, whom Barth called the elect human being and the electing God in one. Yet on the election of the community Barth did not entirely escape the abstraction. In the manner of Augustine’s Retractions, Barth wrote to Maruardt toward the end of his life that he had been so busy with Israel that he had had no time for the Jews. Does Barth, as Marquardt and Sonderegger suggest, throw up despite himself a conceptual screen onto which he at once projects an abstraction and behind which he hides actual human beings , a screen resistant to the blowing of the Spirit? Do the concepts “ man” and “ woman” form a similar conceptual screen, dating from Schleiermacher’s dialogue Christmas Eve, in which men and women have essentially different responses to the incarnation of Jesus Christ? Das ewig M??nnliche and das ewig Weibliche, inherited from German romanticism, see to run afoul of Barth’s trinitarian particularism, as does “ Israel”. Yet further application of Barth’s own principles, including more attention to the Spirit, leaves him more options in his treatment of Jews and gender, and richer exegesis – including exegesis by anagogy. (shrink)

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the recovery by western Christendom from the Arabs, Jews and Greeks of the metaphysical treatises of Aristotle, and their translation into Latin, caused a ferment in the intellectual world comparable to that produced by Darwin in the nineteenth century. To vindicate traditional methodoxy Albertus Magnus undertook to harmonize the doctrines of the Church with the Peripatetic philosophy, and this work was carried to its conclusion by his pupil, St Thomas Aquinas, with such (...) success that the latter has become the official philosopher of Roman Catholicism. The system of Aquinas centres in his conception of God, to the exposition and criticism of which this book is devoted. (shrink)

This long overdue English translation of Karl Löwith's magisterial study is a major event in Nietzsche scholarship in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Its initial publication was extraordinary in itself—a dissident interpretation, written by a Jew, appearing in National Socialist Germany in 1935. Since then, Löwith's book has continued to gain recognition as one of the key texts in the German Nietzsche reception, as well as a remarkable effort to reclaim the philosopher's work from political misappropriation. For Löwith, the centerpiece of (...) Nietzsche's thought is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, a notion which Löwith, unlike Heidegger, deems incompatible with the will to power. His careful examination of Nietzsche's cosmological theory of the infinite repetition of a finite number of states of the world suggests the paradoxical consequences this theory implies for human freedom. How is it possible to will the eternal recurrence of each moment of one's life, if both this decision and the states of affairs governed by it appear to be predestined? Löwith's book, one of the most important, if seldom acknowledged, sources for recent Anglophone Nietzsche studies, remains a central text for all concerned with understanding the philosopher's work. (shrink)

‘The one who peers into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres, and is not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, such a one shall be blessed in what he does’ (James 1:25). Freedom, in one sense of the word or another, is a central theme of the bible, the Old Testament as well as the New. During the Middle Ages, Christian theologians developed this theme into a doctrine of the natural right of freedom of the (...) individual or natural person and made it into a moral and intellectual bulwark against the encroachments of the modern state. The classical liberal or libertarian tradition in Western political thought, from John Locke to the American Founding Fathers to Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard, owes an immense debt to the likes of Thomas Aquinas, Jean Gerson, Francisco de Vitoria, Juan de Mariana and Batholomé de las Casas. Not coincidentally Christianity and classical liberalism together went into rapid decline towards the end of the nineteenth century and especially in the globalisation of European wars in the twentieth century. At that time, mass democracy and national expediency became the pretexts of choice to subvert constitutional limitations on the use of political power. The decline was not halted —was perhaps even accelerated—when Christians and liberals alike began to adopt ‘social doctrines’ and the advocacy of social policies that only confirmed the impression that there is no salvation outside the state. However, I do not intend to describe the historical linkages between classical liberalism and Christianity. Instead I shall try to explicate their relevant common concept of personal freedom and trace its role in some of the central stories of the bible, those that purport to be direct reports of the actions and words of God or Jesus Christ. I am not concerned here with the stories about the Jews or with the reports of what prophets and apostles said about the meaning and relevance of the divine words and actions. Important as they are for understanding the Jewish and the Christian traditions, they already are historical expressions and applications of religious beliefs rather than expositions of the story to which those beliefs refer.. (shrink)