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Safeguarding the distinction between God and world has always been a basic interest of negative theology. But sometimes it has overemphasized divine transcendence in a way that made it difficult to account for the sense of God's present activity and experienced actuality. Criticisms of the Western metaphysics of presence have made this even more difficult to conceive. On the other hand, there has been a widespread attempt in recent years to base all theology on (religious) experience; the Christian church celebrates God's presence in its central sacraments of baptism and Eucharist; process thought has re-conceptualized God's presence in panentheistic terms; and some have argued that God migh...
In this book, Eric E. Hall takes up the question of the meaning of a vigorously used concept in the liberal west: authenticity and the pursuit of personal originality. By uncovering this idea's uses within three deepening contexts - the ethical, the ontological, and the theological - the author unfolds authenticity's origins and implications. To the degree that authenticity seeks in all contexts freedom from social horizons, the conclusion renders attempts to embody this ideal secularly impossible. The goal requires a total transcendence that only the divine could fulfill. Human authenticity thus emerges in creatively imitating God's self-sacrificial expression on the cross, which both transcends and revalues the horizons of this world.
Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Chicago, 2008 under title: The word made flesh and the mazy page: symbol and allegory in Coleridge's philosophy of faith.
Asle Eikrem strives to develop a systematic philosophical understanding of the constitutive structures of religious discourses. Different philosophical traditions (phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatics, metaphysics or analytical philosophical thinking) have articulated these structures in their own distinctive ways. The author aims to show how insights from partly conflicting traditions can be coherently reconstructed within the framework of a comprehensive philosophical presentation. The central thesis guiding his work is inspired by the deep-metaphysics of German philosopher Lorenz B. Puntel, and states that the relation between the pragmatic, semantic and ontological structures of religious discourses must be understood as internally necessary. They cannot be thought independently from each other. The pragmatic and semantic structures of religious discourses must be understood as substructures in a comprehensive ontological dimension (Being) that is characterized as practicable and expressible.
Keith H. Lane examines Soren Kierkegaard's concept of religious authorship and argues for Kierkegaard's status as a religious author. He elucidates how such authorship may have similarities to philosophical authorship (particularly philosophy as envisioned by Ludwig Wittgenstein) and wherein the two differ. Starting with Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript and giving special attention to The Point of View and other later writings, Lane investigates aspects of thought and expression that may be unique to religious authorship and explores the particular constraints, challenges, and opportunities for one who writes from within a framework of religious belief and commitment-including such issues as protectionism, apologetics, persuasion, and the tension between certainty and uncertainty that attends religious authorship.
How does God talk to us? The image of the speaking God offers a profound insight into the nature of communication. The idea of the God’s Word runs like a red thread through the entire Bible. Few theologians, however, have interpreted the concept “Word of God” as a linguistic phenomenon, but Augustine, Luther, and Barth are among those who have. What sets this study apart from others is its emphasis on the aspects of semiotics (Augustine), semantics (Luther), and pragmatics (Barth). Hofmann then places these three theologians in the context of the linguistic analytical philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ian Ramsey, and John L. Austin. This work carries forward the dialogue between theology and modern philosophy of language, while at the same time opening up the Word of God for human reality. It also touches on the fields of the doctrine of God and Christology, attempting nothing less than a comprehensive language theory of the Word of God.
Arne Grøn’s reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s authorship revolves around existential challenges of human identity. The 35 essays that constitute this book are written over three decades and are characterized by combining careful attention to the augmentative detail of Kierkegaard’s text with a constant focus on issues in contemporary philosophy. Contrary to many approaches to Kierkegaard’s authorship, Grøn does not read Kierkegaard in opposition to Hegel. The work of the Danish thinker is read as a critical development of Hegelian phenomenology with particular attention to existential aspects of human experience. Anxiety and despair are the primary existential phenomena that Kierkega...
A study of Graham Greene's fiction from the perspective of ethics and community, focusing on the narrative pattern that emerges from the author's idiosyncratic use of keywords like peace, despair, compassion or commitment. This book explores their potential for the textual articulation of narrative conflict and the dramatization of the ethical.
This collection of essays offers a series of rigorously focused art-historical, historical, and philosophical studies that examine ways in which materiality has posed and still poses a religious and cultural problem. The volume examines the material agency of objects, artifacts, and environments: art, ritual, pilgrimage, food, and philosophy. It studies the variable "senses” of materiality, the place of materiality in the formation of modern Western religion, and its role in Christianity’s dialogue with non-Western religions. The essays present new interpretations of religious rites and outlooks through the focus on their material components. They also suggest how material engagement theory - a new movement in cultural anthropology and archeology - may shed light on the cultural history of Christianity in medieval and early modern Europe and the Americas. It thus fills an important lacuna in the study of western religion by highlighting the longue durée, from the Middles Ages to the Modern Period, of a current dilemma, namely the divide between materialistic and what might broadly be called hermeneutical or cultural-critical approaches to religion and human subjectivity.
This study confronts the current crisis of churches. In critical and creative conversation with the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), Ulrich Schmiedel argues that churches need to be “elasticized” in order to engage the “other.” Examining contested concepts of religiosity, community, and identity, Schmiedel explores how the closure of church against the sociological “other” corresponds to the closure of church against the theological “other.” Taking trust as a central category, he advocates for a turn in the interpretation of Christianity—from “propositional possession” to “performative project,” so that the identity of Christianity is “done” rather...