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Since its first appearance in 1821/22, The Christian Faith has had a fractious history of reception. It implements decisive departures for theology, founding the possibility to speak about God on human freedom. It recognises the role of historical consciousness, and the need to relate to advances in the natural sciences. The study investigates the early critiques of Schleiermacher’s analysis of the feeling of utter dependence, of his conception of Christ as the archetype of the God-consciousness, and of his doctrine of God in terms of absolute causality. It reconstructs the revisions carried out in the second edition of 1830/31 as a break-through to a transcendental argumentation. Does Sch...
The nature and role of positive law has largely been neglected in recent Protestant theology and social ethics. Modern Protestantism and Positive Law introduces and critically summarizes a tradition in Continental Protestant thought about human law, drawing on writings of Barth, Brunner, Ellul, Thielicke, Wolf, Pannenberg, Huber, and Kreβ, many of which have not been translated into English. The book argues that law is an essential political and social institution within developed societies, one that is normative and dependent on an encompassing vision of justice but that also necessarily reflects the contemporary pluralism of those societies. Modern Protestantism and Positive Law argues that theological and ethical perspectives on positive law developed by Protestant thinkers have a place in reflection on positive law, provided they are conceived and expressed in a manner appropriately respectful of the diversity of contemporary opinion regarding the expression of religious perspectives in the public arena.
The past three decades have witnessed a significant transatlantic and trans-disciplinary resurgence of interest in the early nineteenth-century Protestant theologian and philosopher, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). As the first major Christian thinker to theorize religion in a post-Enlightenment context and re-conceive the task of theology accordingly, Schleiermacher holds a seminal place in the histories of modern Christian thought and the modern academic study of religion alike. Whereas his “liberalism” and humanism have always made him a controversial figure among theological traditionalists, it is only recently that Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion has become the target of polemics from Religious Studies scholars keen to disassociate their discipline from its partial origins in liberal Protestantism. Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology documents an important meeting in the history of Schleiermacher studies at which leading scholars from Europe and North America gathered to probe the viability of key features of Schleiermacher’s theological and philosophical program in light of its contested place in the study of religion.
Imagining Outer Space makes a captivating advance into the cultural history of outer space and extraterrestrial life in the European imagination. How was outer space conceived and communicated? What promises of interplanetary expansion and cosmic colonization propelled the project of human spaceflight to the forefront of twentieth-century modernity? In what way has West-European astroculture been affected by the continuous exploration of outer space? Tracing the thriving interest in spatiality to early attempts at exploring imaginary worlds beyond our own, the book analyzes contact points between science and fiction from a transdisciplinary perspective and examines sites and situations where utopian images and futuristic technologies contributed to the omnipresence of fantasmatic thought. Bringing together state-of-the-art work in this emerging field of historical research, the volume breaks new ground in the historicization of the Space Age.
In the dominant view, morality is more rational and universal than, and therefore independent from, (christian) religion. Believers do not have exclusive moral knowledge. Moral principles can be known by anyone. Morality, not religion, is the supreme judge of human actions in the world. Some contributors to this volume defend this view on theological and philosophical grounds. The advantages of such a view for thinking about a common global morality are clear. However, according to many authors, the conception of morality underlying this view is at the least, impoverished, if not wrong: this view cannot explain the importance and the persistence of moral taboos. Furthermore, every morality i...
Despite the revival of intellectual history in recent years, there is still relatively little research into German-Jewish intellectual history between 1933 and 1938. The present work studies for the first time the important discussions of the period from the debate between Leo Strauss and Julius Guttmann, Alexander Altmann’s contribution to “Jewish theology,” to the reception of the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger as well as the works of David Baumgardt and Fritz Heinemann. Many now forgotten texts of those discussions have been made accessible here. All the leading figures presented in this study were sooner or later forced to choose between “philosophy” and “law.”
Scripture has always played an important role in Christian theology. This study provides an issue oriented overview of the concepts of Scripture in Protestant theology from the 16th century Reformation onward. It then sets forth the concepts of Scripture in the theologies of two contemporary systematic theologians: W. Pannenberg and D. G. Bloesch. It analyzes, compares and evaluates the theological and anthropological presuppositions that have influenced their concept of Scripture. Despite fundamentally different starting points and other significant distinctions Pannenberg and Bloesch reveal surprising similarities. This seems to suggest that for both the concept of Scripture is determined ultimately by presuppositions that are derived and shaped extra scripturam".
In recent years, the challenge of relating one’s own theological concept of man and his destiny to secular topics, such as the inviolability of human dignity, has generated a dynamic discourse about how Islamic anthropology can help cultivate and perfect the individual self and social ‘humanisation’. This anthology brings together contemporary Muslim and non-Muslim approaches to the secular notion of human dignity with reference to the Islamic tradition in general and the anthropology of the Qur’ān in particular. The collection presents approaches to Islamic theological anthropology, across a range of fields, especially with regard to the narrative of Adam and Iblīs, which occurs i...
The Possibility of Norms examines what defines social norms. Norms are not mere justifications or causal explanations of what we do, but point towards the possibility of divergent states of the world. Möllers's eye-opening analysis develops a new conceptual framework for social norms, from law and religion to the social and political sphere.