John Caputo's 'radical theology' calls attention to the event stirring in the name of God. He utilizes a certain reduction in order to bring this into view which has developed from a Husserlian to a 'radical' form. I argue that his thematizing of the event is an important point of emphasis in post-modern philosophy of religion but that his reduction suffers from three problems. It presupposes that any theological discourse in terms of being is onto-theological, it relies on a naturalistic binary of possibility and impossibility to exclude the miraculous, and this strangely determinate horizon of possibility inhibits the givenness of the event. Caputo's deconstructive concern for the event in the name of God could ironically be further radicalized by not employing his radical reduction.
Focusing on Jurgen Habermas's Also a History of Philosophy, the article argues that his conception of postmetaphysical philosophy remains internally unstable, insofar as his account of communicative reason continues to rely on holistic and implicitly metaphysical assumptions. This instability becomes particularly apparent in Habermas's understanding of religion, as articulated in his genealogy of the entanglement of faith and reason. In this context, the priority accorded to ritual practice and fides qua over doctrinal truth-claims tends to marginalise the rational content of religious belief. From a theological perspective, the article examines the implications of this problem for the rationality of claims of strong transcendence. It concludes that, although Habermas's project prompts a critical reassessment of enduring metaphysical frictions between faith and reason, it cannot straightforwardly serve as a source of inspiration for a postmetaphysical self-understanding of theology. The argument proceeds from the standpoint of a contemporary analytic and fallibilist conception of metaphysics.
This study reinterprets Augustine's theory of attention (attentio and intentio) by uncovering its neglected pedagogical dimension. While modern scholarship has focused on attention within Augustine's epistemology and Trinitarian psychology, this essay argues that Augustine also conceives attention as a spiritual discipline to be educated and sanctified. Drawing on texts from De musica to De catechizandis rudibus (c. 399-400), it shows that for Augustine, education is not a transfer of knowledge but, rather, the formation of attention: a redirection of the soul from distraction toward truth and the love of God. The teacher, modelled on the humility of Christ, acts as a 'custodian of attention', guiding and transforming the learner's intentio animi. Through this lens, Augustine's pedagogy unites cognition, ethics, and theology, offering a profound vision of teaching as a kenotic art of attention and a strikingly relevant resource for contemporary reflection on learning and spiritual formation.
This article aims to contribute to the scholarship of Obereit's concepts of nihilism and philosophy of nothingness by reconstructing the historical and conceptual context of these two concepts. First, a brief overview of the historical development of Obereit's philosophy is provided to clarify the place of these concepts within his work. Second, a comparative analysis of Obereit's and Jacobi's notions of nihilism, philosophy and faith is undertaken. Third and finally, Obereit's critical reception of Kantian philosophy is examined, particularly concerning the epistemological status of intellectual intuition in both thinkers.
The missing piece for many inquirers about God is a recognized experience of God as supporting evidence for belief in God. This article characterizes such experience in terms of a self-confirming and self-manifesting God who suffers with humans. It does so in the context of the issue whether God, if real, would do better now with the world. Inquirers often give an affirmative answer to support atheism implying that God does not exist. A silencing theodicy, in response to atheism, questions supposedly firm objections to the reality and goodness of God based on the world's evils. Such a theodicy does not show that atheism is false, but it undermines the evidential support for atheism sought in claiming that God, if real, would do better now with the world. The article examines whether God asks too much of humans with 'higher' divine ways, but it proceeds without relying on a contested notion of the best of all possible worlds. It explains how God self-confirms divine reality and goodness in the midst of unexplained suffering for humans.
This article advances an account of why, in the digital age, the Catholic Jubilee's constitutive rite - the bodily crossing of the Holy Door - resists virtualization. Critiquing theories that define screens as 'operational thresholds,' it argues that authentic threshold experience presupposes materiality and the inseparable pair door-threshold. Building a threefold grammar - limes (boundary and separation), ostium (structural solidity and protection), and ianua (mistagogical passage) - the study shows how embodied crossing is requisite for access to an order of reality that cannot be simulated. Applied to the Catholic Jubilee, this grammar clarifies why the pilgrimage's telos is not a place but a passage. Anthropologically, doors engage the body: they must be touched, pushed, and crossed. A screen is a window for viewing; a door is an instrument for entry. Theologically, the door images the human person, an interface of interior and exterior, sin and sanctification, called to be traversed by grace and responsibility.
This article offers an analysis of two central concepts in J. H. Obereit's Der wiederkommende Lebensgeist der verzweifelten Metaphysik (1787): nihilism and the philosophy of nothingness. After providing an overview of the literature on Obereit's concept of nihilism, the article provides a response to criticisms in the literature regarding the lack of clarity, systematicity, and argumentative consistency in Obereit's concept of nihilism. It will be argued that Obereit's nihilism differs not only from G & ouml;tze's philosophical nihilism but also from the meaning Jacobi later gave it and, consequently, from the meaning of the word in common usage. Obereit's nihilism has a positive and affirmative connotation; it does not imply atheism but, on the contrary, can only be justified when the existence of God is assumed. Moreover, it serves as a means for Obereit's philosophical project during those years: the philosophy of nothingness, which consists of the restoration of metaphysics after Kant and his thesis concerning the impossibility of objective knowledge of God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul.
Here I suggest ways in which the Hobbes-Bramhall debate and its reception contributed to the commonly accepted false dilemma between libertarianism and compatibilism in Christianity. Specifically, I will show that Bramhall's primary initial strand of argument against Hobbesian necessity was his general assertion of liberty from determination - which he claimed nearly every philosopher and divine that he knew of held - and not an argument for liberty upon more specified theological bases that could be called Arminian (though such a synergist strand was present from the beginning). Unwary readers were liable to see his defense of liberty simply being a defense of his Arminian views, while, in truth, Bramhall's general view of adherents of liberty would encompass those who maintained 'dependent freedom' and not just Arminians. What is more, the reception of the debate has helped fuel the appearance that there were only two viable sides to free will controversies within Christianity. That is, some major works limit Bramhall's understanding of libertarian freedom to one that is only appropriable to a form of Arminianism like the former term tends to be used today. This argument squares with important historical work done by Richard Muller and the authors of Reformed Thought on Freedom.
The reception of John Dewey's A Common Faith has been quite marginal in philosophy of religion since its appearance in 1934. The more memorable aspect to Dewey's reconstruction of religion, his reformulation for God, tends to confound natural theology, transgress scientific naturalism, and offend humanism's secularity. Neither supernatural nor just natural, not personal but far from impersonal, and thoroughly experiential yet never observable, his philosophical divinity seems to elude categorization. Initially he pictures a God of personal ideals driving the process of self-realization. Then Dewey sketches how a society's collective devotion to realizing its shared ideals amounts to its shared religious experience oriented through that idealized God. Not halting with religious pluralism, he demands natural piety from everyone in the pursuit of realizing shared ideals for all humanity. That universal project of realizing idealizations inheres a motivational unity into an ideally-real deity which Dewey calls God. That humanity-wide endeavor conveys the deified spirit of unlimited democracy, not because humanity or democracy should be God, but because genuine democracy without borders reveres one deity without peers. Dewey's religious philosophy and its God, while distinctive among philosophical deities for personalistic, participatory, and progressive character can be classed with ethical monotheism.
Art and religion are often compared on the grounds that there is an alignment between feelings of aesthetic rapture and religious experience. For many, the intense emotion we sometimes feel when experiencing art allows for an analogy to religious experience. Given this comparison, several scholars have suggested that artistic rapture might be a site for religious experience. Such arguments admit several important questions about this often-made comparison: Are there sufficient grounds for an analogy between aesthetic and religious rapture? Can the feeling-content of such experiences actually lead to knowledge of a corresponding spiritual reality, such as God? And, ultimately, what is the best way to understand the relationship between art and religious experience? This essay responds to these questions. The first section examines the comparison between artistic rapture and religious feeling. The second section then considers the epistemological claim that religious feelings can lead to knowledge of the divine, urging caution with such arguments. Nonetheless, I still contend that there is a profound relationship between art and religious experience. The third section pursues this through sacramental theology, conceptualising art as a site for encounter with the created world and a way of discerning and responding to the gift of creation.
Esoteric, neo-Gnostic authors hold that the Nicene Council decided which early Christian writings it included in the New Testament canon and excluded Gnostic works, whether or not at the instigation of emperor Constantine. A few scholars agree that there is or might be some truth in this view. This paper demonstrates that for this opinion there are no historical cues from the first 550 years after the Council. The question is when this persuasion originated. The Synodicon Vetus, a Byzantine work from the late ninth century, tells a story that suggests such a decision, although it does not mention Gnostic books explicitly. After this work had been published in Strasbourg in 1601, several authors, like Voltaire and Helena Blavatsky, gave it some credibility. In this way it was uncritically adopted and disseminated by other authors, mostly without any reference. The authors of this paper argue that Christian spirituality would have developed into a quite different, less earthbound direction if the Church had included Gnostic books in its scriptural canon.
This paper explores the relevance of the Nicene and Chalcedonian Christological dogmas from a Christian feminist and ecofeminist perspective, in light of the climate crisis and the rise of far-right movements. While traditional Christology has often restricted divine embodiment to a male figure, integrating it with biblical Wisdom traditions - such as portraying Jesus as the Incarnation of Lady Wisdom - offers a more expansive, creation-centered vision. I argue that these dogmas, though often dismissed as products of outdated power structures, can be reappropriated to affirm God's presence in all flesh and the wider creation. Ecofeminist theology and Christological doctrine need each other, and the eucharist serves as a vital space where this embodied theology is enacted.
This article examines the presence of disabled confessors at Nicaea through the lens of disability studies, considering the significance that their embodied experience may have had on the doctrine, declarations, and reception of the Nicene Council - both initially and for people with disabilities today. While no definitive list of Council attendees exists, one account suggests all but eleven of the bishops present were 'maimed' as a result of persecution. The presence of confessors - those who suffered and were disfigured and disabled from persecution - at the Council in 325 CE is undisputed. What remains contested in the limited scholarship on Nicaea that discusses their presence is their authority. Some scholars (e.g. Cameron, Hall, Barnes) argue that the confessors' broken bodies and experiences granted them influence over the Council's proceedings, while other studies (e.g. Kelhoffer) suggest that their presence has no direct bearing on the Council's doctrinal pronouncements. Ultimately, this article contends that embodiment matters, and that regardless of their exact numbers, the presence of disabled confessors influenced the doctrine that defined - and continues to define - the Church.
The letter of Constantine to Alexander and Arius implies that the occasion for the conflict between Arius and Alexander was the latter's request that each of the presbyters in Alexandria explain 'a certain passage of things written in the Law.' This essay will examine the exegetical practices deployed by both sides and the theological framework such practices involve, to consider whether the controversy that ensued was about 'Trinitarian theology,' as we typically understand it today, or the mystery of Christ contained in the Scriptures, and, consequently, whether the fourth-century debates was about one theological locus or had its roots in earlier exegetical practices and continued further into the following centuries.
Historians have studied the relationship between the Early Christian Creeds and Christian Doctrine. Yet before doctrinal language, there was embodied practice. Practices of prayer, singing, care and preaching preceded the accepted credal formularies. The paper discusses the relationship between creed and practice from a practical theological perspective. It departs from an analysis of baptismal practice in the Early Church and its relation to the doctrinal language in the creed. The analysis applies the approach of the 'four voices of theology' and it is argued that normative theology as expressed in creeds is preceded by operant theology in practices. Next, this is explored more broadly in relation to other religious practices, such as singing, preaching and care. The closing section explores the complex relationship between beliefs and practices and suggests further research in the areas of historical analysis and normativity in theology.
The term homoousios stands as a cornerstone of the Nicene Creed. In churches where the Nicene Creed is recited liturgically, the shared essence of Father and Son forms an integral tenet of faith. Yet, this very term is often rejected or reinterpreted within modern Christology, viewed as quintessentially a product of the Greco-Roman context surrounding early Christian confession. It has become conventional to link homoousios with the substance metaphysics characteristic of pre-Enlightenment (pre-1750) philosophy and theology. Since then, relational thinking has increasingly been considered a more adequate way to express the divinity of Jesus than this Hellenistic import. This contribution will first outline the contemporary critique of substance metaphysics and its application to Christology. It will then offer a defense of homoousios through engagement with Ingolf Dalferth's relational Christology. Finally, it will explore the implications of employing both Christological models for spirituality and liturgy.
In the West, we are aware that we have added the filioque to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed without the authority of an ecumenical council. Some of us may be aware that the Council of Nicaea (325) also took important decisions regarding the computation of the Easter date. We are mostly unaware, however, of the fact that prayer was an important topic at the Council of Nicaea, and that Orthodox churches charge the West with contempt for the decisions of the Council of Nicaea on kneeling while praying on Sundays and in the Easter season. In Canon 20, Nicaea bans kneeling during prayer on Sundays and during the fifty days commencing on Easter because kneeling is considered a penitential attitude and incompatible with celebrating Christ's resurrection. Here I discuss Canon 20, its background, meaning, and reception, and provide some theological considerations on the relevance of Canon 20 for today.
The discussion on whether it is permissible for Christians to partake in military service is often a heated debate. One of the Canons of the Council of Nicaea speaks of (re-)entering military service and is usually interpreted as advocating pacifism. However, this contribution shows that Christians served in the military from earliest Christianity, while influential Christian thinkers and sometimes individual soldiers argued against it. The practice of Christians in the military started long before Nicaea, and Canon 12 should be interpreted in terms of specific actions against those believers who wanted to re-enter military service under Licinius, Constantine's enemy. While one should expect that the Canons would have a lasting impact, it did not - as we show the arguments and developments through the ages, up until today: from the Just War theories developed by St. Ambrose and St. Augustine through the sacred soldier advocated by Bernardus of Clairvaux, to the spiritual warfare by Erasmus and the non-violent stance by Pope Francis today.
In this introductory article the guest editors explain the topic of this special issue. Furthermore they highlight the main emphasis and approach of each contribution.
