I show that David Lewis’s argument in “Divine Evil” has logical problems and also misrepresents Christianity. He offers a “straw figure” argument and with it commits an ad hominem against Christian people. In “Divine Evil” he fails to acknowledge that in the long and serious intellectual tradition of Christianity, his view of God is unrecognizable. In this tradition, evil is the deprivation of being and is parasitic on the goodness of being. God overcomes it through God’s redemptive actions and, thus, it’s impossible for God to do evil and philosophically irresponsible to say the Christian view of God is evil.
Rahner’s theology of the cross, as articulated in the last two decades of his life, has several weaknesses: it neglects Jesus’ Jewishness, makes supersessionist presumptions, is typically more abstruse than dramatic, and is insufficiently connected to his theology of sin. At the same time, many of his core soteriological insights remain valuable. This article seeks to expand on those insights, especially by integrating post-conciliar covenantal theologies. A soteriology which features Christ as the covenant-in-person, I argue, can serve as a corrective to these shortcomings and capitalize on Rahner’s contributions.
Karl Rahner used the word-pair “transcendent” and “categorical” to describe God’s reality in relation to the predicates of human knowledge. Rahner’s earliest writings elaborated the word-pair as an expression of Thomist metaphysics. Then, at the time of Vatican II, he applied the two words to humanity’s participation in revelation while avoiding the immanentism of the Modernists. In his final years, Rahner used categorical and transcendent to explain moral freedom and divine revelation. Today the word-pair can help solve problems that hinge on human knowledge of the divine.
This paper argues that Karl Rahner’s concept of self-determination through the fundamental option was profoundly shaped by his sensitivity to the social, political, and spiritual struggles of his time. Drawing on historical studies, it examines the pastoral situation of the German Catholic community during Rahner’s youth and early adulthood, highlighting the simultaneous strengthening of Catholic identity and self-determination among laypeople, alongside anxieties about moral uprightness. While Rahner’s theology is often considered complex and inaccessible, this paper demonstrates how it directly addresses these religious concerns in ways that the contemporary realist debate could not. Taking Hearer of the Word as a key example of his early theological thought, the study shows how Rahner grounds his theology in the existential relationship between the person and God. In doing so, Rahner dissolves the notion of an independent autonomy that might conflict with the Church, while offering a balm to the moral anxiety and turmoil of the war years. Situating his thought within the historical challenges faced by German Catholics in the early twentieth century, this paper reveals his theology as both a response to and a reflection of the lived experience of the Catholic community.
The essay discusses two sources of randomness in the natural world. The first one is methodological and is associated with the complexity of the system, the inability to handle data of astronomically large scale, or the lack of adequate theory. The second is due to the emergence of a state that cannot be expressed as a function of a previous state albeit it is perceived as its derivative. By examining the ramifications of each possibility, the essay concludes that in both cases, albeit from different directions, objectivism is an illusional concept and that the only avenue to move forward is an anthropocentric perception of life and of the natural world. In both cases the conclusions reached may appear as paradoxical which raises skepticism regarding the breadth of the modern epistemological perspectives.
Contemporary theology is marked by an aspiration to operate ‘in the middle of things’ that raises important questions about just how a meaningful ‘middle’ might be identified. This essay furthers reflection on the task of operating ‘in the middle of things’ through an account of the way that an interrelated set of divisions between incommensurate conceptual spaces opens within modern thought. By considering divisions rooted in distinctions between manifest and scientific images of the world, depsychologised and critical visions of meaning, and public and personal standpoints of moral reasoning, this essay highlights the difficulties of occupying a conceptual ‘middle,’ and suggests that there is no sure way to do so beyond the cultivation of a form of wisdom.
When a system of government is controlled by majority vote, something has to be done to prevent what is known as the “tyranny of the majority.” Protective measures commonly involve provisions embodied in a constitution, such as amendments to keep the majority from tyrannically imposing any particular religion, restricting freedom of expression, or enslaving part of the population. But something extremely important is missing in the U.S. Constitution: there is no amendment to keep the majority from instituting and maintaining economic arrangements that result in the majority living well at the expense of the minority. Slavery is prohibited, but not “slave wages.” The important question for the future of democracy is how this economic tyranny of the majority can be ruled out. What I propose here is not a new amendment—which could prove extremely difficult to enact—but rather a permanent legal linkage between high wages and low wages.
Anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that non-existence is superior to human existence as we know it, which necessarily contains much evil. So it would be better not to cause others to come into existence. Anti-natalist logic can be combined with the soteriological problem of evil to produce “the soteriological problem of reproduction”: the possibility of ending up in an eternal hell makes it better not to have be born. I will review and supplement recent employments of such logic by Kenneth Einar Himma, David Bentley Hart, R. Zachary Manis, and Roberto J. De La Noval so as to argue against a traditional conception of hell.
This article first aims to clarify the biblical notion of the soul as a psycho-physical unity, by comparing it with the Platonic dualism of body and soul. It then analyses the distinction between the notion of resurrection of the body and that of the immortality of the soul. Next, it explains how Aristotle, followed by Muslim and Jewish commentators, shifted from the first to the second notion. Finally, it highlights the replacement, initiated by Maimonides and achieved by Spinoza, of the notion of soul by that of mind, as well as the modalities of its eternalization.
In An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, Berkeley compares vision to a language, and in Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, he compares nature’s methods to a divine language. In this article, I firstly study the characteristics of the notion of language used by Berkeley in these two contexts, as well as the scope of the two analogies. Based on the results of this study, I show how, contrary to what is generally asserted, the notions of the ‘language of nature’ in the New Theory of Vision and the Principles have a different and, in some respects, incompatible meaning, status and purpose. I then suggest how all the amendments and deletions made to the passages dealing with the language of nature in the works and new editions published during the 1730s can be read in the light of this incompatibility and Berkeley’s efforts to prevent the risk of a drift towards materialism and atheism linked to a consideration of nature as a language.
