This article is a précis of Mark C. Murphy’s Divine Holiness and Divine Action (Oxford University Press, 2021), which offers an account of God’s holiness and of the difference this view of God’s holiness should make to our understanding of divine action.
Various thinkers are concerned that the Orthodox view of Ancestral Sin does not avoid the age-old Augustinian concern of Pelagianism. After all, the doctrine of Ancestral Sin maintains that fallen human beings do not necessarily or inevitably commit actual sins. In contemporary literature, this claim could be articulated as a denial of the ‘inevitability thesis.’ A denial of the inevitability thesis, so contemporary thinkers maintain, seems to imply both that human beings can place themselves in right relation to God as well as the Pelagian denial that all require Christ's work to attain this right relation to God. This article demonstrates that the Ancestral Sin, along with a denial of the inevitability thesis, is neither Pelagian nor Semi-Pelagian. I show that the doctrine of Ancestral Sin denies (Semi-) Pelagianism in various ways. I show that, for Ancestral Sin to entail (Semi-) Pelagianism, one must commit to several assumptions, each of which is plausibly deniable and none of which Orthodox thinkers affirm.
At the outset of Collins's The Unique and Universal Christ he notes the relatively late arrival of discussion surrounding Christian theology of religions as such onto the proverbial scene.Of course, Christian haves been talking about the beliefs and soteriological status of those in other religious groups -not to mention those within various intra-Christian sects! 1 -since the earliest days of the Church, but theology of religions as such is far more recent.Collins notes that "from the start of the century up to the 1960s-1970s, this as yet unnamed discourse was mainly explored as a matter of missiology" (1), yet it developed into a more "abstract and academic matter" (2) as it progressed in the face of mounting secular challenges to the possible validity of Christian belief due to the world's manifestly variegated religious landscape.As this development continued Alan Race's threefold typology of Christian theologies as "exclusivist," "inclusivist," or "pluralist" emerged as a leading categorical method in the theology of religions, and it is against the grain of this predominant typology that Collins runs this book's major argument.Across its span, Collins presses the reader to see that Race's typology "is not simply incomplete, as if more categories are needed, and not simply defective, as if it merely fails to describe its objects, but that it only arises in light of and attends to concerns about the philosophical legitimacy of religious faith" (4).At bottom, per Collins, the threefold typology is polemical and apologetic, reflecting "a very specific, and controversial, understanding of Christian theology itself" (7).And so, he moves instead to suggest that "in the context of theology of religions, it is not the conclusions of any one type but the construal of Christian theology itself that merits typological consideration" (7).Pulling no punches, Collins contends that "Race's typology is neither theologically sound nor historically illuminating" (8) and we would be better served in doing theology of religions via a reappraisal of Hans Frei's fivefold typology of Christian theology.The book does this across five chapters, but there are really three that contain the bulk of its argumentative content: Chapters 2 and 3, which address the respective typologies of Race and Frei, and Chapter 4, which works to apply Frei's typology to the twentieth-century's ecumenical movement as a demonstration of its usefulness.As such, I will focus my attention on these parts of the book.In essence, the demonstration of Chapter 2 is that, "for Race, Christian theology is primarily accountable to the academy and not to the church" (70).He shows how Race, in taking up Ernst Troeltsch's principles of criticism, analogy, and correlation, positions 1 An interesting example of the bleed through between these categories in antiquity exists in Caroline Schroeder's work on the theology of Shenoute of Atripe.
Liberalism is taking a beating. Many regimes return to religious rationales for state authority. They increasingly oppose liberal institutions. This essay lays the groundwork for engaging these religious anti-liberalisms. In this essay, I assess the religious anti-liberalism known as Catholic integralism. This ancient doctrine challenged historic political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Surprisingly, it has recently resurfaced in some Catholic intellectual circles. Integralists propose that governments exist to secure the common good: temporal and spiritual. God authorizes two powers to govern humankind. The state governs in matters temporal, the church in matters spiritual. When their missions intersect, the church is sovereign owing to its nobler purpose. Contemporary Catholic political philosophy rejects integralism. But it remains overwhelmingly perfectionist: states exist to promote the authentic individual and common good. These natural law perfectionists say that states should promote natural goods: goods, such as health and friendship, that anyone can see as such through the use of reason. States should not promote supernatural goods: goods, such as faith and hope, that we only grasp through revelation. Catholic perfectionists treat natural and supernatural goods asymmetrically. Integralists reject the asymmetry. God authorizes the church to promote supernatural goods, and the church may direct the state to advance its mission. On this basis, I argue that integralists can mount a powerful philosophical argument against standard natural law perfectionism—the symmetry argument. It claims that natural law perfectionists cannot justify their asymmetric treatment of goodness. Integralism, in contrast, treats the good symmetrically.
In the exceptional book Divine Holiness and Divine Action, Mark Murphy defends what he calls the holiness framework for divine action. The purpose of our essay-response to Murphy’s book is to consider an alternative framework for divine action, what we call the agapist framework. We argue that the latter framework is more probable than Murphy’s holiness framework with respect to select theological desiderata.
Terence Cuneo & Jada Twedt Strabbing, Samuel Fleischacker, Jonathan Rutledge & Jordan Wessling, and Sameer Yadav have generously engaged with the accounts of divine holiness and its implications offered in my Divine Holiness and Divine Action (2021), criticizing its arguments and in some cases offering attractive alternative accounts. Here I respond to some of their criticisms.
While it would be easy to add many more biblical scholars to this list, it is harder to think of theologians to add-Lucy
Joshua Cockayne's Explorations in Analytic Ecclesiology seeks to fill an evident lacuna in the evergrowing literature of the field of analytic theology, namely the philosophical investigation of the unity of the Church in Christ as an effect of the action of the Holy Spirit (vii).His concern is not to offer a comprehensive treatise on all dimensions of ecclesiology but rather more specifically "to offer an account of what it means for the Church to be one" (viii).To this end he especially draws from the methodology of Oliver Crisp and the late David Efird in offering "a model of ecclesiology which serves to make clear what it means to think of the Church as one in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, but one which never pretends to get to the full truth of the matter" (ix).He asserts strongly that the Church is mysterious and cannot be described or understood directly.Yet such models as analytic theology offers by drawing from the resources of analytic philosophy may nevertheless make it possible to "expand our understanding of the Church" without reducing it to the level of a merely human institution.Cockayne's essential thesis is that "the Church is a social body, composed of many individual members, united through the work of the Holy Spirit to be the body of Christ" (xi).The first three chapters have to do with conceptual matters.They present a model of the Church as a social group, of which the unity as Christ's body is principally the effect of the agency of the Holy Spirit.The next four chapters have to do with practical matters.They discuss baptism, the Eucharist, the liturgy, and social justice as actions of the Church understood as Christ's body through the work of the Holy Spirit.Chapters 1-3 thus address the question of what the Church is whereas chapters 4-7 address the question of what the Church does (xiii).Cockayne likewise includes a helpful epilogue which provides a summary of his central arguments and claims.Chapter 1 addresses the question of Church unity.Cockayne is convinced from his interpretation of the Gospel according to John that the unity of the Church must be understood in a metaphysically robust manner (4).It must be possible to speak of the Church as a single "thing" even despite the plurality and differentiation of its members.Cockayne maintains that the tired dichotomy of individualism and holism is a false one (7).Drawing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's critique of German idealism as well as from the work of Philip Pettit, Cockayne insists that the irreducible reality of the individual cannot be compromised even while one rejects naïve atomism in recognizing the interconnectedness of individuals and the wholes of which they are parts.The reality of the group as a unit supervenes upon the individuals that constitute it without being reducible to them.Chapter 2 addresses the question of the Church as an agent.Cockayne prefers a "functionalist" account of agency according to which agency can be ascribed to a thing even apart from its possessing particular intentions, its own proper mental states, and other such.This makes it possible to speak of social groups like the Church as something like agents that perform actions (27).The Church is also conceived of as a specific kind of group.Coalitions are groups with a shared goal but without a joint decision-making procedure; a collection is a group constituted by agents that are united under a rationally operated group-level decisionmaking procedure that can attend to moral considerations; and a combination is a group constituted by agents who do not together constitute a coalition or a collective (26).The
Mark Murphy dedicates Divine Holiness and Divine Action to answering two questions: What is divine holiness? And why does it matter for understanding divine action? According to Murphy, divine holiness consists in God’s having those features that make it appropriate for creatures to be simultaneously attracted to and repelled by God. This account, in turn, affords a novel framework for understanding divine action, one intended to avoid the pitfalls of alternative approaches emphasizing God’s moral goodness or lovingkindness. In this essay, we express agreement with Murphy’s idea that divine holiness is crucial for understanding divine action. But we find ourselves balking at two significant junctures. First, we contend that Murphy’s characterization of divine holiness requires revision, as appeal to attraction and repulsion doesn’t adequately capture attitudes such as awe and reverence that are central to experiences of the holy. And, second, we argue that the ‘holiness framework’ for divine action fails to accomplish its aims, largely because it rejects the claim that God’s perfect moral goodness and lovingkindness ground God’s holiness. We conclude that theorists should instead embrace a framework for action that integrates God’s perfect moral goodness, lovingkindness, and holiness.
In Divine Holiness and Divine Action Mark Murphy seeks to establish four key claims: first, that divine holiness consists in a supreme desirability of creaturely union with God and a commensurately supreme creaturely unfittingness for that union; second, that this holiness-concept is grounded in a value-gap between God and creatures which by default motivates God to withdraw from creatures rather than love us or seek our welfare; third, that the love and concern for creaturely welfare exhibited in God’s creating and redeeming is a contingent and freely chosen override of the default stance of holiness; and fourth, that God should be thanked and emulated in virtue of exhibiting a kind of humility in overriding the demands of holiness for our sakes, though not worshipped or praised for this humility, since these latter attitudes should be reserved for necessary rather than contingent features of God. I argue that each of these four claims is mistaken, and further that it is a good thing they are mistaken, because if Murphy’s account were right the appropriate response to God would be neither worship nor thanks but rather abject despair.
Palamism has long been enormously influential within Eastern Orthodox thought, and in recent years it has been gaining increased attention in non-Orthodox philosophical and theological circles as well. Here I develop an argument for one of Palamism's core commitments (the reality of at least one uncreated divine energy distint from the divine essence) based on platonism about abstract entities.
Two areas of theological consideration that are under perennial scrutiny, at least for Christian theologians, are Scripture and the church; the one because it is the basis of our faith and the other because it is the context within which, by and large, that faith is experienced.Plenty of ink has been spilled wrangling over these topics, but interestingly the relationship between how one thinks about Scripture and how one thinks about the church is discussed much less frequently.Enter Brad East's insightful volume, The Church's Book, the aim of which is to illustrate just how intertwined the loci of Bible and church are in theology.His goal in this book is to make the case that it is actually how one thinks about the church that determines how one thinks about Scripture.Before exploring East's argument in detail it is necessary to acknowledge that this is not a work of analytic theology, strictly speaking.The style and substance of East's argument would not clear the bar of Michael Rea's five prescriptions from the original volume, Analytic Theology (Rea 2009).Nevertheless, East's project is certainly intending to bring further clarity, coherence, and precision to the relationship between bibliology and ecclesiology through the use of careful analysis to build evidence for the interconnectedness of these doctrines.This requires East to paraphrase, simplify, and clarify much of the metaphorical language and tropes of the three authors that form the centerpiece of his analysis, reframing them in terms of more familiar and simple concepts for the sake of his comparative analysis.So, while not analytic theology in a strict sense, East's work nevertheless bears some kinship to analytic theology.Furthermore, both of the doctrines that East is exploring and the relationship between them seem to me to be ripe for deeper engagement by analytic theologians and so the purpose of this review is to propose just such engagement to those invested in the project of analytic theology.East's goal of establishing and clarifying the connection between ecclesiology and bibliology proceeds essentially in two parts (though I have combined the first two of East's original three-part arrangement): descriptive analysis in part one and comparative analysis in part two.In the descriptive portion of the work, East looks in detail at the work of three theologians who, for him, represent the three major streams of orthodox Christian theology: John Webster representing "reformed" theology, Robert Jenson representing "catholic" theology, and John Howard Yoder representing "baptist" theology.The descriptors are in scare quotes above because, while I believe East's typology is largely accurate and helpful, his terminology can be misleading.By "reformed" East means the mainstream Protestant tradition; "catholic" encompasses not just Roman Catholic but also Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism/Episcopalianism; and "baptist" (the most misleading of the three, in the opinion
Aristotle's famous sea-battle argument in De interpretatione 9 launched a still-ongoing debate over the status of future contingents.For present purposes I'll follow Todd (3) in taking these to be propositions stating of some causally contingent event-type (e.g., a sea-battle) either that it will happen or that it will not happen. 1Aristotle seems to have held that such propositions are neither true nor false so long as both the event's occurrence and non-occurrence remains an open question, that is, so long as the event remains both causally contingent and future.On this view, there being true future contingents is incompatible with the causal contingency of the events they describe.Despite the esteem generally accorded Aristotle, the majority view has long been that he was wrong on this point: There are true future contingents.This became the majority view partly for theological and partly for philosophical reasons.Theologically, belief in true future contingents is driven by the idea that God is omniscient and provident, and therefore knows exactly how the future plays out.Philosophically, it is driven mainly by conceptual worries about bivalence and excluded middle.Until recently, the main source of dissent from the majority view has been determinism, both its theistic and physical varieties: There are no true future contingents because there is no causal contingency.Of late another dissenting view now known as open futurism has emerged as a major player in both philosophical and theological contexts.Open futurism affirms causal contingency (over against determinism) but also denies that there are any true future contingents (over against the majority view).Philosophically, open futurism derives support from recent developments in physics (esp.quantum mechanics), logic (tense and multi-valued), metaphysics (esp.issues of temporal ontology and alethic grounding), and of course Aristotelian-style worries about whether an alethically settled future is compatible with causal contingency (esp.human free will).Theologically, open futurism derives support from perspectives like open theism and process theism, both of which affirm that the future is (to some degree) open-ended from God's own perspective.It is in the context of open futurism that Patrick Todd's book is situated.Unlike Aristotelian-style non-bivalentist open futurism, which says that future contingents are neither true nor false, Todd contends that all future contingents are unequivocally false.I'll call this all-falsist open futurism.Todd is not the first to argue for such a view, 2 but he is the first to give it a book-length defense, and with a major academic publisher to boot.This will likely secure a 1 While I follow Todd's usage here, it's better to think of future contingents as causally contingent event-types rather than as propositions about those things.Focusing on propositions adds an unnecessary conceptual layer that makes it harder to integrate future contingents with probabilities.See (Rhoda Forthcoming). 2See, for example, (Hartshorne 1965).
Some Christian theologians and philosophers maintain that God’s punishments are always (at least partly) motivated by redemptive love for those punished, even when these punishments are considerably severe (e.g., killings or damnations). However, advocates of such a conception of divine punishment face significant challenges. Perhaps most fundamentally, it is not entirely apparent how severe and loving features of divine punishment might be understood to fit together within a viable theological model. In this article this foundational issue is addressed. By culling resources from St. Gregory of Nyssa, the present aim is to proffer a contemporary model of divine punishment that naturally combines redemptive love for those punished with apparently harsh treatment.
The problem of eternal separation is the problem of explaining how someone could be happy in heaven while knowing that his beloved is in hell. Some argue that this problem is insoluble, while others try to solve it through the lover, the beloved, or the love between them. I argue that the problem of eternal separation is really three problems, namely, of suffering, separation, and regret. I show that no existing reply solves these problems simultaneously. I then present a new approach through theodicy. I argue that, if we reflect on what it would take to defeat the suffering from losing one’s beloved to hell, a regress emerges, and an adequate solution to the problem of eternal separation is a solution to this regress. I articulate five replies to the regress and evaluate their prospects. The upshot is a roadmap to defending the traditional Christian view of heaven and hell.
At the latter half of the twentieth century, Richard Swinburne proposed a model of the incarnation built upon Freud’s divided mind theory. Over the course of two publications, Tim Bayne has formulated the most robust critique of Swinburne’s model to date. In this paper, I argue that Bayne’s objections rest on key misinterpretations of Swinburne’s work. Moreover, when one properly understands the model, these objections lose their force. I begin by expositing Swinburne’s divided mind model (DM), highlighting its four foundational theses. Next, I respond to Bayne’s objections against DM, demonstrating they rest upon misconceptions of the model.
This response to Mark Murphy’s Divine Holiness and Divine Action constructs an account of what Murphy calls “secondary holiness” — the holiness of everything other than God — oriented to the Jewish tradition. On the theory that differences come out most sharply against a background of similarities, an initial section lays out what the author shares with Murphy methodologically. The essay then offers a reading of the aesthetic and ethical significance of Jewish ritual practices that delimit holy objects and times. Central to the ethical aspect of this account is an analysis of what it might mean, in interpersonal relationships, to respect certain things as “sacred” to another; this leads to the suggestion that regarding certain things as sacred to God may be a basis on which to develop a personal relationship with God.
The epistemology of disagreement has been one of the most discussed topics in recent analytic epistemology.The results of this discussion have been applied early on to the religious context, and one of the issues has been the unique nature of religious disagreement, which sets it apart from other forms of peer disagreement.This collection of essays by leading epistemologists presents the state of the art of this discussion.The volume starts with an introductory chapter, which helpfully explains the basic moves and ideas that have been employed in the general disagreement debate.Several essays focus specifically on the question of how religious disagreement might or might not differ from other forms of disagreement.Arguing for uniqueness in the religious sphere may be helpful if one wishes to confront the consiliationist solution to disagreement.In this case, because religious knowledge is somehow unique, there is no real peer disagreement since the evidence basis is different for each person and consequently all the parties in dispute may rationally retain their original beliefs.There are several ways of arguing for the uniqueness of religious disagreement.One way is to maintain that religious believing is not merely doxastic, but it involves deeper beliefs and commitments of what kind of person I wish to become.Effectively, religious convictions are very broad so that they form the basis for the believer's cognitive framework.Giving up a religious conviction would likely result in a ripple effect that threatens a wider body of beliefs.In this case, the believer has a reason not to give in too easily in the face of disagreement.This is suggested by
