bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937)
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

Rudolf Otto, an early and leading student of religious experience, was a devout Christian thinker (part theologian, part philosopher, part phenomenologist of religious experience) who was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He held that numinous experience – experience of the uncanny that is strongest and most important in cases in which it seems to its subject to be experience of God – is unique in kind. Such experience of God, he held, occurred in both Semitic and South Asian monotheistic traditions. Recognizing the intellectual or doctrinal content of numinous experience, but influenced by Kant’s thesis that knowledge-giving concepts cannot refer beyond possible objects of sensory experience, Otto tried to remain faithful to both numinous experience and Kantian philosophy by talking about ‘ideograms’ that express the content of numinous experience but, allegedly at least, are not concepts.
Personalism
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

Personalism is the thesis that only persons (self-conscious agents) and their states and characteristics exist, and that reality consists of a society of interacting persons. Typically, a personalist will hold that finite persons depend for their existence and continuance on God, who is the Supreme Person, having intelligence and volition. Personalists are usually idealists in metaphysics and construct their theories of knowledge by inference from the data of self-awareness. They tend to be nonutilitarian in ethics and to place ultimate value in the person as a free, self-conscious, moral agent, rather than in either mental states or in apersonal states of affairs. Typically, holding that a good God will not allow what has intrinsic value to lose existence, they believe in personal survival of death.

The term ‘personalism’, even as a term for philosophical systems, has myriad uses. There is said to be, for example, atheistic personalism (as in the case of McTaggart, famous for embracing both atheism and the immortality of the soul), absolute idealistic personalism (Hegel, Royce, Calkins), and theistic personalism (Bowne, Brightman, Bertocci). Leibniz and Berkeley are seen as early personalists; both were theists and idealists. Kant, while not strictly a personalist, was influential in personalism’s history. In particular, B.P. Bowne (1847–1910) borrowed freely from Kant, while refusing to accept a Kantian transcendentalism in which our basic concepts or categories apply in a knowledge-giving way only to appearances and not to reality. R.H. Lotze made personality and value central to his worldview, and was a European precursor of American personalism.
Phenomenology of religion
Authors: Westphal Merold
Published: September 2018

The phenomenology of religion is a descriptive approach to the philosophy of religion. Instead of debating whether certain religious beliefs are true, it asks the question ‘What is religion?’ It seeks to deepen our understanding of the religious life by asking what (if anything) the phenomena we normally take to be religious have in common that distinguishes them from art, ethics, magic or science. Since the search for what is common presupposes difference and brings to light an astonishing array of divergent beliefs and practices, the quest for the essence of religion unfolds quite naturally into questions of typology ‘What are the most illuminating ways of classifying religious differences?’

Sometimes the phenomenology of religion is motivated by a desire for quasi-scientific objectivity, combined with at least a soft scepticism about metaphysical speculation; if we cannot decisively resolve the metaphysical mysteries of life, people with this approach argue, at least we can give an unbiased description of those interpretations of the world we normally designate religious. At other times the phenomenology of religion has a more existential orientation: whether or not our arguments can settle questions about the ultimate shape of being, we have to choose our own mode of being-in-the-world; and if we are to decide intelligently whether or not to be religious, we need to be as clear as we can about what it means to be religious – ineluctable uncertainty may make faith something of a leap, but the leap need not be blind.
Postmodern theology
Authors: Westphal Merold
Published: September 2018

The term ‘postmodernism’ is loosely used to designate a wide variety of cultural phenomena from architecture through literature and literary theory to philosophy. The immediate background of philosophical postmodernism is the French structuralism of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Barthes. But like existentialism, it has roots that go back to the critique by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche of certain strong knowledge claims in the work of Plato, Descartes and Hegel. If the quest for absolute knowledge is the quest for meanings that are completely clear and for truths that are completely certain, and philosophy takes this quest as its essential goal, then postmodernism replaces Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God with an announcement of the end of philosophy.

This need not be construed as the death of God in a different vocabulary. The question of postmodern theology is the question of the nature of a discourse about deity that would not be tied to the metaphysical assumptions postmodern philosophy finds untenable. One candidate is the negative theology tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart. It combines a vigorous denial of absolute knowledge with a theological import that goes beyond the critical negations of postmodern philosophy. A second possibility, the a/theology of Mark C. Taylor, seeks to find religious meaning beyond the simple opposition of theism and atheism, but without taking the mystical turn. Finally, Jean-Luc Marion seeks to free theological discourse from the horizon of all philosophical theories of being, including Heidegger’s own postmodern analysis of being.
Prayer
Authors: Mavrodes George I.
Published: September 2018

The concept of prayer is now most commonly applied to any sort of communication which is addressed to God. That is, prayer is that activity in which believers take themselves to be speaking to God. One may ask God to do something (petitionary prayer), but that need not be the only sort of content that prayer may have. There are prayers in which one thanks God for something, and others in which one praises God and expresses one’s adoration. A worshipper may also pray to express (or to make) a commitment to God, or to make a vow. Penitents pray to confess their sins, to express their repentance, and to ask for divine mercy and forgiveness. In general, any sort of speech-act which might be addressed by one human being to another could also be addressed to God, and thus be a prayer. Some such acts (such as, perhaps, commanding) might be thought inappropriate when addressed to God, but no doubt there can be inappropriate prayers. And some prayers may even be tentative and unsure about the existence of the addressee, prayers which might be thought of as beginning ‘O God, if there is a God…’.

Some writers, principally from within a tradition of mysticism, also apply the notion of prayer in a somewhat broader sense – in, for example, expressions like ‘prayer of quiet’ and ‘prayer of union’. Here ‘prayer’ seems to mean any intentional state – worship, adoration, enjoyment of the divine presence and love, and so forth – which the worshipper believes to be associated with a genuine contact with the divine, regardless of whether it contains an element of communication addressed to God.

In the sense of a communication addressed to the divine, prayer seems to fit best with the theistic religions, which construe God as a person, or as something like a person. Here the addressee is taken to be someone who is an appropriate recipient of a communicative act. The fit seems rather more awkward in those religions which construe the divine reality in impersonal terms. With reference to prayer in the theistic religions, a principal topic of philosophical interest involves the omniscience and benevolence of God – if he knows all my needs and desires, why inform him of them through prayer? And will he not satisfy all my needs regardless of whether I pray? If divine benevolence is conditional on prayer, it seems less than perfect. A response to the first question is to point out that not all speech-acts need be construed as conveying information; a response to the second is to argue that our having to ask for things on behalf of ourselves and others might make for a better world than if this were not the case. Another issue is the way in which God responds to prayer. Some argue that God responds through miracles; others suggest that God, knowing our future prayers, providentially created a world that would satisfy them – thus prayer causally influences earlier events.
Predestination
Authors: Mavrodes George I.
Published: September 2018

Predestination appears to be a religious or theological version of universal determinism, a version in which the final determining factor is the will or action of God. It is most often associated with the theological tradition of Calvinism, although some theologians outside the Calvinist tradition, or prior to it (for example, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas), profess similar doctrines. The idea of predestination also plays a role in some religions other than Christianity, perhaps most notably in Islam.

Sometimes the idea of predestination is formulated in a comparatively restricted way, being applied only to the manner in which the divine grace of salvation is said to be extended to some human beings and not to others. John Calvin, for example, writes:

We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others. Therefore, as any man has been created to one or the other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life or to death.

(Institutes, bk 3, ch. 21, sec. 5)

At other times, however, the idea is applied more generally to the whole course of events in the world; whatever happens in the world is determined by the will of God. Philosophically, the most interesting aspects of the doctrine are not essentially linked with salvation. For instance, if God is the first cause of all that happens, how can people be said to have free will? One answer may be that people are free in so far as they act in accordance with their own motives and desires, even if these are determined by God. Another problem is that the doctrine seems to make God ultimately responsible for sin. A possible response here is to distinguish between actively causing something and passively allowing it to happen, and to say that God merely allows people to sin; it is then human agents who actively choose to sin and God is therefore not responsible.
Process theism
Authors: Basinger David
Published: September 2018

Process theism is a twentieth-century school of theological thought that offers a nonclassical understanding of the relationship between God and the world. Classical Christian theists maintain that God created the world out of nothing and that God not only can, but does, unilaterally intervene in earthly affairs. Process theists, in contrast, maintain that God and the basic material out of which the rest of reality is composed are coeternal. Moreover, process theists believe that all actual entities always possess some degree of self-determination. God, it is held, does present to every actual entity at every moment the best available course of action. And each entity does feel some compulsion to act in accordance with this divine lure. But process theists deny that God possesses the capacity to control unilaterally the activity of any entity. Thus, what occurs in relation to every aspect of reality involving a multiplicity of entities – for example, what happens in relation to every earthly state of affairs – is always a cooperative effort.

This understanding of the God–world relationship has significant theological implications. For instance, while classical Christians must attempt to explain why God does not unilaterally intervene more frequently to prevent horrific evils, process theists face no such challenge since the God of process thought cannot unilaterally control any earthly state of affairs. On the other hand, while most classical Christians maintain that God at times unilaterally intervenes in our world primarily because divine assistance has been requested, process theists naturally deny that God can be petitioned efficaciously in this sense since they believe that God is already influencing all aspects of reality to the greatest possible extent. Moreover, while most Christian theists believe that God will at some point in time unilaterally bring our current form of existence to an end, process theists maintain that the same co-creative process now in place will continue indefinitely.

Not everyone finds the process characterization of the God–world relationship convincing or appealing. But few deny that process theism has become a significant force in modern American theology.
Providence
Authors: Hasker William
Published: September 2018

Divine providence is God’s care, provision, foresight and direction of the universe in such a way that the universe as a whole and individual creatures within it fulfil God’s purposes. Belief in providence was affirmed by some Greek philosophers (especially the Stoics), and is a fundamental tenet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In modern times, questions have arisen about the possibility of divine intervention in worldly affairs; this creates a difficulty for belief in providence, because it makes it hard to see how God can shape events so as to carry out his providential purposes.

Theories of providence differ with regard to the extent to which God has direct and specific control over earthly events, as opposed to guiding the course of affairs in a general way towards his overall goals. The strongest affirmation of divine control comes from Calvinism, which accepts a compatibilist view of free will (that is, that free will is compatible with determinism) and affirms God’s absolute control over everything that happens. Other views affirm libertarian free will for creatures; some place limitations on God’s knowledge of the future, and process theology places stringent limits on God’s power to affect worldly events. These limitations tend to give creatures a limited degree of independence over against God, and lessen God’s direct and specific control over events.
Ramsey, Ian Thomas (1915–72)
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

Ramsey’s work developed within two parameters. One concerned God and language: he held that no literal statement could be true of God; all language concerning God must be metaphorical. Another concerned his epistemology: knowledge, he held, comes ultimately from experience – sensory, introspective, but also religious. Evidence that God exists comes from experience, and claims about God must be cast in nonliteral terms.
Reincarnation
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

The doctrine of reincarnation teaches that each human being has been born and died, and again been born and died, over and over again in a beginningless process that will never end unless they become enlightened. The doctrine of karma asserts that right and wrong actions bring, respectively, positive and negative consequences. For monotheistic religious traditions that accept reincarnation and karma, each person beginninglessly depends on God, and karmic consequences are under God’s providential control; repentance and faith may lead to God graciously cancelling negative consequences. Nonmonotheistic religious traditions that embrace reincarnation and karma doctrine see karma as operating in terms of what is, in effect, a moral version of natural or causal law. Both sorts of religious tradition view escape from the reincarnation cycle – ‘the wheel’ – as the ultimate goal of one’s existence and as possible only if one can escape from having karmic consequences still coming at one of one’s deaths. Monotheistic traditions see escape as continuance of personal identity, and living in the presence of God (as in monotheistic Hinduism). Nonmonotheistic traditions range from seeing escape as continuance of personal identity in a disembodied condition of omniscience (Jainism, an atheistic religion), loss of all personal identity in entering a changeless nirvāṇa, or annihilation of all undesirable states but continued existence composed of only desirable states (as in different Buddhist traditions), or simply the realization of identity with a qualityless ultimate reality, so that there only apparently are either persons or reincarnations (as in Mahāyāna voidism and Advaita Vedānta).
Religion and morality
Authors: Mouw Richard J.
Published: September 2018

The relationship between religion and morality has been of special and long-standing concern to philosophers. Not only is there much overlap between the two areas, but how to understand their proper relationship is a question that has stimulated much debate. Of special interest in philosophical discussions has been the question of divine authority and the moral life. If there is a God, how are we to understand the moral status of his commands? Are there moral standards that even God must acknowledge? Or does God’s commanding something make it morally binding? Secular thinkers have insisted that these questions pose a serious dilemma for any religiously based ethic: either the moral standards are independent of God’s will, with the result that God’s authority is not supreme, or God’s will is arbitrary, which means that what appears to be a morality is really a worship of brute power. Many religious ethicists have refused to acknowledge the dilemma, arguing for an understanding of divine moral directives as expressions of the complexities and excellences of God’s abiding attributes.

The impact of religion on moral selfhood has also been much disputed. Secularists of various stripes have insisted that religion is not conducive to moral maturity. Religious thinkers have responded by exploring the ways in which one’s notion of moral maturity is shaped by one’s larger worldview. If we believe that there is a God who has provided us with important moral information, then this will influence the ways we understand what is to count as a ‘mature’ and ‘rational’ approach to moral decision making.

Religious ethicists have had a special interest in the ways in which worldviews shape our understandings of moral questions. This interest has been necessitated by the fact of diversity within religious communities. Different moral traditions coexist in Christianity, for example, corresponding to the rich diversity of theological perspectives and the plurality of cultural settings in which Christian beliefs have taken shape. This complexity has provided some resources for dealing with the ‘postmodern’ fascination with moral relativism and moral scepticism.

The relationship between religion and morality is also important for questions of practical moral decision. Religious ethical systems have often been developed with an eye to their ‘preachability’, which means that religious ethicists have a long record of attempting to relate theory to practice in moral discussion. The ability of a moral system to provide practical guidance is especially important during times of extensive moral confusion.
Religion and science
Authors: Murphy Nancey
Published: September 2018

Philosophical discussion of the relation between modern science and religion has tended to focus on Christianity, because of its dominance in the West. The relations between science and Christianity have been too complex to be described by the ‘warfare’ model popularized by A.D. White (1896) and J.W. Draper (1874). An adequate account of the past two centuries requires a distinction between conservative and liberal positions. Conservative Christians tend to see theology and science as partially intersecting bodies of knowledge. God is revealed in ‘two books’: the Bible and nature. Ideally, science and theology ought to present a single, consistent account of reality; but in fact there have been instances where the results of science have (apparently) contradicted Scripture, in particular with regard to the age of the universe and the origin of the human species.

Liberals tend to see science and religion as complementary but non-interacting, as having concerns so different as to make conflict impossible. This approach can be traced to Immanuel Kant, who distinguished sharply between pure reason (science) and practical reason (morality). More recent versions contrast science, which deals with the what and how of the natural world, and religion, which deals with meaning, or contrast science and religion as employing distinct languages. However, since the 1960s a growing number of scholars with liberal theological leanings have taken an interest in science and have denied that the two disciplines can be isolated from one another. Topics within science that offer fruitful points for dialogue with theology include Big-Bang cosmology and its possible implications for the doctrine of creation, the ‘fine-tuning’ of the cosmological constants and the possible implications of this for design arguments, and evolution and genetics, with their implications for a new understanding of the human individual.

Perhaps of greater import are the indirect relations between science and theology. Newtonian physics fostered an understanding of the natural world as strictly determined by natural laws; this in turn had serious consequences for understanding divine action and human freedom. Twentieth-century developments such as quantum physics and chaos theory call for a revised view of causation. Advances in the philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century provide a much more sophisticated account of knowledge than was available earlier, and this has important implications for methods of argument in theology.
Religious experience
Authors: Alston William P.
Published: September 2018

Philosophy is interested in religious experience as a possible source of knowledge of the existence, nature and doings of God. The experiences in question seem to their possessors to be direct, perceptual awarenesses of God. But they may be wrong about this, and many philosophers think they are. Many philosophers think that such experiences are never what they seem, and that no one has a veridical experience of the presence and/or activity of God. The main philosophical reason for supposing that such experiences are in fact sometimes veridical is a principle according to which any apparent experience of something is to be regarded as veridical unless we have sufficient reasons to the contrary. Experiences are innocent until proven guilty. If we do not accept that principle, we will never have sufficient grounds for taking any experience to be veridical – religious, sensory or whatever.

There are critics who think that we do have sufficient reasons to the contrary in the case of religious experience. For one thing, we do not have the same capacity for intersubjective checks of religious experiences that we have with sense perceptions. But to this it can be replied that we should not suppose that sense perception represents the only way in which we can achieve genuine cognitive contact with objective reality. For another thing, it is widely supposed that religious experience can be adequately explained by psychological and social factors, without bringing God into the picture. But even if this-worldly factors are the only immediate causes of the experience, God could figure as a cause farther back in the causal chain. Finally, the disagreements between alleged experiences of God, especially across different religions, provide a reason for doubting the deliverances of religious experience. But it is possible for a number of people to be genuinely experiencing the same thing, even though they disagree as to what it is like. This is a common occurrence in sense perception.
Salvation
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

For there to be such a thing as salvation, there must be someone to be saved, something from which they need to be saved, and some way in which they can be saved from it. ‘Salvation’ is primarily a religious term, and religious traditions typically assume that there is some basic religious problem that all people face. Monotheistic religions (for example, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Viśiṣṭādvaita and Dvaita Hinduism) whose central doctrine concerns God conceived as Creator and Providence take this basic problem to lie in the fact of sin. Human persons have sinned (knowingly acted against the will of God) and sinning has become habitual. Thus there is need for forgiveness and reformation, which are available only in God’s gracious pardon and restorative power. People can receive forgiveness and reformation through repentance and faith. Salvation by sheer self-effort is impossible. Nonmonotheistic traditions (for example, Buddhism, Jainism, Advaita Vedānta Hinduism) take a particular sort of ignorance to be the basic problem. The ignorance in question involves having false beliefs about the nature of persons and their cosmic environment. The proper treatment and cure is the achievement of an esoteric religious experience in which calm and bliss are accompanied by an understanding of the true nature of reality. The different traditions give very different accounts of what this nature is. Thus religious traditions differ greatly in the ways in which they conceive persons, their basic religious problem, and the proper treatment and cure. Secular notions of salvation, as in classical Marxism, tend to be secularizations of one or another religious conception – in the Marxist case, of the notion of the Kingdom of God.
Sin
Authors: Quinn Philip L.
Published: September 2018

The most archaic conception of human fault may be the notion of defilement or pollution, that is, a stain or blemish which somehow infects a person from without. All the major religious traditions offer accounts of human faults and prescriptions for dealing with them. However, it is only when fault is conceived within the context of a relationship to a personal deity that it makes sense to speak of it as an offence against the divine will. The concept of sin is the concept of a human fault that offends a good God and brings with it human guilt. Its natural home is in the major theistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

These religious traditions share the idea that actual or personal sins are individual actions contrary to the will of God. In the Hebrew Bible, sin is understood within the context of the covenantal relation between Yahweh and his chosen people. To be in covenant with Yahweh is to exist in holiness, and so sin is a deviation from the norms of holiness. In the Christian New Testament, Jesus teaches that human wrongdoing offends the one whom he calls Father. The Qur’an portrays sin as opposition to Allah rooted in human pride.

According to Christian tradition, there is a distinction to be drawn between actual sin and original sin. The scriptural warrant for the doctrine of original sin is found in the Epistles of Paul, and the interpretation of Paul worked out by Augustine in the course of his controversy with the Pelagians has been enormously influential in Western Christianity. On the Augustinian view, which was developed by Anselm and other medieval thinkers with considerable philosophical sophistication, the Fall of Adam and Eve had catastrophic consequences for their descendants. All the progeny of the first humans, except for Jesus and his mother, inherit from them guilt for their first sin, and so all but two humans are born bearing a burden of guilt. The Augustinian doctrine of original sin is morally problematic just because it attributes innate guilt to humans. It was criticized by John Locke and Immanuel Kant.
Steiner, Rudolf (1861–1925)
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

Rudolf Steiner held that humanity has passed through an astral and an etheric stage and has possessed intuitive and clairvoyant modes of consciousness. People, he held, once enjoyed psychic powers and existed in forms of matter more rarefied than those that characterize their current successors. Nevertheless, people still exist on four levels, the physical, the etheric, the astral and the spiritual, and earlier psychic skills are retrievable. Steiner, who called this theory ‘anthroposophy’, was particularly influenced by Goethe and theosophy.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1881–1955)
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin taught that the evolutionary process is governed by a ‘law of complexification’ which dictates that inorganic matter will reach ever more complex forms, resulting in inorganic matter being followed by organic matter and organic matter being followed by conscious life forms. Viewed by observers, humans are material systems within a larger physical system. Viewed introspectively, a human being is a self-conscious creature possessed of freedom and rationality, with the capacity for action and inquiry. Each element in the world has some form of this dual ‘exterior’ aspect and ‘interior’ aspect, though consciousness arises only late in the evolutionary history. Teilhard de Chardin saw neither reason to doubt that matter can give rise to mind, nor any basis for reducing mind to matter. The prospects for humanity are gratifying, as evolution, following the law of complexification with the cooperation of human choice, moves to an Omega point at which Christ’s fullness will include as his ‘body’ a unified humanity that is at peace.

Scientific critics of Teilhard de Chardin’s theory have charged that his optimism involves extrapolation far beyond what the present evidence warrants. Theological critics have argued that he does not sufficiently consider the degree of evil in the world; optimism can only be justified if we assume that evil can be redeemed by transcendent divine action, because immanent evolutionary processes may not suffice.
Temple, William (1881–1944)
Authors: Yandell Keith E.
Published: September 2018

William Temple was concerned to unite personal Christian religion and social action, finding in the doctrine of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ the basis for human dignity. He held that while the universe long existed without finite minds, and finite thought has its origin in the functioning of physical organisms, thought transcends its origins, creating ideas not occasioned by or referring to its physical environment, and purposively affecting that environment. Our capacities to seek truth, appreciate beauty and recognize duty are best explained by a purposive creative Mind using physical creation to bring other minds into existence. Created minds continually depend for their existence on God’s continuing to sustain them.
Tillich, Paul (1886–1965)
Authors: Hammond Guyton B.
Published: September 2018

Tillich was one of the most influential Christian theologians of the twentieth century. Notable for his effort to translate the language of the Western religious tradition into terms comprehensible to modernity, he drew upon various secular philosophies, including Marxism, existentialism and psychoanalysis, as well as literature and the arts. In his view, these contemporary secular expressions contain the questions which theology must address. He was sometimes criticized for losing one or another aspect of Christian orthodoxy, but more often praised for making it possible to be both Christian and modern. He fled Germany in 1933, in the early days of Nazism. As an expatriated German who became an American citizen, Tillich came to understand his life as one standing ‘on the boundary’. He saw himself as an interpreter, occupying the boundary between the Old World and the New, between philosophy and theology, between religious orthodoxy and humanistic secularity, and between university and church.

Tillich was an intellectual who achieved widespread popular acclaim. Even though his lectures and publications were strewn with allusions to obscure thinkers, he gained a substantial following and was frequently quoted in the popular press. His courses were immensely popular, and his sermons – delivered mostly in college chapels – met with great public approbation.

Two of Tillich’s themes stand out as most influential. First was his advocacy of a broadened category of the religious. By defining religion as a person’s ‘ultimate concern’, he was able to maintain that virtually everyone has some religious commitment. Through this conceptualization it became possible to view such twentieth-century ideologies as Nazism and Communism – as well as Americanism – as in significant respects religious perspectives. This broadened definition of religion gained wide acceptance, with sociopolitical and even judicial implications. (The US Supreme Court’s definition of conscientious objection was influenced by Tillich’s formulation.) Second, Tillich’s persistent claim that all language about God is symbolic had great impact. Objecting to views of religious language as merely symbolic, he contended that efforts to be literal in one’s talk of God are seriously deficient. By the same token, he argued that the mythic quality of religious narratives cannot be removed without detriment. Finding much American religion strongly literalistic, Tillich persistently argued the contrary view.
Trinity
Authors: van Inwagen Peter
Published: September 2018

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a central and essential element of Christian theology. The part of the doctrine that is of special concern in the present entry may be stated in these words: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each God; they are distinct from one another; and yet (in the words of the Athanasian Creed), ‘they are not three Gods, but there is one God’. This is not to be explained by saying that ‘the Father’, ‘the Son’ and ‘the Holy Spirit’ are three names that are applied to the one God in various circumstances; nor is it to be explained by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are parts or aspects of God (like the leaves of a shamrock or the faces of a cube). In the words of St Augustine:

Thus there are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and each is God and at the same time all are one God; and each of them is a full substance, and at the same time all are one substance. The Father is neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit; the Son is neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. But the Father is the Father uniquely; the Son is the Son uniquely; and the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit uniquely.

(De doctrina christiana I, 5, 5)

The doctrine of the Trinity seems on the face of it to be logically incoherent. It seems to imply that identity is not transitive – for the Father is identical with God, the Son is identical with God, and the Father is not identical with the Son. There have been two recent attempts by philosophers to defend the logical coherency of the doctrine. Richard Swinburne has suggested that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be thought of as numerically distinct Gods, and he has argued that, properly understood, this suggestion is consistent with historical orthodoxy. Peter Geach and various others have suggested that a coherent statement of the doctrine is possible on the assumption that identity is ‘always relative to a sortal term’. Swinburne’s formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is certainly free from logical incoherency, but it is debatable whether it is consistent with historical orthodoxy. As to ‘relative identity’ formulations of the doctrine, not all philosophers would agree that the idea that identity is always relative to a sortal term is even intelligible.
Dooyeweerd, Herman (1894–1977)
Authors: Bolt John
Published: September 2018

A Dutch philosopher and legal theorist, Herman Dooyeweerd challenged the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous rational thought and sought a religious foundation for philosophy. Religious self-knowledge, he contended, is the necessary condition of all knowing. Dooyeweerd proposed an elaborate ontology of physical and social reality based on the Christian doctrine of creation. His thought has been influential among Calvinists in The Netherlands, North America and South Africa.
Theosophy
Authors: Wakoff Michael B.
Published: September 2018

Etymologically, ‘theosophy’ means wisdom concerning God or divine things, from the Greek ‘theos’ (God) and ‘sophia’ (wisdom). Seventeenth-century philosophers and speculative mystics used ‘theosophy’ to refer to a knowledge of nature based on mystical, symbolical or intuitive knowledge of the divine nature and its manifestations. It referred also to an analogical knowledge of God’s nature obtained by deciphering correspondences between the macrocosm and God.

In the late nineteenth century, ‘theosophy’ became associated with the doctrines of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the popular Theosophical Society. She drew on Buddhist and Hindu philosophy and fragments from the Western esoteric tradition, especially Neoplatonism. She espoused an absolutist metaphysics in which there is a single, ultimate, eternal principle which remains unchanged and undiminished, despite manifesting itself partially in the periodic emanation and reabsorption of universes. Her cosmology included a spiritual account of the evolution of material bodies, which serve as the necessary vehicles by which individuals gradually perfect themselves through cyclic rebirth.
Religion, philosophy of
Authors: Stump Eleonore , Rea Mike
Published: September 2018

Philosophy of religion comprises philosophical reflection on a wide range of religious and religiously significant phenomena: religious belief, doctrine and practice in general; the phenomenology and cognitive significance of religious experience; the authority and reliability of religious testimony; the significance of religious diversity and disagreement; the relationship between religion (or God, or the gods) and morality; the doctrines, practices and modes of cognition distinctive to particular religious traditions; and so on. It is as old as philosophy itself and has been a standard part of Western philosophy in every period (see Religion, history of philosophy of). Since the latter half of the twentieth century, there has been a great growth of interest in it, and the range of topics that philosophers of religion have considered has expanded considerably.

Philosophy of religion is sometimes divided into philosophy of religion proper and philosophical theology. This distinction reflects the unease of an earlier period in analytic philosophy, during which philosophers felt that reflection on religion was philosophically respectable only if it abstracted away from particular religions, focusing on doctrines and problems shared in common by multiple religious traditions. But most philosophers now feel free to examine philosophically any aspect of religion, including the doctrines and practices peculiar to individual religions. Not only are the doctrines and practices of particular religions philosophically interesting in their own right, but also they often raise questions that are helpful for issues in other areas of philosophy. Reflection on the Christian notion of sanctification, for example, sheds light on certain contemporary debates over the nature of freedom of the will (see Sanctification). Likewise, reflection on Buddhist expressions of gratitude toward those who do one harm, or toward those whom one benefits, has been taken to shed light on the proper analysis of gratitude.

As a result of the blurring of boundaries between philosophy of religion proper and philosophical theology, philosophy of religion has in recent years taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary character, with work in philosophy of religion engaging to a much greater degree with relevant work in systematic theology, historical theology and cognate areas in the study of other religions. Within the analytic tradition of philosophy, this interdisciplinary shift is perhaps most visible in the rise of ‘analytic theology’ (see Analytic theology).
Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000)
Authors: Dombrowski Daniel
Published: September 2018

Despite the fact that Hartshorne often criticized the metaphysics of substance found in medieval philosophy, he was like medieval thinkers in developing a philosophy that was theocentric. From the 1920s until the beginning of the twenty-first century he defended the rationality of theism. For much of this period he was almost alone in doing so among English-speaking philosophers. He was largely responsible for the rediscovery of St Anselm’s ontological argument. But his greatest contribution to philosophical theism was not regarding arguments for the existence of God, but rather a theory regarding the actuality of God – i.e., how God exists. In his process-based conception God was seen as supreme becoming in which there was a factor of supreme being, in contrast to the view of traditional theism, wherein God was the supreme, unchanging being. Hartshorne’s neoclassical view has influenced the way many philosophers understand the concept of God. A small, but not insignificant, number of scholars think of him as the greatest metaphysician of the second half of the twentieth century.
Ontotheology
Authors: Halteman Matthew C.
Published: September 2018

‘Ontotheology’ has two main meanings, one arising from its usage by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and a second from its usage by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Though Kant’s influence on Heidegger suggests at least a loose connection between these two senses of ‘ontotheology’, they are largely independent of one another.

For Kant, ‘ontotheology’ describes a kind of theology that aims to know something about the existence of God without recourse to scriptural or natural revelation through mere concepts of reason alone, such as the concept of the ‘ens realissimum’ (the most real being) or the ‘ens originarium’ (the original, most primordial being). Ontological arguments for the existence of God such as those offered by Anselm and Descartes are paradigm cases of ontotheology in the Kantian sense.

For Heidegger, ‘ontotheology’ is a critical term used to describe a putatively problematic approach to metaphysical theorizing that he claims is characteristic of Western philosophy in general. A metaphysics is an ‘ontotheology’ insofar as its account of ultimate reality combines—typically in a confused or conflated manner—two general forms of metaphysical explanation that, taken together, aim to make the entirety of reality intelligible to human understanding. These are an ontology that accounts for that which all beings have in common (universal or fundamental being) and a theology that accounts for that which causes and renders intelligible the system of beings as a whole (a highest or ultimate being or a first principle). Traditionally interpreted, Platonic metaphysics is a paradigm case of ontotheology in the Heideggerian sense insofar as it explains the existence of particular beings by recourse to universal forms (ontology) and explains the origin and intelligibility of the whole of beings by recourse to the Good as that from which everything else emanates (theology).

It is this Heideggerian sense of ‘ontotheology’—and, in particular, Heidegger’s influential critique of the approach to metaphysics it describes—that animates contemporary discussions of ontotheology, especially in ‘continental’ history of philosophy and philosophy of religion. The main problem with ontotheology, according to Heidegger and his heirs, is that it is driven by a desire to ‘master’ reality that masks a deeper anxiety over the challenge of existing as finite beings vulnerable to a world that resists and confounds our life projects. Critics maintain that this existential mood of stability-seeking angst disposes humanity to experience the world primarily as something to be subordinated to human intellect and will. They contend that this mood so pervades ontotheology that, within its purview, reality is reduced to what can be calculated, measured, and manipulated: beings are understood predominately as consumable resources, God is depersonalized into a first cause, and opportunities to experience awe and wonder at the indeterminate, inexplicable, mysterious, or holy aspects of reality are diminished or occluded.
Idolatry
Authors: Fowl Stephen
Published: September 2018

The use of material images of various gods (idols) in religious worship has a long history and a central place in the polytheistic religions of the ancient world. The worship of these gods is strictly prohibited in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This practice is generally referred to as idolatry. In addition, the making of images of the one God along with the use of such images in worship is also considered idolatry within these three monotheistic faiths. In the ancient societies within which Judaism, Christianity and, later, Islam emerged, almost all aspects of life were touched by the presence of idols. For a Jew (particularly in the diaspora) or a Christian to faithfully negotiate one’s way through the activities of daily life in such a world required sustained attentiveness and resolve.

Over time, idolatry became more generally and metaphorically associated with ideas, motivations, beliefs and commitments that draw believers’ attention away from God. In some instances in Christianity, idolatry simply becomes a synonym for sin.

Although it is not common today for Jews, Christians or Muslims to worship fabricated images of their own or other gods, some of the ongoing philosophical and theological issues concern how God’s creation can manifest the invisible God. In what ways, if any, can the created world mediate God truthfully to humans? Can such things as icons be instrumental in the worship of the one God without that worship being idolatrous? In recent French phenomenological writing, some of these issues receive attention.

Although these concerns may seem distant from those of the Bible and Quran, they share a common recognition that idolatry stems from a failure of attentiveness, an inability or unwillingness to focus one’s attention and desire upon God in the face of myriad distractions.
Ockhamism
Authors: Finch Alicia
Published: September 2018

Ockhamism, so named because it was developed and defended by the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Ockham, is a long-enduring response to fatalist arguments. Fatalism, the thesis that it is impossible for anyone to act freely, comes in two varieties: logical and theological. Logical fatalists begin their argument with the assumption that no matter what anyone does, it has always been true that she does it, while theological fatalists begin by assuming that no matter what anyone does, God has always known that she does it. Fatalists go on to argue that, since no one can change what has always been true or what God has always known, no agent can ever do anything other than what she does; hence, no agent ever acts freely. The Ockhamist response, in brief, is that arguments for fatalism trade on a failure to distinguish between changing the past, on the one hand, and its being up to an agent what the past was like, on the other. Once the relevant distinction is drawn, Ockhamists contend, it is clear that fatalist arguments are unsound.

Though Ockham himself was primarily concerned with theological fatalism, his argument may just as well be formulated as a response to logical fatalism. It should be noted that there are many formulations of Ockhamism, just as there are many formulations of the fatalist argument.