Twentiethcentury Criticism Of The Enlightenment Karl Barth
The effect of these changes has been seen as disastrous. A modern German historian, Gerhard Benecke, wrote that 'the Aufkl rung was the most serious political mistake any generation of German politicians and intellectuals could possibly have made' Benecke 1979 79 between 1770 and 1800 they destroyed the stability, partly religious in origin, of an older federal German Reich. 'They provided as an alternative the secular practice of citizens' rights and eventually nation-state pretensions that...
Contrasting Theologies Of Culture
Culture in the widest sense obviously encompasses a great deal everything from science and technology to social customs and fine art. Indeed, it comprises whatever human beings create and cultivate beyond the sphere of biological necessity, including artifacts, practices, and symbol systems, along with their attendant meanings and values. Culture in this broad sense arises in the human space between nature and divinity. Wherever nature or God touches the human, culture becomes a factor. From a...
Psalmody
It is not clear how early the book of Psalms became 'canonical' in its present form. The presence among the Dead Sea Scrolls of Psalter manuscripts differing in arrangement from our Psalter may indicate that the order of the Psalms was still not fixed in the first century BCE, though some scholars argue that these manuscripts are selections, arranged for liturgical use, from a book that was already fixed see the discussion in Sanders 1992 842-3 . In either case it is likely that most Jewish...
The Matrix Of The Hebrew Scriptures
The Hebrew Bible has its roots in a wide national literature that contained not only religious but also secular documents. With few exceptions, however, it is only religious texts that survived as part of the Scripture recognized by Jews in the last pre-Christian centuries. The Hebrew Bible is not just a national literature but a national religious literature a religious literature that was to be the mainstay of Judaism after it had lost any geographical homeland or political independence....
Stewart Sutherland
Epicurus' old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing whence then evil Listen if all have to suffer so as to buy eternal harmony by their suffering, what have the children to do with it tell me please It is entirely incomprehensible why they, too, should have to suffer and why they should have to buy harmony by their sufferings. Why should they, too, be used as...
Romanticism And Idealism
Kant's view of God was Deistic. That is, God is the supremely wise and powerful creator, but does not act providentially within the natural order, and is not a possible object of human experience. He seems a remote and intellectual absentee God, though Kant finds it necessary to postulate his existence as a support to scientific investigation and moral commitment. Reacting to this austere doctrine, Schleiermacher 1768-1834 argued that religion is based on feeling, not intellect or moral...
The Contributors
PAUL AVIS is an Anglican parish priest and a Prebendary of Exeter Cathedral. He was educated in London and Cambridge, gaining his doctorate from the University of London in 1976. He is a member of the Church of England's General Synod, Doctrine Commission and Faith and Order Advisory Group, an Inspector and Examiner of theological colleges and courses, and Honorary Research Fellow and part-time lecturer in the Department of Theology of the University of Exeter. His publications include...
Other Routes
An increasing number of philosophers and theologians find themselves uncomfortable with the ambitions of speculative theodicy. For Ivan's question about the morality of God apparently bringing about or allowing evil for the sake of greater, future good, sounds more forceful to generations brought up with the knowledge of the Holocaust and like tragedies made possible by the powers developed by twentieth-century humanity. One question raised by such events is how far speculative theodicy can see...
Christian Use Of The Old Testament In The New
The writers of the books which eventually made up the New Testament take the Old Testament to be the Word of God and a constitutive part of the tradition of Christianity itself. In Acts 4 25, for example, the Holy Spirit is said to have spoken through the mouth of David. The foretelling of the life, death and resurrection of Christ in the Old Testament is a constant theme running through the New. Micah 5 2, for instance, speaks of the birth at Bethlehem Hosea 11 1 of the coming from after a...
Christianity And Religion Lessing And Rousseau
This approach was facilitated by the growth of the perception that Christianity was only one religion among others, a secular view quite different from the Deist attempt to dissolve Christianity into 'natural religion'. There had for long been a Western perception of the rest of the world as having developed differently, but this had been understood as a mystery of Providence. God had simply chosen not to redeem the Chinese a familiar presence to the eighteenth-century West before the arrival...
Existentialism
Another form of revolt against Hegel is the rejection of any attempt to discern a universal pattern in history, or to speak in general terms about the nature of human existence. Existentialism is a form of philosophy which attempts to examine human life as it is lived, in concrete detail, not in terms of abstract theorizing. Reacting against the apparent subordination of the individual to the Absolute Spirit, in Hegel, it makes the individual the centre of its investigations. Since it is in...
Descartes Foundationalism And Modern Philosophy
The centrality of epistemology in modern philosophy is clearly due to Descartes. He himself tells us he is seeking to start from the foundations in order to build a firm and lasting structure in the sciences. Whatever the precise order of priorities in his mind, he certainly had two key objectives. One was to free scientific enquiry, once and for all, from the criticisms of Pyrrhonian scepticism, recently fashionable through the rediscovery of the writings of Sextus Empiricus Descartes 1966...
Locke Liberation
Examined against its actual historical background the verbal violence and intellectual sang-froid with which some of the English Deists and mid-eighteenth century French philosophes often attacked Christianity was a measure both of the shift of mood which was taking place and of the power which the Churches still had to resist it. To argue that the Deists were not 'men of the Enlightenment' is to think too much in terms of a movement with a specific programme they were an essential part of a...
Hans Frei five types of theology
Hans Frei 1922-88 has proposed that any theology can be analysed in terms of how far it is first, an exercise in internal self-description by the Christian community, and second, a function of the wider and general religious or philosophical activity of its cultural context. By taking these two poles as possible reference-points, five main types of theology may be identified, both historically and in the present Frei 1992 . First, theology may be considered simply to be a branch of philosophy,...
Types of scholasticism
Scholasticism was a heterogeneous movement. Even during the thirteenth century, significant divergences became evident within the movement, as may be seen by comparing the writings of Aquinas, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, representing the characteristic approaches of the early Dominican school, the early Franciscan school and the later Franciscan school respectively. By the late medieval period, at least nine major schools had developed within the movement, reflecting considerable diversity in...
Continuities from the early Middle Ages
The Protestant Reformation is the natural place at which to end the history of medieval Christendom. In suggesting that its real beginning is most usefully dated only a few centuries earlier, there is a risk of underestimating the importance of the early medieval period in the history of Christianity. It should therefore be stressed that the origins of 'Christendom' as understood here can be traced far back into the early medieval past, so that there is something to be said for a sort of 'Whig...
Prophecy and Apocalyptic
As we have seen, the prophetic books are among the most complicated cases of the development from freely composed literature to fixed Scripture. Even the latest books, composed well after some others were already more or less 'canonical', show signs of having passed through several stages of redaction e.g. Haggai and Zechariah and some books, such as Isaiah, span several centuries. From about the third century a new kind of literature, 'apocalyptic', is generally held to have developed, as...
The papacy and religious movements before the Reformation
Even though many historians would now hesitate to speak of a general deterioration of medieval religion, most would still agree that the papacy had declined, been corrupted and become politicized. It has been regarded as little more than an aggressive Italian Renaissance state, competing for territory with other powers in the peninsula. A common interpretation of papal history from the thirteenth century goes something like this. By the mid-thirteenth century, the papacy had again lost the...