Justification and Participation in Christ: The Development of the Lutheran Doctrine of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord - By Olli-Pekka Vainio (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reviews in Religion & Theology, 2009
This paper considers work by Christopher Hitchens, who is part of the group called the 'New Atheists', and a response to this by Tina Beattie. The concern of Hitchens is to alert his readers to the problems that arise from fideistic belief, and his proposed solution in common sense naturalism. The author argues that while Hitchens does raise important questions about fideism, he himself is a fideist in his claims about reality. Far from being new, these are the same claims as held by ancient materialists: all of reality can be reduced to atoms in motion.
Beyond Liberation Theology: A PolemicBy Ivan Petrella
Reviews in Religion & Theology, 2009
This paper considers work by Christopher Hitchens, who is part of the group called the 'New Atheists', and a response to this by Tina Beattie. The concern of Hitchens is to alert his readers to the problems that arise from fideistic belief, and his proposed solution in common sense naturalism. The author argues that while Hitchens does raise important questions about fideism, he himself is a fideist in his claims about reality. Far from being new, these are the same claims as held by ancient materialists: all of reality can be reduced to atoms in motion.
Between Faith and Belief (reviewed by Colby Dickinson)
Joeri Schrijvers' latest study in contemporary continental philosophy and the possibility of the religious steers immediately toward very familiar terrain: the possibility of atheism, the phenomenon of secularism and the 'return of religion' in recent continental thought. Considering a number of popular writers, such as John Caputo, Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Sloterdijk, and Jean-Luc Marion, to name only the most prominent, Schrijvers looks not only to how their arguments are rooted in the nuanced philosophies of Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida, but he also begins to critique the narrow interests they maintain in attempting to overcome ontotheology and metaphysics once and for all (the subject too of his earlier study Ontotheological Turnings, also with SUNY Press). Such efforts, according to Schrijvers, are really a matter of philosophical hubris—that is, of presenting a totalizing narrative that really cannot be declared as such to exist as an enclosed space. By focusing on lesser known figures such as Reiner Schürmann and Ludwig Binswanger, Schrijvers deftly parses the arguments given for moving beyond Christianity in the work of several of the aforementioned authors, and mounts a position that faith without belief is 'phenomenologically impossible' as this formulation leaves our embodied existence out of the picture. In short, these critiques of metaphysics attempt to present a world without love and a love without world. There is a subtle criticism but also defense of tradition that Schrijvers mounts in this book through the turn to love and life as they 'outwit' tradition, while simultaneously grounding themselves in it. It is the task of the book as a whole to preserve metaphysics as a possibility through a philosophical account of incarnation developed alongside Binswanger's phenomenology of love. By contrasting Binswanger with Heidegger in order to elucidate a phenomenology of religious life, Schrijvers promotes a more robust, intersubjective way of being in the world that can more adequately account for the role of love in one's life—an acknowledgement too of the necessity for being-with others (and otherness itself) that describes how we, ontically, do exist in our world, and in the lived institutions and religions that comprise it. We cannot simply abandon such ways of being in the world in favor of a purely abstracted critique of every institutional order. The other before us gives us something that we cannot give ourselves and, to put things rather bluntly, this matters a good deal in terms of how we experience life and love. To abstractly develop an anarchic, gnostic or antinomian critique of all institutional, systematic, ordered and religious ways of being in our world without acknowledging our embodied ('incarnational') reality of needing such forms (such as he charges Caputo, Nancy and Sloterdijk of aiding) is to miss a major feature of what it means to be human. Though this may sound like an overly simplistic account of Schrijvers' rigorous treatment of a much more complex argumentation as it is pursued in each thinker's works, it is a major strength of the book that he is able to distil matters into such clear lines of thought. What struck me time and again while reading this book was its entirely readable quality, as if I were listening to someone who wasn't trying to hastily dispatch a difficult argument as much as it was the voice of someone who has such a strong grasp of the field as to render their commentary in crisp and lucid prose. This book is a reliable guide to a series of ongoing debates in continental thought that have seemed for some time to be at an impasse. My intuition is that this impasse has mainly resulted from somewhat partisan entrenchments (phenomenology versus deconstruction) that refuse to engage with the connections between diverse methodologies. Schrijvers' fine work navigates this impasse with precision and fairness, and thereby gives us a path forward for maintaining embodied religious practice in our world today.
The Contribution of Cornelio Fabro to Fundamental Theology. Reason and Faith, 2023
This book offers a fresh theological perspective on faith by exploring its gnoseological and metaphysical foundations. It recovers the existential aspects of faith by engaging with the thought of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard. This study is informed by the dynamic Thomistic lens developed by Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995), one of the most original twentieth-century commentators on Thomas Aquinas and a preeminent specialist on Kierkegaard and the phenomenon of militant modern atheism. In harmony with the guidelines presented by John Paul II in number 67 of Fides et Ratio (1998), the book will be of particular interest to students and professors of fundamental theology. This study will also provide a philosophical foundation for Christians interested in a deeper knowledge of their faith, and a stimulating topic for anyone questioning the openness of the human being to the Absolute.
Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics - By Richard A. Burridge
Reviews in Religion & Theology, 2009
This paper considers work by Christopher Hitchens, who is part of the group called the 'New Atheists', and a response to this by Tina Beattie. The concern of Hitchens is to alert his readers to the problems that arise from fideistic belief, and his proposed solution in common sense naturalism. The author argues that while Hitchens does raise important questions about fideism, he himself is a fideist in his claims about reality. Far from being new, these are the same claims as held by ancient materialists: all of reality can be reduced to atoms in motion.
Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI by Tracey Rowland
The Catholic social science review, 2009
This paper considers work by Christopher Hitchens, who is part of the group called the 'New Atheists', and a response to this by Tina Beattie. The concern of Hitchens is to alert his readers to the problems that arise from fideistic belief, and his proposed solution in common sense naturalism. The author argues that while Hitchens does raise important questions about fideism, he himself is a fideist in his claims about reality. Far from being new, these are the same claims as held by ancient materialists: all of reality can be reduced to atoms in motion. Also considered is Tina Beattie's analysis and response to the New Atheists. Her cogent analysis is helpful, although her own proposal to resolve the debate encounters difficulties similar to those attending fideism. Can all of reality be explained as atoms in motion? Is belief in something besides atoms in motion mere superstition? Can violence
It would be fair to say that in recent times there has been a growth in the acceptance of the so-called New Atheism as professed by such eminent scientists as Richard Dawkins and others. What is different about New Atheism, as compared to (Old) Atheism, is that not only do its followers profess a disbelief in a theistic reality, but they actively encourage an opposition to theism, most often accompanied by a “pugnacity towards religion”, using their own understanding of what theism – and faith – is and is not. Dawkins observes that “one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.” This is what, for Dawkins and others of his persuasion, faith entails – a suspension of understanding (this despite Theology’s oft acknowledged task of being fides quaerens intellectum). This essay will attempt to define what the inconsistencies and similarities are between Religion, specifically the Catholic Christian religion, and New Atheism. It will specifically try to demonstrate the similarities to being a ‘believing atheist’ with that of a ‘believing Christian’ so as to highlight the inconsistency within the New Atheist’s position.
The Problem of Criteria and the Necessity of Natural Theology
The Heythrop Journal, 2011
Most streams of Christianity have emphasized the unknowability of God, but they have also asserted that Christ is the criterion through whom we may have limited access to the depths of God, and through whose life and death we can formulate the doctrine of God as Triune. This standpoint, however, leads to certain complications regarding 'translating' the Christian message to adherents of other religious traditions, and in particular the question, 'Why do you accept Christ as the criterion?', is one that Christian thinkers have attempted to answer in different ways. There are two influential responses to this query in recent Christian thought: an 'evidentialist' approach which gradually moves from a theistic metaphysics to a Christ-centred soteriology, and an 'unapologetic' standpoint which takes God's self-disclosure in Christ as the perspectival lens through which to view the world. The opposition between these two groups is primarily over the status of 'natural theology', that is, whether we may speak of a 'natural' reason, which human beings possess even outside the circle of the Christian revelation, and through which they may arrive at some minimalist understanding of the divine reality. I outline the status of 'natural theology' in these strands of contemporary Christian thought, from Barthian 'Christomonism' to post-liberal theology to Reformed epistemology, and suggest certain problems within these standpoints which indicate the need for an appropriately qualified 'natural theology'. Most of the criticisms leveled against 'natural theology', whether from secular philosophers or from Christian theologians themselves, can be put in two groups: first, the arguments for God's existence are logically flawed, and, second, even if they succeed they do not point to the Triune God that Christians worship. In contrast to such an old-fashioned 'natural theology' which allegedly starts from premises self-evidently true for all rational agents and leads through an inexorable logic to God, the qualified version is an attempt to spell out the doctrinal beliefs of Christianity such as the existence of a personal God who interacts with human beings in different ways, and outline the reasons offered in defence of such statements. In other words, without denying that Christian doctrines operate at one level as the grammatical rules which structure the Christian discourse, such a natural theology insists on the importance of the question of whether these utterances are true, in the sense that they refer to an objective reality which is independent of the Christian life-world. Such a 'natural theology', as the discussion will emphasize, is not an optional extra but follows in fact from the internal logic of the Christian position on the universality of God's salvific reach.