Beth Felker Jones. Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2014. 256 pages (original) (raw)
Related papers
"The Self (nafs)," St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. Edited by Brendan N. Wolfe et al., 2024.
This study seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of major themes, questions, and developments concerning the concept of the self in Islamic thought. Beginning with the Qur’an and then following the various streams of Islamic thought such as theology (kalām), philosophy (falsafa), and mysticism, this study shows how Muslim thinkers reveal themselves to be fundamentally concerned with the problem of the human condition. Their manner of addressing this central issue from their differing perspectives devolves on the cultivation of what can be called both an anthropocentric and anthropocosmic understanding of the self that emphasizes self-knowledge, self-cultivation, and self-transformation on the one hand and a relational view of the self and the cosmos on the other. That is, cosmos and self are not two separate realities, but two sides of the same coin—a coin minted in the image of God. The ecological implications of such a perspective in which all phenomena are interconnected is also briefly explored. Moreover, numerous Muslim thinkers argue that it is in terms of the realization of one’s true nature or selfhood that the activity of flourishing or the process of moral and spiritual perfection is best understood.
A philosophical anthropology of the Cross: the cruciform self
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2015
Self. Bloomington/Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 2013, 22,5 x 15,5, XIII+261 p., $ 28, ISBN 978 0 253 00672 1 (pb). Also cloth (978 0 253 00671 4) and electronic (978 0 253 00704 9) Any purely philosophical anthropology or ontology will always remain unsatisfactory, the author (Fordham University) contends. Any thought that ignores or neglects the event, the word and the symbol of the Cross will be incapable of explaining the full meaning of human existence. Such neglect does not necessarily be formulated as a blunt denial or rejection, even any philosophical or theological conceptualisation that fails to incorporate the singularity of the Cross leaves a gap in the human selfunderstanding. Already here, in the basic contention of this book, I discern a fundamental problem: how can the word of the Cross grant philosophy access to what is to philosophy itself a scandal, viz. the Cross?
Cura et Casus: Heidegger and Augustine on the Care of the Self
2006
In the context of the much-debated 'return of religion', this paper argues that Heidegger's concept of responsibility for oneself, including the idea of fallenness, owes itself chiefly to Augustine's discussion of sin and temptation. The crucial difference is that Heidegger conceives the process of an agent's singularization as taking place in confrontation with one's dying, the dying that opens up possibilities for action and understanding to an agent, rather than with the personal loving god of Augustine's Confessions. …is there not a least some Platonism in the Verfallen? Jacques Derrida, "Ousia and Gramm!" I Modern thought and life finds itself in the awkward position of drawing sustenance from sources it can neither endorse in their entirety nor shake off in the manner of a tabula rasa. Presumably, this is the situation of all thought. For the moderns, however, the conundrum takes on peculiar salience due to the claim to generate its resources-in particular for ethical life, in its widest sense-from out of itself, from non-traditional, secular sources. While the emphasis on selfgeneration has been criticized at least since Hegel's critique of Kant, a perceived, and muchdiscussed, return of religion to modern or postmodern culture has in recent years led to a renewed focus on the theological sources of the modern West. In a less hubristic stance with regard to 2 overdrawn Enlightenment hopes, the task in approaching this cultural phenomenon has become one of acknowledging a double debt to religion, especially Christianity: recognizing in it the origins of seminal, more or less secularized ideas without which our ethical life cannot be seen as what it is, such as the ideas of responsibility and universal equality, while perusing religion with regard to that which (still) remains-perhaps to our disadvantage, but at least explicatory in relation to the return of religion-unsecularized, unappropriated, and perhaps untranslatable. With regard to the first debt, the debate about the degree to which such translation has been successful, or completable at all, is far from over (from Carl Schmitt to Hans Blumenberg and Claude Lefort). However, recent years bear witness to a remarkable shift in emphasis toward the second issue. Philosophical, cultural, and religious thinkers, secularists, non-secularists, and those in-between-at times called, or denounced as, post-secularists-are broaching the question of that which, having its origins in religious thought and life, should or should not, could or could not be translated into the language of modern culture. It is remarkable in this context that even self-avowed secularists, who insist on such translation more than others, concede that the self-generation of modernity is hard to achieve, that the religious heritage still provides urgently needed resources that await their translation. Jürgen Habermas claims that, in the face of the possibility, provided by the recently discovered, and still to be discovered, tools of genetic engineering, of designing human beings so as to undermine their sense of autonomy, the Christian distinction between the creator and the created demands translation into the language of our postmetaphysical lifeworld (Habermas 2001). For Jean-Luc Nancy, that which remains to come of Christianity, that which philosophical concepts (those of, for instance, Hegel and Schelling) have determined as inaccessible, is represented by the ideas of love and faith-to be sure, belief or faith not in an epistemic sense (Nancy, Benvenuto, 2002).
The anatomy of the abyss : Kierkegaard, modernity and the self before God
2005
This thesis attempts to explore a theological anthropology devised principally from a theological reading of the works of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). It is argued that Kierkegaard's writings testify to the modem fixation upon the 'self', whilst proposing a theological anthropology that constitutes an attempted recovery from the modem drive for self-possession via isolated introspection. It is the failure of the self to grasp itself through self-reflection that engenders the dialectics of `anxiety', `melancholy', and `despair' which potentially initiate the self s authentic self-becoming `before God'. Kierkegaard's works are thus read as negatively transcribing the failure of the modem self to authenticate itself whilst positively indicating towards a relational theological anthropology which re-situates authentic selfconsciousness in relation to an Other. However, the decisive point for selfhood is that the ̀ other' before whom one stands is th...
This essay intends to explore the genesis of one of the key concepts in continental philosophy of personalism-the concept of the 'Other. It attempts to use most influential philosophical and psychological contexts to demonstrate how the Self is linked to the Other logically, notionally and conceptually. The present analysis employs two principal approaches to the problem-philosophical and psychological. From the stand point of the former, the key figure of the hereunder discourse is Hegel and his theory, while the later will be represented predominantly by Lacanian ideas. The present article will also discuss major influences of Hegel's philosophical ideas on the Lacan's theory.
Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century Christian Thought, ed., by Rasmussen, Wolfe, and Zachhuber, Oxford University Press, 2017
Nineteenth century Christian thought about self and relationality was stamped by the reception of Kant’s groundbreaking revision to the Cartesian cogito. For René Descartes (1596-1650), the self is a thinking thing (res cogitans), a simple substance retaining its unity and identity over time. For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), on the other hand, consciousness is not a substance but an ongoing activity having a double constitution, or two moments: first, the original activity of consciousness, what Kant would call original apperception, and second, the reflected self, the “I think” as object of reflection. Both are essential to the possibility of an awareness of a unified experience. Such an awareness is achieved only insofar as the self is capable of reflecting on its activity of thinking. As such, the possibility of self-consciousness, or the capacity to reflect on one’s own acts of thought is essential to the constitution of the self. This new model of the mind became the starting point to the thought of central 19th century figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This chapter will explore their reception of Kant’s model of self-consciousness, the controversies surrounding its development and exposition, and the advantages of this model for theological reflection. The idea of mind as essentially capable of reflection provided an account of how the self can stand in an ontologically immediate relation to God constitutive of the self, while at the same time allowing that the self’s consciousness of itself is distinct from this original moment, so that a limited or false consciousness of self is possible. As such the task of the self is to recognize (that is, to realize in and through self-consciousness) who it most truly is, both in relation to God, and in relation to self and other.
Introduction: Transcending Selves
Religious Individualisation, 2019
Religion is inherently relational. Talking of religion or religiosity means talking of a relationship people think to have to something else, something beyond, or something felt inside, but in every case something that is not immediately available. At the same time, no religious individual can neglect his or her relationship to other people, and there are various religious positions that equally give this relationship prominence. Finally, the concern of an individual for him-or herself is often conceived in relational terms, as 'self-relation'. In cases considered spiritual or religious, this may overlap with the inner experience of a larger force. Preoccupation with oneself, or with one's self, occurs in various shades and to varying degrees. There also is the suggestion to regard the object of self-relation as itself a relation (Schlette, this publication; cf. below in this Introduction). These three types of relationality are not independent of each other, but condition, if not actually co-constitute each other. How the relations among these relationships are being conceived nonetheless varies immensely. Not all three are in focus to an equal degree in each case. What differs in particular is the degree to which human individuals or human selves are being assigned an active, shaping (gestaltende) role in this relational web, or are seen as merely recipients of the acts of others or the Other, or even as being engulfed by, and thus disappearing into the position or role that is being assigned to him or her. Relations in all three respects allow the individual-and actually constitute the conduits that enable this-to express him-or herself, to expand, to explore things, to widen his or her scope, to connect, but also to experience 'an other' and the import and significations of an other. The question is, in which way the individual develops and builds, and actually can develop and contribute to building, these relationships. Individuals contributing to a process of individualisation each represent an exemplar of a particular modality of individualisation. In reverse, and this points to instances of de-individualisation, one's others (or the Other), and the relationships to or with them, may constrain and even overwhelm the individual. What then matters is how 'the' Other, how the social others, how the 'self' and 'selves', and how the form and dynamics of their interrelations and interactions are being conceived. The view on these relationships moreover differs depending on the angle one claims to take: that of an Ego who puts him/herself at the centre; that of the Divine (God) and the expectations humans ascribe to the Divine; or that of one's social others, if not of the 'generalized other' in G. H. Mead's sense of the term (Mead 1934). 1 Versions of the triadic or triangular model are further explicated in the article of Fuchs in this publication and in the Afterword of Section 1.2.