Christian Ontology Research Articles

Who Is Our Neighbor? Other-Than-Human People and Climate-Change Organizing

Getting to know one’s neighbor is one of the basic tenets of traditional community organizing. The author expands conceptions of who one’s neighbors are. First, she introduces one-on-one campaigns, expanding this principle in the presence of other-than-human people and transforming community organizing into a cosmic effort to bring shalom to creation. Second, the author reads Laudato si’ through the eyes of Querida Amazonia, wherein Pope Francis invites all to drink from Indigenous millennial wisdom. With the help of Andean-Indigenous Christian ontology, the author explores other-than-human neighbors. The result is not an animistic or sacralizing view of the earth but a humble recognition of the place of humans in creation. Finally, the author shows how to do a one-on-one campaign with other-than-human neighbors.

The Hong Kong Reception of Kierkegaard: From the 1950s to the Present

Abstract Early in the 1950s, Kierkegaard’s philosophy had already been introduced to the academic circle of Hong Kong, which was an in-betweener between Chinese and Western cultures. Nevertheless, while Kierkegaard was frequently discussed by the Japanese philosophers of the Kyoto school, Hong Kong Chinese philosophers (remarkably New Confucians) from the 1950s to the 2010s rarely appreciate Kierkegaard’s philosophy. This paper argues that these Chinese philosophers are uninterested in Kierkegaard because their major concerns are the preservation of traditional Chinese culture in Hong Kong, and Kierkegaard’s philosophy seems to be irrelevant to their visions and missions, and Kierkegaard’s Christian ontology seems to be inconsistent with New Confucian ontology.

God in All Things

One divine ontology can account for multiple religious experiences. Specifically, the theological metaphysic of Ramanuja integrates four distinct encounters with the holy. Due to its openness, Ramanuja’s theology resonates with Western panentheism—the belief that God is both within and beyond the material universe. We can experience 1. a personal, transcendent God, 2. a divine humanity, 3. a sacred cosmos, and 4. an awe-inspiring rational order. If the experiencer thinks exclusively, then they may believe that their experience is the only legitimate experience. But if one divine ontology can accommodate the varieties of religious experience, as does Ramanuja’s, then such exclusivism is unnecessary. This article proposes a panentheistic Christian ontology based on the Hindu (Visisitdvaita) theology of Ramanuja that accounts for the four religious experiences listed above. It then provides celebratory examples of each experience in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, thereby providing biblical support for Visisitdvaita, Christian panentheism. Finally, I argue that Ramanuja’s personalist panentheism better serves Christian faith than impersonalist Platonic Idealism.

God Became Human So That Humans Could Become Posthuman?

AbstractTaking a cue from Teilhard de Chardin's Christologically inflected speculation, the key question in this issue is whether the project of transhumanism is compatible with Christianity and the Incarnation of Christ. Two articles focus on theological anthropology and the limits, if any, of human perfection in light of Christ's perfection. Another article examines the ontological claims about human nature in transhumanism and its incompatibility with a Christian ontology. The last two turn from more abstract concerns to consider how the use of technology can inhibit or help human moral and spiritual development.

Canine Ministries:Co‐Instrumentalityof Human and Dog in a Christian Ontology

SUMMARYWithin the last century, US Americans have come to humanize dogs and place a greater personal value on them than ever before. In response to this cultural change, some US Christians have begun to use therapy dogs in ministry work. For this exploratory study, six chaplains in a canine ministry share their experiences and beliefs about their use of therapy dogs. Their stories reveal a unique form of human‐animal partnership emergent in contemporary society distinguished by a faith‐based context. The chaplain and ministry dog act together as co‐instruments of God, both being subject and object simultaneously. The dogs occupy an ontologically complex position of being subordinate to humans while also embodying virtues that Christians idealize. This paper focuses on the chaplains’ conceptualization of the relationality between themselves, their dogs, and God. Their accounts reveal changing perceptions of what it means to be human vis‐a‐vis our relationship with animals. [multispecies ethnography, dogs, religion, Christianity, ontology]

Understanding of personality: Averintsev, Bybler, Gefter, Bibikhin

The problem of personality in philosophy has been significant since the emergence of Christianity. In Soviet Russia, this problem has been actualized since the 2nd half of the twentieth century, since the Thaw, when the books of Russian religious philosophers became known. We were the original heirs of Christian ontology and ethics, which assumed that a personal appeal to God on You (Tu) testified to a change of places in the interior of being itself, which becomes intimate, close, because the infinite God, being in a person, makes him the same infinite person. The Latin term "persona" is translated as "mask" (personality). V.V. Vinogradov in the "History of Words" says that the word "personality", associated with Latin and Greek meanings (persona, prosopon), was not used massively in the Old Russian language until the XVII century, and in the XVII and XVIII centuries it began to denote only the official position of a person. It is impossible to associate this meaning of the face with what was in antiquity and the Middle Ages. This is a homonym. Reflecting on Greek literature, S. S. Averintsev wrote that the term "creativity" is poorly applicable to the Greek philosophers: "poyesis" is a matter understood as an invention. The Greeks invented an objectified type of communication-through-literature, i.e. dialogue, consciously separated from life communication. Dialogue as an invention revealed the fundamental undialogical nature of Greek literature, and Socrates is the ideal of a radically undialogical person who cannot be internally hurt by the word of the interlocutor. Therefore, for Averintsev, a personality is a mind free from a "dialogical situation", it is a mask, an individual understood as an eidos. It is the mask — "immobile-clear, fully revealed and appeared" — that is the semantic limit of a continuously emerging face. By opening the "mask", the Greeks emphasized the importance of individuality. V. S. Bybler, criticizing Averintsev, argues that dialogue is not a construction, it is an internal dispute of the philosopher taking place in his own soul. He is in the thought itself, pushing its definitions to the limit and reaching the border of other possible definitions, concepts, understandings. According to Bybler, the thought itself is dialogical, communicating with itself within itself and forming a gap between itself and the other "I". At the same time, Bibler defines his philosophy as the philosophy of an eternally borderline culture. Dialogue is a tense collaboration between an author who worked in a past culture and a reader who lives in a modern culture. Personality for the Bibler is the ultimate embodiment of the individual — the reverse course of Averintsev. M. Ya. Gefter and V. V. Bibikhin worked out this problem 20 years later. Gefter, based on the unmotivated appearance of homo sapiens and the unexplained appearance of speech, emphasized that speech destroyed the limit of understanding between people. This is also connected with his reliance on the concept of the World of Worlds and the definition of personality, which, in his opinion, is not a higher form built over the individual, but a later phenomenon that entered into a dispute with individuation. Personality is a choice, a form of overcoming oneself with access to others, a case. Bibikhin, not agreeing with the theoretical positions of Averintsev and Bybler, turns out to be closer to Gefter. It does not proceed from the development of the individual or personality, having changed the aspect of reasoning. He posed the problem of the wholeness of a human (homo) who initially deals not with knowledge, but with being and non-being. Before knowledge there is affirmation and negation, which sound in speaking silence before any speech and push a person to act. A human (homo), i.e. not an individual or a person, begins with an act; he is, first of all, such an act. The difference between Bibikhin's approach, which is closely related to the ideas of hesychasm, from Averintsev and Bybler lies in his understanding of philosophy as timeless. For him, everything known is the World, not even modernity. Personal properties (prosopon) are possessed only by God, who is "personal" and "hypostatic", because He expresses energy. This problem of the action of the energetic Word is the most important witness of the world given through man and recognized through language. Language poses the problem of understanding, assuming an initial misunderstanding between people.

Crossroads of Culture: Christianity, Ancestral Spiritualism, and the Search for Wellness in Northern Malawi, by Eric Lindland.

<i>Crossroads of Culture: Christianity, Ancestral Spiritualism, and the Search for Wellness in Northern Malawi</i>, by Eric Lindland.

СУТНІСНІ ПРОЯВИ СУЧАСНИ Х ПРОБЛЕМ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОЇ ІДЕНТИЧНОСТІ НА ПРИКЛАДІ ПРАВОСЛАВ'Я: ДЖЕРЕЛОЗНАВЧИЙ АНАЛІЗ

The religious processes taking place in Ukraine recently are increasingly encouraging a comprehensive philosophical and religious analysis of the relationship between the national and religious, ethnic and confessional, mental and sacred, political and ideological, etc., since these connections are essential factors in the formation of statehood, national identity, spiritual identity and religious certainty of the people, which is causing the increased interest of domestic researchers: from philosophers, historians, psychologists to sociologists, ethnographers, linguists, etc. The essence of the specificity of national identity in general, Orthodoxy in particular, is revealed through a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the main dominants of the Orthodox creed, among which is the anthropological idea that permeates the entire Christian ontology and epistemology. These problems are constantly under the close attention of scientists and have repeatedly become the subject of professional research of the past and professional searches of modern domestic and foreign scientists. In modern Ukraine, there is an increase in the number of studies, particularly in the history of Orthodoxy, its beliefs and rituals, as well as its interaction with the state and society. A wide and diverse range of religious topics is quite significant and significant today. All this is due to the fact that Orthodoxy has historically been and remains the dominant religious factor in our country, and it is it that can claim to be called an autochthonous (mentally rooted) religion in Ukraine.

Crkva kao ikona budućeg Carstva Božjeg

The basic subject of Christian ecclesiology is eschatology. The central theme, the focus of the biblical text, is directed towards the anticipation of the future Kingdom of God. Bearing in mind the eschatological foundation and setting of Christian ontology, based on the theological opus of the Holy Father, we will speak, first of all, about the creation of the world, created with the aim of being the Kingdom of God. The course of eschatological ontology will direct research towards the question of overcoming death, which inevitably leads to the question of the identity of the Church, as a space of overcoming death and personal communion with the coming Emperor. The rootedness of the Eucharist, therefore, of the Church itself, in the eschatological reality will open the perspective that the Eucharist is an icon of the Kingdom of God, with a direct reference to the question of iconicity, explicitly placed in the relationship prototype - icon. A correct understanding of the Church's eschatological position, within the framework of iconic reality, will give rise to the question of the relationship between the creation of the world and the Kingdom of God, with a focus on the Holy Father's hermeneutic key, which is reflected in the phrase "cosmic Liturgy"

Gadamerian and Chinese Philosophical Reflections on the Developments of Chung-ying Cheng’s Post-Dialogue Onto-hermeneutic Philosophy

Abstract In light of developments in Chung-ying Cheng’s (1935-) onto-hermeneutic philosophy during the years after his dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) took place in Heidelberg in May 2000, I explore several new issues related to Cheng’s understanding of Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy. First of all, I argue that Cheng has not addressed the vital concept of the “inner word” in Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and point toward some of its fecund hermeneutic significance, especially with regard to its characterization of Sprache/Language and its dynamics within human understanding. Secondly, I underscore the fact that Cheng (and the majority of other contemporary Chinese philosophers) have not understood the profound impact of Christian philosophical writings in Gadamer’s work, particularly in his claim that Christian ontology offers an alternative to ancient Greek ontologies that are “categorically significant.” Finally, I describe and analyze the development of a new theistic understanding of reality within Cheng’s post-dialogue publications, suggesting ways of critically advancing his claims in the light of Gadamer’s account of the “inner word” and the Christian ontological claims grounded in the logos-theology as presented in the prologue to the Gospel of John.

The Ontology of the Offense: Rowan Williams and Johannes Climacus on Christology and Ontology

In Christ the Heart of Creation, Rowan Williams argues that Christology as expounded by the classical tradition in Western theology holds a bounty for thinking in Christian ontology about the God-world relation. In particular, he uses the work of Soren Kierkegaard throughout to show that the relation between finite and infinite, immanent and transcendent, is not competitive, and thus there need be no metaphysical problem when holding that the incarnate God-man is both fully human and divine. This essay argues, however, that Kierkegaard’s own pseudonymous work cited by Williams holds the incarnation to be far more paradoxical and intellectually offensive than Williams allows. However, such priority of offense does not put an end to Christ’s central ontological position but rather shifts it to new directions in our thinking about theological ontology. Rather than Williams’ own conception of a cosmos in which the divine and non-divine are compatible and harmonious, Kierkegaard presents a doctrine of existence in which God and the human are in constant, dynamic engagement and in which temporal being bears ultimate primacy for Christian existence.

Distinction between Existence and Essence in Avicenna’s Ontology and Its Influence on Christian Philosophical Theology with a Focus on Aquinas’ Views

Avicenna is an influential philosopher whose contributions in ontology led to the transformation of Greek philosophy into philosophical theology in the Middle Ages. He distinguished between existence and essence, divided beings into necessary and contingent beings, and believed in the objectivity of existence. This article discusses Avicenna’s innovations in philosophical ontology and its influence on Christian ontology and theology, especially on Aquinas’ thought. The article focuses on the distinction between existence and essence and its implications in Avicenna’s philosophy and studies its influence on Aquinas’ theology. It will show that although Aquinas, especially in his De Ente et Essentia, is influenced by Avicenna’s ontology, his understanding of Avicenna’s views are sometimes inaccurate, and this has led him to disagree with Avicenna in some cases.

Проблема русофобии в историософии Ф. И. Тютчева

&lt;p&gt;The article makes the first ever attempt to carry out a systematic examination, based on the historical, publicistic, poetic and epistolary body of work of Tyutchev, of the interrelation of different levels and aspects of the concept of &amp;ldquo;Russophobia&amp;rdquo;, introduced by the poet. His fundamental concern with the hierarchic relation of Christian ontology and anthropology, with historical processes, with different results of dynamics of the theocentric and anthropocentric perception of existence and history in Russia and in the West is emphasized. It is shown in the article how the analysis of the religious, historical, cultural, anthropological mainstays leads Tyutchev, in his own way, to Pushkin&amp;rsquo;s conclusion that the history of Russia, as compared to the history of Europe, needs a &amp;ldquo;different thought, different formula&amp;rdquo;. It&amp;rsquo;s demonstrated how different interpretations of those mainstays cause issues, discords.&lt;/p&gt;

Existence Philosophy as a Humanism?

Abstract This article examines the challenges for understanding Kierkegaard’s philosophy from the perspective of our modern, heterogeneous societies, and seeks to define a humanism or existential ethics within Kierkegaard’s existential anthropology. After examining the problems inherent in Kierkegaard’s account of neighbor-love and human equality, we question the possibility of separating Kierkegaard’s existential anthropology from his Christian ontology. Suggesting that Kierkegaard’s philosophy does not leave us empty-handed, as political and social critiques claim, we sketch out the premises for a Kierkegaardian understanding of existential ethics which is not merely an ethics of self-accomplishment, but which places concern for others at the fore.

Отношение к категориям религиозного и светского у основоположников славянофильства (Киреевский, Хомяков, Самарин)

The author analyses the main works of I.V. Kireevsky, A.S. Khomyakov and Yu. F. Samarin that touch upon the problems of religion and secularism (religious, secular). The author summarizes the common approaches of the three Slavophiles to this issue. The Slavophil methodology attributed the origins of the secularization process to the specifics of Western Christianity, which had finally formed at the time of the Great Schism. The Slavophiles paid attention to the religious nature of modern secular anti-religious ideologies, which though denying religion and their own religious origin, still could not offer any worthy alternative. All three philosophers defended Christian ontology, therefore they did not consider secularism in a humanistic and positivistic sense, as something which was opposite to religion or was an area beyond all religions.

Христианская аксиология и онтология договорного права

Христианская аксиология и онтология договорного права

Between Ecclesiology and Ontology: A Response to Chris Allen on British Food Banks

ABSTRACTThe sociologist and theologian Chris Allen develops aspects of both Liberation and Postliberal theologies to launch a critique of the two dominant contemporary Christian responses to British food insecurity: food charity and food justice campaigning. Allen maps an alternative approach: a land activist Church that draws on its own historical counter-cultural practices and takes an oppositional stance to the contemporary state and market nexus. Drawing on the work of the Italian philosopher and political theorist Roberto Esposito, this essay argues that Allen's goals could be more fully realized by investigating with greater nuance Christian ontology, ecclesiology and the role of the state. Turning again to Allen's sources in this essay, the variety and potential of foodbank volunteering along with the legitimacy of food justice campaigns are critically reintegrated into a more radical project, a project which includes but is not limited to the sphere of the ecclesia.

Towards a Christian Ontology of Political Authority: The Relationship between Created Order and Providence in Oliver O’Donovan’s Theology of Political Authority

This article argues that the formally similar conceptions of political authority provided in Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order and The Desire of the Nations appear to assume different ontologies of political authority. The former account conceives political authority as a special use of natural authorities found in the created order, where ‘authority’ is defined as what it is that evokes free and intelligible human action. The latter account, however, appears to attribute the existence of political authority exclusively to divine providence. I contend that these two accounts of political authority are ostensibly in tension. I also argue that O’Donovan’s subsequent ‘providentialist’ account of political authority is unable to explain how political authority can evoke free and intelligible action in political communities. I maintain that O’Donovan can remove this apparent tension by returning the essence of political authority to creation, as he did in Resurrection and Moral Order, and then regard the Christ-event as redeeming political authority rather than merely restricting its historical function to judgment, as he argues in The Desire of the Nations. The emergence of O’Donovan’s ‘Christian liberalism’ could then be regarded as the ‘work of divine providence in history’ facilitated by the redemption of the natural authorities in the created order.

Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought by Jennifer Newsome Martin

Reviewed by: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought by Jennifer Newsome Martin David Bentley Hart Jennifer Newsome Martin. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. xii + 310 pp. Putatively a simple work of intellectual genealogy, delving down to a little-explored subterranean tributary of that vast ocean that is Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological project, Jennifer Newsome Martin's book is many other things beside: a reconstruction of the logic of some of the deepest themes in Balthasar's thought, an excellent introduction to the world of Russian "religious philosophy" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an extended reflection on freedom and necessity in the relation of creation to God, an essay on Trinitarian metaphysics in modern systematic theology, and even something of a theological manifesto (though perhaps a sometimes inadvertent one—it can be so hard to tell with scholars of the sober and scrupulous sort). It is also a book that, as only rarely ever happens, makes [End Page 114] substantial contributions to both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theological scholarship. Balthasar is such a titanic figure in modern Catholic thought not simply because he was so enormously prolific, or simply because he was so intimidatingly erudite, but mostly because he was inexhaustibly imaginative and daring as a thinker. And he lived at a particularly fortunate moment; he belonged to that first generation of theologians fully able to enjoy the intellectual liberty recovered for Catholic thinkers by the rise of the ressourcement movement and of what came to be called (at first opprobriously) la nouvelle théologie, as well as by the defeat of the stultifying and degenerate Baroque "manualist" Thomism that had become dominant in Catholic thought by the end of the nineteenth century and that had had its final, cartoonish expression in the writings of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. And no theologian took more daring advantage of that freedom than did Balthasar. For him, the return to the patristic wellsprings of Christian thought was not a retreat to a body of static orthodoxies, but a rediscovery of the speculative and spiritual vitality of the church's first great intellectual golden age. And, like the fathers, he believed that all the riches of human thought could be explored by, and claimed for, theology. His conceptual world was not only vast but wild; he was at once classical, scholastic, romantic, modern, and perhaps even a little post-modern. As such, he was better prepared than any other Catholic thinker of his time to appreciate and learn from the even more adventurous Russian "religious philosophers" and theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Martin's book addresses Balthasar's readings, criticisms, and appropriations of Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov, and in doing so provides a surprisingly thorough treatment of many of the principal themes of the writings of each of these thinkers. She also makes it quite clear that, in a sense, Balthasar was resuming and [End Page 115] qualifying the various attempts of the Russians to adopt what was best and to subdue what was worst in the brilliant, beguiling, and perilous thought of Schelling (in his middle and late periods), especially as regards questions of freedom and necessity within the life of the Trinity and in the relation between God and creation. In the process, she pursues her story through some of the deepest and most turbulent waters of modern Christian ontology and metaphysics, Trinitarian systematics and Christology, aesthetics and anthropology, without losing her way. Among the Russians in her story, Berdyaev comes off most poorly—and appropriately so—as repeating Schelling's most problematic, most incorrigibly mythological moments, without the compensating virtue of Schelling's immense speculative genius. For Balthasar, Berdyaev was more a spur than an inspiration. Soloviev, by contrast, with his far greater systematic and logical gifts, presented Balthasar with a model worthy of emulation, even if one also requiring some degree of diffidence. But, really, Balthasar's most consequential engagement with modern Russian theology lay in his encounter with Bulgakov. Martin's book lays out, probably for the...

The Realization of Harmony in a Broken World: Reconsidering the Role of Ethics in Milbank's Ontology of Peace

Milbank's Christian ontology of peace indicates a way out of the contemporary crisis of Western democracies. Milbank argues that politics should have a positive and communitarian goal, and that contemporary liberalism fails insofar as it is preoccupied with the limitation of evil, and insofar as it presupposes a fundamentally egoistic anthropology. Milbank's alternative harmonizing vision of reality and humankind has been criticized for preempting all too quickly a harmony which has not yet been realized, and for thereby undermining the crucial role of reactive ethical laws and human work for the realization of true harmony in a world marred by a tragic dimension. Contrary to this criticism, this article advances the claim that Milbank pays too little attention to the ways in which real harmony is already being realized in the world, which is why he presents his ontology as an ideal toward which an entire society should work, under the guidance of ethical laws. A reading of Schillebeeckx's more positive reception of liberalism will serve to illustrate the political consequences of a position that focuses more on the already realized harmony in this world than on an ideal harmony.