Divine Omnipotence Research Articles

Political philosophy and the God of Abraham

Contents: Introduction Chapter One: The Twofold Account of Creation: and the Hermeneutical Problem Chapter Two: Creation and the Meaning of Divine Omnipotence Chapter Three: The Ontological Implications of the Unfolding of Creation, for Creatures and Creator Chapter Four: Creation and Divine Solicitude for Mankind Chapter Five: Creation and the Meaning of Good and Evil Chapter Six: Pollution and Purgation Chapter Seven: Abram from the Calling to the Covenant Chapter Eight: Abraham at the Peak Chapter Nine: Kierkegaard's Challenge Conclusion

Overcoming Violence in Practice

In Christian thought, the classic theological response to evil and suffering, known as operates on a metaphysical level. It aims to elucidate questions about God: God's power to prevent evil, God's goodness and justice, and God's purposes in allowing evil. It also examines questions about humanity: Are humans chronically prone to sin and violence? Does suffering serve good purposes? Does God redeem suffering? In recent Christian attempts at theodicy, attention has focused on divine omnipotence and human freedom in attempts to exculpate God for cruelty in allowing the magnitude of suffering visible in such events as the Holocaust, where six million Jews and five million Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, and other noncombatants were killed under Nazi orders. Symmetrical with exploration of the front end explanatory questions of why bad things happen in a supposedly good world, theodicies also explore the back end justificatory questions of how God can heal the damage, unevenly and unfairly distributed, in this life or the afterlife. Key exemplars of modern theodicy are Leibniz and Hegel, thinkers who have greatly influenced twentieth-century analytic and continental philosophy of religion, respectively. Despite the urgency of responding to evil, theodicy has been criticized for its abstract, global approach to suffering and its programmatic focus on justifying God in the face of violence. My own critique of theodicy has epistemic and moral components. Theodicy rests on epistemological hubris, building precarious intellectual systems in pursuing knowledge of God. Additionally, theodicy is guilty of moral turpitude on account of its single-minded focus on explanation, which smooths over the scandal of suffering and overlooks the prevention and alleviation of violence.2 Fortunately, there are more promising alternatives than theodicy in Christian thought. Particularly in the twentieth century, existentialist and Marxian philosophical movements have contributed to practical rather than theoretical emphases in response to theodicy questions. Reflection on the situatedness of the subject has prompted this shift as theology becomes more self-conscious of its cultural assumptions. Especially since the 1960s, contextual varieties of theology have emerged that recognize its socially embedded character. Theology is never purely dislocated conceptual reflection, innocent of ethical consequences, but a discourse with practical origins and effects. To use Marxian vocabulary, all theology is an ideology expressing the conscious and unconscious interests of a social group or class. This insight

La nozione di magia nell'immaginario antico

The following essay is an attempt to demonstrate the connection between two typical features of the ancient magic: its female and foreigner nature. These features are implied within the concept of «non - omnipotence», which is connected with the idea of dolus (stemmed from the ancient magic) and in opposition to the divine omnipotence.

La justificación de la libertad del hombre frente a la omnipotencia divina en la ética de Guillermo de Ockham

The freedom issue has not been systematically considered by Ockham; that is why the author approaches it from the point of view of the methodological principles examined by the Venerabilis Inceptor in order to reach its development. First, the basis for the new gnoseo-ontological justification of the reality proposed by the Ockham's followers is established. That makes it possible to set the limits in which the issue is framed according to a model strongly inspired in the principle of divine omnipotence. Ockham's approach uses the Aristotelian language and doctrine of free will, but from a completely different point of view; since the Aristotelian free will results from a first recognition of a number of possibilities from which the agent opt; then freedom is an intellectual capability. Ockham sets aside this key element of Aristotelianism by changing the approach of study; he supports that will is an active power and its key option -acting or not acting- does not depend on the human intellect but on itself as a causa sui. Metaphysic and Anthropology, which support this belief, have been materially changed as compared to the main trends of the XIII Century: nature lacks a specific direction; it is not determined by truth and good. Only the free and conscious agent acts towards and end established by himself while the physical universe is predictable and perfectly determined. Freedom is shown as a new reality against natural determination, thus shaping the first medieval version for the modern dilemma of freedom versus determinism.

Thomas vs. Thomas: A New Approach to Nagel's Bat Argument

In this paper I examine Thomas Nagel's familiar challenge to physicalism. Nagel famously uses his vivid example about the sensory apparatus of bats to illustrate the difficulty of providing a purely physical characterization of phenomenal experience. Adapting Thomas Aquinas's principle regarding the nature of divine omnipotence, I argue that the fact that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat does not threaten physicalism.

"L'Art et les gens": Jean-Luc Nancy's Genealogical Aesthetics

is an ancient, immemorial scene, and it does not take place just once, but repeats itself indefinitely, with regularity, at every gathering of the hordes, who come to learn of their tribal origins, of their origins in brotherhoods, in peoples, or in cities-gathered around fires burning everywhere in the mists of time. (Jean-Luc Nancy, Of Divine Places)Jean-Luc Nancy's treatise on aesthetics, Muses, begins with a journey into the field of etymology, into the roots and origins of the name of the Muses. Rather than following the Greek etymology-in which Muse relates to music, the arts, and through manthanein to the process of learning as well-Nancy pursues the Latin roots and imagines the Muses as more encompassing manifestations of the spirit: The Muses get their name from a root that indicates ardor, the quick-tempered tension that leaps out in impatience, desire, or anger, the sort of tension that aches to know and to do. In a milder version, speaks of the 'movements of the spirit' (1996, 1).In preferring this route through the Latin mens (spirit or soul), however, Nancy skips over another connection implicit in his own language. This of the spirit that yields such ardor and tumult can be seen as the mental correlative of the menses, the movement of the blood in the female bodily cycle. am suggesting that the excitement, arousal, and force associated with the mens-let us say, with the movement of the poetic spirit-might operate here as a metonymic displacement of the menses, which mark and interrupt the internal movements of the female body, thus inscribing on it the passage of time. This image of time's traces on the female body becomes all the more exegetically poignant, since the principal function of the Muses in Nancy's text consists in delineating the temporality of art by marking the rise and fall of artistic movements and epochs, as well as of aesthetic philosophies.Embodiments of the divine force that visited the poet in the Homeric times, the Muses gradually disappeared until they were reduced in modernity to a single muse. modern muse, however, is less of a divinity and more of a ceremonial evocation of her predecessors. She is a figure of speech, an ornamental apostrophe to an external being that ironically exposes the absence of any such genuine externality in a solipsistically self-reflexive age. This is why in his study of the great modernist poet, Stephane Mallarme, Yves Delegue speaks of the poet's moderne de l'Impuissance (1997, 58), namely, a muse denuded of her divine omnipotence, who is now only a faint index of the vigor of her ancient precursors.Earlier on, Theodor Adorno also commented on the disappearance of the Muses as a modernist motif in Eduard Morike's poem On a Walking Tour. Entering a small town at sunset, where On the streets lies the red evening light, Morike completes this melancholy image of the bygone day with an invocation to the muse, equally now a figure of the past, enveloped in the glow of the dusk and emptied of her divine fervor, though still capable of a rousing sentimentality: I am as if drunken, led astray- / Oh muse, you have touched my heart, / With a breath of love! (Morike qtd. in Adorno 1991, 47-48). It is as if this word [muse], writes Adorno, one of the most overused in German classicism, gleamed once again, truly as if in the light of the setting sun, . . . and as though even in the process of disappearing it were possessed of all the power to enrapture which an invocation of the muse in the modern idiom, comically inept, usually fails to capture (48). In part, we can say that a lonely muse is possible only in her disappearance and that she moves us only in her departure, because her plural nature-her proper mode of appearing-has been expended. This image of the exhausted muse corresponds to the 19th-century notion of aesthetic exhaustion. consolidation of the Muses into a single impotent muse parallels the 19th-century reduction of the arts into Art, itself a vanishing category capitalized as if to compensate for its loss. …

Divine Omnipotence and Moral Theory in Abelard's Theology

Divine Omnipotence and Moral Theory in Abelard's Theology

Three Twentieth-Century Jewish Responses to Evolutionary Theory

The three thinkers examined in this paper, Abraham Isaac Kook, Mordecai M. Kaplan, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, responded to the challenges of Darwinian evolution in different ways. Kook stressed divine immanence, whereas Kaplan redefined divine omnipotence. Both accepted biological evolution but rejected the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. Leibowitz, too, rejected natural selection and Darwinism, although for scientific reasons rather than theological concerns. These thinkers' positions on evolution and the posture each adopted toward science in general are studied.

More Difficult to Believe? Luther on Divine Omnipotence

This article considers Luther's statement in thesis 21 of the 1545 doctoral disputation of Petrus Hegemon (1545) concerning the difficulty of belief in creatio ex nihilo, and suggests that this difficulty shapes the later Luther’s theology in significant ways. The difficulty is reconstructed as a gradual movement into the mystery of the creatio ex nihilo. The first site of difficulty correlates the knowledge of creatures as particulars with the knowledge of the Creator as the source of existence. The move towards a second site is propelled by the question of inevitable death, which Luther answers by moving from material and natural generation to the resurrection and then to the creatio ex nihilo. At the third site, Luther addresses such disturbing questions as the suffering of the righteous, the historical cycle of political power, and the harshness of reprobation. He answers these questions by integrating the symmetrical biblical statements of the annihilatio and the creatio with a theological theory of divine omnipotence. God's hiddenness is understood as God's omnipotence working at the specific locations of self‐negation, as well as behind the ebb and flow of historical‐political contingency. Faith presses into the hidden mystery, grounded in the certainty that all things are effected by the Creator whose nature is self‐giving goodness, and established by the hope that the light of glory will determine more fully the God who is to be honored above all.

Interpreting Arnauld (review)

Reviewed by: Interpreting Arnauld ed. by Elmar J. Kremer Lisa Downing Elmar J. Kremer, editor. Interpreting Arnauld. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 183. Cloth, $65.00. This attractive volume represents (with one exception) the proceedings of what was evidently a lively colloquium on Arnauld’s philosophy, held at the University of Toronto in 1994 to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. Although Antoine Arnauld has been best known to contemporary philosophers as the author of the fourth set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations, interest in Arnauld’s own philosophical thought appears to be on the rise within the Anglo-American philosophical community, as indicated by the publication, within the last eight years, of two new translations of his Des vrayes et des fausses idées (a philosophical polemic against Malebranche) and a new translation of the Port-Royal Logic that Arnauld co-authored with Pierre Nicole. This new collection, from an international group of contributors, is thus well-timed. The two main themes that emerge from the collection as a whole serve to indicate the potential importance of Arnauld scholarship to our understanding of seventeenth century philosophy. The first theme that unites most of the papers is that of the diversity of views that existed within the constellation of philosophers who identified in one way or another with the doctrines of René Descartes. Arnauld was, of course, one such Cartesian. Nevertheless, many of the papers take the differences between Descartes and Arnauld as their starting point. Peter Schouls sets up a general contrast between the modernity of Descartes’ thought, as founded on the validity of subjective consciousness, and the tradition-grounded character of Arnauld’s philosophy. Jill Vance Buroker focuses productively on Arnauld’s and Descartes’ opposing views on the nature of assertion and judgment. Alan Nelson uses Arnauld’s challenge to Descartes’ account of the material falsity of ideas as the basis for a controversial but fascinating reassessment of a range of crucial issues in Descartes scholarship: clarity and distinctness, objective reality, and representation, as well as material falsity. Jean-Luc Solère’s contribution (described further below) documents the fact that significant philosophical debates existed, not [End Page 367] just within Cartesianism, but even within the still narrower Jansenist community that agreed in taking Augustine and Descartes as their philosophical models. In thus highlighting and documenting the diversity and richness of Cartesianism, the collection provides a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. This theme is also very much present in the essays by Ndiaye, Kremer, and Carraud, which are discussed below. The second theme, shared by the majority of the papers, is that of philosophical theology. As Elmar Kremer remarks in his editor’s introduction (p. ix), while Arnauld himself held that philosophy and theology are distinguishable disciplines, the volume as a whole documents their many interconnections in his work. These interconnections are especially well brought out in the contributions by Kremer, Solère, and Sleigh. Kremer argues that we can understand three of Arnauld’s key departures from Descartes (with respect to the nature of body, the production of sensory ideas, and divine omnipotence) as motivated by his Christian commitments. Solère contends, in his intricate and illuminating essay, that Arnauld’s views about the metaphysical status of known truths (that they are relations in our minds, rather than entities in God grasped by us) are connected to a debate about the savability of non-Christians, and that his disputant, Pierre Nicole, developed an account of implicit or indirect knowledge in order to accommodate his commitment to general grace, a divine illumination had by everyone. Robert Sleigh’s essay considers the difficult question of how Arnauld wished to reconcile his doctrine of efficacious grace with human freedom: Arnauld clearly advocated some sort of compatibilism, but what sort, exactly? Although Sleigh admits that he cannot give an unambiguous defense of a single answer, his map of the territory is very valuable indeed. Other topics in philosophical theology touched on in the collection are the epistemology of papal infallibility (discussed by Thomas Lennon), miracles (discussed by Graeme Hunter) and divine omnipotence. This last topic (which is connected both to the question of the...

On the intellectual sources of modern atheism

The fundamental principles that have determined modern culture since the eighteenth century conflict with those that have given rise to traditional theism. Some have described the modern ones as implicitly 'atheistic'. The term is not new. Socrates was branded with it for undermining the polytheist religion of his time and so, in a different way, was Epicurus. Those who attempted to rethink the nature of transcendence have always been called atheists. Yet both believed in God or the gods. Closer to our own time the pious Spinoza was charged with atheism for having articulated the relation between transcendence and immanence in concepts that varied from the traditional ones. The stigma adhered to his name all through the eighteenth century. Lessing's reputation as a religious thinker changed overnight when Jacobi revealed his Spinozistic leanings. Even the devout Fichte lost his chair at the university of Jena in the Atheismusstreit. The 'atheism' dealt with in this paper was both more radical and more comprehensive. It consisted not in a shift of the relation between immanence and transcendence, but in a gradual evanescence of the very idea of transcendence. Unlike earlier 'atheisms', it failed to replace what it abolished. It was in fact the final stage in an intellectual movement derived from Christian theological assumptions. Nominalist theology in the late Middle Ages had, in a one-sided emphasis on divine omnipotence, ruptured the bond of analogy that had linked Creator and creature. This changed the relation between reason and revelation in a

The theological origins of modernity

Most critiques of modernity rest on an inadequate understanding of its complexity. Modernity should be seen in terms of the question that guides modern thought. 77ns is the question of divine omnipotence that arises out of the nominalist destruction of Scholasticism. Humanism, Reformation Christianity, empiricsim, and rationalism are different responses to this question.

The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Theology

The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Theology Francis Oakley [W]e must cautiously abandon [that more specious opinion of the Platonist and Stoick] ... in this, that it ... blasphemously invades the cardinal Prerogative of Divinity, Omnipotence, by denying him a reserved power, of infringing, or altering any one of those Laws which [He] Himself ordained, and enacted, and chaining up his armes in the adamantine fetters of Destiny. Walter Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature : A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (London, 1652) Of the various attributes characteristically ascribed to God in the Christian tradition—goodness, wisdom, omniscience, omnipotence, and the like—it is omnipotence which of recent years has most persistently been the object of focused attention among philosophers and historians alike. That that should be the case with philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition is not altogether surprising. While it is doubtless a development few would have predicted half a century ago, the years since then have seen something of a recrudescence of interest in a legislative or divine-command ethic. 1 Had that [End Page 437] not itself conspired to make omnipotence an obvious focus of philosophic attention, the deepening contemporaneous preoccupation with modal logic or the logic of possibility would surely have succeeded in so doing. Understood classically as affirming of God the ability to do all things and connoting a virtual capacity for action (as opposed to a power exercised in actuality), omnipotence has proven to be something of a troublesome notion, inviting unrestrained speculation about hypothetical divine action and generating a veritable cat’s cradle of philosophical conundrums concerning the relationship of God’s power to his will, wisdom, goodness, and justice. Medieval theologians and philosophers alike were forced to grapple with these taxing problems, 2 and philosophers of our own era have found them no less directly pertinent to their own logical and ethical concerns. 3 In 1955 Mackie inaugurated what was destined to become an ongoing discussion of omnipotence in the philosophical journals, 4 and such philosophers as Kenny and Keane, Cowan and Wolfe, Dummett, Plantinga, Swinburne, and Geach have been drawn into the fray. Since then, as a result, the pages of Mind, Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and even The Listener have been punctuated by their efforts to grapple with those venerable questions concerning the divine power that had exercised St. Peter Damiani in the mid-eleventh century, brought Abelard to grief a half-century later, and subsequently led Peter Lombard to devote to them a crucial and influential section of his Sentences—whether God of his omnipotence could undo the past, whether he could have made things other than he had, or created a world better than he did, and so on. 5 [End Page 438] While no medievalist can be expected to be anything but gratified by this unexpected testimony to the enduring significance and power of medieval scholastic concerns, those of us interested especially in the intellectual developments of the later-medieval centuries have particular reason to be energized by it. The years since Mackie launched this contemporary philosophical debate have also seen an intensification of interest on the part of historians in the ways in which, during these particular centuries, medieval thinkers themselves came to terms with the implications of the divine omnipotence and dealt with the theological and philosophical puzzles characteristically generated by that notion. Unlike the philosophers, whose concerns have been somewhat more broad-ranging, the historians have focused in particular on a quintessentially scholastic distinction that was developed, it has been said, “as a ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether God is able to do or arrange things other than he did in creating the orders of nature and grace.” 6 The distinction in question is that between God’s power understood as absolute and as ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata), which the theologians and philosophers of the period deployed as part of their great effort of accommodation between Greek philosophical and biblical notions of the divine, and the historical significance of which the scholarship of the past forty years has served increasingly to vindicate. 7 But while that distinction has been...

Jesus and the Star Folk

As science finally eliminates the moon as a living habitat telescopes probe ever further for extraterrestrial vitality. NASA expects, barring terrestrial catastrophes, to probe Mars every two years eventually recovering Martian rocks for laboratory investigation. These, with Martian fragments already found in Antarctica, may soon resolve whether or not life has existed, lives now, or will evolve on that frigid, thin atmosphered planet. The European Space Agency anticipates launching early next century an ‘Interferometry Observatory’ to seek signals of life from relatively earthlike planets. These explorations from both sides of the Atlantic, with advances in astronomical science, the popularity of space fiction, art, and para-religious phenomena make certain that, for the foreseeable future, people will wonder about extra terrestrial life, its possibilities, its traces, its evolutionary potential, and its unnoticed presence even now.Humans have wondered about star folk for a surprisingly long time. In the golden age of Greece philosophers debated the possibilities of a plurality of worlds including planets with intelligent life. In the 5th century BC Pythagoras thought the moon, visible from earth then as now, was inhabited. So did Epicurus and famously somewhat later the prolific essayist and biographer Plutarch. Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle dismissed pluralism. But some early church Fathers, including Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Jerome, were open to possibilities of stellar life. Aquinas, like Augustine, thought this earth alone was habitable but resolutely affirmed Divine omnipotence. Three years after Thomas’ death the Bishop of Paris (Etienne Tempier) in 1277 fuelled speculation about extraterrestrials by condemning the proposition ‘that the First Cause cannot make many worlds’.

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Christ in Christian Tradition. Volume Two, Part Two: The Church of Constantinople in the Sixrh Centuty. By Aloys Grillmeier. Christ in Christian Tradition, Volume Two, Part Four: The Church of Alexandria with Nubia and Ethiopia after 451. By Aloys Grillmeier. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. By Denys Turner. Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhood in Catholicism. By Maurice Hamington. Christian Doctrine in the Light of Michael Polanyi's Theory of Personal Knowledge (Toronto Studies in Theology, no 66). By Joan Crewdson. Nonfoundationalism (Guides to Theological Inquiry). By John E. Thiel. Sacramenta: Bibliographia Internationalis. Compiled by Maksimilijan Žitnik. Critical Perspectives on Christian Education. Edited by Jeff Astley and Leslie Francis. After All: Religion Without Alienation. By Don Cupitt. The Last Philosophy. By Don Cupitt. The Christian God. By Richard Swinburne. Die Religionswissenschaft und das Christentum: Eine historische Untersuchung über das Verhältnis von Religionswissenschaft und Theologie (Studies in the History of Religions 61). By Sigurd Hjelde. John Duns Scotus: Contingency and Freedom, Lectura I, 39. Edited by A. Vos Jaczn, H. Veldhuis, A. H. Looman‐Graaskamp, E. Dekker and N. W. den Bok. Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by T. McDermott. St Thomas Aquinas: Teacher of Truth. By Francis Selman. Aquinas' Five Arguments in the ‘Summa Theologiae’ la, 2, 3. By Lubor Velecky. Almighty God: A Study of the Doctrine of Divine Omnipotence, By Gijsbert Van Den Brink. God. Passibility and Corporeality. By Marcel Sarot. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Introducing Philosophy 1). By B. R. Tilghman. Ancient Greek Philosophy: Its Development and Relevance to Our Time. By Robert C. Trundle, Jr. Taking Life Seriously: A Study of the Argument of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’. By Francis Sparshott. Feminist Interpretations of Plato (Re‐Reading the Canon). Edited by Nancy Tuana. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. By Adriana Cavarero. The War Lover: A Study of Plato's ‘Republic’. By Leon Harold Craig. Plotinus. By Lloyd P. Gerson. Al‐Farabi and His School, by Ian Richard Netton. The Age of German Idealism (Routledge History of Philosophy 6). Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. ‘Fear and Trembling’ and ‘Repetition’ Edited by Robert L. Perkins. The Fear, the Trembling, and the Fire: Kierkegaard and Hasidic Masters on the Binding of Isaac. By Jerome I. Gellman. Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy. By Michael Weston. ‘The Letter on Apologetics’ and ‘History and Dogma’. By Maurice Blondel, texts presented and translated by Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan. Being and My Being: Gabriel Marcel's Metaphysics of Incarnation. By Joseph Konickal. GenEthics: Technological Intervention in Human Reproduction as a Philosophical Problem. By Kurt Bayertz. Clinical Bioethics: Theory and Practice in Medical‐Ethical Decision Making. By James F. Drane. Ecotheology: Voices from South and North. Edited by David G. Hallman. Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well‐being and the Natural World (Environmental Philosophies). By John O'Neill. Emotion and Spirit: Questioning the Claims of Psychoanalysis and Religion. By Neville Symington. The Psychology of Religious Knowing. By Fraser Watts and Mark Williams. Counseling and Psychotherapy of Religious Clients: A Developmental Approach. By Vicky Genia. The Puzzle of Ethics. By Peter Vardy and Paul Grosch. Power and Christian Ethics. James P. Mackey. Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony c.970‐c.1130. By Marcus Bull. The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200. By C. Stephen Jaeger. Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By Paul Bushkovitch. Confession and Community in Seventeenth‐Century France. Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine. By Gregory Hanlon. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. By Richard Godbeer. ‘No Religion Higher than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia. By Maria Carlson. The Jesuit Myth. Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth‐Century France. By Geoffrey Cubitt. Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis. By Marvin R. O'Connell. Religion and Democracy in Latin America. Edited by William H. Swatos. A Tale of Two Missions. By Michael Goulder. Studying John: Approaches to the Fourth Gospel. By John Ashton. The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/64). By James Carleton Paget.

Omnipotence, feminism and God

My focus is on the attribute of omnipotence and this for two reasons. One is that it has been crucial in the feminist critique, playing a key role in confirming - for feminists - that the concept of God in philosophy of religion is not politically innocent but rather a projection of masculine attributes and goals onto a divine being. Further, it might be supposed that by looking at the critique of one attribute discussion could be narrowed down to a range of issues manageable in a single paper. This latter reason entails problems, since it is evident that the rejection of omnipotence in God as obviously a male projection is part and parcel of a wider case and may stand or fall with that case. However, a reading of authors such as Reuther, Hampson and Daly would suggest that the alleged errors in the doctrine of omnipotence are reasons for thinking that the entire, traditional concept of God has to go and thus, in turn, that the errors of omnipotence are independently discussible to some degree. However, the notion that there is an independently weighable feminist case against the doctrine of divine omnipotence faces two further difficulties. They both stem from what appears to be the curious indirection

To pray or not to pray: Reflections on the intersection of prayer and medicine

Recent medical studies documenting the influence of prayer in our physical lives challenge mainstream Christians to rethink their ideas and practice of prayer. A new model of prayer questions dysfunctional images of prayer based on 1) the doctrine of divine omnipotence, 2) the rewards-punishments notion of health and illness, and 3) linear notions of the power of prayer. Relational, holistic, and multidimensional images of God, human existence, and the effects of prayer provide the basis for a constructive theology of prayer. Ironically, the fact that prayer is not omnipotent makes it possible to practice prayer in a technological context.

Ancient and High-Medieval Interpretations of Jesus in Gethsemane: Some Reflections on Tradition and Continuity in Christian Thought

Although Jesus' agony in the garden (Matt 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42; Luke 22:40–46) may be powerful and even inexpressibly poignant to modern readers, it was a plague and embarrassment to patristic and medieval interpreters. Few narratives in the New Testament were so inimical to received christological assumptions. Ancient and medieval interpreters, at least those ultimately judged to be orthodox, ascribed to the Incarnate Word the qualities of divine consubstantiality, omnipotence, omniscience, obedience, and impassibility. The pericope, at least in its Markan and Matthean versions, however, presents a figure who appears in utterly human form—powerless, ignorant, recalcitrant, and passible.

Buridan and Skepticism

Buridan and Skepticism JACK ZUPKO DESPITEJOHN BURIDAN'SREPUTATIONas the foremost Parisian philosopher of the fourteenth century and the predominant role played by his teachings in European universities until well into the sixteenth century,' our understanding of his thought in a number of areas remains sketchy. Epistemology is a case in point. Only a handful of studies have touched on this topic over the past five decades,, and most of these have been interested not in explaining Buridan's epistemology per se, but in sorting out the complex relationship between Buridan's remarks on knowledge and a number of skeptical propositions associated with Nicholas of Autrecourt. Because I feel that this relationship has never been properly understood, and that Buridan's reply to Nicholas is as good a place as any to begin discussing his epistemology, the present study will likewise be addressed to this issue. But it should serve as well to illustrate Buridan's general position on the question of human knowledge, since, as we shall see below, his reply to Nicholas makes no sense unless certain doctrines implicit in his brief remarks are made explicit. As far as Buridan and Nicholas are concerned, two facts stand in need of explanation: on the one hand, the fact that Buridan and Nicholas were con- ' As the late Jan Pinborg once observed, Buridan's "way of doing philosophy and his main tenets affected all European universities for the next 15~ years or more, often to the degree that his works were used as primary textbooks at important courses" (Preface to The Logic.of,John Buridan: Acts of the Third European Symposium on Medieval Logic and Semantics [Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1976l,7). ' See, e.g., Ernest A. Moody,"Ockham, Buridan, and Nicholasof Autrecourt," Franciscan Studies 7.2 (June 1947): i 13-46, rpr. in Moody, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic (Berkeley:UniversityofCalifornia Press, 1975), 1~7-6o; T. K. Scott,Jr., "NicholasofAutrecourt, Buridan and Ockhamism,"Journal of the History of Philosophy 9 (1971): 15-41; J. M. Thijssen, "John Buridan and Nicholasof Autrecourt on Causalityand Induction," Traditio 43 (1987):~3755 . Another group of studies has examined Buridan's epistemologyfrom the standpoint of his logic and theory of demonstration: Scott, "John Buridan on the Objects of Demonstrative Science ," Speculum 4~ (1965): 654-73; Sten Ebbesen, "Proof and Its Limits according to Buridan: Suramulae 8," Preuve et raisonsg~l'Universit~de Paris: Logique, ontologieet theologicau XIVe sikcle,ed. Z. Kaluza et P. Vignaux (Paris:J. Vrin, 1984),97-11o; Peter King, "Jean Buridan's Philosophyof Science,"Studies in History and Philosophyof Science 18(1987): 1o9-32. [19'] 192 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:2 APRIL 1993 temporaries at Paris, making it improbable that Buridan did not at least have some acquaintance with Nicholas's notorious skeptical theses (several of which were formally condemned in 1346); on the other, Buridan's apparent failure, despite his philosophical reputation and stature at the University, to attempt anywhere in his known corpus of writings a serious, sustained defense of the possibility of knowledge against Nicholas's skeptical challenges. Portions of questions in two different works are thought to contain replies to Nicholas's arguments,s but neither discussion seems to do much more than merely gainsay Nicholas's position by rejecting his criterion of certainty. Not surprisingly, commentators have been disconcerted by Buridan's silence on the matter. It has been suggested that Buridan had not read enough of Nicholas's work to understand it,4 and that his reply may have been directed not against Nicholas but "some anonymous, or perhaps illusive [s/e], opponents."5 One commentator even finds in Buridan a "schizophrenic attitude" towards articles of the faith, accounting for his failure to take seriously the implications of divine omnipotence in developing his theory of knowledge. 8 My aim here is to rehabilitate Buridan by showing that his failure to rebut Nicholas's arguments is part of a broader and perfectly sensible antiskeptical strategy rooted in his theory of evidentness and certainty. I think the appearance that Buridan does little to engage Nicholas's arguments is correct, but not because he was unfamiliar with them. Rather, Buridan thinks that some kinds...

The Dialogue between Abraham and Yhwh in Gen. 18.23-32: a Historical-Critical Analysis

An analysis of the logic of the dialogue between Abraham and YHWH in Gen. 18.23- 32 shows that this text attempts to persuade its historical audience of the validity of several theological propositions by appealing to YHWH as the most preferred audi ence. Some of these propositions, and in particular the idea that there may be limits to divine omnipotence, and that human beings know some of the rules concerning what God ought to do, caused uneasiness in the theological discourse of the time. The dia logue in Gen. 18.23-32 also sheds light on some likely characteristics of the post- monarchic community in which it was written.