Question Of God Research Articles

Creatio Ex Nihilo through the Prism of Father Sergei Bulgakov’s Sophiology

Father Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), directly influenced by Vladimir Solovyov and especially by Father Pavel Florensky, developed his sophiological concept which takes a central place in his doctrine of Trinity and God's economy. The main failure of the Russian sophiology is that the question of God's Wisdom is not Christologically founded in the spirit of the New Testament and patristic teaching. Bulgakov neglects the theology of God's uncreated energies. He thinks that it does not sufficiently explain the creation of the world as well as the relationship between God and the world. According to him, the creation of the world and its unity with God can be explained only through a mediator who acts as an “ontological bridge” between the Creator and the creation. Bulgakov, using the ontological mediation paradigms that are characteristic for certain ancient philosophical systems, especially Neo-Platonism, develops his doctrine of Sophia. She is immanent to both the nature of God and the creation. This attitude leads Bulgakov to the position of pantheism. In order to avoid this danger, he modifies his teaching introducing two models of Sophia: “Divine Sophia” and “Created Sophia”. Unlike the patristic theology, Bulgakov’s sophiological essentialism does not tend the antinomy of apophatic-kataphatic theology, and thereby he puts into question the ontological difference between the Creator and the creation. It is a failed attempt to interpret the dogma of the creation of the world ex nihilo, through categories and concepts that are alien to the church tradition.

Evolution, Cooperation and the God Question

Evolution, Cooperation and the God Question

The Question of Providence and the Problem of Evil in Suhrawardī

Abstract Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī’s philosophical works seem to contain two conflicting views on providence: in the Talwīḥāt and the Mašāriʿ, he endorses the Avicennian view, only to deny providence altogether in the Ḥikmat al-išrāq. This contribution aims to explain the seeming inconsistency by investigating it in light of the underlying question of God’s knowledge of particular things. I will also argue that despite his qualms concerning providence, Suhrawardī accepts the closely related Avicennian answer to the problem of evil.

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

Why are we here?

AbstractIf one believes in God, what should one say is the answer to the question of why we are here? In this article, I hope to show that when we ask why we are here we ask several different questions at once and that Theism allows (indeed dictates) that these different questions have very different answers. Appreciating these differences can remove at least that perplexity generated when an answer which could well be plausible were it to be given in response to one question of God's purpose for us is mislocated and treated as if it were an answer to another.

Paul Ricœur: traços do religioso numa filosofia sem absoluto

This paper assesses the ways in which Transcendence and the question of God appear in the philosophy of Paul Ricœur. Taking stock of the debate on the theological turn of French phenomenology, the paper aims to show the unique position held by Ricœur among French phenomenology and hermeneutics, in that in spite of his Christian faith, Ricœur strove to put forward a philosophy of limits ‘without absolute’ while, at the same time, developing inquiries in phenomenology and hermeneutics of religion. The paper follows the development of Ricœur’s thought on this matter, from his early phenomenological works, through the hermeneutical turn and until the essay of fundamental anthropology of Oneself as Another, unpacking the Kantian and Hegelian influences, the approach on religion ‘within the limits of reason alone’ and also the way in which the Kantian undertones of hermeneutics as philosophy of finitude at the same time open the space to hope and imagination. Ricœur’s philosophy therefore appears as a rigorous descriptive and interpretive effort that strives not to mix the genres of discourse, while, at the same time, we can still find some ethical and supra-ethical traits in his practical philosophy that do stem from his Christian faith – but whose status is inspirational and therefore does not dent the overall theoretical framework of his philosophy of limits.

Dostojewskijs Gottesfrage aus der Sicht von Jean-Paul Sartre und Slavoj Žižek

One of the most discussed problems in Dostoyevsky's work, at least in Western philosophy and especially in Existentialism, concerns the question of God, which has been received and interpreted in very different ways. This editorial introduction will refer to two readings - that of Sartre and that of Slavoj Žižek. The aim is to show that these two interpretations, although at first sight seemingly antithetical, are not mutually exclusive but complementary.

God, New Natural Law Theory, and Human Rights

Critics of the “New” Natural Law (NNL) theory have raised questions about the role of the divine in that theory. This paper considers that role in regard to its account of human rights: can the NNL account of human rights be sustained without a more or less explicit advertence to “the question of God’s existence or nature or will”? It might seem that Finnis’s “elaborate sketch” includes a full theory of human rights even prior to the introduction of his reflections on the divine in the concluding chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. But in this essay, I argue that an adequate account of human rights cannot, in fact, be sustained without some role for God’s creative activity in two dimensions, the ontological and the motivational. These dimensions must be distinguished from the epistemological dimension of human rights, that is, the question of whether epistemological access to truths about human rights is possible without reference to God’s existence, nature, or will. The NNL view is that such access is possible. However, I will argue, the epistemological cannot be entirely cabined off from the relevant ontological and motivational issues and the NNL framework can accommodate this fact without difficulty.

The Question of God’s Perfection

Is God perfect? The recent volume entitled The Question of God’s Perfection stages a conversation on that topic between mostly Jewish philosophers, theologians, and scholars of rabbinic literature. Although it is neither a work of biblical theology nor a contribution to the theological interpretation of scripture, The Question of God’s Perfection yields stimulating results for these other, intersecting projects. After briefly describing the volume’s central question and contents, the present essay situates the volume’s offerings within the state of the biblical-theological and theological-interpretive fields. In its next section, it considers—and compares— The Question of God’s Perfection with one twentieth-century theological antecedent, the Dutch theologian K.H. Miskotte. In closing, it poses questions for ongoing discussion. The Question of God’s Perfection: Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud, edited by Yoram Hazony & Dru Johnson. Philosophy of Religion – World Religions 8. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019. ISBN 9789004387959

Big History versus Cosmic History: A Review of Ted Peters’ Book

ABSTRACT In God in Cosmic History, Ted Peters seeks to establish cosmic history by incorporating religion and the God question into big history. Peters begins with an evidence-based narrative just as big historians do, but his theological assertions regarding God as the author of cosmic history take us beyond where scientific knowledge will allow us to go. We still need to find new ways to express ancient wisdom that are not inconsistent with science. Ted Peters sets us off on a very useful path to do this, but the journey is still underway.

II. The Question of God in the Struggle for Racial Justice

In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.” “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.” Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?

Teologi Inkarnasi dan Gereja Yang Inkarnatoris menurut Hans Urs von Balthasar

The uniqueness of Balthasar's theology of incarnation lies in the fact that he bases his arguments of kenosis primarily on the Bible and the theology of patristics. On this basis, he confronts the systematic theological exposition of incarnation with the question of God in modern times. Balthasar represents the centre of his theological principle in the "drama of God". This drama became visible to all men when Christ, Son of God, died for the salvation of the world. That is an act of solidarity and became for Balthasar the central concept of soteriology. Based on the incarnation of Christ, Balthasar calls the church to a living practice of kenosis in her missions.

Seeking a Wiser Worldview in the Twenty-first Century: Micheal O'Siadhail's The Five Quintets (I)

Seeking a Wiser Worldview in the Twentyfirst Century: Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets (I)* David F Ford A poet’s work must be the interface embracing all the wonders we’ve amassed with gratitude but also, in the light of what we’ve lost or thought we had surpassed, motifs of wisdom you with second sight will slowly re-begin to interweave. You won’t look back to try to underwrite all loss or hanker for some make-believe, but in the glare of here and now to find a vision for our world you must conceive; as Dante once prepared the modern mind you too must show a depth and breadth of view that lets the future in our now unwind.1 That is how, within an imagined conversation in the fifth and final canto of the fifth of The Five Quintets, Hannah Arendt addresses the author of the poem, Micheal O’Siadhail. It opens up a way into the poem as a whole that will be followed in this article. I will read it as an accompaniment to seeking a twenty-first century worldview2 that has the characteristics suggested by that passage: grateful appreciation for ‘all the wonders we’ve amassed’; recovery of things from the past that have been lost or wrongly superseded, in order to weave their wisdom into life now; refusal to sentimentalise or idealise the past, together with insistence on realistic assessment of it in the Studies • volume 110 • number 437 59 light of current issues; and searching for the sort of ‘depth and breadth of view/that lets the future in our now unwind’. In other words, I am looking for a worldview that has practical implications for how we move into the future from where we are now – our desires and orientations, motivations, perceptions, judgements, decisions, habits, and practices. My basic point is that, among all the religious, secular and hybrid possibilities, whatever our worldview is, we could always do with having more wisdom, and reflection on this poem can help make us wiser. Dantean daring The reference to Dante gives the most relevant historical analogy. In the fullest of many explicit references in the poem to Dante’s Divine Comedy,3 O’Siadhail addresses him in the final canto of the first quintet as ‘My Dante’, and sees him preparing the transition from the Middle Ages to the Italian Renaissance: A rich pre-modern mind allows you mix Rife thoughts retrieved with things so up-to-date In science, art or purse and politics, The cosmos in your seedbed city-state… (39)4 That points to the first four of O’Siadhail’s quintets – ‘Making’ on the arts, ‘Dealing’ on economics (‘purse’), ‘Steering’ on politics, and ‘Finding’ on the sciences – and Dante’s response to O’Siadhail adds the future orientation characteristic of both poems: I dare allow my sacred poem to leap From where we are to where we’re made to be. (39) O’Siadhail’s response to that calls Dante ‘a daring scout’ venturing across the frontier between the Middle Ages and modernity, ‘summing up what somehow opens out’. Dante’s reply names the parallel task O’Siadhail is attempting seven hundred years later: You’ve chosen to pursue the selfsame path And summing up an era work the seam Between the modern and its aftermath. (40) Studies • volume 110 • number 437 60 David F Ford All through the four haikus and sonnets of this section on Dante runs the theme that culminates in the fifth quintet, ‘Meaning’, and, above all, the most challenging meaning issue for both Dante and O’Siadhail, the question of God: You’re stretching still my mind and my desire To walk our daring God of love’s high wire. (40) Dante’s daring inspires O’Siadhail’s, and it may even be that, taking into account his twenty-first century context in Europe and North America,5 O’Siadhail should be judged the more daring of the two because of how he engages with God. Neither in English-language literary culture, nor in the dominant intellectual spheres of economics, politics, the sciences, and philosophy, has it been generally fashionable to...

Diamantino Martins e a Existência Radicalmente Orientada para Deus

Diamantino Martins, one of the main masters of the Braga School, was part of the founding group of the Portuguese Journal of Philosophy (Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia). He is the author of a vast philosophical work, and presents an original thought on natural evidence and immediate intuitive knowledge of God. The fine sensitivity and psychological analysis of the feeling of the divine in the deepest identity of the human being manifest, in his work, a penetrating understanding of the actuality of the question of God, very present in the return of the religious and the divine, in the literature of the end of last century. It is also situated in the innovative current of philosophical thought of contemporary Portuguese authors, about the philosophical treatment of the question of God, like Sampaio Bruno and Fernando Pessoa.

Preaching in the time of COVID: finding the words to speak of God

ABSTRACT This study contends that preaching in a time of crisis, such as the global pandemic, demands homiletical models that enable speech about God which can address the questions of God’s character and activity that are raised by great tragedy and disruption. A sample set of sermons, from churches of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, preached during the first United Kingdom wide national lockdown are reviewed as to what they say about God in relation to the pandemic. A model for crisis preaching as apophatic discourse is presented and then the central process of ‘saying and unsaying’ is applied to one of the more theocentric sample sermons in order to evaluate the potential effectiveness of the proposal.

POSIÇÃO ANTISSISTEMÁTICA, ANTIEÓRICA E DIRETA DE L. WITTGEINSTEIN COMO ENFOQUE INADEQUADO DA QUESTÃO DE DEUS

O presente trabalho está inserido em uma discussão bastante difundida e diversamente formulada em âmbito filosófico e teológico, usualmente apresentada como “questão de Deus”. Buscamos apresentar a análise de uma das posições deste questionamento, especificamente a de L. Wittgenstein, a partir da perspectiva filosófico-sistemática empreendida por Lorenz B. Puntel em sua obra Ser e Deus. Para este propósito será necessária a apresentação da problemática questão a partir de um enfoque considerado inadequado por Puntel: a abordagem totalmente antissistemática, antiteórica e direta de Wittgenstein a partir da crítica de John Hyman. Após a exposição dos conceitos básicos da filosofia sistemática enquanto teoria geral do Ser de Puntel, a discussão dos enfoques inadequados da questão de Deus, da teoria da figuração, do conceito de “místico” e da perspectiva pautada pelos “jogos de linguagem”, buscamos apontar as supostas insuficiências da posição de Wittgenstein em contraste com o a filosofia sistemático-estrutural.

Christopher BuckleyPre-Eternity of the World

BOOKS IN REVIEW Christopher Buckley Pre-Eternity of the World Nacogdoches, Texas. SFA University Press. 2021. 120 pages. IN THIS NEWEST collection, Christopher Buckley’s twenty-sixth, you might expect to see some evidence of decline, overwriting, or dilution of content; none of that is the case. Instead, we encounter Buckley’s imaginative power manifested in a fully matured style, a style characterized by complete naturalness of voice and a seemingly effortless mastery of craft. The title poem of this collection sets the standard for the book, a twelve-page poem that muses about quasars, Einstein, Spinoza, mitochondrial DNA, surfboards hauled on dented Bel Airs in the 1950s, loneliness, religion, koi, clouds, quarks, and many other things pulled into the vortex of a farranging mind considering the sum total of its experience and existential moment. The associative technique employed in these poems does not result in the dazzling showmanship of poems by, say, Albert Goldbarth, which of course afford their own type of pleasure; instead, the effect is one of a deepening intimacy in a relaxed but earnest solitude, as if the reader were sitting next to the author somewhere by the sea and listening quietly. This mesmerizing atmospheric quality of Buckley ’s poems is one of the great pleasures of reading them. At their most essential, whatever these poems may ostensibly be about, they are about a feeling, a certain disposition toward experience, an uneasy repose pulled by nostalgia as well as by the outer edge of knowledge and beyond that. One of the other great pleasures of reading these poems is their original figurative language. Similes and metaphors are never dispensable ornaments hung on the narrative tree of the poem; they are always woven as part of the poem’s fabric, often the main points on which the poem turns in its associative movement. In the early portion of “Remorse,” we read: “Brown shoes beaten / into submission, blind / witnesses to everything— / a yellowed rind of light / in the inner lining / of my tattered coat— / there, just above the heart, / where the ash of stars / has been collecting / since I was 29. // Bits of sun / like old wishes, like bruised / gardenias in a bowl, filter / through the paralytic trees— / the white glare / off the sea speaking / in the syllogisms of salt.” For all the heady mention of cosmology and Western philosophy, these poems proceed by feeling, feeling that seeks and finds form for itself, often in original figurative language. Examples are everywhere throughout the book, but the ending of “Evening Song—on a late birthday” serves as a good example of this as well as of a rare moment of peace, almost: “I’ve done my work / and this late in the day I leave / all uneasiness to the sea— / the dark sea, indifferent as always— / from which I nonetheless accept / every breath I take today / from an on-shore breeze—here / where I am almost happy, adrift / in the frail boat of my heart.” These poems also include an ongoing consideration of religion. In an earlier work, Buckley describes himself as a “spiritual non-believer.” It’s hard to say if that has changed. He certainly still has no time for “believers” reified in their own certainty; in the title poem, we encounter this attitude early: “and God-botherers / of every stripe, / with unquestioning convictions about the landscape / of the invisible.” Yet, in these new poems, he does not seem ready to completely deny “the other side,” though he considers it unlikely. In the final lines of the title poem, we read: “I can see there’s no guarantee / that anyone survives these dark waters, / is likely to get out of here alive . . . / all I know is that we go on / standing here / holding on to the rope-end of hope.” It seems that the poet has moved from “nonbeliever ” to agnostic tilting to nonbelief, yet the insistence with which these poems interrogate the unseen and the question of God suggests an undercurrent of desire for things to be otherwise. Readers will likely enjoy these poems not for their answers but for their intellectual and emotional honesty in the movement of mind. Fred Dings University of South Carolina...

The Qur’ānic Dialogue with the Mystical Theology of Logos in John’s Gospel

The Qur’ān, the “Holy Writ” of Islam, builds its rationale of revelation on the scriptural model of biblical tradition. Embracing direct divine intervention in worldly affairs as the first principle within the constrictions of monotheistic theology, the Qur’ān resurrects biblical purview of an intermediary agency linking the transcendent divine with the terrestrial human, which the author of John’s Gospel identifies as “Logos”. This article argues that the Qur’ānic conception of kalām-Allah, at a conceptual level, engages with John’s mystical theology of the divine origin of the Logos-incarnate and reinterprets the conception as well as its application. This cornerstone of John’s theology formulates a crucial basis for the Qur’ānic narrator’s self-reflection through both content and form of revelation as such. Biblical literature written prior to Johannine appropriation of Logos does not cohere with John’s mystical paradigm, which the Qur’ān, on the other hand, brings to a whole new level of theological maturation. The Qur’ān dialogues with John’s Gospel at multiple levels on the principal question of God’s personal interaction with humanity and presents its nuanced metaphysical construct in conversation with the Logos principle, but in distinction from John’s incarnation theology.

How convincing is the case for God? The ‘Finnes Gud?‘ television series offers you the chance to assess it!

There are times in life when one is conscious of a ‘wake-up call’. I seem to encounter them quite regularly and they tend to impact my life and my priorities. One memorable example was the first time I encountered Richard Dawkins on television. In a series on prime time on the UK’s Channel 4, he presented a series called The Root of All Evil? While the Bible claims that the root of (all kinds of) evil is the love of money, Dawkins implied it was religion – Christianity included. According to Dawkins, the insistence on there being a God is Medieval – fit only for a time when we had a more primitive understanding of science. Can there be anything more damaging than substituting science with magic? Can there be anything more destructive of intelligence and civilisation than teaching innocent children that there is a creator God who intended to bring the universe into existence – especially since we can show it achieved that all by itself! What amazed me about this Dawkins TV series is that it broke all the rules of balanced broadcasting. Interviews that had been conducted with Christian theologians and/or scientists, ended up in the trash bin. Because of that indirect encounter, I went on to produce a TV series called The God Question. It is available with Norwegian subtitles as Finnes Gud? More in a moment.

Prefatory Note

Abstract This short piece by Richard Kearney updates for the contemporary conversation the original forward he co-authored with his fellow conference organizer Joseph S. O’Leary. It lays out the themes of the publication of their 1979 Colloquium Heidegger et la question de Dieu. If Heidegger seems to suggest a discussion of theology by engaging Being, which religious tradition pairs with God, he himself was not interested in this correlation. He nevertheless served to open a path for others to follow. Facing up to the crisis of technological alienation, and firmly grounded in the Western tradition’s double belonging to the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions, the contributors of contributors of this original conference take up precisely this task to rethink the question of God.