Relation Of God Research Articles

Nursing Perspective on the Genesis Account of Creation

Biblical accounts of creation tell the origin of the world and the beginning of God's relationship with humankind. Azusa Pacific University assigns graduate nursing students a faith integration project analyzing Creation accounts through the eyes of a nurse researcher. This report integrates eight students' investigations of Genesis 1 and 2, offering deep, rich insight into nursing practice.

What Puritan Guarantee?

In The Puritan Origins of American Self Sacvan Bercovitch claims American Puritans believed God had made a long promised summons to them, irreversible as was irresistible, to erect New Jerusalem in (97). Eventually, their speculations about millennial site [of New Jerusalem] shifted from New England to, vaguely, America itself (xviii). This divine irreversible geographic guarantee had extraordinary implications. It meant the idea of America ... assured settlers of success.... The American Puritan self was a garden enclosed from threat even of secular failure (101). Over centuries, that Puritan guarantee evolved into a nation's divine right to expand (xvii). Cotton Mather's writings, main focus of Puritan Origins, are ideal for explicating this American Puritan guarantee because, according to Bercovitch, Mather is a come to life (68). Historians reviewed Puritan Origins enthusiastically when came out in 1975. But by time arrived at graduate school twelve years later, enthusiasm had faded. Historians had grown dubious about an American self and about New England as foundation of American history. Puritan specialists became more interested in connections between American and English Puritanism than differences. Perhaps most important, Dwight Bozeman argued persuasively intentionally world-changing Puritan errand into wilderness, millennial or otherwise, was an artifact of mid-twentieth-century scholarship (Guru). Before read Puritan Origins in graduate school, understood, as still do, New Englanders assumed no guarantee of success. God summoned New England as he had summoned ancient Israel, conditionally on holiness of region's inhabitants. As John Winthrop in A Modell of Christian Charitie in 1630 warned, if our heartes shall turne away, soe wee will not obey [God] ... wee shall surely perishe out of good land (48). The conditionality of God's relationship with New England was repeated countless times afterwards, in tones ranging from mild optimism to severe anxiety, not only by individual ministers but by ministers and laity speaking collectively. (1) Millennialism did not alter conditionality. By middle of 1630s, some New Englanders started to believe their pure churches foreshadowed millennium (Winship, Making 61-62). Puritan Origins' many quotations linking New England and millennium express no more than this foreshadowing; they could be piled up endlessly without ever conveying anything about guaranteed success or an American New Jerusalem* The prominent minister John Cotton, for example, served as a very enthusiastic emigrant around 1635 when he wrote to a friend in Holland the order of churches and commonwealth ... brought into his mind new heaven and new earth (C. Mather, Magnalia 1: 325). But Cotton emphasized New England churches needed much more holiness to participate in millennium and there was no certainty of them achieving it. The closest he came to Bercovitch's irreversible Puritan guarantee was I hope Lord will bring us to it (Churches 16, 20-22). Cotton identified New Jerusalem not with America but with coming church of those Jews who were to convert to Christianity as millennium approached (Way 10). Cotton Mather, John Cotton's grandson, was no less representative in his speculation about New England (1702) in Magnalia Christi Americana. There he suggested Christ had intended New England to be a pattern to his other churches, worried this role was finished, and asked whether Plantation may not, soon after this, come to nothing (1: 27). Mather claimed New Jerusalem would hover not over America but over earthly Jerusalem (Smolinski 375-77). Both ministers knew Israel, God's church, did not necessarily need a permanent New England Israel in order to realize prophecies in which New England appeared to play a role. …

An Enquiry into Sufi Metaphysics

The fact that Sufi metaphysics is usually taken to be merely the writings of Islamic philosophers, like Ibn al-'Arabi, seems to underestimate the philosophical indications of literary texts in the Sufi tradition. When Sufi literary texts are examined for philosophical content, that content is sought within and through the traditional Sufist approach. However, there appears to be a lack of correspondence between the traditional approach on the main conceptions (of God, of the universe, etc.) in Sufism and what literary texts can offer regarding those, when some literary texts are to be examined in a way in which an underlying philosophical system can be extracted from them. In this article, Ipresent a brief analysis of The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, one of the most significant works focusing on God and written in Sufi tradition. I suggest an alternative framework for Sufi metaphysics, which overlaps with the metaphysical connotations of The Conference of the Birds, via some Spinozistic ideas on God and on God's relationship to the rest of the universe. Since The Conference of the Birds represents a metaphysical doctrine that is apart from the traditional approach, I argue that we are not justified in thinking that Sufi metaphysics is only what Islamic philosophers have so far offered us.

Correction

In his thoughtful “Theological Assessment” of the Cape Town Commitment, Robert J. Schreiter, C.PP.S., writes, “The question of the relation of God's covenant with the Jews and God's salvific activity in Christ, treated explicitly at Manila (A.3), does not reappear at Cape Town” ( IBMR 35 [April 2011]: 90). His statement was based on a draft of the document sent to him, not the final version of the Cape Town Commitment, which was published in the same issue of the IBMR (pp. 59–80). In the published version, the issue does appear quite explicitly in section IIB.1: We affirm that whereas the Jewish people were not strangers to the covenants and promises of God, in the way that Paul describes the Gentiles, they still stand in need of reconciliation to God through the Messiah Jesus. There is no difference, said Paul, between Jew and Gentile in sin; neither is there any difference in salvation. Only in and through the cross can both have access to God the Father through the one Spirit. We continue, therefore, strongly to affirm the need for the whole Church to share the good news of Jesus as Messiah, Lord and Saviour with Jewish people. And in the spirit of Romans 14–15, we urge Gentile believers to accept, encourage and pray for Messianic Jewish believers, in their witness among their own people. The editors regret the error.

Theology and Mathematics—Key Themes and Central Historical Figures

This article provides a survey of the history of the dialogue between the disciplines of mathematics and theology. It identifies three principal historical periods—the ancient, the scientific revolution, and modern. It identifies five key themes—the ontological status of mathematics; mathematics as a bridge to a noumenal world; God's relationship to the physical universe and how mathematics is part of this; truth—its nature, how we know it, certitude; and the role of mathematics in culture. The author develops these themes by exploring the thinking of several major historical figures.

Newton on God's Relation to Space and Time: The Cartesian Framework

Beginning with Berkeley and Leibniz, philosophers have been puzzled by the close yet ambivalent association in Newton's ontology between God and absolute space and time. The 1962 publication of Newton's highly philosophical manuscript De Gravitatione has enriched our understanding of his subtle, sometimes cryptic, remarks on the divine underpinnings of space and time in better-known published works. But it has certainly not produced a scholarly consensus about Newton's exact position. In fact, three distinct lines of interpretation have emerged: (1) Independence: space and time are not essentially related to God. (2) Causation: space and time are caused by God. (3) Assimilation: space and time are attributes of God. This paper defends the third interpretation against the first two by drawing out the under-appreciated influence of Descartes' metaphysics on Newton's ‘physico-theology’.

Philosophy of Nothingness and Process Theology

AbstractThis paper discusses the two representative philosophers of the Kyoto School, Kitaro Nishida and Hajime Tanabe from the perspective of process theology and the Buddhist-Christian dialogue in Japan.The first chapter explicates Nishida’s concept of “pure experience” in comparison with William James’ radical empiricism and with Kant’s dualism of sense and reason. Pure experience in Nishida’s sense is neither a passive reception of objective sense-data given before subjective mental operations, nor the raw material of experience which must be given “form” by experiencing subject. It is nothing but metaphysically ultimate activity from which both the experiencing subject and the whole range of the experienced objects from sense-perception to intellectual intuition emerge as its self-unfolding.The second and third chapters discuss the two key concepts of process theology, “concrescence” and “the extensive continuum” with a special reference to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of “emptiness (sunyata)” and “dependent arising (pratityasamutpada)”. Nishida’s tripartite concept of topos, i.e. a topos of relative being, a topos of relative nothingness, and the topos of absolute nothingness will be applied to process theology in order to explicate the relation of two ultimates in Whitehead’s metaphysics, i.e. the relation of God as the religious ultimate to creativity as the metaphysical ultimate.The fourth and fifth chapters discuss Hajime Tanabe as a critical successor of Nishida’s philosophy of Nothingness. Tanabe is more akin to Whitehead than to Nishida in that Tanabe reformulates Nishida’s concept of Nothingness from the temporal perspective of a finite human existence related essentially to “species” or “society” in the historical world. Tanabe transforms the unity of contradictories in the logic of topos into the contrasted opposites in the historical process of becoming, which involves novelty and discontinuous leaps at points of historical crisis. For him history has become “the overall Koan” in which the metaphysical topology of static being is to be superseded by the innovative principle of nothingness in the historical world.

What Sort of a God is to be Found in dementia?

Although a great deal has been written on pastoral responses to dementia, some of the theological questions it raises remain relatively unexplored. In this paper, the author argues that the widespread experience of living with someone with dementia has the potential to reshape our understanding of God's relation to humanity. He goes on to survey some key contributions to the existing theological literature on this subject and so to suggest directions for further theological work.

Divine Omniscience: Is God's Foreknowledge at Risk in the Context of Contemporary Science?

Does quantum indeterminacy threaten the classical theological doctrine of divine omniscience? Certain popular interpretations of quantum physics have challenged conventional ways of thinking about time and space, being and becoming. Consequently, the traditional doctrine that God knows all things, including future contingent events, has recently come under debate. This paper explores how the way we think about time affects the way we think about God's relation to time. Theologians need to be careful when appropriating scientific theories in their theological reflections because interpretations of those theories often bring along unnecessary metaphysical presuppositions. Using an interpretation of special relativity that focuses on the Lorentz transformation, this paper shows that modern physics does not truly challenge the doctrine of divine foreknowledge. In fact, modern physical theories can actually deepen theological reflection on the classical doctrine of divine omniscience.

God’s Body at Work: Rāmānuja and Panentheism

In recent decades philosophers of religion espousing traditional Christian viewpoints of divine action as well as those who have offered substantial revisions of these doctrinal positions have grappled with the question of whether, and in what sense, God can be said to be "embodied" in the world. Thinkers with or without specific Christian commitments from different standpoints, such conceptualized as the grand monarch timelessly exercising unilateral power over creation, but that a more immanental understanding of divine action can be developed by viewing the world as in fact the body of a temporal God. Setting themselves against the "perfect being" theology of Augustine, Aquinas and Anselm, with its specific formulations of maximal power, aseity, simplicity, necessity and timelessness, they have instead developed various patterns of "panentheism" which they argue can highlight the real communication and interrelationships between God and the world. Along with emphasizing God's intimate presence in all finite entities, they believe that this notion of the embodied divine can help to dissolve various paradoxes and perplexities that have beset Christian orthodoxy, such as the compatibility or otherwise of human free will with divine omniscience, petitionary prayer with divine eternity, the Biblical account of Jesus' suffering with divine impassibility, and so on. Mainstream Christian thinkers, who are otherwise sensitive to the charge that God's relation to the world has sometimes been viewed in extrinsic terms as the distant deity or the cosmic clockmaker, have nevertheless rejected this notion of God's embodiment in the world, their primary charge often being that it dilutes

THE SOCIAL ARTICULATION OF TIME IN EUGEN ROSENSTOCK‐HUESSY

AbstractSociologists and theologians have both devoted considerable attention and energy to time, but the two rarely speak to one another. Sociologists investigate the effects of clock time, railway schedules, and calendars on culture, while theologians examine God's relation to time, usually the time of physics. The neglected German‐American thinker Eugen Rosenstock‐Huessy can help to bridge this gap. In his historical work, he paid particular attention to the role of rituals and calendars in shaping time, but he was also a Christian thinker who confessed that Jesus Christ brought in the “fullness of time.” This article considers some aspects of Rosenstock‐Huessy's rich account of time in the hopes that both theologians and sociologists, but especially theologians with sociological interests, will find his insights fruitful and mine them further for the productive possibilities.

Swinburne on divine necessity

AbstractMost analytic philosophers hold that if God exists, He exists with broad logical necessity. Richard Swinburne denies the distinction between narrow and broad logical necessity, and argues that if God exists, His existence is narrow-logically contingent. A defender of divine broad logical necessity could grant the latter claim. I argue, however, that not only is God's existence broad-logically necessary, but on a certain understanding of God's relation to modality, it comes out narrow-logically necessary. This piece argues against Swinburne's overall account of modality and rebuts his argument for narrow-logical contingency.

Trinity and Church: Trinitarian Perspectives on the Identity of the Christian Community

AbstractStarting from practical problems with praying and living a Christian life, the author argues that God's relationship with the Christian community has primacy over God's relationship with individual believers. When we conceive of the Christian community as being the body of Christ, we can uphold the high Christian ideals of prayer and living a Christian life without making them unattainable: these ideals are ideals for the community rather than for individual persons within the community. Next, the author argues that being the body of Christ is given to the Christian community not as a possession but as a task to fulfil through the power of the Holy Spirit. Finally, he shows how, in becoming the body of Christ through the Spirit, the Christian community is drawn up into the trinitarian community. He concludes that the identity of the Christian church cannot be fully understood apart from the Trinity.

The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas by Gilles Emery, O.P.

BOOK REVIEWS The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. By GILLES EMERY, 0.P. Translated by FRANCESCA MURPHY and GILLES EMERY. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 464. $150.00 (cloth), $45.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-19-920682-7 (cloth), 978-0-19-958221-1 (paper). This volume will doubtless prove a classic on Thomas's Trinitarian thought. It evinces speculative acumen and great historical erudition. Emery places Thomas's doctrine within medieval theology and demonstrates its relation to the patristic debates, which Thomas knew well. Emery's control of the medieval problematic, Albert, and Bonaventure is extraordinary. The book illumines the relevance of the questions and their ordering in Thomas's Summa Theologiae. Although Emery follows broadly the order ofthe Summa Theologiae, he employs all Thomas's major Trinitarian writings as well as his scriptural commentaries (esp. on the Gospel of John) to illuminate, expand, and complement that masterful summary. This expanded treatment helps to point out Thomas's development and to interpret the sometimes abbreviated text of the Summa Theologiae. Overall Emery seeks to link harmoniously the speculative doctrine of the Trinity in itself (immanent) to the Trinity's effectuation of man's salvation (economic). An initial chapter notes that, although the Summa Theologiae starts from the divine persons to explain our salvation, Thomas's exegetical commentaries argue to the immanent Trinity, the persons' divinity, from their workings in the economy: our re-creation and divinization occur because the Holy Spirit leads to the Son, who leads to Father. The second chapter stresses the mystery of the Trinity: it is known only through revelation. At best theologians defend it, showing that it is not contrary to reason, that personal distinctions are compatible with divine simplicity. A third chapter compares the structures of the commentary on the Sentences, the Compendium, De Potentia, and the two Summae in their presentations of the Trinity. Though each work has advantages, the Summa Theologiae represents the culmination ofThomas's thought. Treating Thomas's central argument, Emery dedicates separate chapters to the processions, the relations, and the persons (qq. 27-29). Against Arians and Sabellians, who linked God's actions to external natures, the origin of the persons was traced to actions giving rise to immanent processions, which must be consubstantial to the divinity since no accidents exist in God. After the first 143 144 BOOK REVIEWS procession of knowing (Logos) is recognized as an immanent act1v1ty, 1t 1s identified with generation (Son). The second procession raises difficulties since love carries the lover outside himself. After early hesitations both Summae interpret the good loved as dynamically immanent in the lover as volition's term and fruit. Although both processions involve intellect and love "concomitantly" (I Sent.), Thomas uses the modes of knowing and loving (De Pot.) to establish their order as relations of origin. The two processions constitute a "circle" since God, understanding himself, conceives the Word through which he loves himself. This immanent "circulation" excludes every other procession. Anticipating question 41, Emery introduces notional acts as actions of the persons in generation and spiration, since the Trinity can be envisaged from many different angles. These acts are produced by the divine nature as their principle, not the divine will, as Arius imagined, although God's will is concomitant with his nature. "The power through which the Father begets must be designated as the divine nature itself in the person of the Father" (76). The chapter on relation traces its development from the Arian crisis to Augustine and Boethius; all relied on the Father-Son relation to reject a difference of nature between them. Relation can be either real, if both terms belong to the same "order," or "logical" (elswhere called "rational"). God's relation to the world is logical insofar as he is not enriched by it; it implies no indifference. Since Father and Son are consubstantial, they belong to the same order; their relation is real. While Thomas rejects Gilbert de la Porree's "extrinsic relation," condemned at Reims, for impugning God's simplicity, he borrows Albert's insight that relation has a "minimal degree of being" since Aristotle's relation does not inhere in a subject but involves "an ec...

THEOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY, CLASSICAL THEISM, AND “LIVED TIME” IN ANTJE JACKELÉN'S TIME AND ETERNITY

Abstract.Antje Jackelén's Time and Eternity successfully employs the method of correlation and a close study of the question of time to enter the dialogue between science and theology. Hermeneutical attention to language is a central element of this dialogue, but we must be aware that much science is untranslatable into ordinary language; it is when we get to the bigger metaphysical assumptions of science that true dialogue begins to happen. Thus, although the method of correlation is a useful way to approach this dialogue, there is not a strict equivalence in this relationship. Theology needs science more than science needs theology. In speaking of time and God we must keep in mind the relational nature of classical Christian theism, even in its most austere forms. We should not read Enlightenment ideas of God back into the classical Christian tradition or neglect the apophatic emphasis in Christian theism, which warned against assuming knowledge of the divine nature. God's relation to time always lies beyond our understanding. Studying the effects of either the Newtonian or Einsteinian concepts of time on our theological concepts should not detract our attention from the “lived time” that characterizes human experience. Consideration of the notion of time in the Madhyamaka Buddhist tradition reminds us that we cannot control the inner reality of time and that for humans time is something to be considered pragmatically.

The Rehabilitation of Myth: Enlightenment and Romanticism in Johann Gottfried Herder’s Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie

In literary, cultural and historical study of mythology, Johann Gottfried Herder is often portrayed as the bridge between the Enlightenment and the Romantic age. Myths for Herder were not only material for poetry, but the essential content of religion. Herder’s new understanding of myth and religion did not, however, signify a rejection of the Enlightenment principle of rationality. On the contrary, this understanding expanded and transformed his understanding of rationality. Herder regarded man’s mythopoetic activity as a genuine and natural form of man’s cognitive appropriation of the world. The personification of natural forces in the cultural creation of gods did not denote a return to irrationalism, but an extended form of rationality. According to Herder, the Bible had to be read as a human mythopoetic creation. The Old Testament, which depicts the special relation of God to His people, was in Herder’s <em>Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie</em> (1782–1783) the result of a poetic worldview characteristic of nomadic societies. Herder did question the validity of the Old Testament as a true source of religion and its usefulness even for modern man. Mythology did not have to be rejected as untrue imagination. Old Testament monotheism could be related to Spinoza’s pantheism and the Law of Moses could be seen as a precursor of the modern constitutional tradition.

THEISTIC NATURALISM AND “SPECIAL” DIVINE PROVIDENCE

Abstract.Although naturalistic perspectives are an important component of their accounts of divine action, most participants in the current dialogue between science and theology eschew a purely naturalistic model. They believe that certain events of divine providence require a special mode of divine action, over and above that inherent in naturalistic processes. The analogy of human providential action suggests, however, that a strong theistic naturalism can account for these events. This model does not depend on a particular notion of God's relationship to time and is not inherently implausible from a scientific perspective. Although it can be interpreted deistically, the model also is consonant with a nondeistic theology that may be described as involving a pansacramental or incarnational naturalism.

Deep Symbols and Mythic Imagination in the Hermeneutics of Creation Texts

This article reflects on creation through the lens of different traditions of Christian scholarship, and argues for a returning of the theology of creation to its rightful place at the centre of theological discourse about God's relationship with the world—intrinsically linked to the economy of salvation and not in opposition to it. It posits a necessary re-visioning of the relationship between humanity and other-than-human creation via a re-evaluation of the epistemological function of symbol and myth, and a re-examining of the governing principles within myth typologies and their implicit axioms within creation theology. The hermeneutical insights of philosopher Paul Ricoeur and biblical exegete Claus Westermann are brought into conversation. Building on the Ricoeurian epistemological axiom that ‘the symbol gives rise to thought’, the article avers the creation imaginary as a deep and formative symbol of God's free and loving purposes enacted through different and even contesting cultures and traditions and within the whole cosmos. In imaginative dialogical rereading, the community of faith can be open to God's free and loving relationship with all creation, thus also participating in the divine work of renewing the face of the earth.

Milton's Paradise Lost: Moral Education– By Margaret Olofson Thickstun

<i>Milton's</i> Paradise Lost: <i>Moral Education</i>– By Margaret Olofson Thickstun

Toward a Missional Theology of Participation: Ecumenical Reflections on Contributions to Trinity, Mission, and Church

The question concerning the Triune God's relationship to the world is constitutive for any understanding of a congregation's life in mission. A socially embodied theology of participation finds its condition of possibility in the life of the Triune God. This condition of possibility provides a theology of participation with an understanding of the life of the Triune God as a community of love in mutual relationality and genuine otherness. We propose as a ground for a theology of participation this more social trinitarian understanding, rather than an understanding of God as single acting Subject.