Secular Theology Research Articles

Against theological readings of Sartre

AbstractThis essay addresses ‘the God‐haunted Atheist paradox’ in Sartre's early philosophy and argues against a series of efforts to show that Sartre maintains a ‘secular theology’. It shows that if Sartre's ontology is correct, the God of ‘classic theism’ cannot possibly exist. It argues against two sophisticated efforts to show that theological influences infiltrate Sartre's early ontology and permeate his moral psychology. It also rejects the claim that Sartre's (Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946/2007, Yale University Press) distinction between secular and religious existentialism ‘has no basis in fact’. It shows that Sartre appropriates religious language in order to give debunking secular explanations for religious phenomena and that he inverts traditional Christian values. It concludes that Sartre is an anti‐theologian.

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

Martin Luther’s Theory of “Two kingdoms” and Its Practical Dimension

Luther’s “theory of two kingdoms” outlines “the kingdom of God” governed by “spiritual government” and “the kingdom of the world” governed by the “secular government”. It also emphasizes the obedience to the secular rulers regardless of their tyranny. Luther’s solution to the problem of their tyranny made him controversial, especially after the oppression of civilians and Jews by the extreme power politics in Auschwitz tragedy in World War II. Some scholars argue that it has kept religion indifferent to society and politics. To address this issue, Niebuhr and Moltmann proposed a political theology that focuses on the reality of human conditions in this earthly life. Latin American liberation theology further applied secular theology to practice, but it eventually shifted to spiritual construction in the face of the spiritual crisis of the loss of theological identity. The relationship between the two kingdoms can be explored from the perspective of spirit (πνευματικῶς pneumatikoos), soul(ψυχήν psychēn) and flesh (σαρκίνοις sarkinois). This paper aims to demonstrate the inherent affinity between the two kingdoms and respond to the criticism of the “two kingdoms” theory.

Political Theology Without Religion

There is a constant tension that exists within each individual. This is the struggle between the hidden ideologies and fixed ideas which enslave the individual and the need to rid themselves of them. It is through these that implicit religion forms. We require, in order to counteract this, a new theology, a secular theology – one which emphasizes the individual. In order to bring about a new theology, it is necessary to reconsider the philosophies of Adam Weishaupt, Louis Althusser, and Max Stirner and bring them into the modern discussion of implicit religion. This paper aims to bring together these understudied philosophers as well as contemporary leaders in political theology in order to reimagine the potential of the individual to rid themselves from fixed ideas and to realize their potential.

An Enhancement of Human Relation Integrating Buddhist Principles for Administrators of Primary Schools in Thailand

The purpose of the research article was to propose the enhancement of human relation integrating Buddhist principles for administrators of primary schools in Thailand. Mixed methods research was used for research design. Questionnaires was used for data collection from 390 administrators and teachers in primary schools. Interview form was designed for interviewing 24 key informants, including focus group discussion with 9 experts. Qualitative data was analyzed by using content analysis whereas descriptive statistics was used to analyze quantitative data analysis. Results indicated that the enhancement of human relation integrating Buddhist principles for administrators of primary schools in Thailand can be developed through 3 aspects consisting of 1) personal characteristics, 2) understanding others, and 3) working with others, and analysis results showed at a high level in all aspects. For the integrating of human relations with Buddhist principles for administrators in primary schools in Thailand composed of 1) the principles of human relations for school administrators. In communication, both formal and informal between the school administrators and teachers, students and the community in order to work together to achieve the objectives divided into 3 areas which were (1) personal characteristics, (2) understanding of others, and (3) working with other. 2) Buddhist principles used in school administration, it is the Buddhist Dhamma principle which is integrated with human relations principles, consisting of 7 things which are (1) Kalyanmittita, (2) Yonisomanasikara, (3) Gracing virtues II, (4) Honesty III, (5) Secular Theology IV, (6) Sangahavatthu IV, and (7) Sappurisadhamma VII. The guidelines for the enhancement of human relation integrating Buddhist principles for administrators of primary schools in Thailand focused on 3 aspects: 1) Principles of human relations, 2) Buddhist principles used in school administration, 3) principles of school administration. The operation enhancement can be divided into 4 aspects of the school, which were (1) academic administration, (2) budget administration, (3) human resource management, and (4) general administration. The body of knowledge from this research can be divided into 3 areas as follows: Personal characteristics by integrating Buddhist principles. In understanding others is to be able to integrate with the Buddhist principles in 3 topics which are Kanlayanamitta, Yonisomanasikara and Gracing virtues II. In working with others is able to integrate with the Buddhist principles with 2 principles which are Gharavasa Dhamma IV and Sangahavatthu IV.

A Foray into (Study of?) Christian African Political Theology

ABSTRACT This article is a theoretical exploration of the concept of African Political Theology (APT). Consequently, part of what I do in this article is to illuminate the particular ways in which APT negotiates the tension between the secular political theology received from the western traditions and the materialist political spirituality that animates much of the African religio-political context. Specifically, I argue that APT decenters the state in African politics and, in its stead, re-centers the everyday particularity of African historical reality with specific reference to justice. To that end, I posit that African Political Theology positions itself as a specific notion of African histories and religions rather than simply an extension or expansion of the western notion of Political Theology.

Epistemological critique of “Islamic reason” in the neomodernist project of Mohammed Arkoun

The article deals with analyzing the historical epistemology of “Islamic reason” as it is developed in the works of the French philosopher Mohammed Arkoun. The key concepts comprising the supporting framework of Arkoun’s theory are clarified. Special attention is given to the problem of historical interrelation of religion and violence, the role of “dogmatic enclosure” in legitimizing the religious violence and the “secular theology” as a possible antidote that could preserve the religion from being instrumentalized by different political actors. In Arkoun’s view, one can reach the unthought of Islamic religious tradition by consciously resorting to modern historical-anthropological, linguistic and sociological knowledge. This appeal makes it possible to reveal a special “regime of truth” and the attitude that have accompanied Islamic reason throughout history, and, therefore, to reach new horizons of thought. This whole process may be called criticism of the Islamic mind. According to Arkoun, the “deconstruction” of traditional structures performed in the course of this criticism is not identical with the destruction of the Islamic mind par excellence, but coincides with the emancipation of its content within the framework of the emergent reason, that is, with the demonstration of its inclusive and truly all-human — humanistic — potential. In the conclusion of the article, both the theoretical scientific and practical existential significance of reaching the unthought of Islamic tradition is noted.

NO PAIN, NO GAIN: FIGHTING AND OVERCOMING IN SPORT

Through a mythological-theological critic of struggle and overcoming in sport, we pretend to defend a thesis based on suffering as an educational formative process, as a human development process, either in a institutionalized environment, such as schools, or not. Howsoever it is important to clarify that suffering does not refer to punishment, physical violence or common sense suffering, it means the little (or not) frustrations understood by Freud in his sexual theory, libido, theory of pleasure, as part of human development (LASTORIA, 2017a). By critique, we understand “the denial of the established norm, the anti-positivism, the search for a fairer and more humane society.” (PUCCI, 2017, p.01). The “mythological-theological” will be based in authors from the DEI school of secular theology (Department of Ecumenical Investigation, in San Jose, Costa Rica). For being ambiguous, struggle and suffering in sport can reproduce the same mythical-religious sacrificial foundation demanded by neoliberal capitalism overconsumption, an unethical, fatalistic, hedonistic, selfish foundation, or promote the construction of a resilient personality, a fighter personality, a human being.

Political theology; revising the relation of theology and the political issue with the emphasis on the narratives of Karl Schmidt

In this paper, three commonly used concepts of political theology in different periods of the history of Western thoughts are briefly reviewd. The golden age of political thought in the west called most of the politics functions for theology as political theology. The political issue is considered as an autonomous and independent subject, which reserves the ability for itself to change theology. With the advent of Christianity and its influence on the political and governance pillars, this equation was reversed for centuries, and politics,as the theology servant,was identified as an ancestral affair. It is only in the modern times that Weber, by stating that science should be away from value, created a bedrock for political theology, in which it was not necessary to be a theologist to reach theology. In this context, Schmidt serves the concept of political theology in a sociological sense to serving to depict that the modern state, alongside with its preceding times, is a theological concept that has survived by omitting secular theology.

Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Religion within the Context of Human Security and Authenticity in Vito Mancuso’s Lay Secular Theology

SummaryVito Mancuso, one of Italy’s most famous intellectuals and author of best-selling books on religion – such as

Religion, Toleranz, Rassismus im Wirkungsspektrum der Philosophie John Deweys – mit einem Seitenblick auf 100 Jahre „Demokratie und Erziehung“

Religion, tolerance and democracy in the philosophy of John Dewey are at the centre of this contribution, with specific attention tho their contexts. In view of the escalating violence against Afro-Americans in the USA, which produces counterviolence, the question arises: What was the significance of tolence in Dewey’s conception of democracy? How successful was Dewey in using his pragmatic instrumentalism as a tool against open racism in American society? To answer these questions it is necessary to look at the origin and reception of pragmatism and the history of tolerance. A hundered years after the publication of „Democracy and Education, the the attempt of an answer leads to the realistic conclusion that Dewey’s educational philosophy promised more than it achieved. Two theses are discusssed: „Democracy and Education“ can only be fully understood against the background of a unity of democracy and religion in Dewewy’s early work. Secondly: Dewey’s social philosophy is a secular theology. While it could hardly reach the „color problem“ of American society, it was able to strengthen the belief in democracy.

Secular Theology as a Challenge for Jewish Atheists

Secular Theology as a Challenge for Jewish Atheists

Debating virginity-testing cultural practices in South Africa: a Taylorian reflection

In January 2016, a perennial row over virginity testing was renewed, pitting traditional adherents of Zulu cosmology and cultural practices against human rights advocates. The paper does not position itself within this debate. Rather, it adopts a meta-perspective in order to understand why the debate arises in the first instance. Using Charles Taylor as a guide, it argues that the pre-modern porous self in the West was innately tied to a cosmology. The self was porous precisely because it saw itself as part of that cosmology. But with the onset of modernity, the self becomes increasing ‘buffered’, as a self that does not belong to that cosmology but is self-owned and self-regulated. This paper contends that the practice of virginity testing has to be seen in the light of the porous conception of the self and opposition to the practice in the light of the buffered conception. And as such, the opposition at base is seeking to preserve its specific view of the world against a practice it sees as undermining its implicit ‘theological’ perspective. Keywords : Virginity testing, Zulu culture, Charles Taylor, cosmology, human rights, social imaginary, secular theology

Engaging Bonhoeffer: The Impact and Influence of Bonhoeffer’s Life and Thought ed. by Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

Reviewed by: Engaging Bonhoeffer: The Impact and Influence of Bonhoeffer’s Life and Thought ed. by Matthew D. Kirkpatrick Mark Mattes Engaging Bonhoeffer: The Impact and Influence of Bonhoeffer’s Life and Thought. Edited by Matthew D. Kirkpatrick. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016. xxiv + 351 pp. Kirkpatrick, lecturer at the University of Oxford, assembles fifteen high-quality essays that assess the impact of Bonhoeffer’s thinking on Christian ethics. All essays assume some familiarity not only with Bonhoeffer’s thought and Bonhoeffer scholarship but also with trends in Christian ethics over the last eighty years. The book merits the attention of thinkers both within and outside of Bonhoeffer studies. Keith Clements shows how Bonhoeffer was mediated to the English-speaking world through two English theologians, John A. T. Robinson, and Ronald Gregor Smith. Robinson used Bonhoeffer’s concept of “religionless Christianity,” in which faith is no longer privatized or used to legitimate power in order to develop a Christian theology for a secular age (3). In contrast, Smith utilized Bonhoeffer’s [End Page 463] affirmation of human agency in order to affirm humanity’s contribution to history in opposition to the Platonic favoritism of the eternal over the temporal (7). For Smith, that the transcendent is to be met in this world, not the world to come (8), counters a secularistic reductionism that rules out a transcendent dimension to reality altogether. Eleanor McLaughlin explores Bonhoeffer’s impact on the “Death of God” theologians in the mid-twentieth century, such as Thomas Altizer, for whom God was not to be found in church but instead in the secular world (33). Altizer could draw from Bonhoeffer’s conviction that a “suffering God” disbarred from the world is the God who can help a humanity “come of age” (39). Tom Greggs outlines the complicated theological rapport between Karl Barth and Bonhoeffer. In spite of Bonhoeffer’s charge that Barth is a revelational “positivist,” that is, God is known solely through his revelatory word and not in nature or history, each theologian appreciated the other’s work (61). Robin Lovin compares Bonhoeffer’s ethics with Reinhold Niebuhr’s. For Niebuhr, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is not do-able, as Bonhoeffer suggests, but instead is an “impossible ideal” which “inspires and judges us” (70). Matthew Kirkpatrick compares Bonhoeffer with Joseph Fletcher’s “situation ethics.” Unlike Fletcher who believes some good can always be wrestled from every situation, no matter how bad, Bonhoeffer urges us, if need be, to disobey the law, become guilty, if one can thereby help the neighbor (101). Guido de Graaff compares Bonhoeffer and Stanley Hauerwas. While both reject a foundationalist approach to ethics which wants to establish Christian ethics in some neutral, broader stance than what faith provides, Bonhoeffer’s ethics is less amenable to the virtue ethics Hauerwas espouses. Both however sense the at times tragic implications of Christian behavior. For pacifist Hauerwas, non-violence can expose others to suffering while for Bonhoeffer the life of discipleship is costly (136). Geffrey Kelly and Matthew Kirkpatrick note that Bonhoeffer laid the foundations for Liberation theology when he claimed that in Jesus Christ God became a “beggar among beggars,” an “outcaste among outcastes,” and denied “cheap grace” (155). In consequence, for Liberation theologians, to know God is tantamount to doing justice (157). H. Martin Rumscheidt explores how Dorothee Soelle drew out the implications of Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” [End Page 464] in order to develop a more thorough-going secular theology sensitive to feminist concerns. Christine Schliesser notes Bonhoeffer’s impact on Jürgen Moltmann for whom a truly loving God is one who suffers (198). Philip Ziegler charts the impact of Bonhoeffer on Wolf Krötke, a theologian active in East Germany, who highlighted the Bonhoefferinan conviction that God gains ground and power in the world by being powerless (217). Christopher Holmes shows how Eberhard Jüngel articulated the ontological implications of the Trinitarian theology assumed by Bonhoeffer (236). Peter Frick indicates that Gerhard Ebeling, with Bonhoeffer, sought a theology that engages the “real world,” though accentuating Luther’s law and gospel distinction, which Bonhoeffer seldom did (246ff ). Brian Gregor shows how Paul Ricoeur appropriated Bonhoeffer by affirming that the God “of...

Post‐Secularism, Secular Theology, and the Names of the Real

AbstractThis article disputes the common view of religious and secular as oppositional terms. Our contemporary world is post‐secularist, because secularism is a modern ideology that imagines a strict separation of the religious and the political, where religion becomes a purely private affair. This situation is compromised by the “return” of religion in political terms. Constructively, following Jacques Lacan, we can say that secular theology concerns the Real; and with François Laruelle, we can think about a non‐theology that complements what he calls non‐philosophy. Finally, I speculate on three names of the Real: energy, capital, and nomos.

“In spite of the death of God”: Gabriel Vahanian’s secular theology

AbstractWhat if secularity is a theological condition? What if secularity is the theological and societal experience of both biblical religion and the death of God? Beginning with The Death of God (1961), for half a century Gabriel Vahanian (1927–2012) developed a theory of secularity expressed as a distinctly theological saeculum: the shared world of human experience. Vahanian’s saeculum was positioned against what he identified as an “idolatrous concern about secular matters” (196) that resulted in “the idolization of religion” (196) expressed in technological religiosity representing “an unmistakable abdication of faith to reason—or unreason” (197). As outlined in No Other God (1966), Vahanian’s concern was with atheistic theologies that took the death of God and in his view denied it, “by sublimating it into a newfangled soeteriological concept” (4). Vahanian’s theological saeculum gives rise to a radical secular theology that begins in an iconoclasm of the self, includes an iconoclasm of the culture in which one finds oneself, and continually seeks a way to restate the biblical tradition into a post-Christian world. In his last book, Theopoetics of the Word (2014), Vahanian wrote, “You do theology not against the background of the death of God but in spite of it” (121). I have taken this as the epigraph for the discussion that follows. In this I write a radical secular theology via Vahanian’s Praise of the Secular, guided by my approach I term an annotative hermeneutics that arises from an engagement with the weak thought of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. The radical, secular theology that follows occurs against the background of the death of God, the death of God announced by Nietzsche and the death of God so thoughtfully, so faithfully, traversed by Vahanian. It is a secular theology of annotative hermeneutics that arises from Vahanian but is not Vahanian’s. Rather it is where Vahanian’s secular theology may lead us. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.

Radical theologies

AbstractRadical theology as a field encompasses the intersections of constructive theology, secular theology, death-of-God theologies, political theologies, continental thought and contemporary culture. It expresses an inter-disciplinary engagement and approach dedicated to redefining the very terms of theology as a concept and practice. This article provides an introductory overview to a multi- and inter-disciplinary thematic collection dedicated to thinking in this area.

Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh: A Secular Theology for the Global City. By Sharon V.Betcher. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pp. x + 302. $28.00.

Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh: A Secular Theology for the Global City. By Sharon V.Betcher. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pp. x + 302. $28.00.

Teologia wobec wymogu pastoralności

Pod adresem współczesnej teologii stawia się wiele postulatów. Najważniejszymi z nich są naukowość i pastoralność. Z jednej więc strony postuluje się, by teologia była staranna, systematyczna i uporządkowana pod względem naukowości. Chodzi w tym przypadku o jasne określenie jej natury i metody, które konstytuują każdą dziedzinę badawczą jako naukę, a potem konsekwentne kierowanie się wypracowaną metodą. Postulat uzupełniający dotyczy takiego naukowego uprawiania teologii, które pozwoli określić jej miejsce w stosunku do innych nauk. Z drugiej strony formułuje się postulat większej pastoralności teologii. Pojawia się on niemal powszechnie w kręgach związanych z formacją kapłańską. Jest to zrozumiałe, ponieważ studia teologii mają przygotować do pełnienia posługi duszpasterskiej. W kręgach świeckich studentów teologii mówi się raczej o „praktyczności” teologii, chociaż w gruncie rzeczy chodzi o to samo. W niniejszym artykule zostają omówione wspomniane tutaj postulaty na gruncie refleksji nad przedmiotem teologii, jej naturą i metodą, nad niektórymi treściami wykładu teologicznego oraz nad jakością duchową tego wykładu. Szczególna uwaga zostaje zwrócona na możliwości pastoralne teologii, ale formułowane w świetle wyraźnego przyjmowania kryterium jej naukowości.

The Fountain: A Secular Theology – By Don Cupitt

The Fountain: A Secular Theology – By Don Cupitt