论波纳文图拉的范型论

在基督教的信仰中,上帝从虚无中创造了世界,世界万物对上帝有着绝对的依赖性.范型论是基督教的柏拉图-奥古斯丁主义的一种独特理论,其主旨就在于理解创造的本质,理解受造物与上帝的关系.波纳文图拉是中世纪与托马斯·阿奎那齐名的大神学家和哲学家,他将范型论作为理解创造本质的钥匙,将它看作是整个形而上学的核心.在思想上他对当时新兴的亚里士多德主义持批判接受的态度,而追随柏拉图-奥古斯丁主义路线;他通过对柏拉图理念论的改造,将奥古斯丁主义的范型理论发展到顶峰.     

爱·创造·和谐——从《创世记》1至3章谈基督徒的生态伦理观

圣经<创世记>开篇即说"起初,神创造天地"(创1:1),这是基督教信仰的起点,也是上帝自我启示的开始.在随后的经文中,向我们展示的是一个和谐、有序、充满爱的世界.     

爱·创造·和谐——从《创世记》1至3章谈基督徒的生态伦理观

圣经《创世记》开篇即说“起初,神创造天地”（创1：1）,这是基督教信仰的起点,也是上帝自我启示的开始。在随后的经文中,向我们展示的是一个和谐、有序、充满爱的世界。从《创世记》2章4节开始,重点集中在人身上,上帝将有着他的形象和样式的人安排在伊甸园里（参创2：8）,     

阿奎那关于存在与本质相区分的思想

中世纪哲学家托马斯.阿奎那在秉承亚里士多德和波埃修等人相关思想的基础上,提出了以存在论为核心的形而上学学说。阿奎那首先界定了"存在"的含义及其在对存在者的认识中所具有的首要的和基础性的地位;进而对"存在"和"本质"做出了明确的区分,认为它们是构成不同存在者的基本原则,是区分存在者(实体)三种基本类型——复合实体、受造的理智实体和第一存在——所赖以展开的基础。阿奎那的形而上学存在论虽然在中世纪的语境中具有明显的神学意蕴,但他关于存在与本质真实区分的观点、关于存在先于本质的看法,则对以往的形而上学认识模式产生了非常重要的变革作用,并对随后的形而上学存在论思想形成了深刻的影响。     

"尼西亚信经"系列(三)"我们信独一上帝……"

上帝信仰的重要性 上一期探讨了信仰是什么,今期开始探讨我们信仰的对象.<尼西亚信经>开首宣认"我们信独一上帝".这个信念是基督教任何信念的出发点:假如没有上帝,这个世界和人类就不会是被创造的,世界的存在目的和人生的终极意义也就无从谈起.     

上帝创造的主题

一、上帝创造的世界充满和谐 《创世记》1章至2章记载了上帝的创造。我们可以看到,上帝所创造的世界里,充满了和平。上帝与人、人与人、人与自然之间都是那么和谐、融洽。     

面对基督教:克尔凯郭尔和尼采的不同取向——兼论尼采对克尔凯郭尔的批判

本文以互读的方法试图揭示克尔凯郭尔与尼采面对基督教信仰所采取的截然相反的态度。克尔凯郭尔坚持生存者需要一个"全知全能"的上帝,而尼采认为上帝的"全知全能"性正是上帝要被杀死的原因;克尔凯郭尔极力张扬基督教人本主义思想,而尼采则批判基督教人本主义的虚妄性和奴隶本性。尼采认为,克尔凯郭尔的基督教上帝正是形而上学式思想的残余,因此克尔凯郭尔的哲学在根本上是一种"基督教哲学";是尼采彻底颠覆了形而上学,真正使哲学的关注点落实到了人的"生活世界"。     

开放的创造

正是从“希望”这个基本立场出发,莫尔特曼从末世论的观点对传统的创世说加以评论。他认为,上帝的创造不是封闭的体系,而是开放的体系。上帝的创造乃是开放的创造,伊甸园也是开放的乐园。上帝的创造是一个过程,     

爱留根纳的神学美学

作为西方极其重要的哲学家和基督教思想家,爱留根纳的独特之处,在于他从“无”或“不存在”的概念对上帝的理解和思考,这种空前深刻的考量集中体现为一种辩证关系:上帝既是绝对的隐匿,又是通过自我显现的创世!如何在绝对的分裂中保证上帝的独一和完善?如何使上帝在绝对超然的隐匿之无中自我显现和创世?这既是最重要的基督教神学问题,也是形而上学关切的根本。爱留根纳通过他的神学美学给出了天才的回答。     

“我们信独一上帝……”

上帝信仰的重要性上一期探讨了信仰是什么,今期开始探讨我们信仰的对象。《尼西亚信经》开首宣认“我们信独一上帝”。这个信念是基督教任何信念的出发点:假如没有上帝, 这个世界和人类就不会是被创造的,世界的存在目的和人生的终极意义也就无从谈起。假若没有上帝,耶稣就不可能是上帝的儿子,而只是一个普通人(无论他如     

Abstracts of the Major Articles

Aquinas tried to establish his metaphysics of creation theologically and philosophically. Crea- ting belongs to God alone, as means that it is God＇s divine action. For God, as to its essence, is nothing but pure act. The essence of creation is creatio ex nihilo, as means that God the Creator alone creates the entire world out of nothing. Since God is the giver of being, the first principle a- lone, creating is but to give being. And the creatures, as to their existence, were created by God. Although all the things come from God absolutely, they have their own participated being and good. As a new theological paradigm, Aquinas＂ metaphysics of creation was a philosophical ex- pression of the Bible sentence, namely, ＂In the beginning God creates heaven and earth. ＂     

The Gift of the Non aliud: Creation from Nothing as a Metaphysics of Abundance

Although the doctrine of creation from nothing may seem to instantiate a metaphysics of privation, in which the creature’s existence is ultimately one of humiliation, further reflection shows that this conclusion is not justified. For God to be over against the creature as an other who might threaten its autonomy in this way would imply a gap between God’s will and creaturely substance that is inconsistent with creation ex nihilo, according to which creatures are other than God, but God, as the exclusive ground of creaturely existence, is ‘Not other’ than they. This point disrupts the relationships of privation or dependence that mark inner‐worldly acts of creating. To be (always only partly) dependent on a created other is indeed to be revealed as less than sufficient unto oneself; but to be (wholly) dependent on the ‘Not other’ is to be fully sufficient to fulfil the promise of one’s existence.     

Hartshorne’s Dipolar Theism and the Mystery of God

Anselm said that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, but he believed that it followed that God is greater than can be conceived. The second formula—essential to sound theology—points to the mystery of God. The usual way of preserving divine mystery is the via negativa, as one finds in Aquinas. I formalize Hartshorne’s central argument against negative theology in the simplest modal system T. I end with a defense of Hartshorne’s way of preserving the mystery of God, which he locates in the actuality of God rather than in the divine existence or essence. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.     

Some remarks on the re-building of the category of essence and the reflective modernity

If modernity is manifested as essentialism, postmodernity is manifested as anti-essentialism. Modernity is, in essence, human beings’ discovery of their own power, and is based on rational knowledge that has grasped the essence of things. In fact, in the discourse system of modernity, the various concepts of “essence” connote nothing but people’s imaginative constructions and rational conjectures about objects. In the past, our order, be it internal or external, was in essence guaranteed by God. Afterwards, all “essences”, as essences, must rationally prove the reason for their existence. In the postmodern context and discourse system, God, and also the “human being” who has created essence, has “died”. We should not simply resume the belief in traditional essence, but should reconstruct, on the basis of a full understanding of the intellectual meaning of postmodernity’s challenges, some historicity, practicality, and the concept of essence that accords with the historical as well as communicative rationality. We must realize that the essence of things is the essence of particular things in a particular stage of development, internally containing infinite differences and variety. Only things with postmodern traits contain modernity, and only the concept of essence that conceives difference accords with time.     

Anselm's Quiet Radicalism

It is characteristic of Anselm to adopt the formulations of his authorities while giving them meanings of his own, hiding conceptual disagreement by means of verbal echoes. Anselm's considerable originality sometimes goes unnoticed because readers see the standard Augustinian language and miss the fact that Anselm uses it to state un-Augustinian views. One striking instance of Anselm's quiet radicalism is his understanding of free choice and the fall. He seems to uphold standard Augustinian privation theory when he affirms that injustice is merely an absence of justice where justice should be; he seems also to be committed to the standard Augustinian view that everything that has being is created by God. A closer examination, however, shows that Anselm clearly has qualms about whether privation theory can do all of the work to which Augustine had tried to put it; and Anselm actually affirms that every free choice has being and yet is not created by God. I begin by showing that Anselm regards unjust acts as being ontologically on a par with just acts. Injustice itself is nothing, a privation; but an unjust volition is something, and indeed no less something than a just volition. Moreover, creatures have their volitions solely from themselves, not from God. So Anselm must deny that God is the creator of everything that has being: free choices have being, and creatures are the sole causes of those choices. Anselm explicitly draws this radical conclusion, but he does so quietly, without fanfare, taking care to provide ways in which he can still say all the traditional things but mean something radical.     

DIVINE NECESSITY AND CREATED CONTINGENCE IN AQUINAS

It is becoming increasingly more common in Christian theism to conclude that the classical predication of a necessary God who interacts with contingent creation is logical inconsistency. This criticism is especially made by Process theists, but joining with them have been proponents of Open theism as well as others who seek to more closely unite God with the contingency in creation. It is feared that a God who is the transcendent cause of all that exists is unable to relate to creation without necessarily determining it. Yet Thomas Aquinas was not unaware of the potential difficulty in maintaining both a necessary God and created contingency and postulated a solution to the dialectic that fits comfortably within the classical synthesis. This paper examines Aquinas' solution against the charge of incoherence and finds that far from being inconsistent, it coherently succeeds in reconciling the dialectic.     

Trinity and Creation

A theology of creation requires clarity about trinitarian doctrine, especially the relation of the one divine essence to the three persons, the distinction between immanent and transitive acts, and the indivisibility of God's outer works. The triune God is one undivided essence in an irreducible threefold personal modification. The persons of the godhead are distinguished from each other by mutual relations and by each person's proper characteristics; these relations constitute God's immanent perfection anterior to creation. The work of creation is a non-necessary, novel and voluntary work of the Trinity. As an outer work it demonstrates God's unity: the work of creation is not divisible into three distinct actions. But distinct and eminent appropriation of specific acts to specific persons is permissible if each person is understood as a mode of the one divine essence. Creation is thus a common work of the undivided three-in-one; there are not three creators, but three who create.     

BEMBA MYSTICO-RELATIONALITY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE (AGI) PARTICIPATION IN IMAGO DEI

This article interrogates the challenge artificial general intelligence (AGI) poses to religion and human societies, in general. More specifically, it seeks to respond to “Singularity”—when machines reach a level of intelligence that would put into question the privileged position humanity enjoys as imago Dei. Employing the Bemba notion of mystico-relationality in dialogue with the concepts of the “created co-creator” and Christ the Key, it argues for the possibility of AI participating in imago Dei. The findings show that imaging is a fluid, participatory activity that aims at likeness, but also social harmony. It also argues that God is the only original creator, humans are created creators, and that every aspect of visible existence, including AI, is inherently divine imaging. However, strong imaging is only attainable based on the only One and True Image—Christ, whose union of the material and the divine means that all creation can image, excluding nothing, even AI.