Animals and the Image of God in the Bible and Beyond

Abstract :  This article examines theological thought pertaining to the imago Dei doctrine in light of its relation to non-human animals within the framework of biblical, intertestamental Jewish, and early Christian writings. Evaluating theological understandings of human nature as they relate to and interact with theological and philosophical understandings of animals and animal nature, the author finds that the understandings of the image of God and dominion as they are ideally conceived in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are significantly more closely related to the ideas of human-animal continuity, compassion, and responsibility than to human rationality or the human immaterial immortal soul (and the entailed implication of animals' lack thereof).     

The Superego God

This article is an attempt to describe the structure of imaging God at the superego level At the superego level of religious development, this structure has three interrelated pieces: first, there is an adolescing self; second, there is fettered imaging; and third, there is the God the adolescing self is able to relate to in fettered imaging, and this is the Superego God. The article concludes with a brief look at how the adolescing self hears and speaks about the Superego God.The author acknowledges with gratitude the invaluable help in writing this article of Neil J. McGettigan, Religious Studies Department, Villanova University, Villanova, PA.     

The Power of God

Much contemporary analytic philosophy understands the power of God as belonging to the same logical space as the power of human beings: a power of efficient causation taken to the maximum limit. This anthropomorphic picture is often explicated in terms of God’s capacity to bring about any logically possible state of affairs, so-called omnipotence. D.Z. Phillips criticized this position in his last book, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God. I defend Phillips’s argument against recent criticism by William Hasker, contending that the omnipotence thesis is either false or trivial. I trace the superficial plausibility of the thesis to a Cartesian understanding of personal agency, in the light of which God’s power over the whole material world is an inflated version of our more modest power over our own bodies: it is the power of immaterial souls to control material phenomena. This comparison is expressed to perfection in the work of Richard Swinburne, my main target. I argue that by making God a force among other possible forces, in-principle able to be resisted, however feebly, by contrary forces, this picture reduces the Creator to a creature.     

The temporality of God

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

The faces of God

Continental Philosophy Review -