Bullinger and Zwingli on the Salvation of the Heathen

Abstract

Zwingli's vision of heaven in Exposition of the Faith (1531), published by Bullinger in 1536, included several named heathen. This provoked Luther's accusation in 1544 that Zwingli was himself heathen. Bullinger defended Zwingli against this charge in 1545. The article examines the arguments used by Zwingli here and elsewhere and those that Bullinger used in his defence. It shows both the common ground between them and the differences, especially in relation to election.     

The Interpretation of the Bible in Bullinger's Early Works

Abstract

This article notes Luther's, Melanchthon's, and Augustine's influence, but also Bullinger's independence in interpretation. It explores Bullinger's rejection of the view that Scripture is obscure and needs the Fathers to interpret it. His underlying position is that Scripture interprets Scripture. Other principles include the comparison of passages of Scripture, interpreting a few texts by many, obscure texts by clear ones, the necessity for languages, the use of rhetoric, the covenant as the sum and scope of Scripture, an emphasis on the natural sense, and the contribution of secular disciplines. A concluding section considers briefly Bullinger's later use of essentially five principles     

Martin Bucer's Assessment of the Canon of the Mass in the Era of the Religious Colloquies

Abstract

In the early part of his reforming career Martin Bucer shared Luther's and Zwingli's contempt for the Canon of the Mass. However, in the era of the religious Colloquies (1540-1546) Bucer argued that it was the practices and theological commentaries associated with the Canon—not the Canon itself—that supported the debased theology of Eucharistic sacrifice prevailing under the papacy. Bucer maintained that the genuine meaning of the Canon was to be found in the writing of the Fathers, the liturgies of the Eastern church and, indeed, in Aquinas’ Summa. Bucer seems to have hoped that the Catholics would admit communion under both kinds and abolish the private Mass in exchange for the retention of a ‘suitably interpreted’ Canon. An outline of this interpretation can be seen in Article Twenty of the Worms-Regensburg Book (1540-1541). It was further developed in Constans dejensio (1543) and De vera et falsa caenae dominicae administratione (1546) both written in the aftermath of the first Colloquy of Regensburg (1541).     

Evolution and Providence: Discovering Creation as Carmen Dei

Abstract

Bonaventure describes the natural world as carmen Dei (song of God) that humanity should be able to detect through philosophical wisdom. Many contemporary evolutionary biologists, however, present the natural world as an argument against God's existence. Evolution is deemed incompatible with Providence and natural causes competitively exclusive of divine ones. These arguments against God are not proper to science, but to scientism. This purported conflict between evolution and faith is overcome by respecting the epistemological boundaries among science, philosophy, and theology, understanding creation as ontological dependence, and having a non-contrastive divine transcendence, in which God's transcendence does not oppose God's immanence.     

Internalism, (Super)fragile Reasons,and the Conditional Fallacy

Abstract

David Sobel (2001) objects to Bernard Williams's internalism, the view that an agent has a reason to perform an action only if she has some motive that will be served by performing that action. Sobel is an unusual challenger in that he endorses neo-Humean subjectivism, ‘the view that it is the agent's subjective motivational set that makes it the case that an agent does or does not have a reason to φ’ (219). Sobel's objection in fact arises from this very commitment. Internalism, he says, is incompatible with the best subjectivist accounts of reasons for action—accounts that suggest that there are what he calls fragile reasons and perhaps also superfragile ones, both of which allegedly provide for counterexamples to internalism. I argue that such reasons do not in fact threaten internalism. I then briefly explore whether internalism is vulnerable to a related charge—that it commits the conditional fallacy.     

Bucer as Mediator in the 1532 Kempten Eucharistic Controversy

Abstract

Bucer's intervention in the Kempten eucharistic controversy provides a hitherto little-studied example of the Strasbourg Reformer's understanding of the Lord's Supper in its practical, local implications during the years immediately prior to the Wittenberg Concord of 1536. Only months after being accused of ‘Lutheranism’ by his friends in Constance and Augsburg for having claimed the compatibility of the Augsburg Confession with his own Confessio Tetrapolitana at the Schweinfurt Assembly, Bucer made his influence felt in Kempten in such a way that the ‘Lutheran’ pastors there were forced to leave and the position of the local ‘Zwinglian’ pastor was consolidated, much to the chagrin of Luther's supporters. It would be entirely erroneous, however, to describe the Strasbourg Reformer's eucharistic position at this time as ‘Zwinglian'. Bucer's understanding the Lord's Supper, despite having appropriated certain formal elements of Luther's eucharistic interpretation during the early 1530s, remained distinct from both the Wittenberg Reformer's and Zwingli's position on this issue.     

Fate,Fiction and the Future

Abstract

Some fictions, it seems, represent the future as closed, in the sense that some future-tensed propositions are true in those fictions. Yet it is surprisingly difficult to accommodate this plausible thesis within an account of truth in fiction. A number of putative examples of closed fictional futures are discussed (Macbeth, Oedipus, Time and the Conways, The Time Machine) and the problems encountered in reconciling them with various accounts of truth in fiction (David Lewis', Gregory Currie's, Alex Byrne's) elaborated. Connections are drawn between metaphysical views on time and theories of fiction, and an attempt is made to show how the tenseless theory of time (roughly, the denial that time flows) can illuminate accounts of fictional truth, and in particular the issue of how there can be true beliefs about what will happen in a fiction.     

Jean Piaget,the Child's Conception of Physical Causality (Victoria Hazlitt)

Abstract

Jean Piaget. The Child's Conception of Physical Causality. (Trans. by M. Gabain.) London: Kegan Paul; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. Pp. viii+309.     

Measuring the impact on relatives of caring for people with Alzheimer's disease: Quality of life,burden and well-being

Abstract

This study compared key correlates of caregiver stress in 50 Alzheimer's disease patients and their primary caregivers. in relation to three outcome measures - perceived burden, psychological well-being, and quality of life (QoL). These were evaluated using the Zarit Burden Interview. General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-30), and Schedule for the Evaluation of Individual QoL (SEIQoL-DW) respectively. Informal social support was evaluated on Vaux's Social Support Appraisal Scale. Patients' cognitive. functional, and behavioural status were rated on Mini-Mental State Examination, Blessed-Roth Dementia Scale. and Baumgarten Dementia Behaviour Disturbance Scale respectively. Standardised multiple regression analysis was used to compare the outcome measures. In this model burden was highly related to behaviour disturbance. and also to social support (adjusted R² = 0.45). Well-being was significantly related to behaviour disturbance, and also to functional status (adjusted R² = 0.40). With regard to QoL the model performed poorly as most of the variance in QoL was not accounted for by the model (adjusted R² = 0.14). These findings highlight differences in factors determining caregiver QoL. burden and well-being.     

A Conflict in Norms; Metric Versus English Units of Linear Measurement

Summary

This study examined the relationship between incoming information and a person's attitude. The hypothesis tested was that information operates on the cognitive component of attitude which, if sufficiently reorganized, occasions change in the affective component, and that this, if sufficiently large, finally actuates the behavioral component. This hierarchical tricomponent hypothesis was tested by

(a) establishing through factor analysis that cognition, affect, and behavior (each represented by 10 Likert-type statements) were unique attitude components, and thus that dynamic consistency among them is attributable to linkages and not duplication;

(b) establishing through χ² analysis that observed triadic change patterns were significantly more consistent with the hypothesized hierarchy than chance alone would allow;

(c) establishing through a comparison of conditional component changes that the direction of the critical dyadic change patterns were consistent with the hypothesized hierarchy: namely, that cognitive change preceded affective change, and that it, in turn, preceded behavioral change;

(d) establishing through a comparison of group means that the amount of cognitive and affective change was significantly greater for those Ss experiencing affective and behavioral change, respectively, than for those Ss not experiencing such change;

(e) establishing through the use of 25 different change criteria that the foregoing results are relatively stable, and not an artifact of any specific criterion of “attitude change.”     

Disagreement,Credences, and Outright Belief

This paper addresses a largely neglected question in ongoing debates over disagreement: what is the relation, if any, between disagreements involving credences (call them credal disagreements) and disagreements involving outright beliefs (call them full disagreements)? The first part of the paper offers some desiderata for an adequate account of credal and full disagreement. The second part of the paper argues that both phenomena can be subsumed under a schematic definition which goes as follows: A and B disagree if and only if the accuracy conditions of A's doxastic attitude are such that, if they were fulfilled, this would ipso facto make B's doxastic attitude inaccurate, or vice‐versa.     

Perception, Causation, and Supervenience

What relation between an experience and a physical object makes the experience a perception of the object?¹ One common answer is that it is a certain kind of causal relation. The idea is that to perceive an object is just to undergo an experience appropriately caused by the object. This answer is incorrect. The reason is that perceiving an object does not supervene on the causal connection the object bears to the perceiver's experience. Whether or not a person perceives an object depends, in part, on conditions that could obtain or fail to obtain without variation in the causal processes (if any) by which the object causes the person's experience. In what follows, I explain and defend these claims.     

RELIGION AND FRANCIS BACON'S SCIENTIFIC UTOPIANISM

Francis Bacon often is depicted as a patriarch of modernity who promotes human rational action over faith in divine Providence and as a secular humanitarian who realized that improvement of the human condition depended on human action and not on God's saving acts in history. Bacon's New Atlantis is usually described as a “scientific utopia” because its ideal order, harmony, and prosperity are the result of the investigations of nature conducted by the members of Solomon's House. I challenge these characterizations by showing that Bacon's so‐called scientific utopianism is grounded in his religious convictions that his age was one of Providential intervention and that he was God's agent for an apocalyptic transformation of the human condition. I examine the centrality of these religious themes in two of his philosophical works, The Advancement of Learning and The Great Instauration, which are well known for setting out Bacon's critique of the state of learning and for presenting the principles of his epistemology. Analysis of The Advancement of Learning demonstrates Bacon's conviction that his reform of natural philosophy was part of a Providentially guided, twofold restoration of the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of God. Examination of The Great Instauration reveals that Bacon sees his age as one of apocalyptic transformation of the human condition that restores humanity to a prelapsarian state. Analysis of the New Atlantis shows that utopian perfection can be achieved only through a combination of right religion and the proper study of nature. Moreover, when the “scientific” work of Solomon's House is recontextualized within the religious themes of salvation and deliverance that permeate the New Atlantis, the full scope of Bacon's “scientific utopianism” can be seen, and this project is not the one usually portrayed in scholarly treatments. Bacon's program for rehabilitating humanity and its relation to nature is not a secular, scientific advance through which humanity gains dominion over nature and mastery of its own destiny but rather one guided by divine Providence and achieved through pious human effort.     

Contents of Volume 88 (2007)

Abstract

Molly R. Harrower, Editor Recent Advances in Diagnostic Psychological Testing. New York: 1951, 131 pp. Reviewed by Lawrence Edwin Abt, Ph.D.

Hellersberg, Elisabeth F. The Individual's Relation to Reality in Our Culture. Springfield, Ill. Charles C. Thomas, 1950. Pp X + 130. Reviewed by John N. Buck     

Oliva Sabuco de Nantes and her Nueva Filosofia: a new philosophy of human nature and the interaction between mind and body

ABSTRACT

The main objective of the New Philosophy was to ‘improve the lives of people and nations in part by improving medical practice’. To this end, Oliva Sabuco sought to improve humankind's knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of medicine while taking experiential practices into account. She suggested that a variety of procedures (pharmaceutical, emotional and therapeutic) should be adopted to maintain and restore harmony between the mind and body. Oliva Sabuco sought to promote health and prevent disease by expanding our knowledge of the interrelationship between mind and body; the ultimate goal was to understand the body's function and form in order to promote inner harmony and thus health. The influence of classical traditions in moral and natural philosophy, medicine, and cosmography is unmistakable in Oliva Sabuco's text, yet she synthesized these traditions, disagreed with fundamental aspects of them, and transformed them in a holistic philosophy of human nature that is part of a larger view of the cosmos and mankind's place in it.     

The Renaissance Ethics of Music: Singing,Contemplation and Musica Humana

Abstract

This article considers Calvin's late work, the Harmony of the Pentateuch (1563). It takes account of previous attempts to illuminate Calvin's purpose in this production by De Boer, Blacketer, Thiel, Wright and Balserak. There follows a consideration of Calvin's view of the ceremonial law for Christians, and a distinction is drawn between the Old Testament cult and the Old Testament law concerning that cult. It finally takes soundings from the work itself to argue that for Calvin, the timeless spirit of worship could be understood behind its outward expression. What matters is that God is seen to call believers out of the flow of everyday occurrence into worship.