ON THE TENACITY OF CHRISTIAN ANTI‐JUDAISM1

Joachim of Fiore's three ages of Father, Son and Spirit demonstrated that the supersessionist gambit Christianity had introduced against Judaism is a logic any successor can employ. Modernity (cf. modo, “now”) is constituted by a relentless supersessionist logic; the modern issue is less supersessionism than a conflict of supersessionisms. Christianity has repeatedly overspiritualized God's “bodily covenant” with Israel (Wyschogrod). This distortive tendency is intensified in modernity by Christianity's anxiety that it too will appear old/“Jewish” vis‐à‐vis a new New Testament of infinite spiritual freedom (cf. Romanticism.) One corrective would be for Christianity to return to a more Jewish understanding of election.     

The problem of Christian identities in Ephesians

The article examines the impact of the work of Nils Alstrup Dahl on contemporary New Testament scholarship about early Christian identities. The focus is specifically on the many complex questions related to identity in Ephesians, which include the nature of the document itself. The article draws upon a social constructionist approach in analysing the text, with a particular interest in the use of the language of Israel, emphasis on concepts of citizenship, and concentration upon the household and family life.     

A Cross-cultural and Buddhist-Friendly Interpretation of the Typology Exclusivism-Inclusivism-Pluralism

This article develops a new and expanded interpretation of the typology exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism. The proposal refines the categories of what was originally a Christian typology in order to provide a truly cross-cultural and interreligious framework to better understand and compare the most common views of religious diversity found not only in Christianity, but also in Buddhism and other religions. Although building upon Schmidt-Leukel's logical reinterpretation of the typology, the article substantially modifies his framework and understands the typology, not as a comprehensive classification of possible attitudes toward other religions, but rather as an open-ended framework to clarify the nature of the most common theologies of religions that exist in reality. The new interpretation provides a more precise definition of inclusivism that does not conflate inclusivism with the affirmation of a singular maximum, thus distinguishing between absolutistic and non-absolutistic forms of inclusivism. The new interpretation introduces an intermediate position between inclusivism and pluralism called pluralistic inclusivism. The article challenges David Ray Griffin's concept of generic pluralism and proposes a new understanding of pluralism indebted to Raimundo Panikkar.     

Secularism's threat to tradition: A reading of Europe,India and the Limits of Secularism

ABSTRACT

This article offers a reading of Jakob De Roover's important book, Europe, India and the Limits of Secularism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016). It invokes the way in which the English courts have re-described Sikh tradition as religion in order to illustrate the relevance of Jakob De Roover's hypothesis about secularism, explaining its dependence on Christian theology and its inbuilt normative dynamic, which reframes tradition and poses a lethal threat to it.     

Facts and Possibilities: A Model‐Based Theory of Sentential Reasoning

This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals (if) and disjunctions (or), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic possibilities that hold in default of information to the contrary. Various factors such as general knowledge can modulate these interpretations. New information can always override sentential inferences; that is, reasoning in daily life is defeasible (or nonmonotonic). The theory is a dual process one: It distinguishes between intuitive inferences (based on system 1) and deliberative inferences (based on system 2). The article describes a computer implementation of the theory, including its two systems of reasoning, and it shows how the program simulates crucial predictions that evidence corroborates. It concludes with a discussion of how the theory contrasts with those based on logic or on probabilities.     

“Rethinking” the Preface of the Tractatus

This paper is principally a re‐evaluation of the meaning of Denken in the puzzling third paragraph of the Preface to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. It shows that there is a uniform misreading of this paragraph throughout the literature and suggests a corrected reading and some of its implications. The paper asserts that the influential “New Wittgenstein” reading of the Preface as containing Wittgenstein's all important “framing” thoughts on the Tractatus, is correct. However it also argues that the anti‐metaphysical reading the New view draws by way of its frame thesis is incorrect since it is still premised on the incorrect reading of the Preface's third paragraph. With the correct reading of the third paragraph, the paper shows the anti‐metaphysical reading of the Tractatus lacks substantive support.     

Toward Epistemic Decolonial Turn in Missio‐Formation in African Christianity

This article is framed with the World Council of Churches' (WCC) mission statement Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, which seems to be reviving academic interests in missio‐formation as an interdisciplinary field study. The mission statement, which is framed in a postcolonial missional discourse, seems to show interest in how missio‐formation as academic discipline can expose the intersectionality of questions of power, politics, and culture in Africa. The matters of agency, subjectivity, pedagogy, and rhetoric are perceived as central to the envisaged public missio‐formation discourse. Hence, this article argues that the nature of the mission statement must also be comprehended as means for decolonizing missio‐formation paradigm in Africa within a decolonial framework which gives critical attention to how missions have functioned as a colonialist mechanism for colonializing African Christian minds and subjectivity.     

Qur'anic Covenants Reconsidered: mīthāq and ʿahd in Polemical Context

This article examines the Qur'an's use of 'covenant' (Arabic ?ahd and mīthāq). Recent scholarly attention to covenants in the Qur'an has hitherto largely hinged on modern questions of inclusivism, pluralism, or notions of Islamic salvation history. Most studies have focused on Q 7.172 (and its interpretations), which is usually treated as the most important covenantal verse in the Qur'an. The analysis here is intended to be not an exhaustive study of covenant in the Qur'an, but an attempt to re-orient the discussion in terms of the qur'anic usage as distinct from later categories, and to move away from the tendency to prioritize Q 7.172 as the central covenant verse. The article pays particular attention to the way in which the Qur'an re-contextualizes 'covenant' for its own theological ends, and argues that the Qur'an uses this motif for a multiplicity of purposes. To this end it highlights three elements of the Qur'an's covenant theology: (1) its prophetological connotations, (2) its association with legal injunctions and the Decalogue, and (3) its eschatological implications. All three components often serve polemical functions. The article also makes some brief observations concerning the relationship between the Qur'an's use of covenant and its Late Antique context.     

Dancing Contact Improvisation with Luce Irigaray: Intra‐Action and Elemental Passions

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language, Elemental Passions creates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming.     

Pure Extensions, Proof Rules, and Hybrid Axiomatics

In this paper we argue that hybrid logic is the deductive setting most natural for Kripke semantics. We do so by investigating hybrid axiomatics for a variety of systems, ranging from the basic hybrid language (a decidable system with the same complexity as orthodox propositional modal logic) to the strong Priorean language (which offers full first-order expressivity).We show that hybrid logic offers a genuinely first-order perspective on Kripke semantics: it is possible to define base logics which extend automatically to a wide variety of frame classes and to prove completeness using the Henkin method. In the weaker languages, this requires the use of non-orthodox rules. We discuss these rules in detail and prove non-eliminability and eliminability results. We also show how another type of rule, which reflects the structure of the strong Priorean language, can be employed to give an even wider coverage of frame classes. We show that this deductive apparatus gets progressively simpler as we work our way up the expressivity hierarchy, and conclude the paper by showing that the approach transfers to first-order hybrid logic.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the fifth conference on Advances in Modal Logic (AiML 2004) in Manchester. We would like to thank Maarten Marx for his comments on an early draft and Agnieszka Kisielewska for help with the proof reading.Special Issue Ways of Worlds II. On Possible Worlds and Related Notions Edited by Vincent F. Hendricks and Stig Andur Pedersen     

A Luminous and Splendid Truth: On the Mystery of Predestination in Matthias Scheeben

Matthias Joseph Scheeben has been described as one of the greatest and least read theologians of the modern era. This article provides an overview of his theology of predestination, which remains a significant but little-studied aspect of his thought. Section I offers a general sketch of Scheeben's theology of predestination, employing the chapter on this topic in The Mysteries of Christianity as a primary source. Section II takes a deeper look at Scheeben's theology of predestination through an engagement with relevant sections of his untranslated masterwork, the Dogmatik. This section will highlight Scheeben's relationship to both the de auxiliis controversy and the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Connections between Scheeben's theology of predestination and his other theological positions are noted throughout.     

The “Place” of Place‐Based Pedagogy in Teaching Religion: Brooklyn and Its Religions

Place‐based pedagogy offers students a distinctive way to be attentive to a particular expression of a given religion while enabling them to minimize generalizations on the basis of that experience. Place‐based pedagogies decenter the traditional classroom as the sole locus of learning and emphasize the value of learning within varied spatial frameworks including undeveloped natural environments and built environments in rural, suburban, or urban communities. This article, set in Brooklyn, New York, is a case study of place‐based teaching in an urban context. “Brooklyn and Its Religions” is a course that provides students with a place to explore diverse expressions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The article describes the course and analyzes students' field reports in two settings to demonstrate the value of place‐based learning for studying religion in Brooklyn.     

Theory‐building case studies of counselling and psychotherapy

In addition to their potential for healing, psychotherapy and counselling offer extraordinary opportunities to observe human experience and behaviour. I suggest practitioners have expertise in and daily access to the phenomena that theories of counselling and psychotherapy seek to explain. Practitioners’ clinical experience can be accumulated and shared through theory-building case study research. This article summarizes the logic of theory‐building case studies and offers practical suggestions for conducting case study research.     

The Eternal ‘Spirit of the Son’: Barth,Florovsky and Torrance on the Filioque

This article offers an Orthodox response to Barth's defense of the filioque. Florovsky's theology exemplifies how Orthodoxy addresses the concerns underlying Barth's filioque without resort to the filioque. Entailed in the elaboration of Florovsky's Christocentric pneumatology is a critique of other currents in modern Orthodox theology (Florensky, Lossky). Common emphases are noted between Florovsky and T.F. Torrance regarding the consubstantiality and propriety of the Spirit to the Son and the significance of this doctrine for ecclesial life, suggesting a basis for further ecumenical reintegration.     

Function and Argument in Begriffsschrift

It is well known that the formal system developed by Frege in Begriffsschrift is based upon the distinction between function and argument—as opposed to the traditional distinction between subject and predicate. Almost all of the modern commentaries on Frege's work suggest a semantic interpretation of this distinction, and identify it with the ontological structure of function and object, upon which Grundgesetze is based. Those commentaries agree that the system proposed by Frege in Begriffsschrift has some gaps, but it is taken as an essentially correct formal system for second-order logic: the first one in the history of logic. However, there is strong textual evidence that such an interpretation should be rejected. This evidence shows that the nature of the distinction between function and argument is stated by Frege in a significantly different way: it applies only to expressions and not to entities. The formal system based on this distinction is tremendously flexible and is suitable for making explicit the logical structure of contents as well as of deductive chains. We put forward a new reconstruction of the function-argument scheme and the quantification theory in Begriffsschrift. After that, we discuss the usual semantic interpretation of Begriffsschrift and show its inconsistencies with a rigorous reading of the text.     

Counselling psychology in New Zealand

This article offers a brief overview of the history of counselling psychology in New Zealand. It describes current postgraduate study options and registration pathways as well as the institutions and organisations that provide legislative and professional membership and support to counselling psychologists in New Zealand. Data collected from a national survey in 2014 provide insight into the demographics of the profession in New Zealand, the theoretical frameworks that are utilised and employment opportunities that exist for counselling psychologists. The article also highlights the uniqueness of a cultural and contextual approach that aligns itself with New Zealand’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi/te Tiriti o Waitangi which is based on the principles of partnership, participation and protection. It concludes with the challenges the profession face as a new scope of practice. These challenges include establishing a professional identity in the mental health delivery system in New Zealand and responding to an ever increasing multicultural society.     

On Wittgenstein's and Carnap's Conceptions of the Dissolution of Philosophical Problems,and against a Therapeutic Mix: How to Solve the Paradox of the Tractatus

In this article, I distinguish Wittgenstein's conception of the dissolution of philosophical problems from that of Carnap. I argue that the conception of dissolution assumed by the therapeutic interpretations of the Tractatus is more similar to Carnap's than to Wittgenstein's for whom dissolution involves spelling out an alternative in the context of which relevant problems do not arise. To clarify this I outline a non‐therapeutic resolute reading of the Tractatus that explains how Wittgenstein thought to be able to make a positive contribution to logic and the philosophy thereof without putting forward any (ineffable) theses. This explains why there is no paradox in the Tractatus.     

One Hundred Years of Reading Research: Successes and Missteps of Edmund Burke Huey and Other Pioneers

For more than 100 years, research on the psychology of reading has proliferated. In this article, the authors wish to help modern reading researchers understand the origins of the discipline and benefit from its history. This article draws heavily on Edmund Burke Huey's 1908 landmark volume The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, the first scientific treatise in the field of literacy. Starting with Huey, some of the early pioneers’ enduring contributions to the field are highlighted but especially their scientific mistakes that ultimately led the field in promising new directions. An overview of the modern controversy between phonics and whole language instruction is underscored regarding how it arose from early errors.     

Christology and duplex hominis beatitudo: Re‐sketching the Supernatural Again

Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of duplex beatitudo is problematic for theologians who want to read his conception of human nature as integrally ordered to the visio divina. The doctrine seems rather to support a duplex ordo– a tidy parallelism of existent human ‘ends’, one discretely ‘natural’ and the other discretely ‘supernatural’. Is this in fact the case? Does the doctrine of duplex beatitudo commit the theologian to a bifurcated anthropology? Or is it possible to reconcile the doctrine with a more paradoxical anthropology which understands the human being as naturally ordered to a supernatural end that nevertheless exceeds the attainable power of human nature? This article offers a christological reading of the doctrine of duplex beatitudo. The article proposes a tensive distinction in unity of the twofold beatitude according to the Chalcedon paradox: inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter.     

Aristotle's Prior Analytics and Boole's Laws of Thought

Prior Analytics by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384?–?322 BCE) and Laws of Thought by the English mathematician George Boole (1815?–?1864) are the two most important surviving original logical works from before the advent of modern logic. This article has a single goal: to compare Aristotle's system with the system that Boole constructed over twenty-two centuries later intending to extend and perfect what Aristotle had started. This comparison merits an article itself. Accordingly, this article does not discuss many other historically and philosophically important aspects of Boole's book, e.g. his confused attempt to apply differential calculus to logic, his misguided effort to make his system of ‘class logic’ serve as a kind of ‘truth-functional logic’, his now almost forgotten foray into probability theory, or his blindness to the fact that a truth-functional combination of equations that follows from a given truth-functional combination of equations need not follow truth-functionally. One of the main conclusions is that Boole's contribution widened logic and changed its nature to such an extent that he fully deserves to share with Aristotle the status of being a founding figure in logic. By setting forth in clear and systematic fashion the basic methods for establishing validity and for establishing invalidity, Aristotle became the founder of logic as formal epistemology. By making the first unmistakable steps toward opening logic to the study of ‘laws of thought’—tautologies and laws such as excluded middle and non-contradiction—Boole became the founder of logic as formal ontology.

… using mathematical methods … has led to more knowledge about logic in one century than had been obtained from the death of Aristotle up to … when Boole's masterpiece was published.