Free will,grace, and anti-Pelagianism

Critics of synergism often complain that the view entails Pelagianism (or at least semi-Pelagianism), and so, critics think, monergism looks like the only live (orthodox) option. Critics of monergism often claim that the view entails that the blame for human sin ultimately traces to God. Recently, several philosophers (including Richard Cross, Eleonore Stump, and Kevin Timpe) have attempted to chart a middle path by offering soteriological accounts which are monergistic (and thus avoid Pelagianism) but maintain the resistibility of God’s grace (with the aim of blocking the tracing of sin to God). In this paper, we present a challenge to such accounts of the resistibility of grace, namely that they imply that human beings are praiseworthy for omitting to resist God’s grace. Even if such views escape Pelagianism as it is typically defined, they fail to avoid the worry at the heart of prominent criticisms of Pelagianism concerning the praise for a human being’s salvation. At the end of the paper, we suggest three possible solutions to this problem.     

Psychoanalysis, the brain, and amazing grace

Believing that there are many paths to wholeness, the author attempts to investigate three seemingly diverse concepts of healing--spirituality, psychoanalysis, and brain biology. He demonstrates how these three modes may have more in common than often has been historically recognized and this leads him to celebrate that reality.     

Judgment and grace in the aging process

There is both judgment and grace in the aging process. The resources of Christian theology can be utilized to make aging more of a blessing than a curse. Judgment in aging is experienced as the judgment of time—little time left, loss of opportunity either to complete projects or to amend what has not been done well. The sins of the elderly are largely reactive rather than proactive The shape of guilt for the elders easily takes the form of fear of rejection and ultimate despair rather than longing for restoration and hope of forgiveness because of the cultural climate in which we are aging. To overcome this pastoral care management of resources of hope, acceptance and forgiveness are curcially important in ministry to the elders.Professor Becker is Professor of Pastoral Care at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, 2199 East Main Street, Columbus, Ohio, 43209. His article is based on a lecture presented at the American Lutheran Church Synposium on Aging, Ann Arbor, Michigan, September, 1977, entitled Theological Perspectives on Aging.     

Peter Martyr Vermigli on grace and free choice

Abstract

Within contemporary scholarship there has been considerable debate over the character and scope of Peter Martyr Vermigli’s scholasticism, which has sought to locate his thought between the two poles of the ‘via Thomae’ and the ‘via Gregorii.’ This paper traces the Augustinian-Thomist polarity throughout Vermigli’s doctrine of grace and free choice. In particular it seeks to discover Gregorian distinctives in his thought, namely, doctrinal points shared by Vermigli and Rimini, representing a development of Augustine and a departure from Aquinas. Without denying the important Thomist and Aristotelian elements of his thought, this paper concludes that renewed attention now needs to be paid to his profound debt to late-medieval Augustinian scholasticism and its global impact on his theology.     

The effects of grace interventions in church communities*

Grace remains little studied though several recent studies have developed promising ways to measure grace. Here we report two studies involving grace interventions as part of an ongoing investigation of positive psychology in the context of Christian church communities, Study One used a crossover design in which two congregations were measured on grace and other variables at the outset, and again after phases one and two. One congregation received a grace intervention during phase one and the second during phase two. Results showed increased scores on grace but not an expected increase in marital satisfaction among married participants. Study Two used a similar design with two additional congregations to assess effects of a grace intervention on self-forgiveness. As expected, congregants receiving the grace intervention showed increases in trait self-forgiveness when compared to those in the wait-list.     

E-mail, decisional styles, and rest breaks.

E-mail is a common but problematic work application. A scale was created to measure tendencies to use e-mail to take breaks (e-breaking); and self-esteem and decisional style (vigilance, procrastination, buck-passing, hypervigilance) were used to predict the self-reported and actual e-mail behaviors of 133 participants (students and marketing employees). Individuals who were low in defensive avoidance (buck-passing) engaged in more e-mailing per week, both in time spent on e-mail and message volume. E-breakers were more likely to engage in behavioral procrastination and spent more time on personal e-mail.     

Relationship between activity, rest, and free feeding in rats.

General activity and food intake were recorded concurrently in free-feeding rats. Correlations of meal size with associated postmeal interval, activity, and rest were determined. Meal size was significantly positively correlated with both the length of the postmeal interval and the amount of rest in the postmeal interval, but not with the amount of activity in the postmeal interval. This suggests that the amount of energy expended following a meal is not related to the initiation of the subsequent meal and that some alternate mechanism underlies meal-to-meal regulation.     

Nature and grace: the paradox of Catholic ethics.

Roman Catholic bioethics seems to be caught in a paradox. On the one hand it is committed to the natural law tradition and the power of reason to understand the structures of creation and the moral law. On the other hand there is a greater and greater appeal to Scripture and revelation. The tradition maintains that reason is capable of understanding the rational structures of reality and that ethics is properly built on metaphysics. In this way ethics, bioethics, is non-sectarian. However, the tradition also recognizes the effects of Original Sin on the will and intellect and the broad cultural changes that have affected our understanding of metaphysics. The appeal to Revelation is a corrective to many contemporary trends in ethics and bioethics. This article will examine the interplay of reason and revelation in the Church's teaching on sexuality (particularly contraception and in vitro fertilization), suffering, and death. Catholic bioethics is in the end prophetic and ecumenical and not gnostic and non-ecumenical.     

A warning about millisecond timing in Turbo Pascal

It is shown that the “readkey“ function in Turbo Pascal 4.0 runs in cycles of about 40 msec, and thus must not be used to wait for a keyboard response in reaction time studies.     

A(nother) Cosmic Wager: Pascal,METI, and the Barn Door Argument

There is growing debate about whether we should attempt to message extraterrestrials (METI). Much of the debate has focused on the level of risk posed and in particular, the barn door argument (BDA), holds that aliens would already know about us and thus there is little harm that could come from messaging. In this article, I examine the basic logic of BDA by comparing it with Pascal's Wager. These are both intuitive appeals that try to sidestep the empirical debate, but on critical examination they are seen to fall prey to a number of similar problems.     

Experimental philosophers,conceptual analysts,and the rest of us

Abstract

Theories of personal identity purport to specify truth conditions for sentences of the form ‘x‐at‐t_i is the same person as y‐at‐t_j. Most philosophers nowadays agree that such truth conditions are to be stated in terms of psychological continuity. However; opinions vary as to how the notion of psychological continuity is to be understood. In a recent contribution to this journal, Slors offers an account in which psychological continuity is spelled out in terms of narrative connectedness between mental states.The present paper argues that Slors’ theory either is no theory of personal identity at all or is too weak.Towards the end of the paper, it is indicated how the problem uncovered for Slors’ theory may be avoided.