Zorba The Buddha: Capitalism,Charisma and the Cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

This essay suggests a new way of understanding the notorious Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, by examining the intimate relationship between his religious teachings and his business practices. Rajneesh's ideal was in fact that of ‘Zorba the Buddha’, the perfect synthesis of the spiritual and material, the religious and capitalist impulses. After analysing and criticizing the classical Weberian concept of ‘charisma’, this paper argues that charismatic authority is by no means incompatible with bureaucratic organization or rational business practices. On the contrary, not only can charismatic authority be combined with a complex bureaucratic organization, but it can also be transformed into a kind of ‘commodity’ which is bought and sold on the consumer market. Rather than a ‘routinization of charisma’ what we find in the Rajneesh movement is a kind of ‘commodification’ and ‘commercialization’ of charisma. Bhagwan offered (and sold) his followers the promise of the same charismatic authority and divine freedom which he himself enjoyed (though, in practice, this authority could never actually be attained by any of his followers). Moreover, charismatic authority became the basis for a new kind of bureaucratic organization in Rajneesh's world-wide network of commercial enterprises—an organization characterized by a high degree of fluidity and flexibility, able to adapt itself rapidly to meet the changing demands of its consumer market.     

God,Mixed Modes,and Natural Law: An Intellectualist Interpretation of Locke's Moral Philosophy

The goal of this paper is to explicate the theological and epistemological elements of John Locke's moral philosophy as presented in the ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ and ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity’. Many detractors hold that Locke's moral philosophy is internally inconsistent due to his seeming commitment to both the intellectualist position that divinely instituted morality admits of pure rational demonstration and the competing voluntarist claim that we must rely for our moral knowledge upon divine revelation. In this paper I argue that Locke is guilty of no such contradiction. In doing so, I attempt to accommodate Locke's position in the ‘Essay’ that moral principles are demonstrable a priori with his views on the sanctity of Christian revelation. I then consider Locke's conception of moral ideas as a species of mixed modes, or arbitrarily constructed complex ideas, and attempt to navigate the mechanism whereby human understanding can recognize these ideas as conforming to, or straying from, divinely appointed natural law. I conclude that despite Locke's failure to actually provide a full-fledged moral theory, he lays a rationally coherent groundwork for the fulfilment of such a project that accommodates a-priori rational reflection and divine revelation as complementary paths to moral understanding.     

‘God … or a Bad,or Mad,Man’: C.S. Lewis's Argument for Christ – A Systematic Theological,Historical and Philosophical Analysis of Aut Deus Aut Malus Homo

The proposition that Jesus was ‘Bad, Mad or God’ is central to C.S. Lewis's popular apologetics. It is fêted by American Evangelicals, cautiously endorsed by Roman Catholics and Protestants, but often scorned by philosophers of religion. Most, mistakenly, regard Lewis's trilemma as unique. This paper examines the roots of this proposition in a two thousand year old theological and philosophical tradition (that is, aut Deus aut malus homo), grounded in the Johannine trilemma (‘unbalanced liar’, or ‘demonically possessed’, or ‘the God of Israel come amongst his people’). Jesus can only be understood in the context of the Jewish religious categories he was born into; therefore, for Lewis, Jesus is who he reveals himself to be. Jesus' self‐understanding reflects his identity, his triune salvific role; this is for Lewis, the transposed reality of divine Sonship. Reason and logic are paramount here, reflected in the structure of Lewis's argument. Lewis's trilemma is not so much a proof of God's existence, but a question, a dilemma, where each and every person must come to a decision. For all its perceived faults, its simplistic language, Lewis's trilemma still is a very successful piece of Christian apologetic, grounded in a serious philosophical and theological tradition.     

‘God's hangman’: James VI,the divine right of kings,and the Devil

This article considers James VI and I's treatise on the divine right of kings, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), in relation to his earlier treatise on witchcraft Daemonologie (1597). James's articulation of divine right kingship not only served to refute the arguments of his former tutor, George Buchanan (1506–1582), and the Jesuit, Robert Persons (1546–1610), but also served as a bulwark against the perceived threat of the supernatural to his rule. James incorporated the ideal of a stoic subject previously put forward in his Daemonologie into the Trew Law, offering a doctrine of non-resistance that both Catholic and presbyterian subjects were expected to follow. The ideal stoic subject would remain firmly in command of their passions, enduring the ‘curses’ of tyranny or of witchcraft without actively seeking relief for their circumstances.     

Augustine on Creation,Providence and Motion

Augustine's theology of creation has been criticized for its Platonic tendency to denigrate matter and for a supposedly extrinsic view of divine providence that is reminiscent of design and even deism. This article counters such criticism and argues that Augustine explicitly blends extrinsic and intrinsic notions of providential teleological order. For Augustine, God ‘administers externally the natures he has created internally’ by inscribing the rationes seminales within creatures and conferring motion through the mediation of measure, number and weight. By resisting a dualism of intrinsic and extrinsic teleological order, Augustine avoids many of the problems that characterize modern theologies of creation and provides a more coherent account of divine providence.     

Sapientia and Stultitia in John Colet's Commentary on First Corinthians

ABSTRACT

While John Colet, friend of Erasmus and founder of St Paul's School, London, was himself widely read in Classical and pagan authors, he famously characterized pagan books as having the ‘savour of the Demon’ and exhorted minor clergy to reject human or secular wisdom. This article seeks to resolve the apparent tension between Colet's disparagement of human wisdom in his commentary on First Corinthians and his own use of pagan learning and humanist activities. Through a close analysis of Colet's understanding of human and divine wisdom and human stultitia (foolishness) in the commentary, the article argues that Colet's principal concern in reproaching human wisdom (sapientia) was the moral purity of his audience. The article concludes by considering how Colet's view of secular wisdom, thus conceived, represented an early expression of his commitment to religious, ecclesiastical and moral reform.     

THE HOLY & WHOLLY OTHER: KIERKEGAARD ON THE ALTERITY OF GOD

In response to prevailing perceptions, I contend that Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) conceives of the wholly otherness of God via his dialectical category of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine, initially through the self's consciousness of sin and ultimately through the self's acceptance of the gift of forgiveness. Therefore, I claim that while the common designation of Kierkegaard's God as ‘Wholly Other’ may initially evoke the alterity of sin; it is not ultimately sufficient to describe the divine alterity which Kierkegaard regards as more faithfully manifest in the ‘impossible possibility’ of forgiveness. Through this reading, I finally suggest that the ‘Wholly Other’ is not ultimately representative of God in Kierkegaard's writings and might be more faithfully supplemented by the appellation of the Holy Other.     

Karl Barth and the Purification of Divine Simplicity

Johnson investigates Karl Barth's critical appropriation of the doctrine of divine simplicity. While Barth is critical of traditional formulations of the doctrine, he understands himself to be refining the doctrine rather than rejecting it. Barth notes that Scripture attributes a diverse set of perfections to God in describing his salvific actions. These diverse perfections, however, have a fundamental unity: God does not contradict himself, but rather his perfections describe his unified, trustworthy agency. For this reason, we can know that in God's inmost being, God is not self‐contradictory but utterly unified or simple in his self‐fidelity. Johnson points out that a key element of Barth's doctrine of God is that it can never be the mere deduction of an abstract, transcendent entity; rather, it must begin with the transcendent God's relationship to creation, and therefore must begin with Jesus Christ, who reveals the true being of God. Johnson identifies three guidelines for speaking of Barth's doctrine: each one of God's perfections must be seen as perfections of his one divine being; God's one being does not exist above and behind his revealed perfections; and God's revealed perfections are essential to his divine nature. On this basis, Johnson explores what Barth has to say about the relationship between God's freedom and his self‐fidelity, including as this regards his freedom to live his one eternal life for us.     

Becoming No-Thing: Eckhart and Hegel on Identity and Difference

Abstract: My goal in this paper is to draw productively on Meister Eckhart's concept of the ‘no-thing’ in order to illuminate Hegel's ontotheological account of both human and divine kenosis. I advance the view that just as divine kenosis is understood as the outpouring of the divine which includes the death of Christ in its economic activity, human kenosis also requires an engagement with death, namely, a spiritual death to the finite. It is via this species of death which is a becoming ‘no-thing’ that the reconciliation between the human and the divine is disclosed as a unity that relies on the shared identity of the divine and the human while simultaneously respecting the integrity of both. Indeed, it is in and through their parallel activity of kenosis that finite and infinite being achieve their respective transcendence by necessarily engaging with the being of the other. Hence, Hegel's ontotheological work is not reducible to sheer immanentism as some scholars suggest, but instead upholds the genuine transcendence of the divine.     

Conspiracies of immanence: Paul Tillich,Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and C.G. Jung

Jung's psychology proffers a sustained reflection on the traditional religious question of the relation of divine transcendence to immanence. On this issue his psychology affirms a position of radical immanence in its contention that the experience of divinity is initially wholly from within. Though this position remains on the periphery of religious and theological orthodoxy Jung is not alone in holding it among moderns. Paul Tillich adopts a similar stance with his controlling symbols of the divine as ‘Ground of Being’ and ‘Depth of Reason’. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin understands divinity as the experiential energy of evolution itself working within nature and humanity toward greater configurations of universal communion as the basis of community. All of Jung's master symbols of individuation assume such an understanding of immanence uniting individual and totality. His psychology strongly suggests and contributes to the current emergence of a new religious sensitivity based on the awareness of the intra‐psychic origin of all religions. In his later writings he held out such a position as a significant alternative to genocide.     

Scripture's Practical Authority and the Response of Faith from a Speech‐Act Theoretic Perspective

This paper brings together the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff and William Alston in speech‐act theory with the aim of providing a deeper understanding of the nature of divine speaking through the medium of Scripture. Despite the fecundity of Wolterstorff's seminal work on the philosophical theology of Scripture, aspects of his speech‐act centric account are underdeveloped and would benefit from the contributions of William Alston. In particular, his account of divine speech‐acts could be fruitfully expanded by incorporating the concept of ‘taking responsibility’ that is central to Alston's analysis of the nature of illocutionary acts. This would elucidate both the way in which readers of Scripture encounter divine practical authority in the reading process and the nature of the response of faith that is demanded of them.     

Outside‐In: Jung's myth of interiority ambiguated. Or ‐ Knowing me,Knowing Jung – ahah!

Given his lifelong battle against one‐sidedness Jung's persistent prioritising of the ‘inner life’ over the ‘outer’ can seem problematic. The question is raised as to whether an approach that seems to verge uncomfortably close to solipsism can sometimes render Jung blind to the intuition that psychic life is constituted by an on‐going interplay between inner and outer, self and other (an intuition that he himself sometimes articulated so brilliantly). The ‘ambiguation’ of Jung's work offers an opportunity to confront this problem by utilising a critical dynamic that is consistent with Jung's psychological insights.     

Humour and creativity*

‘He laughed to free himself from his mind's bondage’ (James Joyce). ‘It is very strange that I never get any encouragement from psychiatric audiences when I want to talk about art or humour’ (Gregory Bateson). ‘Let us not always assume that a sense of humour is always mocking. It could be loving’ (Gregory Bateson).     

Present in Love: Rethinking Barth on the Divine Perfections

While Karl Barth's identification of love and freedom (in that order) as the fundamental divine perfections was intended to eliminate any gap between God as revealed and God's eternal being, Barth's equation of divine freedom with decision fatally compromises this aim by reintroducing the spectre of a ‘hidden God’ behind the God revealed in Jesus. Moreover, it exacerbates a worryingly anthropomorphic model of divine action, already pronounced in older orthodox theologies, that is ill‐suited to upholding the causal integrity of the created order. Substituting presence for freedom as the foundational perfection paired with (and used to interpret) divine love maintains the benefits of Barth's relative prioritization of love while avoiding the problems that accompany the interpretation of divine freedom as decision. Specifically, it provides a model of divine action in which permission rather than decision emerges as the fundamental mode of willing whereby by God brings the world into being and sustains it in existence.     

Plato,Thomas and the Daring Ethics of Friendship

Abstract

Fergus Kerr observed that Thomas Aquinas inaugurates a new way of doing Christian ethics focused on human flourishing. It is based on a daring model of Christian friendship that has, though, found little success. Why? Because it stems from Aristotle's model of friendship which is, in turn, based upon self-love and exclusivity. Augustine, in particular, is a figure who portrays such friendship as antithetical to God's selfless and universal love: friendship, for him, needs to be ‘triangulated’ in divine love. However, Thomas suggests charity as friendship because he recognizes that friendship is the best ‘school of love’ for human beings: within the ambivalences of friendship, Christians can practise the habits of divine love so that it becomes an overarching principle in their lives. But, there is an irony in Thomas turning to Aristotle for a model of love that embraces rather than transcends human experience, since Aristotle too cannot quite shake off a vision of the ideal life that is uneasy with friendship. For that, we must turn to the work of Plato on friendship, in his dialogue the Lysis, which not only offers a model of friendship wholly committed to it as a school of love, philosophy and the good life, but does so recognizing the ‘in between’ status of human beings similar to that with which Thomas was concerned.     

Divine Immutability,Divine Action and the God–World Relation

In his thought‐provoking critique of classical Christian theism, Isaak Dorner argues that a traditional understanding of God's immutability precludes any diversity in God's action and presence in the world. Dorner reasons that the view of God developed in scholastic thought entails a ‘uniform’ divine causality in which God cannot act in new and distinct ways according to the various circumstances of his creatures. This sort of critique elicits the question of whether God's immutability, if taken to include his pure actuality, flattens out his action such that he is no longer truly engaged in the lives of his creatures. In this article, I propose that a development of the virtual distinction found in scholastic theology proper will enable us to integrate (1) the pure actuality of God and (2) what we may call the formal and temporal diversity of God's action pro nobis that confirms his authentic involvement in the world. Unfolding the explanatory power of the virtual distinction will require considering its relationship to the concept of God's pure actuality and analyzing different aspects of divine action in which the diversity of that action might be located.     

The Sacrifice of Silence: Fear and Trembling and the Secret of Faith

This article examines the important hermeneutical and theological relation between silence and sacrifice in Søren Kierkegaard's (1813–55) divisively enigmatic Fear and Trembling. I contend that this relation becomes clearest when the silence of Abraham is explicated in relation to his esoteric proclamation that ‘God himself will provide a lamb for the burnt offering’. In Abraham's reply to Isaac, the secret of Abraham's faith is concomitantly revealed (as a trust in the notion that ‘with God all things are possible’) and concealed (as a paradoxically ‘impossible’ possibility which cannot be adequately conveyed to ‘the other’). This thereby proposes a qualitative distinction between Abraham's reverent silence before God and his aporetic silence before the other.     

Two Jungs. Apropos a paper by Mark Saban

Jung's idea of the ‘personal equation’ amounts to the reflection that theoretical differences between the psychologies that people teach are rooted in their personalities, in other words, that they are due to the psychology each one ‘has’. This concept also applies to different interpretations of Jung's work. The serious difficulties that Mark Saban has with my psychology are a case in point. Recourse to the concept of the personal equation reveals that Saban has his Jung and I have mine. With his insistence on his Talmudic methodological principle of dream interpretation, that ‘the dream is its own interpretation’, according to Saban Jung means nothing but a rejection of Freudian free association. My Jung goes far beyond that. Jung understands this methodological principle above all in terms of what he calls ‘circumambulation’. The main part of this paper is devoted to an elucidation of what circumambulation involves as a mode of dream interpretation. The paper concludes with the distinction Jung himself introduced between two types of reading of his work, either as ‘paper’ and ‘dead nostrums’ or as ‘fire and wind’, and pleads for a reconstruction of Jung's psychology as a whole in terms of his most advanced, deepest insights, instead of a dogmatic reading mainly based on the early Jung, a reading for which his later revolutionary insights are at best negligible embellishments.