Does Univocity Entail Idolatry?

Idolatry is vehemently rejected by the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and closely connected with idolatry are certain varieties of anthropomorphism, which involve the attribution of a human form or personality to God. The question investigated in this paper is whether a highly anthropomorphic conception of God, one that commits the sin of idolatry, is entailed by a particular theory of religious language. This theory is the 'univocity thesis', the view that, for some substitutions for 'F', the sense of '___ is F' as applied to God and its sense as applied to human creatures is exactly or substantially the same. My claim is that the univocity thesis entails a strong form of anthropomorphism that in effect reduces God to creaturely status and thus succumbs to idolatry (albeit a conceptual form of idolatry). In the course of my argument, a comparison is made between, on the one hand, the methods of Duns Scotus and modern proponents of perfect-being theology in arriving at a concept of God as maximally perfect, and on the other hand the work of Thomistic philosophers (especially Barry Miller) in showing how a more adequate conception of divinity can be reached by dispensing with some of the methods and assumptions of perfect-being theology, particularly the assumption of univocity.     

Explicatio and Complicatio: On the Understanding of the Relationship between God and the World in the Work of Nicholas Cusanus

Cusanus understands the relationship between God and the world through the concept of participation, which he explores through the twin concepts of explicatio (unfolding) and complicatio (enfolding). In Cusanus' view, the dialectics of explicatio and complicatio even apply concerning the relationship between God and humanity. This is explored concerning the relation between divine providence and human freedom, concerning the problem of worship and idolatry, and concerning the understanding of Christ as unfolded divinity and enfolded humanity. It is argued that this allows for an understanding of salvation through grace without reducing the importance of human involvement.     

REPUBLICS AND THEIR LOVES: REREADING CITY OF GOD 191

In City of God 19.24, Augustine rejects Cicero's definition of res publica as a society founded on justice for a new definition focused on common objects of love. Robert Markus, Oliver O'Donovan, and a host of Augustinian political theologians have depicted this move as a positive gesture toward secular society. Yet this reading fails to account for why Augustine waited so long to address Cicero's definition, first discussed in Book 2, and for the radical dualism Augustine sets forth between the two cities throughout his text. I argue, in line with Rowan Williams and John Milbank, for a minority reading of Book 19 that draws upon the narrative structure of City of God. In Books 3–5, Augustine recounts the history of the earthly city according to Rome's penchant for violence and idolatry, both a function of love for temporal goods. In Book 18, Augustine traces the history of the earthly city before Rome according to the same themes, completing a narrative argument that humanity has always been divided according to differing loves. Book 19 advances the idea that such idolatry is injustice—a failure to grant God the worship he is due. With the new definition of 19.24, Augustine retains Cicero's emphasis on the importance of virtue in civic society while characteristically shifting the terms of discussion from justice to love. While such a definition means that Rome can be called a res publica, it also prompts a negative judgment upon her history according to her objects of love. Given her violence and idolatry, Rome is no better than Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Greece—all subject to withering critique in Book 18. Thus, Augustine's new definition does not retract but extends the polemic of City of God.     

The Sin of Heresy: Opposition to Heresy in Augustine’s Confessions

Throughout the Confessions, Augustine repeatedly complains about heresy with a special focus on the heresy he once belonged to, Manicheanism. To those of us who live in a culture in which respectable people rarely, if ever, care about religious orthodoxy to such a degree, these complaints seem rather bizarre. Despite this initial appearance, Augustine presents in the Confessions several plausible reasons for thinking heresy is sinful and, therefore, detrimental to a person’s sanctity and ultimate salvation. In this paper, I argue that Augustine considers heresy sinful because it involves as many as three kinds of idolatry: loving a lie/false conception of God instead of the true God, loving one’s own beliefs more than the Truth, which is God, and loving the worldly praise one receives from developing novel opinions more than God.     

Writing about Islam for Youth: A Study of Two Authors and Two World Views

This is a study of two authors who wrote about Islam for youth: Florence Mary Fitch and Reza Aslan. Fitch's book, Allah, the God of Islam: Moslem Life and Worship (1950), and Aslan's No God but God: The Origins, Evolution of Islam (2011b) offer both historical and current views of Islam and the Prophet Mohammad. Although they wrote some 61 years apart, a review of their works reveals similar views, especially concerning the need for reform in Islam. This study reveals two different worldviews about the development of Islam. Fitch's views, although generally supportive of Islam, reflect Western society's view of Islam and Mohammad over half a century ago, while Aslan, a Muslim-reformist, emphasizes current democratic and humanitarian aspects of Islam that are well-suited for the modern world. Subjects discussed include Mohammad's revelations from Allah, the conquering of Mecca by Mohammad and the ending of idolatry, the beginning of Islam as a dominant religion, the role of women in Islam, the hijab and its origins and use, the jihad and its various meanings and applications, the Quran and its conflicting interpretations, the development and decline of the Caliphate, and the decentralization of Islam. The discussion ends with this quote from Aslan: “The Islamic Reformation is already here.”     

CREATED FOR EVERLASTING LIFE: CAN THEISTIC EVOLUTION PROVIDE AN ADEQUATE CHRISTIAN ACCOUNT OF HUMAN NATURE?

Christians who affirm standard science and the biblical doctrine of creation often endorse theistic evolution as the best approach to human origins. But theistic evolution is ambiguous. Some versions are naturalistic (NTE)—God created humans entirely by evolution—and some are supernaturalistic (STE)—God supernaturally augmented evolution. This article claims that NTE is inadequate as an account of human origins because its theological naturalism and emergent physicalist ontology of the soul or person conflict with the Christian doctrine that God created humans for everlasting life. Both the traditional Christian account of the afterlife and its modern Christian alternatives involve God's supernatural action and a separation (dualism) of person and body at death. STE can combine with several philosophical accounts of the body‐soul relation to provide an adequate Christian account of original human nature.     

Transcendental being: Scotus and Scotists

Of singular importance to the medieval theory of transcendentals was the position of John Duns Scotus that there could be a concept of being univocally common, not only to substance and accidents, but even to God and creatures. Scotus's doctrine of univocal transcendental concepts violated the accepted view that, owing to its generality, no transcendental notion could be univocal. The major difficulty facing Scotus's doctrine of univocity was to explain how a real, as opposed to a purely logical, concept could be abstracted from what agreed in nothing real, in this case, God and creatures. The present article examines Scotus's solution to this difficulty and its interpretation in four of his noted fourteenth-century followers. It is shown that the balance Scotus's solution achieved between the competing demands of the real diversity between God and creatures, on the one side, and the conceptual unity of transcendental being, on the other, is taken in opposed directions by his interpreters. Either the real diversity of God and creatures is given priority, so that the concept of being becomes a purely logical notion, or the real unity of the concept of being is stressed, so that some sort of real community is posited between God and creatures.In the following notes,Lect. andOrd. are abbreviations forLectura andOrdinatio, the titles of Scotus's earlier and later versions of his Oxford commentary on theSentences, respectively.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Special Topic:</Emphasis> Confucian and Christian Conceptions of Creativity

In this article the concept of God as creativity (rather than as “the Creator”) is explored. Though creativity is a profound mystery to us humans, it is a plausible concept today because of its interconnectedness with the belief that our cosmos is evolutionary: new orders of reality come into being in the course of time. Three modalities of creativity are explored here: the initial coming into being of the universe (the Big Bang); the creativity manifest in evolutionary processes; the human creation of culture. It is suggested that this creativity itself should be thought of as God: God is creativity. Thus God-talk is given a referent that is specifiable in terms of today’s understandings of the world and the human. God remains a profound mystery here, but one with a significant place in our modern understanding of the world and human life. This article includes text and ideas taken from my book, In the beginning…Creativity (Kaufman 2004).     

Creation and the Symbiosis of Science and Judaism

It seems to me that the critical questions that science and natural philosophy raise for Jewish theology are the following: Does God evolve? Does the universe have or even need an interpretation, specifically with reference to the fact that most of the universe most of the time is uninhabitable, and there may be many more than one universe? Does the universe need a beginning? What is distinctive about human consciousness, intelligence, and ethics in the light of evidence for evolution from all of the life sciences? Finally, will both life and the universe end? These questions are not only modern. They contain all the primary issues that have dominated rabbinic thought. That agenda can be summarized in six topics: How should we model what we believe about (1) God, (2) the world, and (3) the human being; and how should we understand the relations between them, that is, between (4) God and the world (or, creation), (5) God and the human (or, revelation), and (6) the human and the world (or, redemption)? In this paper I focus on the fourth issue, creation. My answer is presented in detail in my Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation(Samuelson 1994). Here I shall summarize my conclusions there concerning science, Jewish texts, and the correlation between them.     

THE PARADOX OF INQUIRY IN AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS

Abstract: The Confessions recounts Augustine's successful search for God. But Augustine worries that one cannot search for God if one does not already know God. That version of the paradox of inquiry dominates and structures Confessions 1–10. I draw connections between the dramatic opening lines of book 1 and the climactic discussion in book 10.26–38 and argue that the latter discussion contains Augustine's resolution of the paradox of inquiry as it applies to the special case of searching for God. I claim that he develops a model, relying on the universal human experience of joy and truth, that identifies a starting point that (1) is common to all human beings, (2) is sufficient for guiding a successful search for God, and (3) avoids commitment to recollection of experiences prior to birth. The model is crucial to Augustine's rejection of traditional Platonist views about recollection.     

The ‘Divine Names’ and the ‘Attributes of Deity’: On the (Infinite) Analogical Interval in Forty-Six Aphorisms

For the modern tradition of analytic philosophy of religion (that this article rejects), goodness, beauty, wisdom, and so on are divine attributes, whereas, for the classical tradition of Christian theology, they are divine names. This crucial distinction between attributes and names helps to explain why feminist philosopher Grace Jantzen’s charge of an identification of the male self with the divine self in Anglo-American philosophy of religion leads on, directly, to a critique of the ‘doctrine’ of analogy. Jantzen’s critique of ‘classical theism’ is directed against the (largely modern) reduction of God to a (male) superbeing. Here, God’s ‘attributes’ are merely human ones, even if extended to a superlative degree. I distinguish the analogical reflections of Aquinas (following Dionysius) and his heirs from the anthropomorphic dissolutions of the divine in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Theology’s analogical speech, I argue, has the potential to answer – at least partially – the feminist critique of God as a ‘pure projection’ of ‘man’. For Aquinas, God’s perfections must be qualitatively different and not merely quantitative maximisations of our own. I contend that feminist philosophy of religion cannot afford to dismiss the potential of the way of analogy, especially in its negative or apophatic dimensions.     

Three indications for the existence of God in causal metaphysics

With the emergence of modern physics a conflict became apparent between the Principle of Sufficient Cause and the Principle of Physical Causal Closure. Though these principles are not logically incompatible, they could no longer be considered to be both true; one of them had to be false. The present paper makes use of this seldom noticed conflict to argue on the basis of considerations of comparative rationality for the truth of causal statements that have at least some degree of philosophico-theological relevance and can be taken to indicate (not prove) the existence of God. The paper’s comparatively modest aim is to establish belief in the existence of God as a rational metaphysical option, not as a rational obligation. In its final section, enriched causal considerations lead to an indication (not proof) of God as that which guarantees the unified continuance of the physical world.     

Noah J. Toly and Daniel I. Block,eds. Keeping God's Earth: The Global Environment in Biblical Perspective

Abstract

Ted Peters rightly rejects, on biblical and theological grounds, the understanding of kenosis presumably endorsed by Niels Gregersen (and with him Jürgen Moltmann, John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke) as divine withdrawal from creation (tsim tsum). That said, a second version of kenosis, one more consistent with Scripture and early patristic theology, meets Peters' criticism by presenting kenosis not as a creative withdrawal of divine power but as a self-negation on the part of God that results in the generation of created reality along with God's reappearance and presence in it, albeit in another form. This is the kenosis-plerosis model, one according to which God gives history its momentum and empowers finite beings as a consequence of God's own self-negation; this would make possible a way for Gregersen meaningfully to affirm God's action at higher levels of nature without violating nature's integrity, even though it does so in a heterodox way.     

On Aquinas's Theological Reliabilism

In an essay titled Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge, Eleonore Stump rejects the idea that Aquinas's epistemology is foundationalist. I agree with Stump, and share in her conviction that the Angelic doctor developed instead what can be seen as a kind of theological reliabilism. In this article, I intend to take her position a step further. First, I would like to show that Thomistic reliabilism falls into a vicious circle if seen as based on a merely rational theism. Second, I am going to argue that for Aquinas such reliabilism depends instead on Christian faith, construed as the act of believing the revealed truth by virtue of the love relationship that God allows human beings to have with him.     

Fixing Descartes: Ethical Intellectualism in Spinoza's Early Writings

This paper aims at reconstructing the ethical issues raised by Spinoza's early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Specifically, I argue that Spinoza takes issue with Descartes’ epistemology in order to support a form of “ethical intellectualism” in which knowledge is envisaged as both necessary and sufficient to reach the supreme good. First, I reconstruct how Descartes exploits the distinction between truth and certainty in his Discourse on the Method. On the one hand, this distinction acts as the basis for Descartes’ epistemological rules while, on the other hand, it implies a “morale par provision” in which adequate knowledge is not strictly necessary to practice virtue. Second, I show that Spinoza rejects the distinction between truth and certainty and thus the methodological doubt. This move leads Spinoza to substitute the Cartesian Cogito with the idea of God as the only adequate standard of knowledge, through which the mind can attain the rules to reach the supreme good. Third, I demonstrate that in the Short Treatise Spinoza develops this view by equating intellect and will and thus maintaining that only adequate knowledge can help to contrast affects. However, I also insist that Spinoza's early epistemology is unable to explain why human beings drop conceive of the idea of God inadequately. Thus, I suggest that in his later writings Spinoza accounts for the insufficiency of adequate knowledge in opposing the power of the imagination and passions by reconnecting the nature of ideas with the mind's conatus.     

A Religious Interpretation of Emergence: Creativity as God

Thinking of God today as creativity (instead of as The Creator) enables us to bring theological values and meanings into significant connection with modern cosmological and evolutionary thinking. This conception connects our understanding of God with today's ideas of the Big Bang; cosmic and biological evolution; the evolutionary emergence of novel complex realities from simpler realities, and the irreducibility of these complex realities to their simpler origins; and so on. It eliminates anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism from the conception of God, thus overcoming one of the major reasons for the implausibility of God-talk in today's world—here viewed as a highly dynamic reality (not an essentially stable structure), with God regarded as the ongoing creativity in this world. This mystery of creativity—God—manifest throughout the universe is quite awe-inspiring, calling forth emotions of gratitude, love, peace, fear, and hope, and a sense of the profound meaningfulness of human existence in the world—issues with which faith in God usually has been associated. It is appropriate, therefore, to think of God today as precisely this magnificent panorama of creativity with which our universe and our lives confront us.     

CONCEPTIONS OF IDOLATRY AND SECULAR ART IN CHAIM POTOK'S ASHER LEV NOVELS

This article analyses changing perceptions regarding idolatry and secular art in two major Jewish-American novels: Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) and The Gift of Asher Lev (1990). The analysis focuses on the ways in which Potok subverts, recasts, and reinterprets several key tropes from the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture, along the lines of emphatically American concerns, in order to transform traditionally discursive rejections of visual art into affirmative themes for creative endeavours and spiritual renewal in Jewish-American life. In particular, this study demonstrates how the major didactic component in Potok's re-envisioning of Judaism's long-standing association of the visual arts with idolatry stems from the author's advocacy of the tenets of the American branch of Conservative Judaism, according to which the best aspects of modern secular culture are to be integrated with a non-literalist view toward conventional religious principles.     

THE OBLIGATION TO GIVE: A REPLY TO TANNER1

Divine giving, Kathryn Tanner suggests in her recent Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, generates an obligation to give to the needy. This duty, she argues, is a duty to those in need, but not to God. This essay compares Tanner's proposal for the structure of human obligation with two other theological models, and suggests a revised version of her analysis. The obligation to give is reconceived as an obligation to God and self, as well as the needy neighbor. This account removes such charitable giving from the realm of purely supererogatory acts, but does not thereby eclipse the appropriateness of gratitude on the part of the recipient.     

A new typology of modern atheisms: pilgrim atheism versus tourist atheism

This paper distinguishes between two types of modern atheisms: pilgrim atheism versus tourist atheism. Pilgrim atheism is based on and firmly supports the religion/science dichotomy. New Atheism is today’s well-known representative of pilgrim atheism which is characterised by its hostility to all religions. However, their very atheistic conception of the human being as a cognitively privileged animal depends on a theological conception of humanity, i.e. the human being is a God-like creature who can attain God’s objective knowledge. The second part of the paper is dedicated to exploring an emerging modern atheistic discourse: tourist atheism, emblematised by figures such as Alain de Botton. The fundamental argument of that part is that tourist atheists approach religion as a cultural heritage which still contains some benefits for non-believers. Thus, their strategy of approaching religions is not absolute rejection but engaging with them as repositories of useful sentiments, rituals, insights and ideas. Thus, tourist atheists do not hold the religion versus modernity dichotomy. The paper argues that tourist atheism, which has greater concerns for human subjectivity and internal pleasure of humans, is also an extension of another theological conception of humans as created in the image of God: humans who reproduce God’s autonomy and singularity.