Guthrie contends that religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Religion, he says, consists of seeing the world as human like. He offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience.

Taking the use of the logos in Ratzinger's Regensburg Lecture as its starting point, the thesis expands three horizons in Ratzinger studies. Firstly, it extends the understanding of Ratzinger as the author of a logos theology. Secondly, it shows how the Regensburg theme of the full breadth of reason, represented by the logos, is applied by Ratzinger in a critique of secular modernity. Thirdly, it claims that the logos theology of Joseph Ratzinger can provide a repair of the culture of (...) human rights. The thesis argues that if human rights are set exclusively within the framework of secular modernity, they fall sick and fail to meet the criterion of inclusivity and universality. Set within the framework of a Ratzingerian logos theology, their power is strengthened and their promise of inclusivity and universality restored. The thesis calls for a mutually reparative dialogue about human rights, based on the full breadth of reason, between the three constituencies of Christianity, the religions and secular modernity. The thesis concludes that the Regensburg Lecture, far from damaging the dialogue with Islam, and with secular modernity, opens up a new intercultural bridge based on a mutually enriching engagement with a logos-based culture of human rights. (shrink)

One of the oldest conceptions of theology is discourse of the poets about the gods and its philosophical interpretation. Judaism and Christianity borrowed this Greek understanding of theology and revised it only slightly to reflect its own monotheistic vision of God and God’s relations to and with the world of nature and human existence. The question as to which philosophy best explicates and justifies the oral and written mythopoetic discourse of the imaginative bards of Israel and the early Christian community (...) became a fundamental issue and has remained so through the centuries. The aim of this essay is to explore this question once again in the context of post-liberal theology in general, the works of Abraham Heschel, Claude Tresmontant, and the Japanese theologian Tetsaturo Ariga on an implicit biblical philosophy and the explicit metaphysical theism of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. The outcome of this exploration will be a rational reconstruction or ideal type of neo-classical theism or what I have chosen to call existential-hayatological theism. (shrink)

The present article argues that the doctrine of the inseparable external operations of the Trinity is consistent with the doctrine of the incarnation of the Son alone. To demonstrate this, it will be shown, first, that the assumption of human nature can be ascribed to the Son alone when taken as a state, as opposed to an action. Secondly, I will defend John Owen’s claim that the Son is not the “immediate” agent of Christ’s actions. Finally, an appeal is made (...) to Trinitarian “missions” to show the coherence of OAE with our having communion with distinct divine persons. (shrink)

I reclaim the patristic Christological use of perichoresis, by showing how in bringing together different entities, such as God and Nature, and looking at them in unity as the one person of Christ, we can acknowledge the perichoresis between divine and human, divine and nature. Christological perichoresis supports the idea that the whole creation is included in God’s recreated cosmos, in response to the redeeming power of Christ who entered the web of life as a creature. The Christological reading of (...) perichoresis can be an original contribution which supports my ecofeminist Christian view. Christological perichoresis, as the divine form of contextualization, can enable us to follow Christ’s steps to contextualize by taking our own contexts seriously. Human contextualization can only be a witness of divine contextualization. (shrink)

The article reviews the uses of the term ‘oikonomia’ in Greek-speaking antiquity and illustrates how the term was used in all spheres of human existence and in various arts and sciences, usually denoting the prudent dispensation of the field resources. In this era the arts and sciences also received their own economies, and the term oikonomia, designating in most cases the prudent management of resources, appears in political theory, military strategy, law, finance, medicine, literary criticism, architecture, music, history and rhetoric. (...) Among all the spheres, arts and sciences that were economized, the story of oikonomia in the field of rhetoric is at the center of this article’s attention. As shown, the concept of oikonomia took an intermediate form between the realm of thought – that is, the domain of philosophy – and the realm of public speech – the domain of politics. (shrink)

The studies on the history of the notion of “personhood” have largely recognized that Christian thought had a central role in the development and significance of this concept throughout the history of Western civilization. In late antiquity, Christianity used some terms taken from the classic and Hellenistic vocabulary in order to express its own theological content. This operation generated a “crisis” of classical language, namely a semantic transformation in the attempt to address some aspects of reality which were not envisioned (...) by the previous usage of these words. The term person is a paradigmatic example of this process. In fact, from the outset, it played a strategic role in formulating the idea of Incarnation, one of the central doctrines of Christianity. This essay aims to show how, during the first centuries of Christianity, the terms commonly used in order to express the notion of “personhood” became pivotal elements for the formulation of the discourse about the Trinity and progressively acquired new meanings. The analysis focuses only on the initial stage of the elaboration of this concept in Christianity and, based on some of the most significant texts, tries to bring out a series of theoretical problems that may be useful to understand the subsequent debate. In order to do so, the author divides the text in two parts. In the first one, he analyses two features strictly connected to the theological use of the term “persona”, which remained central also when this term was later referred to man. These features are individuality and ontological stability, along with the structurally relational status of personhood. In the second part, the author offers more details about the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers, in particular of Basil of Caesarea, and analyses two sectorial languages—mathematical and iconic language—used by Basil in order to describe the intra-trinitarian relationships. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory opens by intervening in a debate between the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Erik Peterson. Peterson's “Monotheism as a Political Problem” undermined Schmitt's thesis that the modern concept of sovereignty derives from Christian theology by arguing that divine monarchy is a Judaic and Greek idea that was liquidated by the doctrine of the Trinity. Agamben, by contrast, argues that the Trinity preserves and transforms the model of divine monarchy by casting God as (...) singular in his being and multiple in his management of the world. I argue that this critique of Peterson in fact builds upon the “Monotheism” essay, which shows how political theologians inherited and rearticulated conceptual problems derived from Aristotle's Metaphysics, and is driven by Agamben's concern with the impact of Aristotle's thought on ontology and politics. (shrink)