Browsing by Subject "Philosophy of Religion"

The following work explores identity from overlapping vantage points; biblical/theological, historical and practical to establish a robust understanding of identity in our present time. This thesis explores the ontological elements of God and the meaning of “image bearer” through Scripture in Genesis 1-2; Psalm 8; an overview of Wisdom Literature in Job and Ecclesiastes; and the New Testament in Ephesians and Colossians. From a historical view, this thesis focuses on the work of St. Augustine and how humanity was “naturally created” in the imago Dei. Even those that are not Christ followers share in the imago Dei, as hidden as it may be, to be discovered and set free. Through this process, we see holiness (in contradistinction to morality) as foundational to our existence and reflective of God. Holiness is expressed through love in its proper order. For Augustine, our love of God conditions our love for all other things. This establishes an objective starting point, fundamental to all Christians, a proper understanding and embodiment of the Great Commandment. Finally, by practically applying a fresh understanding of one’s identity, humanity has an opportunity to thrive by acknowledging the positive implications of the embracing and embodiment of the imago Dei.The primary methodology of this thesis is through interpreting Scripture in light of the question, “what does it mean to be created in the imago Dei?” Using the work of the early Church Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine give interpretive grounding to passages in both Old and New Testaments. Reading both primary and secondary sources on the imago Dei and its impact upon humankind and specifically the Church. Lastly, incorporating and integrating the work of modern psychology in understanding the modern person in light of the creative work of God in the beginning to our current day.

The following work explores identity from overlapping vantage points; biblical/theological, historical and practical to establish a robust understanding of identity in our present time. This thesis explores the ontological elements of God and the meaning of “image bearer” through Scripture in Genesis 1-2; Psalm 8; an overview of Wisdom Literature in Job and Ecclesiastes; and the New Testament in Ephesians and Colossians. From a historical view, this thesis focuses on the work of St. Augustine and how humanity was “naturally created” in the imago Dei. Even those that are not Christ followers share in the imago Dei, as hidden as it may be, to be discovered and set free. Through this process, we see holiness (in contradistinction to morality) as foundational to our existence and reflective of God. Holiness is expressed through love in its proper order. For Augustine, our love of God conditions our love for all other things. This establishes an objective starting point, fundamental to all Christians, a proper understanding and embodiment of the Great Commandment. Finally, by practically applying a fresh understanding of one’s identity, humanity has an opportunity to thrive by acknowledging the positive implications of the embracing and embodiment of the imago Dei.The primary methodology of this thesis is through interpreting Scripture in light of the question, “what does it mean to be created in the imago Dei?” Using the work of the early Church Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine give interpretive grounding to passages in both Old and New Testaments. Reading both primary and secondary sources on the imago Dei and its impact upon humankind and specifically the Church. Lastly, incorporating and integrating the work of modern psychology in understanding the modern person in light of the creative work of God in the beginning to our current day.

This dissertation examines the philosophy and poetry of three major British Romantic writers (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth) to contest a popular narrative promulgated by literary scholars and intellectual historians that identifies the Romantic movement as a period of progressive secularization in Western modernity. Whether readers subject secularization to critique, such as Charles Taylor does, or welcome it, as M.H. Abrams does, they alike insist that secularization involves a cultural shift from a transcendent ontology to an immanent one and that Romanticism was essential to this shift. I argue, on the contrary, that Romanticism offers a robustly transcendent ontology and that the failure to recognize this very often results from a reader’s reliance on a limited conceptual framework (a Christianity vs. secularism binary, or, in its broader form, secularism vs. organized religion). Thinking in terms of this dichotomy leads readers to misinterpret and overlook genuinely transcendent (i.e. religious) ideas and dispositions in Romantic writers and, therefore, mischaracterize them as secular. The term “secular” effectively erases alternative forms of religiosity, including what I term "Romantic religion," by tossing idiosyncratic theologies and spiritualities together with genuinely irreligious and immanentist philosophies into one single category defined strictly in terms of negation (i.e. that which is not Christianity/organized religion). This tendency is clearest when readers implicitly synonymize “religion” with Christianity, or “transcendent ontology” with Christianity, or “belief in God” with “belief in patriarchal, personalist monotheism.” When readers inherit philosophical and theological concepts strictly from orthodox Christianity, they overlook novel forms of religiosity found in the Romantic period. For example, a writer’s rejection of personalist monotheism or a writer’s belief in the infinite temporality and/or cyclicity of the universe is mistaken for evidence of atheism (one of the many terms subsumed by “secular”). Treating each author in each chapter, I argue that Coleridge accommodates Romanticism to orthodox Christianity, while Shelley and the young Wordsworth redefine “God” as a transcendent real absolute manifest as the universe/Nature, rather than a man who creates and intervenes in the universe/Nature. To break away from the Christianity vs. secularism framework, I use concepts not only from Christian theology (Coleridge), but also Neoplatonism (all authors), Indian Vedic philosophy (Shelley), and Japanese Zen Buddhism (Wordsworth). I argue that none of these writers ought to be regarded as secular, since none of them reject religion per se. To go even further, Romantic religion not only redefines religiosity such that the experience of God can take place outside the clerical, dogmatic, and institutional boundaries of recognized major world religions (in Romantic religion it occurs within aesthetics and the inner life of feeling) but it can also be absent from the experiences of persons traditionally identified as religious solely on the basis of their creedal assent, outward conformity to a given moral law, and/or participation in the ritual practices of an institution. Nonetheless, as the case of Coleridge shows us, Romantic religion is not mutually exclusive with being religious in a traditional sense since Coleridge retains a Romantic sensibility even after converting to Anglicanism.

It is fair to identify the motive of this dissertation with the paradoxical formulation of Gerhard von Rad, to the effect that the essence of biblical Wisdom is disclosed where the sages articulate this wisdom as inherently limited. This coincidence of opposites has been widely embraced by commentators and read as evidence for the sages' encounter with an infinite divine transcendence, to which they responded in humility, and by which their epistemological certitudes were rebuked. Proceeding from these assumptions, the interpretation of Proverbs has widely concerned itself with two nodal points: (1) the fear-of YHWH as the central concept in Proverbs' articulation wisdom as a finite human operation, conducted in the presence of an infinite divine; and (2) the figuration of this sublime experience in the iconic form of Woman-Wisdom.

The hypothesis of von Rad lends itself to another trajectory that prioritizes immanence over transcendence. On this reading, the limit of Wisdom lies not between its mere appearance for us (i.e. finite human subjects) and its essential being in itself (corresponding to a noumenal, divine beyond) but rather runs through the field of appearance, which cannot be rendered coherent by the sages' discursive intervention. This non-symbolizable yet immanent check on the sages' wisdom is analyzed in terms of Lacan's Real, a kernel of being (in psychoanalytic terms, jouissance) entirely beyond the signified that nevertheless arises out of the operations of signification. If discourse is thus intrinsically self-defeating, the status of transcendence should re-evaulated with respect to "limit." Transcendence is not the site that disturbs the Symbolic field, but rather the aporetic conditions of linguistic meaning rely on an externalizing process--what I have called a "poetics of making transcendent"-- for a given discourse to maintain its own coherence, i.e. as that which would be coherent if not for the contingent, impossible object. The fear-of YHWH and Woman-Wisdom, whose importance no one disputes, are re-read from this perspective: the former according to Lacan's concept of the Master-Signifier, the latter according to object (a), the object cause of desire.

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God is available to us in experience, and if so how to account for the nature of that availability and the role that putative perceptions of God have in informing and justifying our theological claims. In addressing this matter, it has become widely assumed amongst Christian philosophers and theologians that this problem - the problem of Christian religious experience - cannot be adequately addressed without also confronting some problems about the nature of perceptual experience per se. How does our ordinary perceptual experience manage to make the world available to our thinking, such that what we think, say and do manages to reach out to the world - to be "about" it? Conversely, how does the world manage to "reach in" to impress itself on us in our experiences, such that our experiences manage to be "of" it? In what way does the world's bearing on us in experience determine whether what we think, say or do is correct?

These have all come to be regarded as thorny philosophical worries about perceptual experience per se, and they all cluster around the fundamental question of how it is that experience makes possible the rational answerability of our intentions to the world. Clearly, it would seem, we cannot address the theological problem of God's perceptual availability to us without also confronting the philosophical "problem of perception." Accordingly, contemporary Christian philosophers and theologians have invariably appropriated various theories addressed to the problem of perception in the course of accounting for how it is that our theological talk manages to be "about" God.

Such theories are then incorporated into one of two kinds of stories, either a cataphatic one in which God's bearing on us in experience is mediated into our language in a straightforward and ordinary way or an apophatic one in which God's entry into thought and speech in experience is an exception to the ordinary situation. The thesis I defend in this dissertation is just that our theological interest in the question of God's perceptual availability can and should be thoroughly disentangled from the problem of perception. Prima facie, that claim seems utterly counterintuitive. If there are difficulties that attend the concept of perceptual experience itself - difficulties about how any mind-independent realities can be made available to us in experience - then any question about what it is to perceive God must confront those difficulties. But the central claim I entertain is just that - contrary to all appearances - there in fact are no such difficulties. Rather, the assumption that we are in fact confronted with genuine philosophical worries about how experience can possibly inform and guide our thinking is false. Moreover, this has led to theological claims about the nature and modes of God's self-revelation which are not merely correspondingly false, but instead they have failed to be so much as coherently intelligible.

In order to address the problem of the nature and theological significance of the perceptibility of God, therefore, we must first free it from the philosophical problem of perception. Chapter 1 sets up this problematic and identifies the aim of disentangling our theologies of religious experience from the problem of perception as an exercise in theological "therapy." That therapy involves five steps, which occupy the remainder of the work. The first is to offer some reasons for thinking that the philosophical problem of perception is in fact a pseudo-problem and that the theories addressed to it are necessarily incoherent. Here I look to John McDowell's recent deconstruction of the problem of perception, on whose strategy I elaborate in Chapter 2. McDowell argues that the problem of perception is ill-conceived just insofar as its various formulations require a solution of one of two sorts, what he calls a "Givenist" or else a "Coherentist" solution. Givenism names the world's giving or impressing of a mental content upon the norms of our thinking which is itself independent of those norms, while Coherentism claims no need to acknowledge any standards of correctness as inhering in the world itself in any sense independent of humanly established norms. Instead, the rational answerability of our thinking to the world in experience can be accounted for precisely in terms of our irreducibly norm-governed dispositions to respond both to it and to one another.

But neither Givenism nor Coherentism can possibly succeed in characterizing "experience" as making us rationally answerable to the world, McDowell argues, because Givenism necessarily requires that our answerability fails to be a properly rational one, while Coherentism necessarily requires that our rational responses fail to be properly answerable to the world, rather than merely to our own responsive dispositions. Since each view has what the other lacks in order to minimally make sense of "experience" as a kind of rational answerability to the world, they have been locked in a vicious and "interminable oscillation." To hold together both Givenism's conception of answerability and Coherentism's conception of the irreducibly rational constitution of that answerability in the most minimally consistent way, however, does not yield a new philosophical theory of "experience" so much as simply returning us to our naïvely held view that in experience our thinking is capable of directly taking in or being presented with the way the world is anyway, the way it would be for humans even if no humans were in fact equipped to recognize it as such.

Having singled out the problem and entitled ourselves to ignore it as failing to surface any genuine philosophical worry, my second task is to show that contemporary approaches to the problem of God's perceptual availability to us in experience are in fact essentially wedded to the pseudo-problem, and as such that they are inheritors of its incoherence. In Chapters 3 and 4 I deploy the McDowellian strategy to critique some recent and influential accounts of our perceptual relation to God, both cataphatic and apophatic. Accordingly, I argue that Jean-Luc Marion ought to be regarded as offering us a theological Givenism of an apophatic sort, while William P. Alston relies on a theological Givenism of a cataphatic sort. Victor Preller and Kevin Hector, on the other hand, present us with theological Coherentisms of an apophatic and cataphatic sort, respectively.

Once we manage to see how these theologies of religious experience are implicated in the incoherence of the problem of perception, however, we can turn from the more critical and ground-clearing deconstruction to a more positive direction in Chapter 5. My third task is therefore that of determining just what we must minimally affirm in order to avoid falling into the oscillation between Givenism and Coherentism. Here again I follow McDowell in holding that such a minimal empiricism is best captured by what he calls a "naturalized platonism." Having "backed into" a naturalized platonism, however, we can see that it simply articulates our naïve realist conception of experience as directly "taking in" the world itself as a normative standard of correctness for our experiences of it and responses to it. This raises the question, however, of how we were ever tempted out of this "naiveté" and into the compulsion to theorize the world's presentations to us in a Givenist or Coherentist way.

The fourth task I take up in Chapter 5 is therefore that of giving a broad sociological explanation of the wide cultural impact of that compulsion, not only upon philosophers, or even theologians, but across diverse registers of society in the modern Western and secular social orders. McDowell, for his part, gestures toward a Weberian genealogy of the problem of perception as a particularly modern prejudice which arises from a disenchanted conception of nature that arose in and around the birth of the sciences. That genealogy however, is inadequate to account for the nature and scope of the problem of perception as a religious problem. I therefore look to Charles Taylor to show how his narrative of disenchantment offered in A Secular Age can serve to correct and buttress McDowell's genealogy. Integrating McDowell's story with Taylor's turns out to have a mutually chastening effect on one another which helps us to distinguish between a genuine freedom from the characteristically modern problem of perception in our theological reflection and the nostalgic fantasy of a return to the "innocence" of a premodern conception of nature as a desirable or achievable aim.

Fifthly and finally, we must be able to see how the newly clarified freedom of theology from the problem of perception secured in the foregoing chapters actually reorients us toward the titular question which the problem of perception has served to obfuscate: the theological question of how to properly characterize our perceptual relation to God. Chapter 6 offers a critical retrieval of Gregory of Nyssa's theology of the "spiritual senses" as a performative display of how we might theologically account for our perceptual relation to God in a way cut free from the problem of perception. In Gregory I find a viable contemporary theological empiricism - an account which characterizes both tasks of theological contemplation and spiritual formation in terms of a receptivity and responsiveness to the perceptible presence and agency of God in the world. The constructive account I appropriate from Nyssen requires further elaboration, but my aim in articulating it is not so much to demonstrate its correctness as to show how it manages to surmount a minimal obstacle that the most influential accounts do not manage to clear - that of consistency with a minimal empiricism which is neither Givenist nor Coherentist.