Download or read book Love s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy written by Claudia Welz and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2008 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Claudia Weltz explores responses to the problem of evil that do not end up in a theodicy. Kierkegaard's and Rosenzweig's reasons for having no reason to defend God and their ethics of love are discussed in the context of German idealism and French phenomenology."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Theodicy of Love written by John C. Peckham and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If God is all powerful and entirely good and loving, why is there so much evil in the world? Based on a close canonical reading of Scripture, this book offers a new approach to the challenge of reconciling the Christian confession of a loving God with the realities of suffering and evil. John Peckham offers a constructive proposal for a theodicy of love that upholds both the sovereignty of God and human freedom, showing that Scripture points toward a framework for thinking about God's love in relation to the world.
Download or read book Volume 9 Kierkegaard and Existentialism written by Jon Stewart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard's international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard's writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.
Download or read book Theodicy written by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Theodicy" is a book of philosophy by the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz published in 1710, whose optimistic approach to the problem of evil is thought to have inspired Voltaire's "Candide". Much of the work consists of a response to the ideas of the French philosopher Pierre Bayle, with whom Leibniz carried on a debate for many years. The "Theodicy" tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. It must be the best possible and most balanced world, because it was created by an all powerful and all knowing God, who would not choose to create an imperfect world if a better world could be known to him or possible to exist. In effect, apparent flaws that can be identified in this world must exist in every possible world, because otherwise God would have chosen to create the world that excluded those flaws. Leibniz distinguishes three forms of evil: moral, physical, and metaphysical. Moral evil is sin, physical evil is pain, and metaphysical evil is limitation. God permits moral and physical evil for the sake of greater goods, and metaphysical evil is unavoidable since any created universe must necessarily fall short of God's absolute perfection.
Download or read book A Frightening Love Recasting the Problem of Evil written by Andrew Gleeson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-12-02 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Frightening Love radically rethinks God and evil. It rejects theodicy and its impersonal conception of reason and morality. Faith survives evil through a miraculous love that resists philosophical rationalization. Authors criticised include Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Marilyn McCord Adams, Peter van Inwagen, John Haldane, William Hasker.
Download or read book A Theology of Love written by Werner G. Jeanrond and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-01-21 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the different dimensions of Christian love. It argues that all expressions of love are wrestling with the challenge of otherness.
Download or read book Works of Love in a World of Violence written by Deidre Nicole Green and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As she constructively engages feminist critiques of Christianity's complicity in violence, Deidre Nicole Green challenges traditional beliefs that self-sacrifice amounts to love and that suffering is inherently redemptive by arguing for a Kierkegaardian conceptions of Christian love that limits self-sacrifice." -- Back cover.
Download or read book The Presence and Absence of God written by Ingolf U. Dalferth and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2009 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Safeguarding the distinction between God and world has always been a basic interest of negative theology. But sometimes it has overemphasized divine transcendence in a way that made it difficult to account for the sense of God's present activity and experienced actuality. Criticisms of the Western metaphysics of presence have made this even more difficult to conceive. On the other hand, there has been a widespread attempt in recent years to base all theology on (religious) experience; the Christian church celebrates God's presence in its central sacraments of baptism and Eucharist; process thought has re-conceptualized God's presence in panentheistic terms; and some have argued that God might be poly-present, not omnipresent. But what does it mean to say that God is present or absent? For Jews, Christians, and Moslems alike God is not an inference, an absentee entity of which we can detect only faint traces in our world. On the contrary, God is present reality, indeed the most present of all realities. However, belief in God's presence cannot ignore the widespread experience of God's absence. Moreover, there is little sense in speaking of God's absence if it cannot be distinguished from God's non-presence or non-existence. So how are we to understand the sense of divine presence and absence in religious and everyday life? This is what the essays in this volume explore in the biblical traditions, in Jewish and Christian theology and philosophy, and in contemporary philosophy of religion.
Download or read book Logics of War written by Therese Feiler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern ethics of war is a field of disparate, competing voices based on often unexplored theological and metaphysical assumptions. Therese Feiler approaches them from the borderline area between systematics, philosophical theology and religious studies. With reference to G. W. F. Hegel's and like-minded thinkers' 'theo–logic' that negotiates Christ's mediation and immanent dialectics, Feiler identifies the logic and problem of mediation as the core concern of political ethics. Feiler unites five representative authors from now disparate strands of contemporary just war ethics, testing whether they offer a meaningful possibility of mediation and subsequent reconciliation: a sovereign realist and a cosmopolitan idealist; a rationalist individualist, an idealist Christian ethicist, and finally, an evangelical theologian. Opening the just war debate for comparative critical engagement, Feiler creates a fascinating study that locates a “dynamic point” at which faithful, free political action can be wrestled from irony, tragedy, and melancholic inertia in the face of totalitarian suffocation.
Download or read book Non Identity Theodicy written by Vince R. Vitale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Questions as personal as those about suffering require a very personal response. However, the most popular responses to "the problem of evil" revolve around abstract discussions of greater goods, maximization of value, and best possible worlds, depicting God as at best an impartial bureaucrat and at worst a utility fanatic, rather than as a loving parent concerned first and foremost for his children. Vince R. Vitale develops Non-Identity Theodicy as an original response to the problem of evil. He begins by recognizing that horrendous evils pose distinctive challenges for belief in God. The book constructs an ethical framework for theodicy by sketching four cases of human action where horrendous evils are either caused, permitted, or risked, either for pure benefit or for harm avoidance. This framework is then brought to bear on the project of theodicy. The initial conclusions drawn impugn the dominant structural approach of depicting God as causing or permitting horrors in individual lives for the sake of some merely pure benefit. This approach is insensitive to relevant asymmetries in the justificatory demands made by horrendous and non-horrendous evil and in the justificatory work done by averting harm and bestowing pure benefit. Vitale then critiques theodicies that depict God as permitting or risking horrors in order to avert greater harm. The second half of this book develops a theodicy that falls outside of the proposed taxonomy. Non-Identity Theodicy suggests that God allows evil because it is a necessary condition of creating individual people whom he desires to love. This approach to theodicy is unique because the justifying good recommended is neither harm-aversion nor pure benefit. It is not a good that betters the lives of individual human persons—for they would not exist otherwise, but it is the individual human persons themselves.
Download or read book God of All Comfort written by Scott Harrower and published by Lexham Press. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does God respond to trauma in a world full of horrors? Beyond their physical and emotional toll, the horrors of this world raise difficult theological and existential questions. Where is God in the darkest moments of the human experience? Is there any hope for recovery from the trauma generated by these horrors? There are no easy answers to these questions. In God of All Comfort, Scott Harrower addresses these questions head on. Using the Gospel of Matthew as a backdrop, he argues for a Trinitarian approach to horrors, showing how God--in his triune nature--reveals himself to those who have experienced trauma. He explores the many ways God relates restoratively with humanity, showing how God's light shines through the darkness of trauma.
Download or read book Humanity in God s Image written by Claudia Welz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we, in our times, understand the biblical concept that human beings have been created in the image of an invisible God? This is a perennial but increasingly pressing question that lies at the heart of theological anthropology. Humanity in God's Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration clarifies the meaning of this concept, traces different Jewish and Christian interpretations of being created in God's image, and reconsiders the significance of the imago Dei in a post-Holocaust context. As normative, counter-factual notions, human dignity and the imago Dei challenge us to see more. Claudia Welz offers an interdisciplinary exploration of theological and ethical 'visions' of the invisible. By analysing poetry and art, Welz exemplifies human self-understanding in the interface between the visual and the linguistic. The content of the imago Dei cannot be defined apart from the image carrier: an embodied creature. Compared to verbal, visual, and mental images, how does this creature as a 'living image' refer to God—like a metaphor, a mimetic mirror, or an elusive trace? Combining hermeneutical and phenomenological perspectives with philosophy of religion and philosophy of language, semiotics, art history, and literary studies, Welz regards the imago Dei as a complex sign that is at once iconic, indexical, and symbolical—pointing beyond itself.
Download or read book Giving Beyond the Gift written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the co-dependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, to differing degrees they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Derrida and Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence in these Jewish thinkers is symptomatic of a larger question. Recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology, a religion without religion, are not radical enough. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. The logic of apophasis, if permitted to run its course fully, would exceed the need to posit some form of transcendence that is not ultimately a facet of immanence. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis that surpasses the theolatrous impulse lying coiled at the crux of theism, an apophasis of apophasis, based on accepting an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute—that does not signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being’s core. Hence, the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift must give way to the more neutral and less theologically charged notion of an unconditional givenness in which the distinction between giver and given collapses. To think givenness in its most elemental, phenomenological sense is to allow the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.
Download or read book Love Freedom and Evil written by Thaddeus J. Williams and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The defining premise of the Relational Free Will Defense is the claim that authentic love requires free will. Many scholars, including Gregory Boyd and Vincent Brümmer, champion this claim. Best-selling books, such as Rob Bell’s Love Wins, echo that love “cannot be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide.” The claim that love requires free will has even found expression in mainstream Hollywood films, including Frailty, Bruce Almighty, and The Adjustment Bureau. The analysis shows convincingly that the claim that authentic love requires free will, does not meet the criteria of consistency, compatibility with Scriptural sources, and the demands of concrete encounter with problems of moral evil.
Download or read book The Trauma of Doctrine written by Paul Maxwell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trauma of Doctrine is a theological investigation into the effects of abuse trauma upon the experience of Christian faith, the psychological mechanics of these effects, their resonances with Christian Scripture, and neglected research-informed strategies for cultivating post-traumatic resilience. Paul Maxwell examines the effect that the Calvinist belief can have upon the traumatized Christian who negatively internalizes its superlative doctrines of divine control and human moral corruption, and charts a way toward meaningful spiritual recovery.
Download or read book The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology and Christianity written by Dennis Hiebert and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-20 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology and Christianity examines the intersection of the sociology of religion – a long-standing focus of sociology as a discipline – and Christianity – the world’s largest religion. An internationally representative and thematically comprehensive collection, it analyzes both the sociology of Christianity and Christian approaches to sociology, with attention to the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant branches of Christianity. An authoritative, state-of-the-art review of current research, it is organized into five inter-connected thematic sections, considering the overlapping emergence of both the Christian religion and the social science, the conceptualization of and engagement with Christianity by sociological theory, the ways in which Christianity shapes and is shaped by various social institutions, the manner in which Christianity resists and promotes various forms of social change, and the identification, diagnosis, and correction of social problems by sociology and Christianity. This volume is an invaluable collection for scholars and advanced students, with special appeal for those working in the fields of sociology and social theory, as well as religious studies and theology
Download or read book Philosophy of Transcendence Selected Problems written by Jana Trajtelová and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does God exist? Is it meaningful to speak of the Infinite or the Absolute? What is to be understood by concepts such as soul, spirit, or love? Are religious truths philosophically relevant and philosophically tenable? The reflective critical thinking of philosophy tries to embrace each side of human reality, even the matters and themes which arise out of the religious experience. This auxiliary textbook intends to present several selected topics of the philosophy of religion and it is primarily intended for bachelor students of philosophy.
