Volume 55, Issue 1

Europe is in crisis, but what sort of crisis is it? Should it be explained in terms of leaving Europe’s Christian heritage? In this paper, the European crisis is described as a crisis which has its origins within early modern Christianity. This crisis can be made visible through the study of the reception of the Johannine prologue. All the dominant streams in the Reformation, both the mainstream and the radical Reformation, privilege John as a primary source of their doctrines, but differ strongly in their interpretation. The spectrum of interpretation that can be reconstructed through the study of the reception of the prologue sheds light on the present European crisis. The European crisis since the Reformation can be characterized as a tension between a universal and a particular understanding of salvation. The first can be found in radical humanism such as the theology of Michael Servetus or Sebastian Franck, in which church and faith ultimately become superfluous. The second can be found in Anabaptist and Reformed theology, in which salvation is exclusively bound to specific religious communities. Luther’s theology is then construed as an attempt to hold the two extremes together.

This article offers an interpretation of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana I-II.5.6, which brings contemporary semiotic theory into dialogue with Augustinian theology in order to flesh out Augustine’s incipient semiotic theological anthropology. The argument focuses on the interrelation between Augustine’s two seminal distinctions, between signum and res, and between uti and frui, reading the first (semiotic) distinction in the light of the second (theological) distinction, and vice versa. The principal claim is that human beings are signs of God; but this is qualified in the course of the argument, resulting in the revised claim that the difference between God and creation becomes manifest in the transformation of human semiotic relations. Specifically, I argue, God’s redemptive transformation of human beings consists in their liberation from mutually reductive (dyadic) interpretation, freeing them for new signification in new contexts. The article ends with the bold conjecture that a genuinely triadic semiotics implies and requires a doctrine of creation.

In a philosophical understanding, the body is a physical and intellectual medium by which the person enters into earthly life and lingers there. As a whole, the body is comprehended sufficiently neither by a philosophy of identity nor by a dualistic, nor by an alterity philosophy. In a personal and relational or in a dialogical approach, however, the human body can be understood as a metaphysically reasonable being. Theologically, the term body denotes the human being in its physical and in its spiritual understanding and also in its individual and in its social understanding. For a human being, the body is an instrument of both the creative self-realization of a human being as well as a form of God’s presence in this world. In its scientific reflection, Christian theology should understand the body of man neither in a separatist, nor in a naturalized, nor in a spiritualized way. The human body is always the body of a human being, in nature and spirit as well as in culture and in faith.

Thought experiments are employed for a number of reasons and in many different disciplines. This paper explores the work of Novalis in relation to the method of thought experiments in theology, with a special focus on the encounter between Christianity and the science of his day. In a first step I revisit the ongoing philosophical discussion on thought experiments in order to highlight the lack of interest in the literary features of thought experiments. Step two is dedicated to a discussion of the work of Novalis as far as his metaphysics of phantasy and imagination is concerned as it plays out in his romantic poetry. Building on the results of this discussion, in a third step I discuss the relationship (a) between thought experiments in theology and other disciplines, (b) between current discussions of thought experiments and previous periods of philosophical investigation into the ‘laboratory of the mind’, (c) between Christianity and science, and (d) between literary fiction and cognition.

Religious disagreement has recently been a popular topic in analytic philosophy of religion. Many of those who have dealt with the topic have done so from an assumption that logically there is no difference between disagreements on religious matters and disagreements on other areas of life. This assumption is called into question by Wittgenstein (and his followers). This paper explores how Wittgenstein’s view of religious disagreements should be understood. The main source of the study is Wittgenstein’s treatment of the nature of religious disagreements in his lectures on religious belief. In particular, I will explore Wittgenstein’s thought by referring to two recent studies on these lectures made by Cora Diamond and Martin Kusch. I will use the tools of epistemic logic to clarify some problems in this discussion. I will also comment on the common fideistic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s view of religion and his antiintellectualist conception of faith.