Volume 64, Issue 3

Plato and Aristotle understood phenomena to be knowable to the extent that they participate in the reality of the unchangeable, and this attitude was appropriated by the church fathers as a way of exploring the world’s dependence on its Creator. Luther’s insistence on the world’s sinfulness and on salvation as one-sidedly dependent on divine agency has been criticized as a rejection of this understanding of the inherent goodness of the world, thus paving the way for the secularized world view of modernity. Among these critics is Erich Przywara in his works up to and including his book Analogia Entis from 1932. However, in 1952 Przywara published an article where he found Luther’s theology of exchange to be a close parallel to his own doctrine of analogia entis , the implication being that Luther is closer to a Catholic understanding of the world’s relationship with God than mainstream post-Enlightenment Protestantism, and this article is an attempt to substantiate that claim.

With the current discussion about posthumanism, the traditional concept of man has become questionable. This also poses severe challenges for theology. In addition to theological anthropology, Christology is particularly affected by this. When it is no longer possible to answer unequivocally what it means to be human, it becomes even more controversial than before how the figure of the Deus-homo should be interpreted. The paper at hand presents a thought experiment in order to check whether it is possible to develop a Christology if one adopts central ideas of recent posthumanist scholarship. Taking Anselm’s famous remoto Christo argument as a model, the thought experiment avoids referring to the concept of man. After three major types of Christology haven been tested, the experiment yields the result that only a very abstract Christology is possible without resorting to explicitly anthropological assumptions. Rather, Christology can be seen as a reason why Christian theologians should reject posthumanism altogether. God has a human face, not a posthuman one.

Zusammenfassung Die zunehmende Verbreitung und Weiterentwicklung sogenannter künstlicher Intelligenz hat neue Fragen der Zurechenbarkeit und Verantwortung erzeugt. In diesem Zusammenhang ist der Vorschlag gemacht worden, das neue Rechtsinstrument der ‚elektronischen Person‘ zu schaffen. Damit sind grundlegende Fragen des menschlichen Selbstverständnisses berührt, es verbinden sich aber auch viele Missverständnisse mit jenem Vorschlag, sowohl bei denen, die den Vorschlag befürworten, als auch aufseiten derer, die ihn kritisch sehen. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Problematik aus juristischer und ethisch-theologischer Perspektive und gelangt zu einer abwägenden Einschätzung bezüglich der Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der elektronischen Person.

This essay proposes an ethics of spirituality as a post-secular question by tracing the legacy of Schleiermacher in Charles Taylor’s account. Given the recent interest in spirituality as a matter of each individual’s perspective and orientation, it is important to explore whether spirituality involves an ethics of spirituality. This question resonates with the ethics of belief in James-Clifford debates and its recent discussions on the non-propositional aspect of belief and its ethical implications for oneself and others. The paper addresses how Schleiermacher and Taylor suggest the ethics of spirituality that demands authentic spirituality and reciprocal communication and recognition, while revealing differences concerning interactions with the institutional church, civil religion, and the civic-cultural frame of rationality and utility.