The article investigates the role of conceptual integration in generating new theological meanings in early Christian texts. Its basic assumption is that metaphoricity and novelty of language of Christian doctrine and teaching in early Christian period should be regarded as a well attested case of linguistic creativity whose mechanisms are explained by Conceptual Blending Theory as proposed by Fauconnier and Turner. After a brief presentation of selected theological studies utilizing cognitive linguistic perspective and a brief discussion of basic notions of Conceptual Blending Theory, the article examines variants of the THE LOST SHEEP IS HUMANITY blend in selected patristic texts by Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Pseudo-Macarius, Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa. The analysis of these variants shows that conceptual integration allowed these authors to create and develop a wide range of theological ideas representing many important aspects of Christian doctrine from soteriology, through ecclesiology to Christology. This in turn proves that cognitive linguistics may provide theologians with instruments of linguistic analysis that shed new light on many aspects of theological language and reasoning.
The Roman Catholic definition of “church”, especially as applied to groups of Protestant Christians, creates a number of well-known difficulties. The similarly complex category, “species,” provides a model for applying this term so as to neither lose the centrality of certain examples nor draw a hard boundary to rule out border cases. In this way, it can help us to more adequately apply the complex ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. This article draws parallels between the understanding of speciation and categorization and the definition of Church since the council. In doing so, it applies the work of cognitive linguists, including George Lakoff, Zoltan Kovecses, Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner on categorization. We tend to think of categories as containers into which we sort objects according to essential criteria. However, categories are actually built inductively by making associations between objects. This means that natural categories, including species, are more porous than we assume, but nevertheless bear real meaning about the natural world. Taxonomists dispute the border between “zebras” and “wild asses,” but this distinction arises out of genetic and evolutionary reality; it is not merely arbitrary. Genetic descriptions of species has also led recently to the conviction that there are four species of giraffe, not one. This engagement will ground a vantage point from which the Council‘s complex ecclesiology can be more easily described so as to authentically integrate its noncompetitive vision vis-a-vis other Christians with its sense of the unique place held by Catholic Church.
The field of cognitive linguistics has generated a powerful set of theoretical tools for analyzing the ways in which we understand, communicate, and create concepts. In the conceptual integration theory of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, the cognitive process known as double-scope blending provides a highdefinition model for the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. In particular, Ricoeur’s notion of developing a second naivete through the blending of ancient and contemporary worlds of meanings can be viewed as the double-scope integration of concepts across disparate conceptual frames. This re-modeling of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics gives it a new level of clarity and precision in cognitive scientific terms, which in turn may be utilized in service of theological and other forms of discourse. Conceptual integration theory also sheds light on other Ricoeur-inspired hermeneutical models and makes a case for the revelatory character of scripture through the meaning-making process of interpretation. The interpretation of the image of God concept in an evolutionary worldview serves as a heuristic example of second naivete as double-scope blending.
John Sanders’ Theology in the Flesh, the first comprehensive overview of the toolkit that contemporary cognitive linguistics offers for theological appropriation, despite its remarkable success, gives rather minimal attention to blending theory, one of the discipline’s most formidable tools. This paper draws on blending theory to offer an alternative to Sanders’ chapter on conceiving God. Central to the proposal is claim that God-talk, like many of the advances in science, technology, and art, entails a kind of tectonic understanding and conceptual mapping that is neither literal nor figurative.
In his book “Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics”, Robert Masson describes a metaphoric process by which newly accepted truths emerge: for example, in the assertion “Jesus is the Messiah,” Christians reconfigure the field of meanings associated with an existing concept from the Hebrew scriptures ( messiah ) by asserting its identification with Jesus. Masson dubs this process a “tectonic equivalence” or “tectonic shift.” In this paper I build on Masson‘s work by examining some of the shifts he describes as tectonic through the lens of the cognitive linguistics concepts of radial extension and polysemy. I propose that a lasting tectonic shift may be understood as a blend creating a radial extension that substantially alters the category structure of the original source frame so that the blended space comes to be understood as a central instance of that category. Such an approach allows a fruitful analysis of the similarities and differences among three example blends: god is a rock, jesus is the messiah, and jesus is god.
The American struggle over healthcare policy is emblematic of the larger crisis of citizenship and national identity. We have a crisis at the structural, policy level, but the problem also goes deep into our moral lives as individuals and commitments as a society. We struggle to come to a workable consensus about why and how we should provide healthcare, and for whom. Who belongs in our circle of care, and what are our commitments to one anothers’ wellbeing? This identity crisis is spinning out into a breakdown of institutional structures and even loss of caring practices. As a Christian ethicist interested in how moral discourse works, my central concern is this: Why are so many American Christians speaking and legislating against health care programs - the Affordable Care Act, but even also Child Health Insurance Program, which covered children? They are using Bible verses to anchor and justify their policy stances. The American health care reform fight is a crisis of citizenship and national identity, but it is also a crisis of Christian mission and witness. A policy statement given by a conservative congressman is used as a test case with which to display how two experts on language could help us understand conservative Christian thinking on healthcare. Charles Taylor reflects as a philosopher on how “the politics of bringing about care” expresses our deepest commitments and our struggle with the impersonal forces of modernity. Charles Fillmore offers models for understanding how thought and language are linked and systematically structured, framed. There are alternatives to conservative ways of framing healthcare, ways that are arguably more coherent and more in keeping with biblical calls to love of neighbor and to building communities of the beloved.
Both the accounts of Abraham’s three visitors (Gen 18:1-15) and of Jacob’s nighttime intruder (32:23- 33) are famous interpretive cruxes. This article shows why the plain sense is that both Abraham and Jacob recognize right away that the newly introduced figures represent their deity. It does this by: (1) accounting for the place of messengers in the mental life of ancient Israel; (2) recovering an under-appreciated yet cognitively based narrative convention regarding messengers; (3) setting the starting point of each narrative with care; (4) attending to the semantics and pragmatics of the main noun in both accounts; and (5) emulating the online processing of language that an audience’s mind automatically employs, which is incremental and prediction-driven. In the emulation exercise, the audience’s mental parser arrives at a “recipient recognition” (RR) construal quickly-already before the end of 18:2, and by the end of 32:25. Furthermore, handling 32:25 in this manner resolves a third crux at the same time (32:2-3). An RR construal is cognitively favored because it yields a coherent and informative text, unlike the “obscured origin” (OO) construal that theologians presently favor. Meanwhile, the emulation validates a previously proposed hypothesis that the noun אִישׁ ’îš functions as the generic label for designating an “agent”-that is, someone who is representing the interests of another party. All told, this article employs a variety of cognitive factors as keys to plain-sense interpretation. Finally, it touches upon the theological implications of the RR construal of the two passages under study.
This article lays the groundwork for articulating a Christian theology of sacrifice within the framework of cognitive linguistics. I demonstrate the affinity and potential for mutual enrichment between three disparate fields of discourse. Beginning with Jonathan Klawans’s methodological proposals for understanding sacrifice as a meaningful phenomenon for those who engage(d) in it, I suggest that the double-scope conceptual blending described by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner provides a helpful resource for Klawans to clarify his thought and answer objections to his proposals. Fauconnier and Turner’s account of double-scope blends is set within an evolutionary account of human development and is the condition of possibility for language, art, science, and religion. I then put Fauconnier and Turner into dialogue with Sarah Coakley’s recent attempts to locate sacrifice within the evolutionary spectrum, and suggest that they provide a more helpful theory of language than Chomsky’s purely formal account.
Research in conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending-referred to collectively as “conceptual mapping”-identifies human thought as a process of making connections across fields of meaning. Underlying the theory of conceptual mapping is a particular understanding of the mind as embodied. Over the past few decades, researchers in the cognitive sciences have been “putting brain, body, and world back together again.” The result is a picture of the human being as one who develops in transaction with her environment, and whose highest forms of intelligence and meaning-making are rooted in the body’s movement in the world. Conceptual mapping therefore not only gives us insight into how we think, but also into who we are. This calls for a revolution in theological anthropology. Our spirituality must be understood in light of the fact that we are embodied beings, embedded in our environment, whose identities are both material and discursive. Finally, using the example of white supremacy, I show how this revolution in understanding the human person can be useful for ethical reflection, and in thinking about sin and redemption.
Recent developments in cognitive science are here interpreted as an apologetic for Christian theology. Naturalistic faiths are suggested to be dependent on the invention of ‘religion’, and domestication of the foreign through translation. A refusal to accept that a relationship with God is something that develops in the course of reflection, has added to his apparent invisibility. Advocates of embodied thinking who effectively undermine Descartes’ philosophy, open the door to theological reflection. A gender-based exploration reveals that means of predicting the embodied nature of thinking also point to the significance of God. Because human thinking is embodied, God also is perceived by people through his embodied impact - much as is the wind. That correct understanding of God brings human wellbeing, is here suggested to be as true for Africa as for Europe.
In “Conceiving God: Literal and Figurative Prompt for a More Tectonic Distinction” Robert Masson criticizes my claim that some concepts of God can be literal in the sense of a non-extended meaning as defined by cognitive linguists. He claims that all of our ideas for God can only be through extended meanings (what is typically called figurative language). He says that blending theory requires this conclusion. In response I make three points. First, I argue that this is not what cognitive linguistics requires. Second, that Masson fails to ever show that “God is an agent” is actually a single scope or double scope blend. Third, I suggest that behind our dispute are different metaphysical commitments regarding divine transcendence. Because I reject his understanding of divine transcendence and he fails to show that divine agency must be understood only in an extended sense, I conclude that religious believers can legitimately claim that some of their ideas of God are literal (non-extended meanings).
Topical issue: Intersubjectivity and Reciprocal Causality within Contemporary Understanding of the God-World Relationship, edited by Joseph A. Bracken
The use of the interrelated terms divine primary causality and creaturely secondary causality to describe the God-world relationship presents problems to Christian philosophers and theologians in dealing with two key issues: first, the freedom of human beings (and to some extent other finite entities) to exercise their own causal powers in independence of Divine Providence for the world of creation; secondly, the responsibility of God and all creatures for the existence of natural evil and the corresponding responsibility of God and human beings for the existence of moral evil in this world. After reviewing some of the ways these issues have been dealt with in the past, the author offers his own solution in terms of a Neo-Whiteheadian systems-oriented approach to the God-world relationship with emphasis on a reciprocal causal relationship between God and creatures so as conjointly to bring about everything that happens in this world.
The God-world relationship bears an ambiguous relationship between God’s immanent life and God’s life in history. The development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the early Church gave rise to a distinction between theologia and oikonomia. Bonaventure’s theology sought to express an economic trinitarianism without compromising the integrity of God’s life, thus maintaining divine immutability and divine impassibility. Twentieth century trinitarian theologies challenge the notion of divine immutability in light of modern science and radical suffering. This paper develops on the heels of twentieth century theology by focusing in particular on the philosophical shifts rendered by modern science and technology. In particular, the insights of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin are explored with regard to Trinity and evolution, precisely because Teilhard intuited that evolution and the new physics evoke a radically new understanding of God. Building on Teilhard’s insights, I suggest that divine creative love is expressed in a fourth mystery which Teilhard called ‟pleromization.” Pleromization is the outflow of divine creative union or, literally, God filling the universe with divine life. Teilhard recapitulates this idea in the evolution of Christ so that theologia and oikonomia are one movement of divine love. My principal thesis is that the Trinity is integrally related to the world; the fullness of divine love includes the personalization of created reality, symbolized by the Christ. To explore this thesis I draw upon the cyborg as the symbol of hybridization and permeable boundaries and interpret Trinitarian life in evolution as cyborg Christogensis. Using the Law of Three, I indicate why a new understanding of Trinitarian life involves complexification and thus a new understanding of Trinity in which the fullness of divine life includes created reality.
Theologians, philosophers, and scientists have pondered the causalities of human beings, nature, and cosmos. This seeks to avoid the reduction of all activity to God and to understand the richness of beings other than God. Thomas Aquinas valued this ‟secondary causality” greatly, while recent thinkers are also advocating its importance again.
This article considers some metaphysical and theological implications of the Anthropocene, which is the proposed name for a new geological epoch that is characterized by massive human disturbances of the Earth system. This stratigraphic time unit concludes the Holocene epoch that offered a relatively stable climate for human civilizations to emerge and flourish. The Anthropocene therefore marks the end of such natural stabilities - both real and imagined - along with a growing awareness of the dynamic agency or subjectivity of the Earth. By magnifying nonhuman subjectivity, the new epoch is widely interpreted by scholars across a range of disciplines as unsettling modern dualistic notions of human exceptionalism. Consequently, nonhuman nature is no longer a relatively inert background for human cultural activities. Humans and nonhumans must now be seen as interrelated Earth subjects. This nonmodern perspective suggests an ecological metaphysics of intersubjectivity along the lines of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, which redistributes subjectivity, creativity, and transcendence throughout nature. Theology in the Anthropocene must therefore account for this nondual view of reality, which arguably implies a divine-world relation characterized by mutual immanence. The proposed earthbound theology ultimately envisions the divine as poetic exemplification of intersubjectivity.
During his address to the US Congress in 2015, Pope Francis lifted up the Trappist monk and famed spiritual writer Thomas Merton as one of four “great” Americans who “offer us a way of seeing and interpreting reality” that is life-giving and brings hope. Drawing from Merton and gesturing to Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, the author explores the epistemological roots of the environmental crisis, arguing that while intellectual conversion to the crisis is crucial, Merton’s witness suggests a deeper kind of transformation is required. Reading Merton schools the imagination in the way of wisdom, or sapientia, a contemplative disposition that senses its kinship with Earth through the eyes of the heart, illuminating what Pope Francis has called “an integral ecology.” The author considers the impact of two major influences on Merton’s thought: the Russian Wisdom school of theology, or sophiology, and French theologian Jacques Ellul, whose 1964 book “The Technological Society” raises prescient questions about the role of technology in education and spiritual formation. Arguing that our present crisis is both technological and spiritual, epistemological and metaphysical, the author foregrounds Merton’s contributions to a sapiential theology and theopoetics while asking how the sciences and humanities might work together more intentionally toward the transformation of the personal and collective human heart.
Contemporary theology has realized the importance of integrating what we know from the “new physics”-quantum mechanics and relativity theory-into the metaphysical and ontological categories used by theology to consider God, the world, and the God-world relationship. The categories of subjectivity and relationality have risen to prominence in these discussions. Both academic and popular presentations can obscure the vital distinction between what physicists agree on concerning quantum mechanics and the contested interpretation of quantum mechanics, or what quantum mechanics reveals about reality. After (1) summarizing the significant distinction between quantum mechanics per se and the interpretations of quantum mechanics and (2) the agreed upon quantum mechanical experimental procedure and its attendant mathematical formalism, as well as a few of the foremost interpretations, this paper (3) attempts a minimalist culling of some rudimentary but clear ontological principles and categories from what is agreed upon in quantum mechanics, without appeals-tacit or explicit-to one of the many controversial interpretations or to contestable philosophical assumptions and deductions, and these are: experience, subjectivity, relationship, and event. The paper closes by (4) commending one speculative scheme that is especially conducive to developing an interpretation of quantum mechanics consonant with the ontological principles and categories so derived, that of Alfred North Whitehead
Topical issue: Rethinking Reformation, edited by Niels Henrik Gregersen an Bo Kristian Holm
The quincentenary of the Reformation in 2017 challenged different actors or subjects (such as civil societies, states, and churches) to come to terms with ‟the” Reformation. This article argues for gaining an awareness of the constructive character of the word ‟Reformation”, so that ‟coming to terms with the Reformation” will mean different things depending on the particular meaning of ‟Reformation,” and, of course, depending on the different acting subjects. The article focuses mainly on how the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the Roman Catholic church addressed and answered the challenge of a common commemoration and celebration of the Reformation on a global level, especially with a view to previous centenaries that led to serious religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. The article analyzes how ecumenical dialogues allowed for a common perception by Lutherans and Catholics of the theological and spiritual gifts of the Reformation for the whole church, and how distinguishing this meaning of ‟Reformation” from another meaning of ‟Reformation” that denotes the sequence of events leading to the split of the Western church was the basis of the historic ecumenical prayer service with Pope Francis in Lund (Sweden) and the leaders of the Lutheran World Federation on October 31, 2016, commemorating the Reformation both in gratitude and lament and committing themselves to continue on the journey from conflict to communion.
While Luther affirmed the believer’s freedom in relation to the world, he described the human being as unfree in relation to God from whom we receive everything and without whom we can achieve nothing good. This article reconsiders the relation between autonomy and heteronomy in the context of a phenomenology of listening: if faith comes from listening (ex auditu) and auditus is not a human capacity, but rather the effect of God’s Word that operates within the human being, how is our (un)freedom to be understood? Further, if a human being’s self-relation is expressed by the ‘voice’ of conscience, which can be ignored only at the cost of losing the unity with oneself, how is responsibility to be conceptualized when the call comes both from ‘within’ and from ‘without’? Finally, what are the implications of this view of the person for the role of religion in public life and the ways in which religious conflicts can be resolved? In an anachronistic thought experiment, Luther is brought into a posthumous dialogue with those that he excluded from the discussion: the Jews. In particular, his view concerning the justmentioned questions is contrasted with insights by Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt.
In general the effect of the Reformation has been negative, but this is because it but imperfectly overcame the legacy of later medieval philosophy which was both univocalist and nominalist. In consequence it has encouraged some of the negative features of modernity: capitalism, the emergence of the sovereign state, the disenchantment of nature, iconoclasm, literalism and the disparagement of tradition. However, modern Catholicism has not been altogether free of this legacy and its consequences either. There has also been, to an almost contradictory degree, a positive consequence of the Reformation at its most radical: the pursuit of the ethical for its own sake and a greater sacralisation of all aspects of reality.
In the German Kaiserreich the University of Heidelberg was known as a liberal academic institution, with internationally well-known professors and many students from foreign countries. Young and innovative scholars in the institution included the Protestant theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), the sociologist Max Weber (1869-1920) and the Professor of Public Law Georg Jellinek (1851-1911) who studied the origins and driving forces of capitalism and of modern occidental rationalism. These scholars were interested in the ‛cultural significance’ of religious beliefs and their ethical implications. They saw religion as a relatively autonomous cultural force sui generis. In close intellectual interaction they focused on the religious roots of modern human rights and the strong ethical differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism.
Martin Luther emphasizes the affective experience of the living God rather than God as an abstract, metaphysical idea. Luther explains this experience of God by distinguishing between God as Deus absconditus in his hidden majesty and God as Deus revelatus suffering on the cross. According to Luther, sinners experience the hidden God as a terrifying presence causing them to suffer. Through faith, however, sinners are able to recognize that this wrathful God is one with the God of love and mercy revealed in Christ. Based on this paradoxical understanding of God, Luther admonishes Christians to seek refuge in God against God. In recent decades, Luther’s accentuation of the revealed God has inspired postmodern philosophers and theologians in their efforts to recast the notion of God in light of the Nietzschean outcry on the death of God and Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology. Hence, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo have weakened the notion of an omnipotent God in favour of an anti-metaphysical understanding of “god” kenotically denouncing his power and occurring as an ethically obliging event. Conversely, postmodern thinking have inspired contemporary Lutheran theologians to reinterpret the notion of God. In this article, Luther’s theology serves as a resource for critiquing these postmodern attempts at post-metaphysically rethinking God the central claim being that they are unable to proclaim the saving promise of a reconciliatory union between God hidden and revealed and between sinful human beings and Christ. As a result, theology is reduced to an ethical manifesto or to compassionate anthropology leaving despairing humans without a language with which to express their sufferings.
This paper explores the link between the extra nos in Gustaf Wingren’s theological anthropology and the homo capax in Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology, considered as two creative receptions of the tradition from Luther. I will argue that the reason that we find such synergies between these two thinkers, even though neither of them ever referred to the other, has to do with their common roots in, and their contributions to rethink, the tradition from the Reformation. Wingren takes his specific place in twentieth century theology as an angry critic of the dominant anti-liberal movements that took the distinctively Christian-in opposition to what we all share as human beings-as methodological startingpoint when understanding the Christian faith, and as an alternative he developed understanding of what it means to be human by starting “outside” oneself. Ricoeur’s philosophical position is developed as a creative alternative to both humanist and anti-humanist approaches, expressed as a wounded cogito capable of imagining “onself as another.” Taken together, these two thinkers provide us with a profound dialectical way of thinking what it means to be human by bringing together a de-centered self and a centered self as integral parts of a wider dialectics.
The aim of this paper is to compare Martin Luther and K. E. Løgstrup on the theme of sin and grace, and to argue that while Løgstrup wanted to stay close to Luther in many respects, he nonetheless provides a secularized version of Luther’s picture, according to which we are liberated from our sinfulness not by God’s grace, but by our ethical encounter with other people. This then raises the question of whether Løgstrup’s approach can work, and thus whether this secularized alternative can be made stable and coherent. We begin by focusing on central themes concerning Løgstrup’s relation to Luther. We then outline the key features of Luther’s conception of sin and grace that were important to Løgstrup , and then consider how he develops that conception in a secularized manner. Finally, we discuss problems that might be raised for Løgstrup’s position.
Topical issue: Latin American Perspectives on Religion, edited by Charles Taliaferro, Marciano Adilio Spica and Agnaldo Cuoco Portugal
The aim of this paper is to defend a type of pluralistic philosophical theory that addresses the specific characteristics of Latin American religious diversity. In order to do this, I will first try to show how, from a Latin American perspective, the discussion of religious diversity necessarily imposes the concept of syncretism and how this concept can be understood within the debate about diversity. After that, I will defend an understanding of religiosity that takes syncretism as something natural, given the functioning of our systems of practices and beliefs in general. Finally I will defend the advantages of a pluralistic philosophical perspective of religion that considers the phenomenon of syncretism and how it is necessary for an understanding of Latin American religiosity.
This article analyses a certain philosophical (ethical and political) interpretation of “the sacred” as brought up by native world views of indigenous peoples in the American continent from a decolonial approach. Translation is used as resistance that resounds in the social-environmental struggles in our continent nowadays, particularly in Mexico. The appropriation of the term “sacred” by native peoples reveals the colonial political theory of the State. By challenging consumerism and ecological destruction, the translation of the indigenous concept of ‟sacred” into an ecological conception of intrinsic link between people and “nature” enables a dialogue between those cultures and the warning of modern science about global warming and the over-exploitation of the earth’s resources.
The debate over the public role of religion and of theology has become quite urgent. Not only by the evident religious presence in the party politics sphere, nor by its influence in the Brazilian social culture and life, but by the role that theology and, in this case, the churches can have to transform the social order. The present work reinforces the emancipatory potential of theology and the action of the church in the public space, pointing to a priority locus, from which both reflection and practice can be emancipatedly formulated, namely, social movements. Social movements, it will be argued, are the space in which the spark that gives rise to social and political change emerges in reality. In this sense, some notes will be made from the notion of Event of Alain Badiou, which recognizes, so to speak, the unique epiphanic character of the Events that can divide history between before and after, which effectively have a radically transforming character. In this sense, the heuristic potential for the church and theology will be emphasized to engage in the struggles of movements in the experience of the Badiousian Events that we could characterize as based on the paradigm of revelation.
This article compares the approach of the Brazilian philosopher Henrique Vaz to the ones of Charles Darwin and Ernst Cassirer about human nature. Firstly, the text expounds Darwin’s ideas about human species in his The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), showing how the strictly biological approach is insightful in many respects, but becomes insufficient to understand humans in some other important points. Secondly, the article argues that those insufficiencies of Darwin’s theory may be overcome by the culture centered understanding of the human phenomenon held by Ernst Cassirer. Some other inadequacies are shown in Cassirer’s account, however, which can be resolved - preserving the virtues of both his and Darwin’s theories - by Henrique Vaz’s dialectic conception of humans as beings towards transcendence.
Brazilian Religious Studies have a short history, with prevalence of descriptive and social sciences approaches. Sometimes phenomenology and hermeneutics are perspectives claimed as philosophical guides or as methods to be used, but often obscurities remain among these claims. Critiques against such perspectives have been formulated, but these are not always careful regarding fundamental issues concerning them. With better clarification of phenomenological hermeneutics’ principles, it is possible to offer useful guidance for understanding Religious Studies as an important discipline in Humanities, without unbalanced views of it that favor simply an empiricist point of view.
The purpose of this paper is to show a surprising coincidence between Lutheran Protestantism and physicalist neurosciences regarding the negation of free will and how this issue can begin to be studied in Latin American academia. The current advance of Protestantism in Latin America, accompanied by a decline in Catholicism, is simultaneous with a growing presence of the physicalist neurosciences. It can be seen that the development of Protestantism and neurosciences coincide historically in Latin America, unlike what happened in other parts of the world, where Protestantism has a much more extensive history. This allows us to suppose that the discussion on free will will be installed as a matter of research and discussion in the Latin American academia, which had not happened until now. In this work we also seek to identify what could be the common element that unites the Lutheran conception and the arguments of the physicalist neurosciences about the negation of free will. We will show that this common element is the aversion to metaphysics as an explanatory dimension of free will. The strong opposition to metaphysics is probably the most important common element between Lutheran Protestantism and the physicalistic neurosciences. This will allow us to show that the proximity between the two is not such an extravagant idea.
Topical issue: Recognizing Encounters with Ultimacy across Religious Boundaries, edited by Jerry L. Martin
“Ultimacy,” it is argued, is not an area that academic studies in theology nor the study of religion can properly investigate; nevertheless, it is also illegitimate to argue therefore that claims to it are simply linguistic power plays. Using an autobiographical methodology, the author explores how their own “imagined” “mystical” experience and scholarly studies may shed light on approaching the study of religious experience, noting particularly work by Rudolf Otto, Robert Sharf, Gregory Shushan, and Ann Taves. Reflections are offered on studying religious experience, approaching ultimacy, and the relationship of theological and religious studies. Moreover, some critical and decolonial perspectives are brought to bear both on the author’s own work, academic studies, and contemporary debates around studying what may be termed “mysticism” or religious experience. The author also argues that the autobiographical and reflexive model offered herein may be a useful perspective for scholarship in the study of religion.
Is religious experience necessarily the product of one specific tradition? The constructivist approach to religious experience which prevails in the contemporary academy certainly suggests that this is the case. But is this not at odds with the idea of an ultimate reality that exists objectively and independently of what any given group of human beings may think about it? This paper argues that the phenomenon of religious conversion militates against the constructivist account.
The prospect of recognizing the ultimate is a matter of interpretation. As such, hermeneutics is used as a framework for describing the interactions of self, language, and the other (whether culturally other or ultimately other). Questioning whether religious ultimacy can be recognized across religious boundaries is based on a mistaken assumption that differences between religions are qualitatively different than differences within a religion. Hermeneutically speaking, intra-communal difference and inter-communal difference are of the same kind. If humans can negotiate the former, they can negotiate the latter. Recognizing ultimacy is an intersubjective act of phronēsis, or practical wisdom. As such, it cannot be explained in any detail apart from the concrete particulars of each encounter. Below is an account of recognizing the Ultimate, analyzed into four explanatory ways: its immediate quality (uncanniness), its vehicle (the classic), its cultural-linguistic mechanism (metaphorical appropriation), and its ontological implications (a signifying cosmos). Each way offers a different type of explanation as to how a person can recognize another religion’s ultimate. I begin with the most concrete: spontaneous feeling, and work my way to more speculative implications.
Simply reading sacred texts across religious boundaries rarely achieves an “aha moment” or an encounter with ultimacy. The possibility of engaging with ultimacy requires establishing some necessary conditions. Any attempt to compel an experience results in false spiritual encounters rather than permitting authentic ones to occur. Therefore, a balance is necessary between being open to the possibility of a religious experience and seeking, but not forcing, an encounter with ultimacy. Placing oneself in a prayerful or spiritual state, for example, achieves the potential for encountering ultimacy by actively reading and meditating on various traditions’ sacred texts. These diverse writings relate others’ encounters with ultimacy and reveal multiple perspectives and imaginative descriptions of the transcendent. An encounter with ultimacy entails an open, willing, prayerful demeanor, intellectual curiosity, a rich imagination regarding divine imagery, and a sincere effort at understanding such a religious experience. A Christian contemplative process known as Lectio Divina satisfies many of these requirements. The method is general and flexible enough to utilize with sacred texts across religious boundaries; it invites a person to slow down, read, pay attention, respond with wonder, and humbly submit to the transforming presence and revelation of ultimate reality.
This essay proposes that action unaccompanied by the usual feeling of conscious agency constitutes a “mark of ultimacy.” Characteristically religious statements of “agentless action” find support in social psychological and cognitive scientific research that calls into question the intuitive belief that conscious thought causes action. An awareness of the limits of our powers of will lies at the the core of those limit experiences that provide the context for the meaningfulness of religious language.
Contemporary studies of wilderness spirituality are based primarily in quantitative social science, and disagree over the relative influence of shared stories and religious traditions. In a study of visitors to California’s national parks and trails, Kerry Mitchell found that backpackers reported heightened perceptions, fueled by such dichotomies as the encounter with the spectacular rather than the mundane, and with divine organization rather than human organization in wilderness. I argue wilderness experience informed only by natural scenery falls short in encountering ultimacy. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “The Mass on the World” offers a unified rather than a fragmented vision of divine relationship to the natural and the human. Multiple readings can inform the wilderness sojourner, including a basic, open reading as a prayer shared with all nature; an environmental reading considering suffering and the act of Eucharistic offering; and a constructive reading to address dichotomies and fuse humanity and nature into an integrated cosmic future
Topical issue: Phenomenology of Religious Experience II: Perspectives in Theology, edited by Olga Louchakova-Schwartz and Martin Nitsche
Because Jorge Bergoglio’s (Pope Francis’s) pontifical texts depart from his predecessor’s Thomistic vocabulary, critics claim his works deploy an “improvisational” style. Closer analysis reveals, however, that Francis deploys the terminology of French phenomenology after the “theological turn.” In fact, Evangelii gaudium and Amoris laetitia frame the event of interpersonal encounter using three concepts drawn from Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophical projects: the gaze, the face, and the other. Without ruling out a direct textual influence, I argue that Bergoglio’s theology of encounter highlights recent phenomenology’s implications for Catholic moral theology and ecclesiology. Faith is born of an encounter with the merciful gaze of a specific other - Jesus Christ. The Church, as the community that bears witness to this gaze, is thus called to eniconize this same gaze for “the least of these” (Matt 25:40). Not obviating the need for moral precepts, the encounter with the particular other becomes the condition of their possibility; moral norms only cohere within the context of the pastoral “face-to-face.” The main ecclesiological consequence of the “pastoral turn” Bergoglio initiates is thus a “kerygmatic hermeneutic” of the Church: the community of believers turns outward to encounter the other in mercy, evangelizing by example and charity.
Analyzing the tendency of Christian believers to rationalize the religious experience of the face of the Other, I reveal through Levinas, how, in doing so, they paradoxically neglect to perceive God, who is love. I will focus on the appropriate response shown by both Levinas and Christ in the inter-human drama, specifically, that of passive kenosis, as opposed to self-preserving activity. In undergoing the an-archic passion of the Other, I encounter a possibility of transformation from my self qua ego which disconnects me from reality, to my self qua responsibility which throws me back into my finitude. This becomes most powerful upon experiencing the Crucifixion of Christ, as ‛I’, as active agent, become traumatically substituted by ‛me’, as passive recipient. When I surrender to this accusative gaze of the face of Christ which pierces my egoistic shell, I encounter, according to Levinas, the infinite demands of the vulnerable Other haunting me before ontological qualification. In this, I experience the trace of the inescapable Infinite who calls me to holiness. This holiness can only be reached if I cease to manipulate God, instead allowing him the freedom to do with me as he wills through the self-emptying passivity which Levinas describes.
This paper examines the history of boundary crossing and boundary preservation between Jews and Christians in the eighteenth century via an unorthodox path. Two men, a Swedish Lutheran natural philosopher and a charismatic Polish Rabbi, give their accounts of ascents to the heavens, both in the 1740s. The lives of Emanuel Swedenborg and the Baal Shem Tov did not intersect, but their otherworldly experiences tell related stories of strife between Jews and Christians while betraying something of a shared horizon concerning the future of their religious communities, and concerning sacred texts and their interpretation. Using a phenomenological framework informed by Emmanuel Levinas, and with theories of experience articulated by Steven Katz and Martin Jay at hand, this paper understands these accounts as articulations of relationship: not just the relationship between the subject and God, scripture, or the heavens, but articulations of the fraught relationship with the religious other in the earthly, human realm. By placing Swedenborg and the Besht, as it were, face to face, this paper emphasizes the presence of the religious other in their experiences, even in their private encounters with the Divine, and even though the intersubjectivity these experiences expose is characterized by difference, difficulty, and asymmetry.
This paper: a) offers a phenomenology of the religious that challenges the assumption that “religious experience” is primarily to be understood as a type of experience, called ‘religious’ experience, which is distinct from other (i.e., ‘non-religious’) experiences; and b) traces out some implications of this for phenomenological and other scholarly approaches to religion. To achieve these aims, the paper begins by explaining the phenomenological claim-found most explicitly in Husserl and Merleau- Ponty-that all experiences are expressive of a certain kind of spirit. This account of spirit, when applied to the phenomenological understanding of the ‘religious,’ allows us to distinguish between religiosity (as a transcendental structure), religions (as dynamic forces that express that structure), and religious phenomena (as concrete phenomena that express religions). In turn, this tri-partite distinction allows us to explain how religiosity leads to the development of religion in a way that suggests that ‘the religious’ is best conceived as a particular dimension of all experience. In that light, two major implications for the study of religion emerge from the phenomenology of the religious provided in this paper: 1) the realm of possible subjects of study is greatly expanded; while 2) the proper object of study is narrowed and clarified
Dennis Hirota is a modern master of Shin Buddhism who for several decades has explicated the role of natural language in fostering Buddhist awakening. At the core of his oeuvre is the claim that Shin Buddhism’s founder, Shinran Shonin (1173-1263), accepted the earlier Mahayana teaching of nondual awareness as a necessary condition for awakening. Shinran’s unique contribution was to insist that ordinary persons were, as a matter of historical circumstance, incapable of the disciplines required to arrive at non-dual awareness. It was just this circumstance that the historical Buddha foresaw when he taught the Larger Pure Land Sutra, in which the mind of the Buddha Amida, perfect wisdom and compassion, became available to ordinary people who call his Name in joyful sincerity. This is a difficult teaching of “non-practice” that embraces many subtleties. As a heuristic to ease the way into Shinran as Hirota presents him, this paper introduces a painting by the modern Japanese scientist and artist, Iwasaki Tsuneo. This is not a “Shin painting,” but certainly a “Mahayana painting” that connects the aspiration of an ordinary person to ultimate truth through the text of the Heart Sutra, arguably the quintessential Buddhist teaching of non-dual awareness.
The Gathas, a corpus of seventeen poems in Old Avestan composed by the ancient Iranian poet-priest Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) ca. 1200 B.C.E., is the foundation document of Zoroastrian religion. Even though the dualistic axiology of the Gathas has been widely noted, it has proved very difficult to understand the meaning and genre of the corpus or the position of Zarathushtra’s ideas with regard to other religious philosophies. Relying on recent advances in translation and decryptions of Gathic poetry, I shall here develop a philosophical interpretation of the Gathas, including, as shall be discussed here in detail, explication of the revelation he reports in the poem known as Yasna 30. I argue that, similarly to Marx, Henry, and Schutz, Zarathushtra connects social criticism with an original philosophy of (inter)subjectivity and existential reflection, placing his account in the context of a fully developed metaphysics which includes the human-divine sharing of mental properties. I show that in order to accommodate this complicated problematic, Zarathushtra uses the vehicle of multiple realities. Reflecting the spontaneity of life, the dynamics of various ontological modes in the text create a reference to subjectivity. A description of the dream in Yasna 30 is sufficiently within the limits of possibility for a dream experience, and thereby delivers three original phenomenological reductions. The reductions initiate a genetic account of the phenomenalization of invisible impulses which give rise to moral choices, and define the human-divine relationship. The opposing moral choices open into a reverse axiological intentionality in the sphere of intersubjectivity, and are said to plot life for the rightful and lifelessness for the wrongful. It can be concluded that Zarathushtra’s theism and views of the social world are “the first philosophy”, with a unique and original phenomenological ontology of intersubjectivity at its core.
My goal in this paper is to investigate the role of the subject in Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology aided by his interpretation of the Kantian categories in ‟Being Given” and ‟In Excess”. I shall relate Marion’s hypothetical saturation of the Kantian categories to the suspension of the I-identity. The inner mechanism of this suspension will be shown to consist in a critical resistance to an excessive intuition that is defined by a failed attempt at the conceptualizing of intuitions. This failure shall manifest the saturated phenomenon as a counter-experience. The critical resistance to an excessive intuition acts as a temporary activity of the subject leading to its role as interpreter inscribed in an infinite hermeneutic. Based on this I argue that Marion’s subject is not destroyed by an excessive intuition but is only called upon to investigate a phenomenon from a multitude of perspectives. I hold this to be of the essence for Marion, as it explains the possibility of interpreting and experiencing the given as a given during the encounter with the given in which both the subject as well as the given become manifest. I shall argue thus that the recourse to Kant further clarifies Marion’s account of a critical, resistant subject. However, this does not mean that I am arguing for Kant’s categories, but that I hold them to have an important explanatory role for Marion’s phenomenology.
In 1988, Tymieniecka explored the religious phenomenon, pursuing the spiritual experience of the sacred as it surges in the life of our soul. She described three movements of the human soul that lead to revelation of the spiritual experience of the sacred. A first movement of “radical examination” is followed by one of “exalted existence” in which the soul proceeds beyond the usual reflection on the interior of the ongoing current of life. Here, we experience sadness at not being able to transcend our finiteness. When the screen of objectivity is broken, the soul surprisingly does not plunge again into its underground turmoil; on the contrary, it dives into the life-giving waters of an underground stream which, like a “sacred river”, flows imperturbably and silently. On this basis, the soul can move “toward transcending”, and lay the groundwork for the life of the spirit, which seeks the Other from finiteness. Tymieniecka stopped at this threshold in 1988. In 2008, she reiterated that from her phenomenology of life no theology had arisen, and yet she hinted that glimpses in this direction had opened with the start of a metaphysics of the fullness of the logos in a vital key.
Recently, Catholic teaching and theology have given much attention to “the preferential option for the poor.” Gustavo Gutierrez, OP, who has popularized the phrase, also defines theology as a “reflection on praxis in the light of the word of God.” The praxis of the option for the poor is therefore indispensable to the theological task, for theology must always be “enfleshed” and concrete in the life of the people. This is particularly the case of Latin American theology and strongly emphasized in the magisterium of Pope Francis. The option for the poor has its foundation in who God is and how God is for the people (cf Exod 3:8-15). The option for the poor is grounded in life. Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life provides a logical approach to theological reflection on poverty, justice, and solidarity with the poor. The people of God, the Church community, live the option in concrete praxis. The God of life has a special love and concern for the poor. The poor, and those in solidarity with them, mysteriously experience the divine love and grace in their everyday lives and la lucha por la vida (the struggle for life). In the living, religious experience is intimately grounded.
An enduring feature of Christian religious life has been the experience of the demonic. This experience can be found in the New Testament, most obviously in reported encounters with demons, but more centrally in the language of spiritual warfare that pervades much of the Pauline literature. In the Patristic period, these ideas were cemented in the Christian tradition in the writings of the Desert Fathers. A phenomenological understanding of experience holds that percepts have qualities that are inherently given as part of the experience, and that these qualities can be observed through the use of phenomenological concepts. An examination of the writings of the Desert Fathers suggests that one inherent quality of some religious experiences is their externality. Thoughts or feelings within the person are perceived as having an external source, and external threats can take on an embodied quality in perception, as in visions of demonic beings. These experiences have their initial constitution in an Otherness centered in the body. On reflection, it is not surprising that we would find a quality of externality in religious experience. Religion and spirituality deal with our relationship to the broader world around us. Recent phenomenological writings by Levinas and Marion have begun to recover the importance of externality, however, they neglect aspects of demonic experiences such as their negative valence. Critics of the demonic have tried hard to expel the idea from Western consciousness, pointing to tragic experiences in early modern history and the apparent need to posit the existence of immaterial entities. However, a careful phenomenological and historical analysis casts serious doubt on this modernist picture. The abandonment of the demonic in much of Christian religious thought and practice carries negative consequences, as it invalidates the external quality of many difficult religious experiences. A recovery of the concept of the demonic would help us better understand the phenomenology of religious life.
It has been stated in academic studies and popular media that Islam began its rise in dominance in Turkey with the accession of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in 2002 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, contrary to claims of societal Islamization, in light of quantitative and qualitative studies this study argues that despite the AKP and its leader Erdoğan being in power, the following evidence has been observed in Turkey: praying rates have decreased, extramarital sexual relationship has become prevalent, the number of mosques per person has decreased, the belief in virginity is a point of honour for fewer people, people‘s clothes have become more flatteringly formfitting and more attractive, including women’s head-scarves; secular experts rather than religious officials are being sought for help concerning problems in daily life, homosexuality has become more socially acceptable visible, traditional family structures has been shattered. Therefore, it is claimed that AKP (or Erdoğan) has failed in efforts to Islamize Turkey over the past 15 years (2002-2017) despite having all the governmental means and opportunities to do so. This study argues that the classical theory of secularization, which claims that modernization leads to secularization, can still explain not only the social transformation seen in historically Christian and Western European countries and their offshoots, but also the social transformation of Turkey, a Muslim-majority country that has been governed for the past 15 years by a political party with clear Islamic sensitivities.
