Divine omnipotence and moral perfection

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW LOKE
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Moral Perfection

AbstractDivine omnipotence entails that God can choose to do evil (even though He will not) by taking up a human nature. In showing others by way of example how temptations are to be overcome, His exposure to evil desires in such circumstances is consistent with moral perfection. The view that ‘God has the greatest power and is morally perfect simpliciter’, is religiously more adequate than ‘God has great power and is essentially morally perfect’. The essentiality of other divine attributes to God is discussed, and rebuttals to Anselmian arguments are offered.

Communicatio Idiomatum

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cross
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Communicatio Idiomatum

This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Christological debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians on the ascription of divine and human predicates to the person of the incarnate Son of God (the communicatio idiomatum). It does so by close attention to the arguments deployed by the protagonists in the discussion, and to the theologians’ metaphysical and semantic assumptions, explicit and implicit. It traces the central contours of the Christological debates, from the discussion between Luther and Zwingli in the 1520s to the Colloquy of Montbéliard in 1586. The book shows that Luther’s Christology is thoroughly Medieval, and that innovations usually associated with Luther—in particular, that Christ’s human nature comes to share in divine attributes—should be ascribed instead to his younger contemporary Johannes Brenz. The discussion is highly sensitive to the differences between the various Luther groups—followers of Brenz, and the different factions aligned in varying ways with Melanchthon—and to the differences between all of these and the Reformed theologians. And by locating the Christological discussions in their immediate Medieval background, the book also provides a comprehensive account of the continuities and discontinuities between the two eras. In these ways, it is shown that the standard interpretations of the Reformation debates on the matter are almost wholly mistaken.

The Formula of Concord and Lutheran Christology in the 1570s

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cross
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Divine Attributes

This chapter gives an account of the debates between the followers of Melachthon and the followers of Brenz in the years immediately prior to the Formula of Concord (1577). It then describes the formula itself, and finally the later Christology of Martin Chemnitz, which differs sharply from his earlier views in a number of key respects. It shows that the two parts of the formula, composed respectively by Andreae and Chemnitz, while agreeing that Christ’s human nature possesses divine attributes, diverge in numerous ways on questions of both Christological metaphysics and Christological semantics, and that these divergences render the two parts prima facie incompatible.

The ‘Compatibilism’ of Human Freedom and Divine Omnipotence

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 257-266
Author(s):  
Wyatt Harris
Keyword(s):  
Martin Luther ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Theological Method ◽  
Divine Simplicity ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Doctrine Of God ◽  
Divine Omnipotence

Abstract Katherine Sonderegger’s doctrine of God, constructed on the basis of a meditation on the incommunicable divine attributes, is here elucidated. I detail Sonderegger’s commitment to divine simplicity and explain her preferred theological method: metaphysical compatibilism. I show how Sonderegger’s unique understanding of compatibilism allows her the freedom to bypass or displace most normative metaphysical arguments proffered by the tradition that attempt to elucidate divine and human freedom. Granting divine simplicity, thus that omnipotence is a moral doctrine, in other words, that omnipotence is good, I present Sonderegger’s notion of compatibilism in her account of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush in Exodus 3 and examine pertinent issues. A novel account of the nature of God is given that presents human freedom in a new light. By way of conclusion, Martin Luther is brought in to shed critical light on Sonderegger’s doctrine of God.

scholarly journals N.A. Berdyaev About the Human Nature

Adam alemi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 486 ◽  
pp. 71-80
Author(s):  
G.D. Khusainova
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Good And Evil

The article analyzes the teachings of the Russian religious philosopher N. A. Berdyaev about man and his essence. It is noted that the basis of this doctrine is its own ontology. In this ontology, adhering to the Christian position as a whole, he nonetheless substantially departs from it. He not only accepts the teachings of J. Boehme, but essentially transforms it. If Böme has Ungrund in God, then Berdyaev places her outside of God. It is Ungrund, according to him that is the source of ontological freedom. In his anthropology, he accepts the ancient idea of man as a microcosm, but since he interprets the cosmos differently than the ancient philosophers, he interprets this idea differently. In addition, he supplements it with the provision that man is not only a microcosm, but also a microtheos. Berdyaev contrasts man and nature, defining man as a supernatural being. Man, Berdyaev claims, has the same attributes as God. The main ones are freedom and creativity. Therefore, according to Berdyaev, man is equal to God and is superior to angels. In his freedom he is almost unlimited: he is free even in the choice between good and evil. Berdyaev, in addition, distinguishes between a person as an individual and a person as a person. It is as a person that a person, according to him, is supernatural, equal to God and has divine attributes.

Andreae and Beza at the Colloquy of Montbéliard

2019 ◽  
pp. 226-255
Author(s):  
Richard Cross
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Son Of Man ◽  
Abstract Nouns ◽  
Hypostatic Union

This chapter describes the debate between Jakob Andreae and Theodore Beza at the Colloquy of Montbéliard (1586). Andreae defends a Brenzian account of the hypostatic union, and modifies his view so that it conforms more closely to Brenz’s own view that the divine powers themselves are in some sense possessed by the human nature. Beza accepts the supposital union. He outlines the ways in which Andreae’s account of the distinction between concrete and abstract nouns might lead to theological difficulties, and shows that a Brenzian view of the communicatio, coupled with a restriction on the set of divine attributes that can be communicated to the Son of Man, results in a Christology that is inconsistent with Chalcedon.

Early Lutheran Christologies

2019 ◽  
pp. 86-119
Author(s):  
Richard Cross
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Hypostatic Union

This chapter outlines the views of Melanchthon and the early Brenz, showing how Lutheran Christology bifurcated into two basic traditions—those accepting bodily omnipresence and those denying it. It demonstrates that Melanchthon quickly abandoned early claims affirming both the omnipresence of Christ’s human nature and its life-giving power, and ended up adopting a view very similar to Zwingli’s. The chapter outlines the first stages in the development of Brenz’s Christology, showing how Brenz, from 1528 or 1529 onwards, came to adopt a view of the hypostatic union according to which the divine person and human nature are the same person but different natures, and according to which human properties are borne by the divine person, and divine properties by the human nature (the so-called genus maiestaticum). By 1561 Brenz has begun to restrict the set of divine attributes that can be borne by the human nature, presumably in response to the Christology of Caspar Schwenckfeld, and the chapter ends with a brief summary of Schwenckfeld’s view.

4. Variety within early Confucianism

2014 ◽  
pp. 48-69
Author(s):  
Daniel K. Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Confucian Tradition ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Moral Perfection ◽  
Cultivation Process

‘Variety within early Confucianism’ considers two very different, early interpretations of the Confucian tradition that have influenced education, social practices, and intellectual tradition throughout imperial Chinese history: that of Mencius (fourth c.bce) and of Xunzi (third c.bce). Both followers of Confucius agree that: (1) man is morally perfectible; and (2) to achieve moral perfection man must undertake a self-cultivation process. But for Mencius, the source of man's moral potential is internal, found in man's nature itself; for Xunzi, man's nature is evil and he must look externally to his environment and culture to find moral resources to redirect his recalcitrant human nature.

Concluding Remarks

2019 ◽  
pp. 256-262
Author(s):  
Richard Cross
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
Hypostatic Union ◽  
Communicatio Idiomatum ◽  
Lutheran Orthodoxy ◽  
The Way

This chapter suggests that part of the early seventeenth-century debate between the theologians of Tübingen and the theologians of Giessen on the question of the communicatio idiomatum represents the conflicting structures of Brenzian and Chemnitzian accounts of the hypostatic union. At issue was the human nature’s possession of divine attributes during Christ’s earthly life, affirmed by the Tübingen theologians and denied by the Giessen ones. The 1624 Decisio saxonica ruled in favour of Giessen, and thus in effect against Brenzian understandings of Christ’s kenosis. Lutheran orthodoxy requires that some (and not all) divine attributes are communicated to the human nature. It concludes with puzzles about the way in which the genus maiestaticum might be possible at all, given the denial of any distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies.

The Anselmian ‘Single-Divine-Attribute Doctrine’

1993 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-77
Author(s):  
H. Scott Hestevold
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Moral Perfection ◽  
Divine Attribute ◽  
Multiple Attribute

There have emerged two distinct approaches to preserving the coherence of theism. The most common approach involves explicating the concept of an absolutely perfect God in terms of the divine attributes (such as omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection) and then analyzing the divine-attribute concepts in such a way that they are rendered mutually consistent. According to this ‘multiple-attribute’ approach, the coherence of theism ultimately turns both on whether each divine-attribute concept can be coherently analyzed independently of the other divine-attribute concepts and on whether the divine attributes are then mutually consistent.

Phenomenology depends on human nature.

2006 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rolf Reber
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature
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