Dostoevsky's Christianity

The article refutes the widespread view that Dostoevsky's Christian beliefs were strictly Orthodox. It is proved that Dostoevsky's religious and philosophical searches' central tendency is the criticism of historical, ecclesiastical Christianity as a false, distorted form of the teaching of Jesus Christ and the desire to restore this teaching in its original purity. Modern researchers of the history of early Christianity find more and more arguments in favor of the fact that the actual teaching of Jesus Christ is contained in that religious movement, which the church called the Gnostic heresy. The exact philosophical expression of the teaching of Christ was received in the later works of J.G. Fichte, whose ideas had a strong influence on the Russian writer. Like Fichte, Dostoevsky understands Christ as the first person who showed the possibility of revealing God in himself and gaining divine omnipotence and eternal life directly in earthly reality. In this sense, every person can become like Christ. Dostoevsky's main characters walk the path of Christ and show how difficult this path is. The article shows that Dostoevsky used in his work not only the philosophical version of true (Gnostic) Christianity developed by German philosophy (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), but also the key motives of the Gnostic myth, primarily the idea that our world, filled with evil and suffering, is created not by the supreme, good God-Father, but by the evil Demiurge, the Devil (in this sense, it is hell).

God’s Omnipotence: A Literary Investigation

The omnipotence of God can be defined as the perfect ability of God to do all things that are consistent with the divine character. Open theists see God as one who is influenced as God interacts with human beings in time and space (temporally). Thus, for Open Theists, God is affected and influenced by the world. This paper revisits the historical, biblical and theological grounds for the doctrine of omnipotence with the aim of re-establishing the relevance of divine omnipotence. Using a literary investigation this article traces the developments of the doctrine of God’s power from the Early Church Fathers to the Reformers to establish whether the articulation of God’s power within Open Theism resonates with Orthodox Theology and Evangelicalism.

Evil and Free Will: Contemporary Free-Will Defense and Classical Theism

The article considers contemporary free will defences, proposed by A. Plantinga, R. Swinburne, according to which the existence of a world in which there is free will is something more valuable than the existence of a world in which there is no free will. It is shown that contemporary forms of free will defences share with atheistic arguments from evil an anthropomorphic model of God, in which God is thought as an individual among other individuals, although endowed with attributes such as omniscience and omnipotence to an excellent degree. It has also been shown that another important point of similarity between contemporary free will defences and atheistic arguments from evil is that both attempt to assess what our world would be like if created by such an individual. In contrast to atheistic arguments from evil, contemporary free will defences argue that divine omnipotence and omniscience are subject to some greater restrictions, as usually assumed, especially due to God's desire to give some of his creations the ability of free choice, which logically implies the possibility and even necessity of the existence of evil. It is demonstrated that classical theism does not share the anthropomorphic model of deity typical for many contemporary philosophers of religion. Classical theism rejects both the anthropomorphic model of deity and the unaccountability of free will to God as the supreme good. On the contrary, it assumes that free decision was initially an opportunity for the voluntary consent of man which had an innate aspiration towards God as his supreme good. Nevertheless, due to the creation of man out of nothing, this consent could not be automatic but implied forming a virtuous character, and man's transition from a state in which he was able not to sin, to a state in which he would be not able to sin.

Nahmanides’ Astrological and Religious Thinking and the Views of the Contemporaneous Catalan Christian Sages

This paper examines the astrological and religious thinking of Moshe ben Nahman (also known as Ramban or Nahmanides) and the intellectual connections in this field with two of the most outstanding Christian thinkers of his time, Ramon Llull and Arnau de Vilanova. Nahmanides, like many medieval scholars, admitted an astral influence, but he did not accept astrology as a divinatory science. He incorporated astrological doctrines in his exegetical works, assuming that Israel is not determined by any star because it only responds to God. Yet the study of medieval medicine and its application cannot be separated from astrology practice because it was considered that the stars had a direct influence not only on the development of the human body, from birth to death, but also in the disease processes which affect it. Ramban and his disciple Solomon ben Adret accepted and practiced astrological medicine. Llull and de Vilanova also devoted themselves to this discipline. All of them agree on the influence of the stars on humankind but condemned astral magic. Like Ramban, Llull rejects other astrological methods considered non-scientific in his time, such as prediction through horoscope. Thus, these thinkers tried to develop an astrology that was not in contradiction with divine omnipotence or free will.

God

Barth’s doctrine of God is revolutionary. It leaves behind many of the traditional elements of a doctrine of God—natural knowledge of God, comparative religious practice, and proofs—and puzzles over simplicity and immutability. In their place Barth installs a new maxim, that God demonstrates or ‘proves’ himself. The Bible is the record of that self-demonstration. The divine perfections emerge in dialectical pairs, each displaying the personal life of God as the ‘One who loves in freedom’. Language for God successfully names God when it speaks of Jesus Christ, the Holy One who exemplifies divine omnipotence, omniscience, grace, mercy, and patience. In this way, Barth carries out his programme of Christological concentration, even in the doctrine of God. This is a doctrine of God unlike any other, an unsettling and a glorious one.

The ‘Compatibilism’ of Human Freedom and Divine Omnipotence

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.

William of Ockham

William of Ockham (b. c. 1287–d. 1347) is one of the giants of medieval philosophy. He was an innovative and controversial thinker who lived an extraordinarily eventful life. He entered the Franciscan order as a young boy and then studied in Oxford and London, where he composed an extensive body of work on logic, natural philosophy, and theology in accordance with the academic requirements of the time. While waiting to incept as a magister with the right to teach in the faculty of theology at Oxford, he was summoned to the papal court at Avignon in 1324, where some of his doctrines were suspected of being heretical. There, he was drawn into the current political crisis of the day between Pope John XXII and the Franciscan order on the question of who owned the property that the Franciscan order used (buildings, clothing, food, etc.). John XXII argued that use entailed ownership; the Franciscans argued that it did not. Ockham waded into the debate, inaugurating an interest in politics and political philosophy that would occupy him exclusively until his death. Eventually convinced that John XXII was a heretic, Ockham fled Avignon in 1328 in the company of Michael of Cesena and other Franciscan leaders, finding protection at the court of Ludwig of Bavaria, the Holy Roman Emperor. He composed a second body of work on property and property rights, heresy, and the nature, origin, and relationship of temporal and spiritual power. Ockham was excommunicated in 1328 but never officially charged with heresy. Ockham’s body of work is remarkable, and not only because of the abrupt shift in his intellectual and political pursuits. Despite the risk of oversimplification, we can identify certain pervasive tendencies in his thought. He exhibits a general preference for parsimony and privileges minimalism in metaphysics while developing a highly sophisticated analysis of language and logic. He insists on a firm foundation for knowledge in our direct experience of individual and contingent objects. He emphasizes divine omnipotence, simplicity, and freedom, and places human freedom and rationality at the heart of his ethics and politics. Ockham’s reputation as an enfant terrible of the late Middle Ages, whose doctrines were commonly represented as either calamitous or revolutionary, depending on the interpreter, has been substantially revised in the past three decades. A balanced and critical assessment of his thought and position in the history of medieval philosophy nevertheless remains an ongoing project.

Thealogy Matters

In this article Carol P. Christ states that ‘thealogy matters’ because religious symbols not only articulate meaning but also provide orientation for ethical decision-making. Rejecting the notions that religious meaning is delivered from on high and that traditions must be uncritically accepted, she proposes a model of ‘embodied theology’ in which individuals and communities take responsibility for religious worldviews. She asks us to question Jungian theories of the feminine, images of the Goddess in patriarchal traditions, models of ritual practice in the Wiccan tradition as articulated by Gerald Garner, and the idea of divine omnipotence modelled on the ‘tyrant ideal’ of God. She explores two ways in which process panentheism can help us to understand the divine power we call Goddess.

Mersenne

Mersenne’s multidisciplinary interests marked the relationship of intellectual collaboration that linked him to Descartes, whose research and publications he solicited and promoted, though without ever becoming a “Cartesian”. Mersenne “molecularized” the Cartesian philosophy in terms of a series of specific issues, but the way in which the Minim triggered the debate generated criticism and polemics rather than adhesions to Cartesianism. Mersenne based his argumentations on philosophical and theological presuppositions that differed from those formulated by Descartes, particularly concerning the hypothetical status of science, the validity of logical-mathematical truths, the radicalization of divine omnipotence, and the argument of deceiving God. The unpublished theological manuscripts of the 1640s reveal, however, that after the 1641 Objections, the Minim was ready to accept crucial Cartesian metaphysical theses, but in his own peculiar way.