Antiunitarian Arguments from Divine Perfection

Some have argued that unipersonal concepts of God collapse into incoherence, so that such a being is no more possible than a square circle, or at least that such theologies are, as non-trinitarian, significantly less probable than some trinitarian theologies. I discuss the general strategy and examine recent arguments by William Lane Craig, C. Stephen Layman, Thomas V. Morris, and Richard Swinburne based on divine love, flourishing, and glory. I show why none of these arguments is compelling, as each has at least one weak premise.

God and the Problem of Evil: An Attempt at Reframing the Debate

This article attempts to reframe the traditional account of the problem of evil for God’s existence. The philosophical debates about the problem of evil for the existence of God within the traditional framework do not exhaust the available options for conceiving of God’s perfection, including our understanding of God’s power and God’s relationship to the world. In responding to the problem of evil, rational theists should seek a reformulation of divine perfection consistent with God’s existence as both necessary and as morally relevant to human life in a manner that does not collapse in the face of the problem of evil. The neoclassical account of God’s nature as developed in the tradition of process philosophy is presented as an alternative that meets these requirements.

Divine Holiness and Divine Perfection

This chapter defends an argument from divine holiness to divine perfection. Primary holiness presupposes a value gap between the holy being and others—it is the greatly superior value of the holy being that makes union with that being desirable for other beings, and makes intimate unity with the holy being at some level unfitting. A necessarily holy being will have to be infinitely and unqualifiedly valuable. For otherwise there will be beings other than God that approach the holy being’s value, at least in certain contexts, in such a way that union with God will not be overwhelmingly desirable and extremely intimate union will not be unfitting. As the God of Scripture must be thought of as absolutely holy, the connection between absolute holiness and absolute perfection underwrites a new argument from Scripture to Anselmian perfect being theology.

Relações étnico-raciais: construção da dimensão pedagógica do cinema negro e a afirmação positiva da africanidade

The article demonstrates the centrality of the academic concern, in the discipline Ethnic-Racial Relations, which is given by an observation of the different Brazilian filmographies. A Chanchada was the paroxysm of the stereotype of racial inferiority of the image of the Iberian-Afro-American as a rural ethnic demand of Amerindian heritage in the progress-averse Jeca Tatu. To affirm the racial superiority of the imagetic hegemony of the Euro-hetero-macho-authoritarian as a sign of divine perfection expressed in the priest as God's representative. Racial domination determined by the power of euroheteronormativity. Cinema Novo was the trend that the black man became an aesthetic referent in the Marxist-influenced Glauberian realization. In the syntax of Cinema Novo in the semiotics of class struggles, the black man is a proletarian expression and the white man configures the bourgeoisie. The ontological struggle to affirm the positive image of minorities is a projection of class struggles. In Black Cinema, the Africanity that is a reference in Cinema Novismo conquers the position of subject in this cinema as the author of its own history. It concludes that it is in the Pedagogical Dimension of Black Cinema, as epistemic cinema that the minority builds the image of positive affirmation representing the visual of the decanted place of speech, as inclusive contemporaneity, overcoming the excluding anachronism.

Divine Temporality and Providential Bodgery

In contemporary debates, one is presented with temporal and timeless conceptions of divine eternality. Each conception is said to have various consequences for understanding divine perfection and providence. In this paper, I shall consider a pair of arguments against divine temporality that suggest that a temporal God could potentially make mistakes, thus making the temporal God less than perfect. I shall develop these objections, and discuss various ways for the temporalist to reply.

The Imperfect God

This paper focuses on the Hasidic view, namely, that human flaws do not function as a barrier between a fallen humanity and a perfect deity, since the whole of creation stems from a divine act of self-contraction. Thus, we need not be discouraged by our own shortcomings, nor by those of our loved ones. Rather, seeing our flaws in the face of another should remind us that imperfection is an aspect of the God who created us. Such a positive approach to human fallibility arouses forgiveness, mutual acceptance, and a hope for repair, and, therefore, has much to recommend itself. In the first part of the paper, I argue that the notion of a perfect God derives from the Greeks rather than the Hebrew Bible. A review of classical philosophies and the idea of God’s imperfection is followed by a consideration of several Jewish attempts to resolve the dichotomy between Divine perfection and an imperfect creation. I focus on Lurianic Kabbalah, Hans Jonas, and on the Hasidic concept of "Ayin" or “nothingness” as the very source of redemption. This Hasidic idea, which was further expanded upon by the Baal Shem Tov’s students, appears in a tale recounted by his great-grandson R. Nachman of Bratslav called “The Hanging Lamp.” I focus on the tale, which illustrates the idea that knowledge of human imperfection is itself a means of perfection and redemption.

Editorial: God's Nature and Attributes

In Western theism, different attributes have classically been ascribed to God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, wisdom, goodness, freedom and so on. But these ascriptions have also raised many conceptual difficulties: are these attributes internally coherent? Are they really compossible? Are they compatible with what we know about the world (e.g. the existence of evil, human freedom, the laws of nature etc.). These traditional questions are part of the inquiry on God’s nature as it is carried out in contemporary philosophy of religion. Another part of this inquiry is constituted by theological and philosophical questions raised by more precise or particular religious conceptions of God – e.g. the doctrine of Trinity in Christianity, or other specific credentials about the right way to understand God’s perfection and absolute transcendence in Judaism, Christianity or Islam. In this issue, we propose to follow these two directions of the inquiry about God’s nature and attributes through historical and systematic studies, in the perspective of contemporary philosophy of religion and analytical theology. While the three papers specifically dedicated to the problem of the Trinity pertain mainly to the second part of the examination (the conceptual analysis of specific credentials and theological doctrines), the three others offer new perspectives and arguments on traditional questions about God, like the problem of evil, perfect goodness, or the problem of divine perfection and God’s freedom.

Divine Unity and the “Ladder of Our Nature”

This chapter places Hilary of Poitiers’s polemical opponents into sharper focus and shows how Hilary brings his epistemological and anthropological insights, described in the previous two chapters, to bear on them. Hilary develops his understanding of divine unity through an intertextual reading of John 10:30 and 14:9 in polemical engagement with Homoian and “Sabellian” theologies and by expanding upon this intertextual reading in previous Latin tradition, and this understanding both depends and elaborates upon his epistemological foundation of divine infinity. Hilary’s arguments for divine unity are based on the condescension of God in the humanity of Christ. For Hilary, humanity’s finite epistemological restrictions require this sort of material, bodily revelation, and by it, humanity is nourished and educated to move beyond its limitations to the vision of the triune God, and led to its fullness in divine perfection. This chapter also discusses divine unity in third- and fourth-century polemical contexts.