Zionism Reconsidered

In some ways, Zionism is legitimate and persuasive, but in other ways it has undermined the possibilities of Israeli peace with the Arab world. The argument that the history of murderous anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, justified the creation of a Jewish state, somewhere, was strong. However, the arguments that the Jews had an eternal right to Palestine were weak. The religious claim that God gave Palestine to the Jews is challenged by Christian and Islamic counterclaims. The argument that 2,000 years ago the Jews were predominant in Palestine until they were driven out by the Romans has long been shown by archaeologists and historians to have little foundation. Even if true, it would be irrelevant to establishing a convincing claim for exclusive Jewish sovereignty today. Likewise, the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate to Britain, the basis for the Zionist claims based on modern history, were simply colonialist impositions.

Metalinguistic Agnosticism, Religious Fictionalism and the Reasonable Believer

With the position, he labels as “new” or “metalinguistic agnosticism” Robin LePoidevin can avoid some problems with which fictionalists about religious language are confronted. Religious fictionalism is a position according to which all religious claims[1] are considered to be false when taken at face value. But because fictionalists about religious language think that certain religious worldviews have pragmatic benefits, they interpret several claims in such worldviews as true in fiction. This enables them to gain pragmatic benefits because they live as if a certain religious worldview were true. Nonetheless, they don’t believe that the respective worldview represents the non-fictional reality.[2][1] In the following I understand a “religious claim“ either as the claim that God exists or as a claim that presupposes the existence of God. Since also Le Poidevin focuses on theistic religions I want to keep this focus in my response. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind that religious fictionalism is not restricted to theistic religions. I also think that metalinguistic agnosticism and the argumentation in this paper could in principle be extended to non-theistic religions.[2] A defense of religious fictionalism can be found in for example Andrew S. Eshleman, “Can an Atheist Believe in God?”, Religious Studies 41, no. 2 (2005) and Andrew S. Eshleman, “Religious Fictionalism Defended: Reply to Cordry”, Religious Studies 46, no. 1 (2010).

Religion as Spirituality

This chapter examines the failure in the courts of Native appeals to religious freedom protections for sacred lands, and it extends the previous chapter's analysis of the reception of Native claims to religion as religion. Where a religious claim conforms to the subjective, interior spirituality that has become naturalized in the United States, it has worked reasonably well in the courts. This is emphatically not the case where claims involve religious relationships with, uses of, and obligations to, land. The chapter explains how courts reason their way out of taking steps to protect Native American religious freedom when sacred places are threatened, a puzzling matter in that courts consistently acknowledge the sincerity of the religious beliefs and practices associated with those sacred places. Along the way the chapter develops a fuller sense of the workings of the discourse of Native American spirituality as it comes to control judicial comprehension of Native religious freedom claims.

Faith as Immunity to History?

Reading Barth in conversation with three different post-Holocaust Jewish theologians on the question of God’s relationship to history, Boesel comes to a new appreciation for the diversity within the Jewish tradition itself. This leads him to pose the important question “If one is to rethink Christian faith and theology in response to engagement with the Jewish ‘other,’ which Jewish ‘other’?” He challenges all theologians engaged in comparative work to consider whether a predisposition to seek common ground restricts which “others” we engage. He goes on to reconsider his original critical reading of Barth, recognizing that Barth’s own theology “appears to move with an inter-religious freedom that can be appropriated as responsive to the diversity of intra-Jewish difference itself” because of its own emphasis on the radical judgment of God that stands over every human religious claim. Boesel ends by acknowledging the problem of supersessionism that continues to haunt Barth’s theology.

Die christlichen Religionen im islamischen Religionsunterricht: eine fachdidaktische Herausforderung

The growing number of Muslim children in state schools has created a task for Muslims with which they are not familiar from within their own traditions. The crux is to figure out a way how Muslim children can encounter other faiths and lifestyles and develop a fruitful dialogue which will benefit society as a whole. During this encounter Muslims ought to, next to their own religion, accept the religious claim to truth of other religions and justify this acceptance with the fundamentals of their own religion. This situation creates the task for Islamic theology to reflect the status of other religions in their theological history, so that Muslim children may no longer experience a discrepancy between their beliefs and the values of the pluralistic society.

Part III, 7 Families, Parents and Children

This chapter examines religious freedom issues that concern the family and parents. There can be no doubt that religiously devout parents are vitally interested in the successful transmission of their faith to their offspring. This is one of the prime incidents of religious liberty. One US judge ventured that ‘no aspect of religious freedom is more treasured than the right of parents to teach children to worship God’. The chapter is organized as follows. Section II outlines the current law governing family autonomy and the religious upbringing of children. Section III contrasts liberal and religious conceptions of the family and childrearing. Section IV explores three controversial topics. First, does a maturing child have an independent right of religious liberty? If not, should she? Second, what is the scope of religious childrearing in the fractured family? Do divorced or separated parents have attenuated rights compared to those parents who are still together? Third, do devout parents have any special religious claim to administer corporal punishment to their children amidst the growing international call for the abolition of the parental right of reasonable chastisement?

Historical Criticism versus Prophetic Proclamation

A question which historical critical scholarship can no longer evade is whether it still contributes fundamentally to the strengthening of faith, or whether it is effecting its dissolution. Where biblical research continues to be done within the framework of Christian convictions, a crisis of identity threatens, since the historical critical approach with its related methodologies tends to dissolve the most fundamental assumptions of the New Testament Christian faith, namely, that salvation is possible only in relation to Jesus Christ. William Mallard focused sharply on this problem when he pointed out that even “when critical research supports a historical religious claim, the character and function of that claim is thereby undermined, and the past event in question loses the force of revelation.” In the same context J. Maxwell Miller argued that there could be no resolution of the conflict between critical inquiry and the biblical view of history because a historical critical understanding can have no place for God's repeated “intrusions” into the course of the Old Testament history. To use Mallard's formulation, a critical explanation for these divine intrusions into the Old Testament history effectively abandons the Old Testament understanding itself. According to Miller: “If the Jewish historian does not offer a natural explanation for the origin of the Exodus traditions, he is untrue to the critical method of historical research. If he does offer a natural explanation, he destroys the basis of his Jewish faith — i.e., that God intruded upon human history at the time of the Exodus and made a covenant with the fathers which applies even today. The same would seem to be true of the Christian historian who attempts to deal with the incarnation or the resurrection.”