Protest, Worship, and the Deformation of Prayer

The idea that lament and protest might have a valuable place in Christian liturgy and practice has become a topic of increasing philosophical-theological interest. In The Hiddenness of God, Rea defended the view that God authorizes and validates lament and protest from human beings—including impious protest, which emerges from outright anger, sorrow, or other negative emotions in response to apparent divine injustice. But this view apparently stands in tension with widespread assumptions about worship and prayer. In particular, it is hard to see how God can authorize and validate impious protest if it is always true that everyone ought to worship God; and it is also tempting to think that impious protest is an instance of what Lauren Winner calls the ‘characteristic deformation of prayer’, which, in turn, suggests that it is defective prayer that should neither be authorized nor validated by God. This chapter addresses these apparent tensions.

Hylomorphism and the Incarnation

This chapter offers a metaphysical account of the incarnation that starts from substantive assumptions about the nature of natures and about the metaphysics of the Trinity and develops in light of these a story about the relations among the elements involved in the incarnation. Central to the view described are two features of Aristotle’s metaphysics: (i) a hylomorphic understanding of material objects, (ii) a doctrine of numerical sameness without identity, and (iii) the view that the nature of a thing can appropriately be identified with its form. These ideas, along with other important aspects of the metaphysical framework which are discussed, form the bulk of the chapter. They are followed by a brief sketch of the account of the Trinity that the author and Jeffrey Brower have presented in detail elsewhere. In the final section, the author’s account of the incarnation is presented.

The Metaphysics of Original Sin

This chapter argues that there is no straightforward conflict between the doctrine of original sin (construed as including the doctrine of original guilt) and the following thesis, which is taken to be the primary source of philosophical objection to that doctrine: (MR) A person P is morally responsible for the obtaining of a state of affairs S only if S obtains (or obtained) and P could have prevented S from obtaining. After surveying a variety of different construals of the doctrine of original sin, the chapter shows that the main source of tension with MR is the further assumption that no human being who was born after the commission of first sin could have done anything to prevent that first sin; and no human being who is born corrupt could have done anything to prevent her own corruption. The chapter then discusses different ways in which this assumption might be resisted.

Narrative, Liturgy, and the Hiddenness of God

Chapter 7 draws on recent work by Eleonore Stump and Sarah Coakley to defend a response to the problem of divine hiddenness that is consistent with the claim that God does not permit divine hiddenness in order to secure greater human goods. Although this conclusion is consistent with the claim that God permits divine hiddenness for the sake of some greater good, it rules out the idea that whatever human goods may be promoted by divine hiddenness are the goods for the sake of which God remains hidden.

Introduction

This book is the second of two volumes collecting together the most substantial work in analytic theology that I have completed between 2003 and 2019. Volume I contains chapters focused, broadly speaking, on the nature of God; this second volume contains chapters focused more on doctrines about humanity, the human condition, and how human beings relate to God. The chapters in ...

The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul

Eleonore Stump’s Atonement is a masterful and historic contribution to the project of Christian soteriology. Among its many virtues is the fact that it manages to be richly novel and innovative while at the same time hewing close and doing justice to what has been most widely and traditionally affirmed about the salvific work of Christ. One of the most interesting and important novelties in the book is her treatment of what she, following Aquinas, calls the problem of the stain on the soul. Chapter 3 presents this problem and Stump’s solution to it, explains why her solution falls short, and then suggests an alternative way of addressing it.

Wright on Theodicy

In Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright suggests that attempting to solve the philosophical problem of evil is an immature response to the existence of evil—one that belittles the real problem, which is just that evil is bad and needs to be dealt with. If he is correct, then the vast majority of work on the problem of evil in the analytic philosophical tradition has been worthless at best, and possibly even pernicious (by virtue of trivializing a serious theological issue). This chapter identifies a kernel of truth in Wright’s objection to philosophical attempts to solve the problem of evil, and goes on to argue that some such attempts avoid Wright’s objection.

Sceptical Theism and the ‘Too-Much-Scepticism’ Objection

The most prominent objection against sceptical theism is that the sceptical theses typically adduced in support of it have ramifications that range far more widely than sceptical theists hope or should tolerate: they lead to scepticism about various aspects of commonsense morality, about divine honesty and goodness, about the evidential value of religious experience, and much else besides. This chapter responds to various different defences of this objection presented by Stephen Maitzen, David O’Connor, and Ian Wilks.

Hiddenness and Transcendence

For over two decades, the philosophical literature on divine hiddenness has been concerned with just one problem about divine hiddenness that arises out of one very particular concept of God. The problem—call it the Schellenberg problem—has J. L. Schellenberg as both its inventor and its most ardent defender. This chapter argues that the Schellenberg problem is an attack on a straw deity. More specifically, it proposes that Schellenberg’s argument against the existence of God depends on certain theological claims that are not commitments of traditional Christian theology and that would, furthermore, be repudiated by many of the most important and influential theologians in the Christian tradition. The chapter closes with some very brief remarks about the implications of this conclusion for what is taken to be the real import of the Schellenberg problem.

In Defence of Sceptical Theism

Some evidential arguments from evil rely on an inference of the following sort: ‘If, after thinking hard, we can’t think of any God-justifying reason for permitting some horrific evil then it is likely that there is no such reason.’ Sceptical theists, ourselves included, say that this inference is not a good one and that evidential arguments from evil that depend on it are, as a result, unsound. Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy have argued that Michael Bergmann’s way of developing the sceptical theist response to such arguments fails because it commits those who endorse it to a sort of scepticism that undermines ordinary moral practice. This chapter defends Bergmann’s sceptical theist response against this charge.