Risto Saarinen – författare

During the last twenty years, the theory of recognition has become an established field of philosophy and social studies. Variants of this theory often promise applications to the burning political issues of current society, such as the challenges of multiculturalism, group identity, and conflicts between ideologies and religions. The seminal works of this trend employ Hegelian ideas to tackle the problem of modernity. Although some recent studies also investigate the pre-Hegelian roots of recognition, this concept is normally considered to be a product of the secular modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study challenges this assumption and claims that important intellectual roots of the concept and conceptions of recognition are found in much earlier religious sources.Risto Saarinen outlines the first intellectual history of religious recognition, stretching from the New Testament to present day. He connects the history of religion with philosophical approaches, arguing that philosophers owe a considerable historical and conceptual debt to the religious processes of recognition. At the same time, religious recognition has a distinctive profile that differs from philosophy in some important respects. Saarinen undertakes a systematic elaboration of the insights provided by the tradition of religious recognition. He proposes that theology and philosophy can make creative use of the long history of religious recognition.

The churches of the Reformation highlight the righteousness of faith (Iustitia Dei) as the core of their theology. Martin Luther formulated this doctrine as an alternative to the Aristotelian virtue of justice. This volume shows, however, that many different versions of philosophical justice circulated in Luther's days. Some of them already affirm the relational features that characterize later Reformation theology. As Protestant scholarship has not attended to the philosophical commentaries on Aristotle and the formative impact of Anselm and John Duns Scotus in philosophy and theology, the medieval background of imputative and forensic righteousness is much broader than earlier studies assume. This volume argues that a new historical paradigm of Iustitia Dei can be outlined by investigating the complex interaction between Anselmian and Aristotelian thought available in late medieval and Renaissance commentaries. The philosophical trajectory of justice underwent a profound transformation before the sixteenth century. While Thomas Aquinas considers that 'the just' is the object of justice, later scholastic commentators affirm an increasingly subjective and voluntary constitution of justice. In Franciscan thinking, this development leads to a view in which the interplay between the lord and the subjects defines the realm of justice. On the one hand, this interplay is connected to biblical views and the teaching of Anselm. On the other, it permeates the early modern considerations of justice. Therefore, the new paradigm outlined in this study influences both Reformation theology and the broader intellectual history of justice in Western thought.

Weakness of will, the phenomenon of acting contrary to one's own better judgment, has remained a prominent discussion topic of philosophy. The history of this discussion in ancient, medieval, and modern times has been outlined in many studies. Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought is, however, the first book to cover the fascinating source materials on weakness of will between 1350 and 1650. In addition to considering the work of a broad range of Renaissance authors (including Petrarch, Donato Acciaiuoli, John Mair, and Francesco Piccolomini), Risto Saarinen explores the theologically coloured debates of the Reformation period, such as those provided by Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, John Calvin, and Lambert Daneau. He goes on to discuss the impact of these authors on prominent figures of early modernity, including Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.While most of the historical research on weakness of will has focused on the reception history of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Saarinen pays attention to the Platonic and Stoic discussions and their revival during the Renaissance and the Reformation. He also shows the ways in which Augustine's discussion of the divided will is intertwined with the Christian reception of ancient Greek ethics, and argues that the theological underpinnings of early modern authors do not rule out weakness of will, but transform the philosophical discussion and lead it towards new solutions.

Over the past twenty years the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era has received increasing attention from experts in the history of philosophy. In part, this new interest arises from claims, made in literature aimed at a less specialist readership, that this transition was responsible for the subsequent philosophical and theological problems of the Enlightenment. Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and theologians like John Milbank display a certain nostalgia for the medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas and, consequently, evaluate the period from 1300 to 1700 in rather negative terms. Other historians of philosophy writing for the general public, such as Charles Taylor, take a more positive view of the Reformation but nevertheless conclude that modernity has been shaped by 1 conflicts which stem from early modern times. Ethics and moral thought occupy a central place in these theories. It is assumed that we have lost something – the concept of virtue, for instance, or the source of common morality. Yet those who put forward such notions do not treat the history of ethics in detail. From the historian’s perspective, their far-reaching theoretical assumptions are based on a quite small body of textual evidence. In reality, there was a rich variety of approaches to moral thinking and ethical theories during the period from 1400 to 1600.

This seventh volume in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible offers a theological exegesis of 1st and 2nd Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Jude. This commentary, like each in the series, is designed to serve the church--through aid in preaching, teaching, study groups, and so forth--and demonstrate the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.

Aktuelle anthropologische, linguistische und philosophische Untersuchungen haben unser Verständnis der Gabe und ähnlicher Phänomene wie Gastlichkeit und Barmherzigkeit bedeutend vergrößert. Obwohl man solche Ergebnisse mit Vorsicht auf historische theologische Quellen anwenden sollte, ähneln sie klassischen Diskussionen über Nächstenliebe, die Verwaltung der Sakramente, die Weitergabe von Traditionen, den freien Willen und Gottes Gnade.In diesem Buch untersucht Risto Saarinen Martin Luthers Verständnis der Gabe und verwandter Aspekte wie Gunst und Wohltaten, Glaube und Rechtfertigung, Tugend und Verdienst, Ethik und Lehre, Gesetz und Christus. Die historische Motivation hinter diesem Fokus beruht auf der Erkenntnis, dass Luther die klassische, mittelalterliche und humanistische Debatte über die Unterschiede und die Parallelen von Gabe und Handel sowohl weiterführt als auch kritisiert. Dieses historische Verständnis ebnet den Weg zu einer angemessenen systematischen Theologie der Gabe.