Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology – serie

Explorations in Analytic Ecclesiology proposes an account of the nature and practice of the Church that draws from work in contemporary analytic social metaphysics, social epistemology, and social ethics. In the first book-length study of ecclesiology in analytic theology, Joshua Cockayne offers a vision of the Church, according to which the Church is united as the body of Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit, despite the apparent diversity of the Church in its gathered, particular forms. This account of the oneness of the Church in and through the work of the persons of the Trinity is then applied to explore the nature of baptism, the eucharist, and liturgy.

Building on his paradigm-shifting work on the incarnation in The Contradictory Christ (OUP, 2021), Jc Beall extends a robust contradictory theology with an account of the trinity. Throughout the history of the Christian church, heretics, apophatics, mystics, atheists, and many others have long proclaimed that the doctrine of the trinity - one of the central doctrines of the Christian faith - is contradictory. In this work, Beall agrees; however, as Beall convincingly argues, one needn't abandon orthodoxy, play language games, inflate one's metaphysics, nor abandon the standard faith in the face of such divine contradiction. Instead, one can accept central axioms of the trinity at face value and, with a suitable account of logical entailment, accept the 'contradictory truths' thereby entailed. With the clarity and precision that only a logician could provide, Beall provided theology and the Christian church in general with a very simple and viable (and arguably correct) model of divine reality. Unlike the vast number of theologians and philosophers before him, Beall rejects the quest for a logically consistent account of divine reality. The triune god (viz., God) is truly and fully described only via contradiction. As such, attempts to remove the contradiction are attempts to remove truths of God.

Analyzing Prayer draws together a range of theologians and philosophers to deal with different approaches to prayer as a Christian practice. The essays included deal with issues pertaining to petitionary prayer, prayer as reorientation of oneself in the presence of God, prayer by those who do not believe, liturgical prayer, mystical prayer, whether God prays, the interrelation between prayer and various forms of knowledge, theologizing as a form of prayer, lament and prayer, prayer and God's presence, and even prayer and the meaning of life. The volume contains cutting-edge studies on a neglected topic of theological study that contributes to the broadening of themes tackled by analytic theology.

There is a kind of knowledge that is non-propositional; one variety of it can be acquired in second-person experience of another person, but it can also be transmitted through narratives. This narratively mediated kind of knowledge can be significant for philosophical and theological reflection. Biblical narratives have prompted detailed reflection for so many centuries because they offer profound insights into the nature of the human condition and human flourishing. This book brings together detailed examinations of narratives in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to yield one large, emergent story, which has something to teach that can be missed when the stories are taken in isolation from one another. These are the stories of Job, Samson, Abraham, Mary of Bethany, the temptations of Christ, the passion of Christ, and the story from the book of Ecclesiastes. Taken together, these narratives depict a possible world in which there is a good for suffering human beings that outweighs their suffering and that could not be gotten without the suffering, not even in a world without the Fall. On this emergent larger story, human suffering is defeated, and peace and joy in human life are possible.

Divine forgiveness is expressed in biblical and liturgical contexts through a variety of metaphors-canceling debts, covering stains, forgoing or stopping litigation, forgetting iniquities, and more. In this study, Cristian F. Mihut retrieves a theologically paradigmatic, liturgically deep, and symbolically evocative image of divine forgiveness that has received little attention: bearing burdens. Gracious Forgiveness: A Theological Retrieval articulates a divine disposition to forgive starting from this metaphor. Embedded in a larger covenantal-relational framework where sin is a cosmic sickness, humans are targets of divine healing, and divine transcendence is expressed through inexhaustible gracious commitments to redress brokenness, divine forgivingness finds its most lucid, tangible, and full expression in the life and work of Jesus Christ. In the person of Jesus Christ, we see most clearly how a gracious God is committed to separating sinners from their sin, and how God heals people by absorbing into God's own being the consequences of their offense. A second main argument of the book is that sin-bearing Christological forgivingness has ethical and relational ramifications. The study articulates a human disposition to forgive-forgivingness-that involves both a certain conception of one's participation in Christ and a certain formation of one's sensibility. Entrenching forgivingness depends at once on developing gracious, hopeful, and merciful dispositions, but also on seeing oneself as a continuant of God's cosmic story of redressing brokenness. Mihut concludes with a defense of the surprising claim that curative forgivingness is compatible with anger, and even recommended to people living under oppression.

All of us some of the time, and some of us all of the time, strive to achieve our own happiness and well-being solely on the dubious strength of our own individual skills, knowledge, willpower, and ingenuity. And we fail, often succumbing to one of the many masks of the capital vice known as Sloth.This volume explores the occasions or consequences of such failures or else strategies for their avoidance. The chapters are loosely connected insofar as they are either inquiries into certain kinds of temptation or confessions of the costs of discovering that one has been thus seduced into sin, or exhortations to prepare oneself to avoid those temptations and their costs. Primary themes include the noetic effects of sin and their impact on interpersonal relationships, forbidden knowledge and self-censorship, duties and rewards of academic mentoring, the theology of creation, chronophobia and existential angst, skeptical theism and its costs, revelation and testimonial knowledge, a common challenge for Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and the philosophy of pessimism and its peculiar temptations.

Modernism's theological project was an attempt to explain two things: firstly, how faith might enable persons to experience their lives as hanging together, even in the face of disintegrating forces like injustice, tragedy, and luck; and secondly, how one could see such faith, and so a life held together by it, as self-expressive. Modern theologians such as Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, and Tillich thus offer accounts of how one's life would have to hang together such that one could identify with it; of the oppositions which stand in the way of such hanging-together; of God as the one by whom oppositions are overcome, such that one can have faith that one's life ultimately hangs together; and of what such faith would have to be like in order for one to identify with it, too. So understood, modern theology not only sheds light on faith's potential role in enabling persons to identify with their lives, but stands in unexpected continuity with contemporary 'contextual' theologies.This book offers clear, careful readings of modernism's key figures in order to explain their relevance to practical concerns and to contemporary understandings of faith.

The claim that God is timeless has been the majority view throughout church history. However, it is not obvious that divine timelessness is compatible with fundamental Christian doctrines such as creation and incarnation. Theologians have long been aware of the conflict between divine timelessness and Christian doctrine, and various solutions to these conflicts have been developed. In contemporary thought, it is widely agreed that new theories on the nature of time can further help solve these conflicts. Do these solutions actually solve the conflict? Can the Christian God be timeless? The End of the Timeless God sets forth a thorough investigation into the Christian understanding of God and the God-world relationship. It argues that the Christian God cannot be timeless.

Central to the lives of the religiously committed are not simply religious convictions but also religious practices. The religiously committed, for example, regularly assemble to engage in religious rites, including corporate liturgical worship. Although the participation in liturgy is central to the religious lives of many, few philosophers have given it attention. In this collection of essays, Terence Cuneo turns his attention to liturgy, contending that the topic proves itself to be philosophically rich and rewarding. Taking the liturgical practices of Eastern Christianity as its focal point, Ritualized Faith examines issues such as what the ethical importance of ritualized religious activities might be, what it is to immerse oneself in such activities, and what the significance of liturgical singing and iconography are. In doing so, Cuneo makes sense of these liturgical practices and indicates why they deserve a place in the religiously committed life.

This work presents a historically informed, systematic exposition of the Christology of the first seven Ecumenical Councils of undivided Christendom, from the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD to the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 AD. Assuming the truth of Conciliar Christology for the sake of argument, Timothy Pawl considers whether there are good philosophical arguments that show a contradiction or incoherence in that doctrine. He presents the definitions of important terms in the debate and a helpful metaphysics for understanding the incarnation. In Defense of Conciliar Christology discusses three types of philosophical objections to Conciliar Christology. Firstly, it highlights the fundamental philosophical problem facing Christologyâhow can one thing be both God and man, when anything deserving to be called "God" must have certain attributes, and yet it seems that nothing that can aptly be called "man" can have those same attributes? It then considers the argument that if the Second Person of the Holy Trinity were immutable or atemporal, as Conciliar Christology requires, then that Person could not become anything, and thus could not become man. Finally, Pawl addresses the objection that if there is a single Christ then there is a single nature or will in Christ. However, if that conditional is true, then Conciliar Christology is false, since it affirms the antecedent of the conditional to be true, but denies the truth of the consequent. Pawl defends Conciliar Christology against these charges, arguing that all three philosophical objections fail to show Conciliar Christology inconsistent or incoherent.

Analytic theology can flourish in the secular academy, and flourish as authentically Christian theology. Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion explains analytic theology to other theologians and scholars of religion, while simultaneously explaining those other fields to analytic theologians. William Wood defends analytic theology from some common criticisms, but also argues that analytic theologians have much to learn from other forms of inquiry. Analytic theology is a legitimate form of theology, and a legitimate form of academic inquiry, and it can be a valuable conversation partner within the wider religious studies academy. Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion articulates an attractive vision of analytic theology, fosters a more fruitful inter-disciplinary conversation, and enables scholars across the religious studies academy to understand one another better.

This is the first full-length study of the doctrine of the Trinity from the standpoint of analytic philosophical theology. William Hasker reviews the evidence concerning fourth-century pro-Nicene trinitarianism in the light of recent developments in the scholarship on this period, arguing for particular interpretations of crucial concepts. He then reviews and criticizes recent work on the issue of the divine three-in-oneness, including systematic theologians such as Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, and Zizioulas, and analytic philosophers of religion such as Leftow, van Inwagen, Craig, and Swinburne. In the final part of the book he develops a carefully articulated social doctrine of the Trinity which is coherent, intelligible, and faithful to scripture and tradition.

The doctrine of the atonement is the distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Over the course of many centuries of reflection, highly diverse interpretations of the doctrine have been proposed. In the context of this history of interpretation, Eleonore Stump considers the doctrine afresh with philosophical care. Whatever exactly the atonement is, it is supposed to include a solution to the problems of the human condition, especially its guilt and shame. Stump canvasses the major interpretations of the doctrine that attempt to explain this solution and argues that all of them have serious shortcomings. In their place, she argues for an interpretation that is both novel and yet traditional and that has significant advantages over other interpretations, including Anselms well-known account of the doctrine. In the process, she also discusses love, union, guilt, shame, forgiveness, retribution, punishment, shared attention, mind-reading, empathy, and various other issues in moral psychology and ethics.

Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory proposes an account of humility that relies on the most radical Christian sayings about humility, especially those found in Augustine and the early monastic tradition. It argues that this was the view of humility that put Christian moral thought into decisive conflict with the best Greco-Roman moral thought. This radical Christian account of humility has been forgotten amidst contemporary efforts to clarify and retrieve the virtue of humility for secular life. Kent Dunnington shows how humility was repurposed during the early-modern era-particularly in the thought of Hobbes, Hume, and Kant-to better serve the economic and social needs of the emerging modern state. This repurposed humility insisted on a role for proper pride alongside humility, as a necessary constituent of self-esteem and a necessary motive of consistent moral action over time. Contemporary philosophical accounts of humility continue this emphasis on proper pride as a counterbalance to humility. By contrast, radical Christian humility proscribes pride altogether. Dunnington demonstrates how such a radical view need not give rise to vices of humility such as servility and pusillanimity, nor need such a view fall prey to feminist critiques of humility. But the view of humility set forth makes little sense abstracted from a specific set of doctrinal commitments peculiar to Christianity. This study argues that this is a strength rather than a weakness of the account since it displays how Christianity matters for the shape of the moral life.

Central to the lives of the religiously committed are not simply religious convictions but also religious practices. The religiously committed, for example, regularly assemble to engage in religious rites, including corporate liturgical worship. Although the participation in liturgy is central to the religious lives of many, few philosophers have given it attention. In this collection of essays, Terence Cuneo turns his attention to liturgy, contending that the topic proves itself to be philosophically rich and rewarding. Taking the liturgical practices of Eastern Christianity as its focal point, Ritualized Faith examines issues such as what the ethical importance of ritualized religious activities might be, what it is to immerse oneself in such activities, and what the significance of liturgical singing and iconography are. In doing so, Cuneo makes sense of these liturgical practices and indicates why they deserve a place in the religiously committed life.

In many Christian traditions, humility is often thought to play a central role in the moral and spiritual life. In this study of the moral virtue of humility, Michael W. Austin applies the methods of analytic philosophy to the field of moral theology in order analyze this virtue and its connections to human flourishing. The book is therefore best characterized as a work in analytic moral theology, and has two primary aims. First, it articulates and defends a particular Christian conception of the virtue of humility. It offers a Christological account of this trait, one that is grounded in the gospel accounts of the life of Christ as well as other key New Testament passages. The view of humility it offers and defends is biblically grounded, theologically informed, and philosophically sound. Second, the volume describes ways in which humility is constitutive of and conducive to human flourishing, Christianly understood. It argues that humility is rational, benefits its possessor, and contributes to its possessor being good qua human. Austin also examines several issues in applied virtue ethics. He considers some of the ways in which humility is relevant to several of the classic spiritual disciplines, such as prayer, fasting, solitude, silence, and service. He considers humility's relevance to issues related to religious pluralism and tolerance. Finally, the book concludes with a discussion of the relevance of humility for family life and how it can function as a virtue in the context of sport.

In Defense of Extended Conciliar Christology: A Philosophical Essay examines the logical consistency and coherence of Extended Conciliar Christology-the Christological doctrine that results from conjoining Conciliar Christology, the Christology of the first seven ecumenical councils of the Christian Church, with five additional theses. These theses are the claims that multiple incarnations are possible; Christ descended into Hell during his three days of death; Christ's human will was free; Christ was impeccable; and that Christ, via his human intellect, knew all things past, present, and future. These five theses, while not found in the first seven ecumenical councils, are common in the Christian theological tradition. The main question Timothy Pawl asks in this book is whether these five theses, when conjoined with Conciliar Christology, imply a contradiction. This study does not undertake to defend the truth of Extended Conciliar Christology. Rather, it shows that the extant philosophical objections to Extended Conciliar Christology fail.

Samuel Lebens takes the three principles of Jewish faith, as proposed by Rabbi Joseph Albo (1380-1444), in order to scrutinize and refine them with the toolkit of contemporary analytic philosophy. What could it mean for a perfect being to create a world from nothing? Could our world be anything more than a figment of God's imagination? What is the Torah? What does Judaism expect from a Messiah, and what would it mean for a world to be redeemed? These questions are explored in conversation with a wide array of Jewish sources and with an eye towards diverse fields of contemporary research, such as cosmology, philosophical logic, the ontology of literature, and the metaphysics of time. The Principles of Judaism articulates the most fundamental axioms of Orthodox Judaism in the vernacular of contemporary philosophy.

Over the past several decades, scholars working in biblical, theological, and religious studies have increasingly attended to the substantive ways that our experiences and understanding of God and God's relation to the world are structured by our experiences and concepts of race, gender, disability, and sexuality. These personal and social identities and their intersections serve as a hermeneutical lens for our interpretations of God, self, the other, and our religious texts and traditions. However, they have not received nearly the same level of attention from analytic theologians and philosophers of religion, and so a wide range of important issues remain ripe for analytic treatment. The papers in this volume address the various ways in which the aforementioned social identities intersect with, shape, and might be shaped by the questions with which analytic theology and philosophy of religion have typically been concerned, as well as what new questions they suggest to the discipline. We focus on three central areas of analytic theology: methodological principles, the intersection of social identities with religious epistemology, and the connections among eschatology, ante-mortem suffering, and ante-mortem social perceptions of bodies.

Fallenness and Flourishing opens with defenses of the philosophy of pessimism, first on secular grounds and then again on distinctively Christian grounds with reference to the fallenness of human beings. It then details traditional Christian reasons for optimism with which this philosophy of pessimism can be qualified. Yet even among those who accept the general religious worldview underlying this optimism, many nevertheless willfully resist the efforts required to cooperate with God and instead pursue happiness and well-being (or flourishing) on their own power. On the assumption that we can acquire knowledge in such matters, arguments are presented in favour of objective-list theories of well-being and the Psychic Affirmation theory of happiness, and the question 'How are people faring in this quest for self-achieved happiness and well-being?' is critically investigated. The unfortunate result is that nearly everywhere, people are failing. The causes of failure, it is argued, are found in the noetic effects of sin--especially in inordinate self-love and self-deception, but also in insufficient self-love--and such failure manifests both in widespread unhappiness and in that most misunderstood of the seven deadly sins, sloth. After a literary tour designed to reveal the many different ways that sloth can damage a life, Hud Hudson provides a constructive proposal for responding to this predicament featuring the virtue of obedience. This virtue is analysed, illustrated, and located in a new theory of well-being.

In this ground-breaking study, Jc Beall shows that the fundamental "problem" of Christology is simple to see from the role that Christ occupies: the Christ figure is to have the divine and essentially limitless properties of the one and only God but Christ is equally to have the human, essentially limit-imposing properties involved in human nature, limits essentially involved in being human. The role that Christ occupies thereby appears to demand a contradiction: all of the limitlessness of God, and all of the limits of humans. This book lays out Beall's contradictory account of Jesus Christ — and thereby a contradictory Christian theology.

In Love Divine, Jordan Wessling provides a systematic account of the deep and rich love that God has for humans. Within this vast theological territory, Wessling's objective is to contend for a unified paradigm regarding fundamental issues pertaining to the God of love who deigns to share His life of love with any human willing to receive it. Realizing this objective includes clarifying and defending theological accounts of the following: how the doctrine of divine love should be constructed; what God's love is; what role love plays in motivating God's creation and subsequent governance of humans; how God's love for humans factors into His emotional life; which humans it is that God loves in a saving manner; what the punitive wrath of God is and how it relates to God's redemptive love for humans; and how God might share His intra-trinitarian love with human beings. As the book unfolds, Wessling examines a network of nodal issues concerning the love that begins in God and then overflows into the creation, redemption, and glorification of humanity. The result is an exitus-reditus structure driven by God's unyielding love.

This study draws upon the resources of both contemporary analytic theology and the theological interpretation of the New Testament in order to investigate a set of important issues in Christology. It is the first work in analytic Christology to draw upon both recent scholarship in biblical studies and recent contributions to analytic philosophy and theology. Thomas H. McCall explores the themes of union with Christ and the faith of Christ as these are developed by the "apocalyptic" and "New Perspective" interpreters of Pauline theology.The volume offers a careful analysis of recent dogmatic proposals about the identity of Christ and the doctrine of election, and provides an examination of debates over the subordination of the Son in Hebrews. It also probes the relationship of the incarnate Son to his Father in Johannine theology. McCall presents an exegetically-grounded theological engagement with recent work on the place of logic in the doctrine of the incarnation.

Holiness is the attribute most emphatically ascribed to God in Scripture, but there has been little attention devoted to characterizing and considering the entailments of divine holiness. In Divine Holiness and Divine Action, Mark C. Murphy defends an account of holiness indebted to Rudolf Otto's description of the experience of the holy as that of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. God's being holy consists in God's being someone with whom intimate union is both extremely desirable for us and yet something for which we--and indeed any limited beings--are unfit. This notion of divine holiness is useful for addressing disputed theological questions regarding divine action. In contrast to standard accounts of divine action that begin with assumptions regarding God's moral perfection or God's maximal love, the appeal to divine holiness supports a rival framework for explaining and predicting divine action--the holiness framework--according to which God is motivated to act in ways that are a response to God's own value by keeping distance from that which is deficient, defective, or in any way limited in goodness. This study exhibits the fruitfulness of a reorientation from the morality and love frameworks to the holiness framework by showing how such a reorientation suggests distinct approaches to perennial problems of divine action regarding creation, incarnation, atonement, and salvation. From the treatment of these perennial problems, a general theme regarding divine action emerges: that God's interaction with the world exhibits a radical sort of humility.

This two-volume collection brings together Michael C. Rea's most substantial work in analytic theology. The first volume considers the nature of God and our ability to talk and discover truths about God, whereas Volume II focuses on theological questions about humanity and the human condition.The chapters in the first part of Volume I explore issues pertaining to discourse about God and the authority of scripture. Part two focuses on divine attributes, while part three discusses doctrine of the trinity and related issues. Part one of Volume II considers the doctrines of the incarnation, original sin, and atonement. Part two examines the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and a theological problem that arises in connection with the idea God not only tolerates but validates a response of angry protest in the face of these problems.

This book is the first of two volumes collecting together Michael C. Rea's most substantial work in analytic theology. This volume considers the nature of God and our ability to talk and discover truths about God, whereas the companion volume focuses on theological questions about humanity and the human condition. The chapters in the first part of Volume I explore issues pertaining to discourse about God and the authority of scripture. Part two focuses on divine attributes, while part three discusses doctrine of the trinity and related issues.

This book is the second of two volumes collecting together Michael C. Rea's most substantial work in analytic theology. The first volume focuses on the nature of God and our ability to talk and discover truths about God, whereas this volume contains essays focused more on questions about humanity, the human condition, and how human beings relate to God. Part one of Volume II considers on the doctrines of the incarnation, original sin, and atonement. Part two examines the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and a theological problem that arises in connection with the idea God not only tolerates but validates a response of angry protest in the face of these problems.

The concept of the atonement is one of the defining doctrine of Christianity. Over the course of many centuries, theologians, church forefathers, philosophers and more have proposed a huge expanse of interpretations of Christ's sacrifice for humanity, each different to the next. In this ambitious study, Eleonore Stump uses the context of this history of interpretation to reconsider the doctrine afresh with philosophical care. Whatever exactly the atonement is, it is supposed to include a solution to the problems of the human condition, especially its guilt and shame. Stump canvasses the major interpretations of the doctrine, highlighting their shortcomings as an explanation for this solution. In their place, she argues for an interpretation that is both novel whilst still using traditional theology, including Anselm's well-known account of the doctrine. Atonement is a rich exploration of the doctrine and all that it covers: love, union, guilt, shame, forgiveness, retribution, punishment, shared attention, mind-reading, empathy, and various other issues in moral psychology and ethics.

The word 'accountability' is often used without much thought being given to what precisely it means. It is especially common in Christian circles, where there is frequent talk about being accountable to God, yet, still, without a clear grasp of this word. Accountability to God proposes, develops, and analyses two concepts of accountability as both a condition and a virtue. It also engineers these concepts to make them particularly apt for thinking about (1) accountability to God and (2) other relationships of accountability that exist under God. In its first part, the book builds a theological and general case for its particular views of accountability. In its second, it engages in the constructive work of developing a theology of accountability in relation to the doctrines of the Trinity, participation in Christ, the Fall, the fear of God, reconciliation, baptism, repentance, faith, and conversion. In developing this theology, Torrance interacts with a number of major theologians, such as the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Karl Barth. He also extensively engages with contemporary work in analytic philosophy, systematic theology (including analytic theology), biblical studies, and psychology. By bringing a diverse range of scholarship into discussion, Accountability to God is the first book to focus specifically on what it means to be accountable to God. It thereby proposes a more positive, constructive, and theologically apt way to think about accountability.