This book presents a thorough and innovative study of Hume's philosophy of religion, a topic central to his whole philosophical project. David Hume, one of the most influential philosophers to have written in the English language, is widely known as a skeptic and an empiricist. He is famous for raising questions about the existence of things for which there is insufficient empirical evidence, such as souls, the self, miracles, and, perhaps most importantly, God.Despite this reputation, however, Hume's works contain frequent references to a deity, and one searches in vain to find a positive assertion of atheism. This book proposes a different reading of Hume on God, in which Hume is seen as proposing a 'genuine theism'. Yoder investigates Hume's use of irony and his relationship with the Deists of his era and offers a thorough re-examination of Hume's writings on religion. Yoder concludes that, despite Hume's criticisms of the church, religiously-based ethics and the belief in miracles, he stops well short of a rejection of the existence of God. Always a creative thinker, Hume carves out a unique conception of the divine being.

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The Divine Attributes" is an engaging analysis of the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the perspective of rational theology.

This ambitious study rationally explores the nature of God, differentiates the idea of God from other historical ideas of the divine, and identifies the core qualities of a maximally great, or perfect, being. It includes detailed discussions of the fundamental divine attributes, such as divine power, knowledge, and goodness. It also addresses whether God is to be understood as eternal, within or outside of time, existing necessarily or contingently, and whether God is to be understood as a physical or a spiritual substance.

The authors conclude that, properly understood, the concept of God is coherent, although certain attributes that some traditional theologians ascribe to God should be rejected.

Paul Helm presents a new, expanded edition of his much praised 1988 book Eternal God , which defends the view that God exists in timeless eternity. This is the classical Christian view of God, but it is claimed by many theologians and philosophers of religion to be incoherent. Paul Helm rebuts the charge of incoherence, arguing that divine timelessness is grounded in the idea of God as creator, and that this alone makes possible a proper account of divine omniscience. He develops some of the consequences of divine timelessness, particularly as it affects both divine and human freedom, and considers some of the alleged problems about referring to God. The book thus constitutes a unified treatment of the main concepts of philosophical theology. Helm's revised edition includes four new chapters that develop and extend his account of God and time, taking account of significant work in the area that has appeared since the publication of the first edition, by such prominent figures as William Lane Craig, Brian Leftow, and Richard Swinburne. This new discussion takes the reader into further areas, notably timelessness and creation and the nature of divine causality.

According to the doctrine of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Spirit are supposed to be distinct from each other, and yet be one and the same God. As if that were not perplexing enough, there is also supposed to be an internal process of production that gives rise to the Son and Spirit: the Son is said to be 'begotten' by the Father, while the Spirit is said to 'proceed' either from the Father and the Son together, or from the Father, but through the Son. One might wonder, though, just how this sort of divine production is supposed to work. Does the Father, for instance, fashion the Son out of materials, or does he conjure up the Son out of nothing? Is there a middle ground one could take here, or is the whole idea of divine production simply unintelligible? In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, scholastic theologians subjected these questions to detailed philosophical analysis, and those discussions make up one of the most important, and one of the most neglected, aspects of late medieval trinitarian theology. This book examines the central ideas and arguments that defined this debate, namely those of Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, and William Ockham. Their discussions are significant not only for the history of trinitarian theology, but also for the history of philosophy, especially regarding the notions of production and causal powers.

Leading spiritual teacher John Philip Newell reveals how Celtic spirituality, listening to the sacred around us and inside of us, can help to heal the earth, overcome our conflicts and reconnect with ourselves. Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul offers a new spiritual foundation for our lives, once centered on encouragement,guidance and hope for creating a better world. Sharing the long hidden tradition of Celtic Christianity, explaining how this earth-based spirituality can help us rediscover the natural rhythms of life and deepen our spiritual connection with God, with each other and with the earth. Newell introduces some of Celtic Christianity's leading practitioners, both saints and pioneers of faith, whose timeless wisdom is more necessary than ever, including: Pelagius, who shows us how to look beyond sin to affirm our sacredness as part of all God's creation and courageously stands up for our principles in the face of oppression. Brigid of Kildare, who illuminates the interrelationship of all things and reminds us of the power of the sacred feminine to overcome those seeking to control us. John Muir, who encourages us to see the holiness and beauty of wilderness and what we must do to protect these gifts. Teilhard de Chardin, who inspires us to see how science, faith, and our future tell one universal story that beings with sacredness.

Brian Leftow offers a theory of the possible and the necessary in which God plays the chief role, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. It has become usual to say that a proposition is possible just in case it is true in some 'possible world' (roughly, some complete history a universe might have) and necessary just if it is true in all. Thus much discussion of possibility and necessity since the 1960s has focussed on the nature and existence (or not) of possible worlds. God and Necessity holds that there are no such things, nor any sort of abstract entity. It assigns the metaphysical 'work' such items usually do to God and events in God's mind, and reduces 'broadly logical' modalities to causal modalities, replacing possible worlds in the semantics of modal logic with God and His mental events. Leftow argues that theists are committed to theist modal theories, and that the merits of a theist modal theory provide an argument for God's existence. Historically, almost all theist modal theories base all necessary truth on God's nature. Leftow disagrees: he argues that necessary truths about possible creatures and kinds of creatures are due ultimately to God's unconstrained imagination and choice. On his theory, it is in no sense part of the nature of God that normal zebras have stripes (if that is a necessary truth). Stripy zebras are simply things God thought up, and they have the nature they do simply because that is how God thought of them. Thus Leftow's essay in metaphysics takes a half-step toward Descartes' view of modal truth, and presents a compelling theist theory of necessity and possibility.

What were the historical and cultural processes by which Cyril of Alexandria was elevated to canonical status while his opponent, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, was made into a heretic? In contrast to previous scholarship, Susan Wessel concludes that Cyril's success in being elevated to orthodox status was not simply a political accomplishment based on political alliances he had fashioned as opportunity arose. Nor was it a dogmatic victory, based on the clarity and orthodoxy of Cyril's doctrinal claims. Instead, it was his strategy in identifying himself with the orthodoxy of the former bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, in his victory over Arianism, in borrowing Athanasius' interpretive methods, and in skilfully using the tropes and figures of the second sophistic that made Cyril a saint in the Greek and Coptic Orthodox Churches.

This book is a consideration of major contemporary African American and Jewish theological understandings of God, human nature, moral evil, suffering, and ethics, utilizing the work of James Cone and Emil Fackenheim. Specifically, it examines how profound faith in a just God is sustained, and even strengthened, in the face of particularly horrific and long-standing evil and suffering in a community. The constructive portion of the book explores theological possibilities by focusing on the concepts of human freedom, resistance, and responsibility--all grounded in divine gift--as an effective and meaningful response to oppression and despair.

This book sets out to change the starting point for theological conversation about the work of the Holy Spirit. Protestant theologians have associated the Spirit's work almost entirely with believers and/or the church. The Spirit's role is to apply Christ's atoning work to God's people. In contrast, early Christian reflection saw the Spirit's main role as bringing about the eschatological rule of God, which reaches beyond individuals or even the church and extends to all creation. This volume explores the shape pneumatology takes when we develop the theology of the Holy Spirit within an eschatological framework that has a universal scope and an unlimited history. When we do so, we find that pneumatology deriving from questions about what the Spirit does for us needs to give way to pneumatology that derives from questions about how the Spirit can draw us into the saving history of the triune God.

Polls show that 45% of the American public believes that humans were created about 10,000 years ago and that evolution is a fictitious myth. Another 25% believes that changes in the natural world are directed by a supernatural being with a particular goal in mind. This thinking clashes head on with scientific findings from the past 150 years, and there is a dearth of public critical thinking about the natural world within a scientific framework.
Evolution and Religious Creation Myths seeks to educate and arm the public on the differences between myth and science, fiction and theory. The book begins with a whirlwind tour of creation stories from several religions. The authors then explore how certain forms of religious fundamentalism clash with the science of evolution. They review how creationists and intelligent design proponents misuse and misrepresent scientific terminology and conclusions to further their own agendas. How do scientists respond to this threat? Modern science, which includes a level of indeterminacy, or chance, cannot support the premise that a supernatural designer engineered nature for a particular purpose in a deterministic fashion. This holds true for the creation of the universe, the appearance of the first biological molecules, chemical evolution, and the evolution of life forms through mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift. Instead, human biological and cultural evolution is described within a genetic framework. Scientists use a barrage of genetic tests and DNA phylogenies to support the scientific basis for evolution. For anyone who has ever needed to argue why evolution and creationism are not both valid theories that deserve equal attention, this book clearly defines the difference between theory and myth. Scientists, teachers, and defenders of the truth should read this book in preparation for when they are called upon to respond.

Spirituality without God is the first global survey of "godless" spirituality. Long before "spiritual but not religious" became the catchphrase of the day, there were religious and spiritual traditions in India, China, and the West that denied the existence of God. Peter Heehs begins by looking at godless traditions in the ancient world. Indian religions such as Jainism and Buddhism showed the way to liberation through individual effort. In China, Confucians and Daoists taught how to live in harmony with nature and society. Philosophies of the Greco-Roman world, such as Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism, focused on enhancing the quality of life rather than buying the favor of the gods through sacrifice or worship. Heehs shows how these traditions, rediscovered during the Renaissance, helped jump-start the European Enlightenment and opened the way to the atheism and agnosticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The personal, inner, approach to religion became known as "spirituality." Spirituality without God is a counterbalance to theistic narratives that have dominated the field, as well as an introduction to modes of spiritual thought and practice that may appeal to people who have no interest in God.

The Triune God, together with the forthcoming second volume, The Works of God, develops a compendious statement of Christian theology in the tradition of a medieval summa, or of such modern works as those of Schleiermacher and Barth. Theology, as it is understood here, is the Christian church's continuing discourse concerning her specific communal purpose; it is the hermeneutic and critical reflection internal to the church's task of speaking the gospel, to the world as message and to God in petition and praise. This volume and its successor are thus dedicated to the service of the one church of the creeds; it is for no particular denomination or confession. The interlocutors of this work's analyses and proposals are drawn from wherever in the ecumenical tradition a question may lead: to theologians and traditions ancient, medieval, or modern; Eastern or Western; Catholic or Protestant.

Instead of introducing students to Christian theology through its doctrines, this text introduces it through discussion of church practices and of the experience of everyday Christian life. By taking a practical approach it encourages students to see that the goal of inquiring after God should be spiritual growth as well as intellectual understanding, enabling them to integrate their faith with their thinking.

The classic and contemporary texts brought together here introduce students to Christian life and thought across the centuries, opening up a dialogue between past and present. These discussions will acquaint readers with Christian claims about God, Jesus Christ, scripture, human nature, sin and salvation in everyday life as well as in communal ecclesial practice. The points of entry examined are study, science, work, affliction, repentance and forgiveness, prayer, love of neighbor, scripture, meditation, preaching, the Christian sacrament of the altar, Christian art, and reflective discernment.

This book explores a variety of biblical texts in order to clarify and better understand the relationship between the individual and the community in ancient Israel. Although much of the argument is focused upon Deuteronomy and the deuteronomistic history, other pentateuchal and prophetic texts are also probed. In particular, certain instances of divine retribution that are corporate in nature are explored, and it is argued that such punishments are quite common and completely understandable of the basic theological ideas that are operative in such cases. The examination turns to other biblical texts that appear to reject the notion of corporate divine retribution (e.g., Ezekiel 18). Here the focus is on whether these texts do in fact reject all forms of corporate divine retribution and how large a shift these texts signal in the biblical understanding of the relationship between the individual and the community. Finally, Kaminsky asserts that certain theological features explored in this study can be used by those scholars who argue that the enlightenment idea of individualism needs to be balanced by a renewed philosophical and theological emphasis on the individual's responsibility to the larger society.>

"It is a grandiose claim to have banished God. With such a lot at stake we surely need to ask Hawking to produce evidence to establish his claim. Do his arguments really stand up to close scrutiny? I think we have a right to know." The Grand Design and Brief Answers to Big Questions by eminent scientist the late Stephen Hawking were blockbusting contributions to the science religion debate. They claimed it was the laws of physics themselves which brought the universe into being, rather than any God. In this forthright response, John Lennox, Oxford University mathematician and internationally-known apologist, takes a closer look at Hawking's logic and questions his conclusions. In lively, layman's terms, Lennox guides us through the key points in Hawking's arguments - with clear explanations of the latest scientific and philosophical methods and theories - and demonstrates that far from disproving a Creator God, they make his existence seem all the more probable.

This study shows how the trinitarian theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar opens up an approach to the controversial question of God's immutability and impassibility which succeeds in respecting both the transcendence and the immanence of God. Contrary to both Process thought and the classical Thomist position, von Balthasar's scattered treatment is here presented thematically, in a way which makes it clear that his idea of an analogous event in the trinitarian God (in which we participate) is a radical re-interpretation of the traditional Christian axiom of divine immutability. In the course of outlining the distinctiveness of von Balthasar's approach, O'Hanlon introduces the reader to some of the fundamental themes of one of the major Roman Catholic theologians of this century, who is still relatively unknown in the English-speaking world.

How can theology think and talk about history? Building on the work of the major twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar as well as entering into sharp critical debate with him, this book sets out to examine the value and the potential of a 'theodramatic' conception of history. By engaging in dialogue not only with theologians and philosophers like von Balthasar, Hegel and Barth, but with poets and dramatists such as the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the book makes its theological principles open and indebted to literary forms, and seeks to show how such a theology might be applied to a world intrinsically and thoroughly historical. By contrast with theologies that stand back from the contingencies of history and so fight shy of the uncertainties and openness of Christian existence, this book's theology is committed to taking seriously the God who works in time.

Arguing for a new direction in postmodern theological thinking, away from the liberalism and nihilism of those who name themselves postmodern theologians, the book collects together for the first time important examples of the work of continental critical theorists relevant to the study of theology or religious studies. Each essay or excerpt is selected, edited and introduced by a leading exponent of that person's work, an exponent who is also a leading figure in contemporary theological debate. The Postmodern God introduces students and researchers to contemporary thought and how it could affect tomorrow's theology. In addition, the Reader offers examples of the work currently being done in theology and ethics which engages with contemporary critical theory. The material in this section treats some of the major themes of this new critical theology - the reappraisal of liturgy, theologies of the city, feminism and religious discourse, postmodern ethics, radical hermeneutics and theology beyond metaphysics.

Does it make sense - can it make sense - for someone who appreciates the explanatory power of modern science to continue believing in a traditional religious account of the ultimate nature and purpose of our universe? This book is intended for those who care about that question and are dissatisfied with the rigid dichotomies that dominate the contemporary debate. The extremists won't be interested - those who assume that science answers all the questions that matter, and those so certain of their religious faith that dialogue with science, philosophy, or other faith traditions seems unnecessary. But far more people today recognize that matters of faith are complex, that doubt is endemic to belief, and that dialogue is indispensable in our day.
In eight probing chapters, the authors of The Predicament of Belief consider the most urgent reasons for doubting that religious claims - in particular, those embedded in the Christian tradition - are likely to be true. They develop a version of Christian faith that preserves the tradition's core insights but also gauges the varying degrees of certainty with which those insights can still be affirmed. Along the way, they address such questions as the ultimate origin of the universe, the existence of innocent suffering, the challenge of religious plurality, and how to understand the extraordinary claim that an ancient teacher rose from the dead. They end with a discussion of what their conclusions imply about the present state and future structure of churches and other communities in which Christian affirmations are made.

In "Reclaiming Theodicy," Michael Stoeber explores various themes of theodicy - theology that defends God in the face of evil - by creatively developing a distinction between transformative and destructive suffering. Emphasising the importance of human compassion and illustrating various spiritual experiences of God that are healing, the book proposes a narrative of life within which one might understand suffering in relation to a personal God of ultimate power and love, and suggests basic principles toward developing a politics of compassion.

Explores the structure of human participation in the triune life. Focuses on the question of describing the 'members' of the Trinity as 'persons'; how language functions in describing God in such terms; and the underlying models which shape our theological perspective.>