My favorite philosophers of religion and theologians
Being a student of theology I obviously have a great interest in various figures in theology and the philosophy of religion and am curious to know who influences others. My major influences are as follows: St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory Palamas, St. John of the Cross, John Wesley, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, St. John Henry Newman, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Jacques Maritain, Edith Stein, Fulton Sheen, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Martin Buber, Maimonides, Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Lossky, Sergei Bulgakov, Richard Swinburne, David Bentley Hart, Psuedo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, and Kitaro Nishida.
If I could narrow it down to three it would be Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and JPII.
If I could narrow it down to three it would be Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and JPII.
Comments (57)
I've never heard of Kant's philosophy of religion, do you know why it didn't have as much of an impact as Hegel's did?
How does kierk fit in there?
I should say Kant’s transcendental theology. People seemed to be more interested in Kant for his ethical writings because that’s the brunt of his work. Hegel just so happened to gather a larger following because his work was extensive on religion. Kierkegaard wrote all about religion; he saw himself as a writer attempting to reintroduce Christianity into a culture that was rejecting it.
I also prefer to drop the metaphysical trappings.
Forgot to mention that I like Levinas. And Kafka’s The Trial is a great book.
The theological reasons for this decision are out of any human understanding: it is so just because it is so. They refer to the fact that Jesus was a man and his apostles were men; this way this theology decides to ignore the historical context, that instead is considered relevant in other cases. For example, the fact that Jesus had no properties was considered something historically limited to his person and not relevant to become a rule for the priests.
How can be considered valuable John Paul II as a theologian, considering that, by creating this dogma about the priesthood denied to women, he followed a theology lacking humanly understandable explanations?
In 1992 John Paul II promulgated the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In canon 2358 of the Catechism, homosexual tendencies are officially declared “objectively disordered”. This way homosexual people are publicly exposed to be treated differently from other people: it is said explicitly in the same canon: “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity”. What is wrong in homosexual people so that they deserve particular compassion, particular acceptance? What are the theological basis to explain these declarations? Who establishes what is objectively ordered and objectively disordered in nature? What are the criteria to establish it?
Not Franz Kafka. Martin Kavka. Author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy.
No wiki entry but this will give you an idea of his work:
https://religion.fsu.edu/person/martin-kavka
Ahhh, yes. I’ve heard of the book but never bothered to read it. I’ll have to look into it!
I haven't studied his theology. I'm not a transcendentalist but I imagine it's unique.
Yeah kierk threw me off because he seems way more protestant than your other picks (in fact he could be an extremist protestant) so I was wondering how you reconciled them.
While I totally understand your point I tend to like JPII because of his personalism, the belief that man is a unique being in the universe that has every right to be an individual. You must understand that his position regarding homosexuality was very liberal for the day; the pope’s prior to him didn’t bother preaching that gay people should be treated with compassion. People left the church because of JPII’s very true statement. As far as women clergy go I personally don’t care if the church did allow this. Before that happens we need to drop the clerical celibacy nonsense. This does not mean that a priest doesn’t have the right to be celibate it’s just that the Vatican mandates it and that’s something I just think is a problem. It should be a persons choice.
From the introduction to Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy
I like to think that I am a Roman Catholic by denominational preference but an Eastern Orthodox Christian at heart. We of course have Byzantine rite churches in Catholicism and I’ve considered “switching” my rite (yes it is possible). Most Byzantine churches and Eastern Catholic churches in general act exactly like Orthodox churches: married priests, slightly different theology (more therapeutic than legalistic), different liturgy, an emphasis on the Church Fathers, and so on. The process seems to be pretty simple. You attend a Byzantine parish for 6 months to a year then write a letter to your bishop asking to switch. Of course you can’t write a hate letter about why the Roman Church is so messed up. That’s automatic rejection. One could just say “Go be Orthodox” but I don’t feel that I want to abandon my Catholic roots entirely. Still thinking on it but hopefully discerning this will cure me of a lot of anger that I have had built up towards the ”Latin” end of the church for a number of years despite my own personal piety.
You definitely should check out Avicenna there if you're a fan of Aquinas, a good chunk of Islamic philosophy influenced Scholastic philosophy.
As for the later period, like Leibniz and what not, they got their access to that tradition through Ibn Tufail's novel which investigated some of the problems in epistemology that later became the focus of that era of philosophy
Raised and educated Roman Catholic, then apostate in my middle teens, and finally unbeliever^^ (freethinker) over four decades since, here are many of the theologians (metaphysicians) and philosophers of religion – who confront "the divine" – from which I've learned a great deal:
Laozi
The Buddha
Aeschylus, Sophlocles, Euripides
Kohelet (Solomon?)
Epicurus
Hillel the Elder
Lucretius
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
John Scotus Eriugena
Adi Shankara
Ibn Rushd
Maimonides
William of Ockham
Benedictus de Spinoza
David Hume
Thomas Paine
Ludwig Feuerbach
Arthur Schopenhauer
Friedrich Nietzsche
Martin Buber
Karl Jaspers
Gabriel Marcel
Mircea Eliade
(Howard Phillips Lovecraft)
Gershom Scholem
Hans Jonas
Kitaro Nishida
(Georges Bataille)
Emmanuel Levinas
"Gora" aka Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
Thomas J. J. Altizer
Howard Thurman
Walter Kaufmann
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Paul Tillich
Iris Murdoch
(René Girard)
(George Steiner)
(Ernest Becker)
(Hans Peter Duerr)
(Irvin Yalom)
Elaine Pagels
Don Cupitt
edit:
antitheist religious skeptic^^
As if these two are the same... :sparkle:
And how they know what that even is?
Did Nietzsche believe in gods? Or only in a dead one?
This is a list of philosophers of religion.
God
As the first in the row. Remarkable...
Try something new, lil D-Ker: actually read one or more of their works. :worry:
I've read the very first in the row! The gods. What use are the others still?
Then you're not a real freethinker. Freethought warrants unbelief? Why's that? You think gods oblige? That only creation from pure chance offers freedom?
:fire:
Confront! Explain yourself, God/priest/cohen/mullah/lama or whoever the hell you are!
Words, words are all I have, to take your heart away...
Kant wished to interrogate, as opposed to converse with, nature. We should adopt a similar line, God has a lot of explainin' to do, ja?
Right now, I don't wanna be in god's shoes!
No, Agent my love. It's us who should explain. The apology should be ours. BTW, you roll the cigarettes yourself?
Why would we need to do the explaining? We had no hand in creation. Is it possible to be good when the way the game has been designed is such a way as to invariably lead to situations that can only be fully described as aut neca aut necare (either kill/harm/maim or be killed/harmed/maimed)?
Goodness is impossible given the way the world is and how it works. There's not enough to go around for everybody if you know what I mean; war and its milder variants (a tiff that on most occasions spirals outta control) are inevitable. To make matters worse, going by the headlines in the media, the conditions aren't exactly improving.
That said, the brain/the mind is a powerful organ. If we, when we, use it well, magic!
As for cigarettes, mine are pre-rolled (by a machine hopefully, I'm fascinated by machines it seems), in packets of 10 (cheaper, deadlier).
Just take a good lookaround. That's not how heaven looks like. Instead, the homonid carbon copies of the homonid-gods did some damned intensive rearranging. Paradis lost. If only god-kind didn't overlook them when they worked on the right stuff. Enthusiasm and craving to escape the collective feeling of existential emptiness, felt in the whole of eternal and infinite heaven, was too overwhelming. No real attention was given to the homonid-gods. To their squiblings and squackeleries. For that they might be to blame
Clifford's Principle
[quote= William Kingdon Clifford]It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.[/quote]
[quote=Wikipedia]The pansy serves as the long-established and enduring symbol of free thought; literature of the American Secular Union inaugurated its usage in the late 1800s. The reasoning behind the pansy as the symbol of free thought lies both in the flower's name and in its appearance. The pansy derives its name from the French word pensée, which means "thought". It allegedly received this name because the flower is perceived by some to bear resemblance to a human face, and in mid-to-late summer it nods forward as if deep in thought.[/quote]
Acting in line with a tradition, bigbooze, is already proof your freedom is in a sweet slavery submissive state. Be my guest! :razz:
Wrong!
A vital touchstone since my adolescence ... :fire:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tXsxvdF481I
Yes, incorporated into my own sigil :death: :flower: (i.e. memento mori, memento vivere).
Just look at the facial expression. Something obstructs, obfuscates, clearly... What can it be? :starstruck:
Quoting Agent Smith
amor fati
If that's a vital touchstone for you, I won't remove it. Your world would collapse. I prefer the sweet security of the spicey divine lickstone.
Sapere aude. I dare you to try, Mr D-K. :point:
Short Story: The Answer (Frederic Brown, 1954)
[i]Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the sub-ether bore through the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe – ninety-six billion planets – into the super-circuit that would connect them all into the one super-calculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then, after a moment’s silence, he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.[/i]
[quote=Voltaire]If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.[/quote]
[quote=Mikhail Bakunin]If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.[/quote]
The Supreme Fascist! That's what Paul Erd?s, Hungarian mathematician, called God.[s]What do we do with fascists?[/s] What did we do to fascists?
:confused:
:up: More!
[quote=ST TOS, s1e18]"Kirk to Enterprise. Red Alert! Cestus Three has been destroyed."[/quote]
\\//_ :nerd:
To try what bigbooze? To prove your thinking is not free?
Where you quoted me fellow troll bigbooze? To take up the stone? Its a light one.
Being a mathematical ratio fascist himself that comes as no surprise. Clash of the titans. Difference being, good old Paul is no real titan. Just a confused thinker translating the universal language into his limited symbolics and numerology, assigning meaning to numbers and creating silly formula and spells to play with them in infinite vector spaces and Lie algebras introducing Lie brackets or derivatives. But if it rocks his boat. Let him rock in peace! He dont need no lullaby!
If we’re defining Neo-Scholasticism as the revival of medieval Christian philosophy then I personally don’t see a problem with it; I’m currently writing my thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas in comparison to Soren Kierkegaard. Neo-Thomism, however, I take issue with. I can’t stand philosophers from this framework who argue from the perspective of “If St. Thomas and the Vatican don’t consign your statement then your statement is false.” This is a limiting tradition that mocks what Thomism is all about. I’m not a Thomist, however; I don’t believe that we can know God’s essence but we can know Him via His energies (i.e. Palamism).
I love Avicenna. There’s so many others that I could’ve listed but if I did that I’d be typing all day. I recently read a fascinating article about Avicenna and medieval Franciscans on the concept of beauty. Don’t know if I can attach pdf’s on here but I’ll play around and attempt to send it.
:smile: :up: Isn't that the way it really is? Real people tend be an assortment of ideas - the objective then seems to be not truth, rather coherence, purging one's worldview of inconsistencies (contradictions).
No one should object to your theism so long as you, simultaneously, don't deny the existence of angels and demons, heaven and hell, souls and spirits.
That's what personfication means, bodies are implicit in that concept.
We can co-opt concepts when it makes sense, oui?
It does (to me). People are identified by their ideas; he's a theist, she's a physicalist, that guy over there is a nihilist, that girl, a realist, so on and so forth.
:chin:
I recently, how coincidentally, saw scientists claiming that we are creations of the alien superdooperdeluxe intelligent race. They have established links between all planets and all life on Earth is a giant simulation created by these new gods.
These scientists were probably frustrated about their scientific status. Yearning for gods while trying to stick to their limited science. Where has the world come to?
:death: :flower: