Abstract Trauma studies have seen rapid growth in popularity within the past two decades, moving from a psychological phenomenon to a concept utilized by literary critics, sociologists, and now biblical scholars. Yet, most of the work on trauma theory within biblical studies focuses on psychological aspects of trauma instead of sociological or cultural aspects of trauma. Drawing on Jeffery Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma, a cultural trauma reading of Micah 1–3 reveals how Micah 1–3 as a book transforms Micah’s localized psychological trauma to become a national trauma, explaining why scribes preserved Micah 1–3. Like holocaust testimony that became a cultural trauma, Micah’s testimony to his trauma became a trauma for all of Judea. To create a cultural trauma, Micah 1–3 define the trauma as divine punishment through an Assyrian invasion due to a breakdown of social order seen in the corrupt owners, rulers, and religious leaders. This cultural trauma then becomes one of the early texts to shape later biblical writers’ understanding of divine punishment. This article offers a different perspective of trauma theory and shows how cultural trauma theory explains why Micah 1–3 were preserved.
{"title":"Micah 1–3 and Cultural Trauma Theory: An Exploration","authors":"Scott Bayer","doi":"10.1515/opth-2022-0222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0222","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Trauma studies have seen rapid growth in popularity within the past two decades, moving from a psychological phenomenon to a concept utilized by literary critics, sociologists, and now biblical scholars. Yet, most of the work on trauma theory within biblical studies focuses on psychological aspects of trauma instead of sociological or cultural aspects of trauma. Drawing on Jeffery Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma, a cultural trauma reading of Micah 1–3 reveals how Micah 1–3 as a book transforms Micah’s localized psychological trauma to become a national trauma, explaining why scribes preserved Micah 1–3. Like holocaust testimony that became a cultural trauma, Micah’s testimony to his trauma became a trauma for all of Judea. To create a cultural trauma, Micah 1–3 define the trauma as divine punishment through an Assyrian invasion due to a breakdown of social order seen in the corrupt owners, rulers, and religious leaders. This cultural trauma then becomes one of the early texts to shape later biblical writers’ understanding of divine punishment. This article offers a different perspective of trauma theory and shows how cultural trauma theory explains why Micah 1–3 were preserved.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43346788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract I conducted anthropological fieldwork (2010–2018) in a charismatic Christian new religious movement the Lights founded by a Transylvanian contemporary folk prophet in 2008. The new religious movement (NRM) has local hubs in North Serbia, Romania, and Hungary. After offering insight into the techniques of how the prophet receives his visions of heaven and hell (as answers to the existential dilemmas of death and the afterlife), I analyse the role and reception of these visionary journeys. I combine interpretive anthropology with the genealogical way of discourse analysis introduced by Michel Foucault. I conceive of complex roles for the narratives about the prophet’s visionary journeys and his theory of reincarnation. These narratives attract people who encounter the prophet and inspire them to participate in the NRM’s religious events. The group wanted to legitimate the prophet with the visions’ moderate style and the relative correspondence with the Bible. Nevertheless, the prophet and the group recognized the divisive nature of these narratives. They found that they could manage their evangelization by creating graduated access to information to avoid preconception judgements. Between 2012 and 2014, the core group of this NRM (lights and the prophet) worked out a multi-level discourse space in the group: a gradation where access to knowledge is based on status. I called this balanced and long-term initiation process the system of threshold narratives.
{"title":"Contemporary Visions of Heaven and Hell by a Transylvanian Folk Prophet, Founder of the Charismatic Christian Movement The Lights","authors":"L. K. Csáji","doi":"10.1515/opth-2022-0214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0214","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract I conducted anthropological fieldwork (2010–2018) in a charismatic Christian new religious movement the Lights founded by a Transylvanian contemporary folk prophet in 2008. The new religious movement (NRM) has local hubs in North Serbia, Romania, and Hungary. After offering insight into the techniques of how the prophet receives his visions of heaven and hell (as answers to the existential dilemmas of death and the afterlife), I analyse the role and reception of these visionary journeys. I combine interpretive anthropology with the genealogical way of discourse analysis introduced by Michel Foucault. I conceive of complex roles for the narratives about the prophet’s visionary journeys and his theory of reincarnation. These narratives attract people who encounter the prophet and inspire them to participate in the NRM’s religious events. The group wanted to legitimate the prophet with the visions’ moderate style and the relative correspondence with the Bible. Nevertheless, the prophet and the group recognized the divisive nature of these narratives. They found that they could manage their evangelization by creating graduated access to information to avoid preconception judgements. Between 2012 and 2014, the core group of this NRM (lights and the prophet) worked out a multi-level discourse space in the group: a gradation where access to knowledge is based on status. I called this balanced and long-term initiation process the system of threshold narratives.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47824474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The difference between revelation and natural reason seems to be as obvious as it is indestructible. Despite this conventional view, Eric Voegelin claims that this difference must be “swept aside” and “cleared away” as it obscures the sphere of original meaning and manifestation and posits the divine as an object. According to Voegelin, through recourse to the ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle, we can discover that there is no natural reason at all but instead: “reason is firmly rooted in revelation.” Obviously, this requires a reinterpretation of revelation. It can neither be equated with the content of the Holy Scripture nor should it be confined to the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. Rather, claims Voegelin, we ought to think of it as a primordial attraction, a movement drawing into the search for truth and the ground of reality. Such an approach may raise objections and provoke accusations of either subordinating philosophy to theology or misusing the language. As I attempt to show in the article at hand, Voegelin insists on revelation because it designates the original manifestation of the ground, and both faith and philosophical elucidation are two modes of responding to this appearing.
{"title":"Revelation and Philosophy in the Thought of Eric Voegelin","authors":"Tomasz Niezgoda","doi":"10.1515/opth-2022-0199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0199","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The difference between revelation and natural reason seems to be as obvious as it is indestructible. Despite this conventional view, Eric Voegelin claims that this difference must be “swept aside” and “cleared away” as it obscures the sphere of original meaning and manifestation and posits the divine as an object. According to Voegelin, through recourse to the ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle, we can discover that there is no natural reason at all but instead: “reason is firmly rooted in revelation.” Obviously, this requires a reinterpretation of revelation. It can neither be equated with the content of the Holy Scripture nor should it be confined to the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. Rather, claims Voegelin, we ought to think of it as a primordial attraction, a movement drawing into the search for truth and the ground of reality. Such an approach may raise objections and provoke accusations of either subordinating philosophy to theology or misusing the language. As I attempt to show in the article at hand, Voegelin insists on revelation because it designates the original manifestation of the ground, and both faith and philosophical elucidation are two modes of responding to this appearing.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44677004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Scholarship and research in the field of thanatology require creative responses to address contemporary concerns regarding how people – individually and collectively – make sense of events and experiences associated with death and dying. This present study focuses on the broader Islamic traditions of the experience of death and the afterlife and provides a conceptual overview of the practices of mourning and memoria. This overview offers an exploration of considerations for the well-being of the deceased, interactions between the living and the dead, as well as how dreams act as conduits between the seen and unseen worlds. Additionally, this study draws from the narratives contained within the fortieth and final book of the eleventh-century Persian Muslim philosopher and jurist, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s epic, titled The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, to address and juxtaposition Muslim conceptions pertaining to death and the afterlife with death anxiety research not currently articulated within the wider Islamic scholarship. Through the exploration of Islamic traditions and the contribution of al-Ghazālī’s citations within The Remembrance, this work will demonstrate how broader reflections on recognising the inevitability of death and the importance of relinquishing earthly attachments posit a creative response to contemporary death anxiety research. Bearing in mind the commonly studied tenets within the wider corpus of al-Ghazālī’s impressive epic, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, it is the literature presented here which warrants full consideration for creative responses to the discussion on death that may consequently be of pastoral significance and provide techniques for lessening death anxiety.
摘要死亡学领域的学术和研究需要创造性的回应，以解决当代人们对人如何 – 单独和集体 – 理解与死亡和死亡相关的事件和经历。本研究关注更广泛的伊斯兰死亡和死后体验传统，并对哀悼和纪念的做法进行了概念概述。这篇综述探讨了对死者福祉的考虑，生者和死者之间的互动，以及梦如何作为可见世界和看不见世界之间的管道。此外，本研究借鉴了11世纪波斯穆斯林哲学家和法学家Abú的第四十本也是最后一本书中的叙述Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī的史诗《死亡与来生的纪念》（The Remembrance of Death and The Afterlife）探讨了穆斯林与死亡和来生有关的概念，并将其与目前尚未在更广泛的伊斯兰学术中阐明的死亡焦虑研究并置。通过对伊斯兰传统的探索和al-Ghazālī在《纪念》中的引用，这项工作将展示对认识死亡的必然性和放弃世俗依恋的重要性的更广泛思考如何对当代死亡焦虑研究做出创造性的回应。考虑到al-Ghazālī令人印象深刻的史诗《宗教科学的复兴》（the Revival of the Religious Sciences）中广泛研究的原则，这里介绍的文献值得充分考虑对死亡讨论的创造性回应，因此可能具有田园意义，并为减轻死亡焦虑提供了技术。
{"title":"Remember Death: An Examination of Death, Mourning, and Death Anxiety Within Islam","authors":"Nilou Davoudi","doi":"10.1515/opth-2022-0205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0205","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Scholarship and research in the field of thanatology require creative responses to address contemporary concerns regarding how people – individually and collectively – make sense of events and experiences associated with death and dying. This present study focuses on the broader Islamic traditions of the experience of death and the afterlife and provides a conceptual overview of the practices of mourning and memoria. This overview offers an exploration of considerations for the well-being of the deceased, interactions between the living and the dead, as well as how dreams act as conduits between the seen and unseen worlds. Additionally, this study draws from the narratives contained within the fortieth and final book of the eleventh-century Persian Muslim philosopher and jurist, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s epic, titled The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, to address and juxtaposition Muslim conceptions pertaining to death and the afterlife with death anxiety research not currently articulated within the wider Islamic scholarship. Through the exploration of Islamic traditions and the contribution of al-Ghazālī’s citations within The Remembrance, this work will demonstrate how broader reflections on recognising the inevitability of death and the importance of relinquishing earthly attachments posit a creative response to contemporary death anxiety research. Bearing in mind the commonly studied tenets within the wider corpus of al-Ghazālī’s impressive epic, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, it is the literature presented here which warrants full consideration for creative responses to the discussion on death that may consequently be of pastoral significance and provide techniques for lessening death anxiety.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46267451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract From the beginning, Levinas’ thought was received not only by philosophers but also by theologians. But his thought is very radical and represents both a challenge and an inspiration for theology. The article aims to see where the challenge and inspiration might lie. Levinas’s basic question is how finite thought can think an infinite and transcendent God. Levinas develops the phenomenology of the Idea of the Infinite and interprets Descartes’ idea of God as a practical desire. For Levinas, the relation to God is intrinsically linked to the relation to the Other. It is an attempt to characterize an autonomous ethical subjectivity whose autonomy, however, does not begin with the subject but in the Other, in whom the presence of God is always already manifest. This description of the subject corresponds to the human being as understood in Christian theology.
{"title":"God Who Comes to Mind: Emmanuel Levinas as Inspiration and Challenge for Theological Thinking","authors":"Jakub Sirovátka","doi":"10.1515/opth-2020-0189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0189","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract From the beginning, Levinas’ thought was received not only by philosophers but also by theologians. But his thought is very radical and represents both a challenge and an inspiration for theology. The article aims to see where the challenge and inspiration might lie. Levinas’s basic question is how finite thought can think an infinite and transcendent God. Levinas develops the phenomenology of the Idea of the Infinite and interprets Descartes’ idea of God as a practical desire. For Levinas, the relation to God is intrinsically linked to the relation to the Other. It is an attempt to characterize an autonomous ethical subjectivity whose autonomy, however, does not begin with the subject but in the Other, in whom the presence of God is always already manifest. This description of the subject corresponds to the human being as understood in Christian theology.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44946215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article investigates the justifications of mass violence in Deuteronomistic historiography through the lens of cultural trauma. The analysis concentrates on the representation and justification of mass violence, that is mass killings and other forms of violence against non-combatants, in Israel’s conquest of the promised land in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua as well as during the loss of the land at the hand of the Assyrian and Babylonian armies, as narrated in 2 Kings 17–25. A comparison of these texts and their respective historical backgrounds helps to profile the contrasts and continuities between them. Trauma theory sheds light on both narratives as media to recover agency and to reconstruct collective identity for emerging Judaism via the historiographical representation of cultural trauma.
{"title":"Triumph and Trauma: Justifications of Mass Violence in Deuteronomistic Historiography","authors":"Dominik Markl","doi":"10.1515/opth-2022-0217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0217","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates the justifications of mass violence in Deuteronomistic historiography through the lens of cultural trauma. The analysis concentrates on the representation and justification of mass violence, that is mass killings and other forms of violence against non-combatants, in Israel’s conquest of the promised land in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua as well as during the loss of the land at the hand of the Assyrian and Babylonian armies, as narrated in 2 Kings 17–25. A comparison of these texts and their respective historical backgrounds helps to profile the contrasts and continuities between them. Trauma theory sheds light on both narratives as media to recover agency and to reconstruct collective identity for emerging Judaism via the historiographical representation of cultural trauma.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47685539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Facing suffering and death, or what is known as human fragility, does not seem all that difficult and challenging in the presence of a morally responsible God or the primordial source of all existence. However, if our theodicy does not allow for the existence of such a God or primordial source, as in Ashʿarite theology or Schopenhauer’s philosophy, then the encounter with human fragility necessitates a more sophisticated explanation. Schopenhauer, by rejecting the loving Christian God, adopts the Buddhist solution to death which, he claims, has been maintained in Sufism. While recognizing Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, Nietzsche disagrees with his moral approach and attempts to address human vulnerability from an aesthetic standpoint. In this article, I argue that Rūmī, following Ashʿarite theodicy, attempts to transcend the moral position of theologians with his concept of love and, instead of appealing to the dominant asceticism of fear and terror, confronts human fragility through the framework of his mysticism of love. The article then makes an effort to provide a reasonable interpretation of this mysticism in light of Nietzsche’s aesthetic metaphysics.
{"title":"The Dragon on the Path and the Emerald of Love: A Nietzschean reading of Rūmī’s concept of love","authors":"H. M. Arani","doi":"10.1515/opth-2022-0215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0215","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Facing suffering and death, or what is known as human fragility, does not seem all that difficult and challenging in the presence of a morally responsible God or the primordial source of all existence. However, if our theodicy does not allow for the existence of such a God or primordial source, as in Ashʿarite theology or Schopenhauer’s philosophy, then the encounter with human fragility necessitates a more sophisticated explanation. Schopenhauer, by rejecting the loving Christian God, adopts the Buddhist solution to death which, he claims, has been maintained in Sufism. While recognizing Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, Nietzsche disagrees with his moral approach and attempts to address human vulnerability from an aesthetic standpoint. In this article, I argue that Rūmī, following Ashʿarite theodicy, attempts to transcend the moral position of theologians with his concept of love and, instead of appealing to the dominant asceticism of fear and terror, confronts human fragility through the framework of his mysticism of love. The article then makes an effort to provide a reasonable interpretation of this mysticism in light of Nietzsche’s aesthetic metaphysics.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49264606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The material turn in the study of religions has opened new methodological vistas, rejuvenating the notion of fetish. Scholars in Africa must acknowledge and share in the successes of the material approach. At the same time, they cannot help but recall that in colonial Africa the notion of fetish was, par excellence, the mirror of primitive religion and the denigration of Africans in the missionary enterprise. Fetish was not only the medium for the fall of African religions and the enforcement of colonial authority, but also and especially, the genesis of the theory of primitive religions. This paradox looms large when the material turn is re-read from southern perspectives as a call for a radical intra-cultural critique of the epistemological positions and subalternity of knowledge production in Africa.
{"title":"Fetish Again? Southern Perspectives on the Material Approach to the Study of Religion","authors":"Simon Kofi Appiah","doi":"10.1515/opth-2022-0197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0197","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The material turn in the study of religions has opened new methodological vistas, rejuvenating the notion of fetish. Scholars in Africa must acknowledge and share in the successes of the material approach. At the same time, they cannot help but recall that in colonial Africa the notion of fetish was, par excellence, the mirror of primitive religion and the denigration of Africans in the missionary enterprise. Fetish was not only the medium for the fall of African religions and the enforcement of colonial authority, but also and especially, the genesis of the theory of primitive religions. This paradox looms large when the material turn is re-read from southern perspectives as a call for a radical intra-cultural critique of the epistemological positions and subalternity of knowledge production in Africa.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44420098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This essay addresses Jean-Luc Nancy’s “deconstruction of Christianity” and how what Christianity proclaims through enacting a deconstruction of itself brings an end to the western, hegemonic hold that Christian imperialism has perpetuated for centuries. Nancy, for his part, takes up the name of Christianity insofar as it is a religious phenomenon that signals a trajectory of thought in the West that must be discerned as providing an “exit from religion and of the expansion of the atheist world.” Since deconstructing the dominant narratives of the West means deconstructing the myth of a sovereign, autonomous deity whose reign, Nancy declares, has reached its end, Christianity utilizes its own kenotic narrative to point toward the end of religion and Eurocentrism at the same time.
{"title":"Ending Christian Hegemony: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Ends of Eurocentric Thought","authors":"Colby Dickinson","doi":"10.1515/opth-2020-0191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0191","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay addresses Jean-Luc Nancy’s “deconstruction of Christianity” and how what Christianity proclaims through enacting a deconstruction of itself brings an end to the western, hegemonic hold that Christian imperialism has perpetuated for centuries. Nancy, for his part, takes up the name of Christianity insofar as it is a religious phenomenon that signals a trajectory of thought in the West that must be discerned as providing an “exit from religion and of the expansion of the atheist world.” Since deconstructing the dominant narratives of the West means deconstructing the myth of a sovereign, autonomous deity whose reign, Nancy declares, has reached its end, Christianity utilizes its own kenotic narrative to point toward the end of religion and Eurocentrism at the same time.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48071214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In his influential essay, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” Dominique Janicaud suggests that phenomenology and theology “make two.” On the thirtieth anniversary of that essay, here we consider some of the main lines of response that have been offered to his account. We suggest that there are three general approaches that have been the most prominent: indifferentism, integrationism, and pluralism. The indifferentists implicitly suggest that Janicaud is right about the divide between phenomenology and theology. The integrationists think that Janicaud is wrong about the divide because theology and philosophy are unable to be strictly distinguished. The pluralists suggest that Janicaud is right about the division, but wrong about how it works. For pluralists, philosophy and theology are distinguished due to the immediate evidential authorities that operate in the two discourses. As such, phenomenological theology and phenomenological philosophy of religion are importantly different. Defending pluralism as the best of the three options, we argue that it avoids the potential reductionism that is present in the other two. We conclude by turning to the ways in which, precisely because phenomenological philosophy and phenomenological theology make two, they can both benefit from being put into robust engagement with the other.
{"title":"It Takes Two to Make a Thing Go Right: Phenomenology, Theology, and Janicaud","authors":"A. Bowen, J. Simmons","doi":"10.1515/opth-2020-0190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0190","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In his influential essay, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” Dominique Janicaud suggests that phenomenology and theology “make two.” On the thirtieth anniversary of that essay, here we consider some of the main lines of response that have been offered to his account. We suggest that there are three general approaches that have been the most prominent: indifferentism, integrationism, and pluralism. The indifferentists implicitly suggest that Janicaud is right about the divide between phenomenology and theology. The integrationists think that Janicaud is wrong about the divide because theology and philosophy are unable to be strictly distinguished. The pluralists suggest that Janicaud is right about the division, but wrong about how it works. For pluralists, philosophy and theology are distinguished due to the immediate evidential authorities that operate in the two discourses. As such, phenomenological theology and phenomenological philosophy of religion are importantly different. Defending pluralism as the best of the three options, we argue that it avoids the potential reductionism that is present in the other two. We conclude by turning to the ways in which, precisely because phenomenological philosophy and phenomenological theology make two, they can both benefit from being put into robust engagement with the other.","PeriodicalId":42436,"journal":{"name":"Open Theology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67246984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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