HEYTHROP JOURNAL最新文献

This article critically examines William Lane Craig’s defence of what he terms the ‘biblical doctrine of the Trinity’ as presented in his contribution to One God, Three Persons, Four Views and his Systematic Philosophical Theology. Craig formulates this doctrine using two core propositions: (1) there is exactly one God; and (2) there are exactly three distinct persons properly called ‘God’. While Craig contends that his formulation represents a biblical justification for the Trinity, the paper argues that his case is ultimately unconvincing.

This article examines aspects of Craig’s argument, including his remarkable claim that the New Testament authors lacked the concept of the identity relation. I argue that whilst the New Testament authors affirmed one God, they did so in a sense different from that required for Craig’s ‘biblical’ doctrine of the Trinity. His second proposition is equivocal and his criteria for evaluation are not specified. The milieu and the pattern of usage within the New Testament mean that finding a maximum of eight texts to justify his second proposition is surprising and tells against his conclusions. Therefore, the prior probability weighs strongly in favour of the alternative explanations for these eight texts that scholars have proposed.

The unequal distribution of goods seems to be a permanent phenomenon both nationally and globally. Although the historical details of the roots of inequality may vary slightly from country to country, one of the main causes is the so-called ‘Matthew effect’, which refers to the accumulation of advantages. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. In this paper, I argue that although the Matthew effect has a bad moral reputation, this effect is inherently neither bad nor good. I introduce four variants of the effect, which represent the most common usages of the term by researchers, and point out that they all have instances that are morally unproblematic. However, I also argue that, in many cases, there are convincing moral reasons to try to reduce the accumulation of advantages. The intuition that the Matthew effect is ethically problematic has good grounds in specific common cases. Therefore, I argue that the Matthew effect deserves its bad reputation.

The relationship between conceptions of a creator God and models of evolutionary development has been characterised mainly by each position’s inability to acknowledge the possibilities of the other. Rather than dismissing the views as incompatible with one another, or pursuing academically unsatisfying attempts to harmonise the two positions, this article attempts philosophically and theologically to reinterpret the role of Christian theism, particularly belief in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, in light of understanding the evolutionary development of reality as a fact of existence. Philosophically, I propose the use of Luis de Molina’s theory of middle knowledge as one possible means of reconciling divine omniscience with quantum uncertainty and biological evolution; while theologically, the concept of theosis will be utilised to rearticulate the role of Christ’s incarnation in light of evolutionary and quantum realities as a means of demonstrating humanity’s gradual evolutionary development from animal, to physical human being, to spiritual human being, as modelled on a belief in the work of Christ.