HEYTHROP JOURNAL最新文献

Within comparative theology, the Hindu doctrine of avatāra has traditionally been compared to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, both of which are expressions of divine embodiment in creaturely form. This article, however, contrasts the doctrine of avatāra with a reading of the incarnation that frames the latter within the broader context of kenoticism developed primarily in modern Christian theology. I argue that this approach (a) alleviates some of the difficulties encountered by the traditional comparison of avatāra with the incarnation and (b) highlights some noteworthy but easily missed dimensions present in the doctrines of both faith traditions. This is established through a comparison of two stories of young Kṛṣṇa and their display of divine play, līlā, with Hans Urs von Balthasar's kenotic reading of both the intratrinitarian relations and the metaphysical structure of finite beings. In this way, the article, on the one hand, alleviates the discrepancies about the number of divine descents and the link between these and the world's creation and metaphysical constitution, and, on the other hand, highlights how the Hindu notion of līlā and Christian kenotic readings intend to express the dialectic of divine sovereignty and accessibility in a philosophically and theologically responsible way.

This article investigates the linkage between Rahner's conception of the human person's relationship with being and with God, and the early Heidegger's understanding of Dasein in relation to the horizon of death. This paper argues that Rahner's attempt to rehabilitate these concepts in his Spirit in the World and Theology of Death distances him from Heidegger in important ways, even as it raises new methodological questions for fundamental theology. Although Rahner boldly redefines the concept of death and even being itself in relation to the Trinity, his approach to Christian faith and to those elements of Aquinas's thought that he chooses to retain expose the risks of an exclusively theological response to the challenges posed by transcendental thought. This paper concludes by suggesting that a return to pre-transcendental scholastic accounts of being can provide a more secure foundation for the theological concepts that Rahner seeks to defend.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof communities, both struggled with a tension between scientific, balanced analysis and a visionary call to a fuller experience of life. Nietzsche moved from a balance of Apollonian and Dionysian factors in life, to a unitary vision of the will to power and individual development. Arnold began with a balance of creation and re-creation, but shifted to a focus on the will to community. Arnold's path here highlights the need to respond to Nietzsche according to Nietzsche's own style, to address his concerns. But it also shows that the need to balance scientific and visionary modes of knowing may also require the deep community that Arnold proposes.

Daniel McKaughan has recently argued that conceiving faith as an ‘action-centred’ attitude whose cognitive component falls short of outright belief can play a central role in explaining how people who regard the truth of Christianity as significantly less probable than naturalism can respond with faith to the gospel proclamation without believing its core claims or presuppositions on insufficient evidence, and without violating the requirements of either pragmatic or epistemic rationality. In this paper I object to McKaughan that hope—the attitude to which he assigns the cognitive role of action-centred faith—is ill-suited for the intended purpose, and that having to the core claims and presuppositions of the gospel proclamation any attitude that is suited for the intended purpose is not going to leave a person who takes her overall evidence to run against some of those claims and presuppositions ‘free to follow the arguments and evidence where it leads’.