Search

Philosophy of religion suffers from inadequate attention to the specific moral character of a transcendent God worthy of worship. This deficiency often results from an unduly abstract conception of a transcendent God, including correspondingly abstract notions of divine goodness and power. A Christian approach to God has a unique solution to this problem, owing to its understanding of Jesus Christ as the perfect human representative of God's moral character or personality. This article identifies some important consequences of this perspective for divine emotion and suffering and for human relating to God in a fitting manner, including for human certitude about God's existence. It also identifies how philosophy of religion can be renewed, in its relevance, by its accommodation of divine redemptive immanence and suffering. In a fitting relation to God, God respects free human agency by not coercing any human will to yield to God or even to receive salient evidence of God's reality. The article considers this prospect. In particular, what if God does not impose a divine self-manifestation on humans but instead has them allow or permit it? This would entail that God does not stalk humans coercively with regard to their decisions about God's existence. An important issue would concern how we humans allow or permit God to emerge as self-manifested (as God) in our experience, thereby expressing God's unique moral character in our experience. If Jesus and the New Testament offer any clue, we would allow divine self- -manifestation to us in allowing a morally relevant kind of death-and-resurrection in our lives, that is, a kind of dying into life with God. This article explores that clue in connection with redemptive suffering, transcendent and immanent. It explains how such divine self-manifestation can underwrite certitude about God's existence, courtesy of interpersonal evidence from God. Such evidence is no matter for mere reflection, but instead calls for imitatio Dei as the means to participate in God's moral character and redemptive suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an analysis of the Fides et ratio encyclical letter (1998), in the light of the contemporary philosophical scenario. The document defends that both faith and reason are valid means to access truth. It duly considers several tendencies of the contemporary philosophical thought which cannot be reconciled with the vision of reality as a whole that is proper to Christian faith. Its intention is to promote a renewal of philosophy aligned with an authentic rationality of a metaphysical and realistic nature which rea-ches the foundation of the being and of truth, overcoming the immanentism, scientificist naturalism and nihilism that characterize a great part of the current philosophical production. With its proposal of conciliation between faith and reason, the encyclical letter opens new perspectives for Christian philosophy and theology which, by renouncing to their defensive attitude concerning modernity, can unhesitantly take on the true metaphysical dimension of reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]