Ultimates: Philosophical Theology, Volume One

Notes

325 Notes Notes to the Preface 1. Philosophy, especially metaphysical philosophy of the sort found here, needs to defend itself in the contemporary situation. Metaphysics is defined from many angles throughout Philosophical Theology, but is explained most systematically in I, 2, iv and I, 9, i. 2. See the bibliographical items below for the author to find the system. A summary of the core tenets, at least in an early version, is “Sketch of a System” in Neville, editor, New Essays in Metaphysics. Commentary material is in Interpreting Neville , edited by Nancy K. Frankenberry and J. Harley Chapman and Theology in Global Context, edited by Amos Yong and Peter G. Heltzel. 3. This conception of the public for philosophical theology is explored throughout these three volumes, but especially in I, 3. 4. I am a Christian of the Methodist denominational culture by birth and early training, the Missouri Midwest version, and am ordained in the United Methodist Church. I am also a Confucian by hard learning through comparative theology and practice and for several years have served on the Consultative Committee of the International Confucian Association, as well as being deeply involved in Buddhist theology and some kinds of practice. I am less well versed in the various kinds of Hinduism but the effort to overcome this limitation shows in the frequent treatments of Hindu themes in these volumes. I believe that the separation of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the first millennium was a mistaken way of dealing with different emphases within Hellenistic Semitic religious life. Moreover, I was educated in the West with English as my native tongue and for the most part am dependent on English translations and scholarship, although I have taught Sanskrit and studied Chinese as well as several European languages. 5. This conception of theology as including within it all the studies necessary to make cases for its first-order topics is an outgrowth of Paul Tillich’s conception of theological system. It stands in contrast to Karl Barth’s conception of theology as anti-system whose boundaries are very tight because they all have to do with determining religious (for him, Christian) identity. Barth viewed theology as a confession of Christian identity and that confession was based on a revelational starting point. 326 v Notes to Preface Nevertheless, cases need to be made for the revelational starting point in comparison with other revelational claims, in terms of philosophical conceptions of revelation, relative to liturgical and practical uses, with assessments of imaginative appeal, and so forth, so that the whole panoply of a theory of religion opens up. 6. See Keith Ward, Religion and Revelation, Religion and Creation, and Religion and Human Nature. See also T.W. Bartel, editor, Comparative Theology: Essays for Keith Ward. 7. See the analysis by William Wood in his “On the New Analytic Theology, or: The Road Less Traveled.” His essay discusses the “field” exhibited in some recent anthologies in analytic philosophy, A Reader in Contemporary Philosophical Theology, edited by Oliver D. Crisp, Analytic Theology: New Essays in Philosophy of Theology, edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, edited by Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea, and Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology, Vol. 1: Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, and Vol. 2: Providence, Scripture, and Resurrection , edited by Michael C. Rea. One of the first analytical books was James F. Ross’ Philosophical Theology in which he attempted to redirect the scholastic philosophy deriving from Thomas Aquinas into new forms provided by analytic philosophy, treating the concept of God, the existence of God, Thomas’ proofs for God’s existence, omnipotence, divine goodness and evil, and divine freedom in creating. He treated no religions or philosophical theological traditions other than Christianity, with the exception of a footnote reference to Avicenna. He took analytic philosophy’s commitment to “justification in terms of consciousness alone” to justify ignoring the philosophical significance of other disciplinary approaches to his topics. 8. See Frankenberry’s edited Radical Interpretation in Religion, especially her introduction and chapter 9. 9. “Analytic pragmatism” is a moniker popularized by Robert B. Brandom in his Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism. In the afterword to that volume, he defends the importance of analytic philosophy in the mix he calls analytic pragmatism. His argument is to make distinctions clarifying criticisms of analytic philosophy as a movement, showing that many of them do not hold. In particular, he says that the ideal of a clear...