Change and Renewal (The Word of God Encyclopedia Book 9)

Some modern Jewish thinkers take care to articulate God outside of the gender binary , [17] a concept seen as not applicable to God. Kabbalistic tradition holds that emanations from the divine consist of ten aspects , called sefirot. Most of classical Judaism views God as a personal god , meaning that humans can have a relationship with God and vice versa. He is not only cosmic but also personal Jewish monotheism thinks of God in terms of definite character or personality, while pantheism is content with a view of God as impersonal.

Who hears and answers. The "predicate 'personal' as applied to God" does not necessarily mean that God is corporeal or anthropomorphic , views that Jewish sages sometimes rejected; rather, "personality" refers not to physicality, but to "inner essence, psychical, rational, and moral". Jews believe that "God can be experienced" but also that "God cannot be understood," because "God is utterly unlike humankind" as shown in God's response to Moses when Moses asked for God's name: Anthropomorphic statements about God "are understood as linguistic metaphors, otherwise it would be impossible to talk about God at all".

According to some speculations in traditional Judaism, people's actions do not have the ability to affect God positively or negatively. If you sinned, how do you harm God, and if your transgressions are many, what do you do to God? If you are righteous, what do you give God? Or what does God take from your hand? Your wickedness [affects] a person like yourself, and your righteousness a child of humanity. A notion that God is in need of human beings has been propounded by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Because God is in search of people, God is accessible and available through time and place to whoever seeks Him, leading to a spiritual intensity for the individual as well.

This accessibility leads to a God who is present, involved, near, intimate, and concerned for and vulnerable to what happens in this world. Although the dominant strain in Judaism is that God is personal, modern Jewish thinkers claim that there is an "alternate stream of tradition exemplified by Maimonides", who, along with several other Jewish philosophers, rejected the idea of a personal God. Modern Jewish thinkers who have rejected the idea of a personal God have sometimes affirmed that God is nature, the ethical ideal, or a force or process in the world.

Baruch Spinoza offers a pantheist view of God. In his thought, God is everything and everything is God. Thus, there can be conceived no substance but God. Although Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, Spinoza's concept of God was revived by later Jews, especially Israeli secular Zionists. Hermann Cohen rejected Spinoza's idea that God can be found in nature, but agreed that God was not a personal being.

Rather, he saw God as an ideal, an archetype of morality. Similarly, for Emmanuel Levinas , God is ethics, so one is brought closer to God when justice is rendered to the Other. To know God is to know what must be done, so it does not make sense to speak of God as what God is, but rather what God commands. For Mordecai Kaplan , the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism , God is not a person, but rather a force within the universe that is experienced; in fact, anytime something worthwhile is experienced, that is God.

It is important to note that, in this model, God exists within this universe; for Kaplan, there is nothing supernatural or otherworldly. One loves this God by seeking out truth and goodness. Despite this, conventional God-language is still useful in nurturing spiritual experiences and can be a tool to relate to the infinite, although it should not be confused with the real thing. Religious Landscape Survey, Americans who identify as Jewish by religion are twice as likely to favor ideas of God as "an impersonal force" over the idea that "God is a person with whom people can have a relationship".

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about contemporary theological discussion. For other uses, see God of Israel. Tanakh Torah Nevi'im Ketuvim. Hasmonean Sadducean Pharisee Boethusian. Positions in Rabbinic Judaism: Positions in Western philosophy: Rationalism Averroism Neoplatonism Avicennism. Names of God in Judaism. Aquinas criticizes the form of naturalism that holds that the goodness of any reality "is whatever belongs to it in keeping with its own nature" without need for faith II-IIae, q. Yet, from reason itself we know that every ordered pattern of nature has two factors that concur in its full development: The example is water: In the realm of our concrete knowledge of things, a lower pattern grasps only particulars, while a higher pattern grasps universals.

Given this distinction of orders, Thomas shows how the lower can indeed point to the higher. His arguments for God's existence indicate this possibility. From this conviction he develops a highly nuanced natural theology regarding the proofs of God's existence. The first of his famous five ways is the argument from motion.

Borrowing from Aristotle, Aquinas holds to the claim that, since every physical mover is a moved mover, the experience of any physical motion indicates a first unmoved mover. Otherwise one would have to affirm an infinite chain of movers, which he shows is not rationally possible. Aquinas then proceeds to arguments from the lower orders of efficient causation, contingency, imperfection, and teleology to affirm the existence of a unitary all-powerful being. He concludes that these conclusions compel belief in the Judeo-Christian God.

Conversely, it is also possible to move from the higher to the lower orders. Rational beings can know "the meaning of the good as such" since goodness has an immediate order to the higher pattern of the universal source of being II-IIae q. The final good considered by the theologian differs, however, from that considered by the philosopher: Both forms of the ultimate good have important ramifications, since they ground not only the moral distinction between natural and supernatural virtues, but also the political distinction between ecclesial and secular power.

Aquinas concludes that we come to know completely the truths of faith only through the virtue of wisdom sapientia. Moreover, faith and charity are prerequisites for the achievement of this wisdom. Thomas's two-fold theory of truth develops a strong compatibilism between faith and reason. But it can be argued that after his time what was intended as a mutual autonomy soon became an expanding separation. Duns Scotus, like his successor William of Ockham, reacted in a characteristic Franciscan way to Thomas's Dominican views.

While the Dominicans tended to affirm the possibility of rational demonstrability of certain preambles of faith, the Franciscans tended more toward a more restricted theological science, based solely on empirical and logical analysis of beliefs. Scotus first restricts the scope of Aquinas's rational theology by refuting its ability to provide arguments that stop infinite regresses.

In fact he is wary of the attempts of natural theology to prove anything about higher orders from lower orders. On this basis, he rejects the argument from motion to prove God's existence.

Book of Mormon - Wikipedia

He admits that lower beings move and as such they require a first mover; but he maintains that one cannot prove something definitive about higher beings from even the most noble of lower beings. Instead, Scotus thinks that reason can be employed only to elucidate a concept. In the realm of theology, the key concept to elucidate is that of infinite being. So in his discussion of God's existence, he takes a metaphysical view of efficiency, arguing that there must be not a first mover, but an actually self-existent being which makes all possibles possible. In moving towards this restricted form of conceptualist analysis, he thus gives renewed emphasis to negative theology.

Ockham then radicalized Scotus's restrictions of our knowledge of God. He claimed that the Greek metaphysics of the 13 th century, holding to the necessity of causal connections, contaminated the purity of the Christian faith. He argued instead that we cannot know God as a deduction from necessary principles. In fact, he rejected the possibility that any science can verify any necessity, since nothing in the world is necessary: So science can demonstrate only the implications of terms, premises, and definitions. It keeps within the purely conceptual sphere.

Like Scotus he argued held that any necessity in an empirical proposition comes from the divine order. He concluded that we know the existence of God, his attributes, the immortality of the soul, and freedom only by faith. His desire to preserve divine freedom and omnipotence thus led in the direction of a voluntaristic form of fideism. Ockham's denial of the necessity in the scope of scientific findings perhaps surprisingly heralded the beginnings of a significant movement towards the autonomy of empirical science. But with this increased autonomy came also a growing incompatibility between the claims of science and those of religious authorities.

Thus the tension between faith and reason now became set squarely for the first time in the conflict between science and religion. This influx of scientific thinking undermined the hitherto reign of Scholasticism. By the seventeenth century, what had begun as a criticism of the authority of the Church evolved into a full-blown skepticism regarding the possibility of any rational defense of fundamental Christian beliefs.

The Protestant Reformers shifted their emphasis from the medieval conception of faith as a fides belief that to fiducia faith in. Thus attitude and commitment of the believer took on more importance. The Reformation brought in its wake a remarkable new focus on the importance of the study of Scripture as a warrant for one's personal beliefs. The Renaissance also witnessed the development of a renewed emphasis on Greek humanism.

In the early part of this period, Nicholas of Cusa and others took a renewed interest in Platonism. In the seventeenth century, Galileo understood "reason" as scientific inference based and experiment and demonstration. Moreover, experimentation was not a matter simply of observation, it also involved measurement, quantification, and formulization of the properties of the objects observed. Though he was not the first to do attempt this systematization -- Archimedes had done the same centuries before - Galileo developed it to such an extent that he overthrew the foundations of Aristotelian physics.

He rejected, for example, Aristotle's claim that every moving had a mover whose force had to be continually applied. In fact it was possible to have more than one force operating on the same body at the same time. Without the principle of a singular moved mover, it was also conceivable that God could have "started" the world, then left it to move on its own. The finding of his that sparked the great controversy with the Catholic Church was, however, Galileo's defense of Copernicus's rejection of the Ptolemaic geocentric universe.

Galileo used a telescope he had designed to confirm the hypothesis of the heliocentric system. He also hypothesized that the universe might be indefinitely large. Realizing that such conclusions were at variance with Church teaching, he followed Augustine's rule than an interpretation of Scripture should be revised when it confronts properly scientific knowledge.

The officials of the Catholic Church - with some exceptions -- strongly resisted these conclusions and continued to champion a pre-Copernican conception of the cosmos. The Church formally condemned Galileo's findings for on several grounds. First, the Church tended to hold to a rather literal interpretation of Scripture, particularly of the account of creation in the book of Genesis. Such interpretations did not square with the new scientific views of the cosmos such as the claim that the universe is infinitely large.

Second, the Church was wary of those aspects of the "new science" Galileo represented that still mixed with magic and astrology. Third, these scientific findings upset much of the hitherto view of the cosmos that had undergirded the socio-political order the Church endorsed. Moreover, the new scientific views supported Calvinist views of determinism against the Catholic notion of free will. It took centuries before the Church officially rescinded its condemnation of Galileo.

Inspired by Greek humanism, Desiderius Erasmus placed a strong emphasis on the autonomy of human reason and the importance of moral precepts. As a Christian, he distinguished among three forms of law: Paul had argued, laws of works, and laws of faith. He was convinced that philosophers, who study laws of nature, could also produce moral precepts akin to those in Christianity. But Christian justification still comes ultimately only from the grace that can reveal and give a person the ability to follow the law of faith. As such, "faith cures reason, which has been wounded by sin.

Martin Luther restricted the power of reason to illuminate faith. Like many reformers, he considered the human being alone unable to free itself from sin. In The Bondage of the Will , he makes a strict separation between what man has dominion over his dealings with the lower creatures and what God has dominion over the affairs of His kingdom and thus of salvation. Reason is often very foolish: But by its reflections on the nature of words and our use of language, it can help us to grasp our own spiritual impotence. Luther thus rejected the doctrine of analogy, developed by Aquinas and others, as an example of the false power of reason.

In his Heidelberg Disputation Luther claims that a theologian must look only "on the visible rearward parts of God as seen in suffering and the cross. Thus faith is primarily an act of trust in God's grace. Luther thus stresses the gratuitousness of salvation. In a traditional sense, Roman Catholics generally held that faith is meritorious, and thus that salvation involves good works. Protestant reformers like Luther, on the other hand, held that indeed faith is pure gift.

He thus tended to make the hitherto Catholic emphasis on works look voluntaristic. Like Luther, John Calvin appealed to the radical necessity of grace for salvation. This was embodied in his doctrine of election. But unlike Luther, Calvin gave a more measured response to the power of human reason to illuminate faith. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion , he argued that the human mind possesses, by natural instinct, an "awareness of divinity.

Even idolatry can contain as aspect of this. So religion is not merely arbitrary superstition. And yet, the law of creation makes necessary that we direct every thought and action to this goal of knowing God. Despite this fundamental divine orientation, Calvin denied that a believer could build up a firm faith in Scripture through argument and disputation. He appealed instead to the testimony of Spirit embodied gained through a life of religious piety. Only through this testimony is certainty about one's beliefs obtained.

We attain a conviction without reasons, but only through "nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself--though my words fall far beneath a just explanation of the matter. Calvin is thus an incompatibilist of the transrational type: But he expanded the power of reason to grasp firmly the preambles of faith.

In his Meditations , he claimed to have provided what amounted to be the most certain proofs of God possible. God becomes explicated by means of the foundation of subjective self-certainty. His proofs hinged upon his conviction that God cannot be a deceiver. Little room is left for faith. Descartes's thinking prepared Gottfried Leibniz to develop his doctrine of sufficient reason. Leibniz first argued that all truths are reducible to identities.

From this it follows that a complete or perfect concept of an individual substance involves all its predicates, whether past, present, or future. From this he constructed his principle of sufficient reason: He uses this not only to provide a rigorous cosmological proof for God's existence from the fact of motion, but also to defend the cogency of both the ontological argument and the argument from design. In his Theodicy Leibniz responded to Pierre Bayle, a French philosophe , who gave a skeptical critique of rationalism and support of fideism.

First, Leibniz held that all truths are complementary, and cannot be mutually inconsistent. He argued that there are two general types of truth: God can dispense only with the latter laws, such as the law of our mortality. A doctrine of faith can never violate something of the first type; but it can be in tension with truths of the second sort.

Thus though no article of faith can be self-contradictory, reason may not be able to fully comprehend it. Mysteries, such as that of the Trinity, are simply "above reason. We must weigh these decisions by taking into account the existence and nature of God and the universal harmony by which the world is providentially created and ordered.

Leibniz insisted that one must respect the differences among the three distinct functions of reason: However, one sees vestiges of the first two as well, since an inquiry into truths of faith employs proofs of the infinite whose strength or weakness the reasoner can comprehend. Baruch Spinoza , a Dutch philosopher, brought a distinctly Jewish perspective to his rigorously rationalistic analysis of faith.

Noticing that religious persons showed no particular penchant to virtuous life, he decided to read the Scriptures afresh without any presuppositions. He found that Old Testament prophecy, for example, concerned not speculative but primarily practical matters. Obedience to God was one. He took this to entail that whatever remains effective in religion applies only to moral matters. He then claimed that the Scriptures do not conflict with natural reason, leaving it free reign. No revelation is needed for morality. Moreover, he was led to claim that though the various religions have very different doctrines, they are very similar to one another in their moral pronouncements.

Instead he focused on the way that we should act given this ambiguity. He argued that since the negative consequences of believing are few diminution of the passions, some pious actions but the gain of believing is infinite eternal life , it is more rational to believe than to disbelieve in God's existence. This assumes, of course, both that God would not grant eternal life to a non-believer and that sincerity in one's belief in God is not a requirement for salvation.

As such, Pascal introduced an original form of rational voluntarism into the analysis of faith. John Locke lived at a time when the traditional medieval view of a unified body of articulate wisdom no longer seemed plausible. Yet he still held to the basic medieval idea that faith is assent to specific propositions on the basis of God's authority.

Yet unlike Aquinas, he argued that faith is not a state between knowledge and opinion, but a form of opinion doxa. But he developed a kind of apology for Christianity: His aim was to demonstrate the "reasonableness of Christianity. Faith cannot convince us of what contradicts, or is contrary, to our knowledge. We cannot assent to a revealed proposition if it be contradictory to our clear intuitive knowledge. But propositions of faith are, nonetheless, understood to be "above reason. Locke specifies two ways in which matters of faith can be revealed: The truth of original revelation cannot be contrary to reason.

But traditional revelation is even more dependent on reason, since if an original revelation is to be communicated, it cannot be understood unless those who receive it have already received a correlate idea through sensation or reflection and understood the empirical signs through which it is communicated.

For Locke, reason justifies beliefs, and assigns them varying degrees of probability based on the power of the evidence. But faith requires the even less certain evidence of the testimony of others. In the final analysis, faith's assent is made not by a deduction from reason, but by the "credit of the proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of communication.

Locke also developed a version of natural theology. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding he claims that the complex ideas we have of God are made of up ideas of reflection. For example, we take the ideas of existence, duration, pleasure, happiness, knowledge, and power and "enlarge every one of these with our idea of Infinity; and so putting them together, make our complex idea of God. David Hume , like Locke, rejected rationalism, but developed a more radical kind of empiricism than Locke had.

He argued that concrete experience is "our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact. He supported this conclusion on two grounds. First, natural theology requires certain inferences from everyday experience. The argument from design infers that we can infer a single designer from our experience of the world. Though Hume agrees that we have experiences of the world as an artifact, he claims that we cannot make any probable inference from this fact to quality, power, or number of the artisans.

Second, Hume argues that miracles are not only often unreliable grounds as evidence for belief, but in fact are apriori impossible. A miracle by definition is a transgression of a law of nature, and yet by their very nature these laws admit of no exceptions. Thus we cannot even call it a law of nature that has been violated.

He concludes that reason and experience fail to establish divine infinity, God's moral attributes, or any specification of the ongoing relationship between the Deity and man. But rather than concluding that his stance towards religious beliefs was one of atheism or even a mere Deism, Hume argued that he was a genuine Theist. He believed that we have a genuine natural sentiment by which we long for heaven. The one who is aware of the inability of reason to affirm these truths in fact is the person who can grasp revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

Immanuel Kant was heavily influenced by Descartes's anthropomorphism and Spinoza 's and Jean Jacques Rousseau 's restriction of the scope of religion to ethical matters. Moreover, he wanted a view that was consistent with Newton's discoveries about the strict natural laws that govern the empirical world.

To accomplish this, he steered the scope of reason away from metaphysical, natural, and religious speculation altogether. Kant's claim that theoretical reason was unable to grasp truths about God effectively continued the contraction of the authority of scienta in matters of faith that had been occurring since the late medieval period. He rejected, then, the timeless and spaceless God of revelation characteristic of the Augustinian tradition as beyond human ken.

This is most evident in his critique of the cosmological proof for the existence of God in The Critique of Pure Reason. This move left Kant immune from the threat of unresolvable paradoxes. Nonetheless he did allow the concept of God as well as the ideas of immortality and the soul to become not a constitutive but a regulative ideal of reason.

Cosmological Argument

God's existence remains a necessary postulate specifically for the moral law. God functions as the sources for the summum bonum. Only God can guarantee an ideal conformity of virtue and happiness, which is required to fulfill the principle that "ought implies can. Rational faith involves reliance neither upon God's word nor the person of Christ, but only upon the recognition of God as the source of how we subjectively realize our duties. God is cause of our moral purposes as rational beings in nature. Yet faith is "free belief": Like Spinoza, Kant makes all theology moral theology.

Since faith transcends the world of experience, it is neither doubtful nor merely probable. Thus Kant's view of faith is complex: He provided a religion grounded without revelation or grace. It ushered in new immanentism in rational views of belief. Hegel, at the peak of German Idealism , took up Kant's immanentism but moved it in a more radical direction. He claimed that in Kant, "philosophy has made itself the handmaid of a faith once more" though one not externally imposed but autonomously constituted.

Hegel approved of the way Kant helped to modify the Enlightenment's dogmatic emphasis on the empirical world, particularly as evidenced in the way Locke turned philosophy into empirical psychology. But though Kant held to an "idealism of the finite," Hegel thought that Kant did not extend his idealism far enough. Kant's regulative view of reason was doomed to regard faith and knowledge as irrevocably opposed. Hegel argued that a further development of idealism shows have faith and knowledge are related and synthesized in the Absolute.

Hegel reinterpreted the traditional proofs for God's existence, rejected by Kant, as authentic expressions of the need of finite spirit to elevate itself to oneness with God. In religion this attempt to identify with God is accomplished through feeling. Feelings are, however, subject to conflict and opposition. But they are not merely subjective. The content of God enters feeling such that the feeling derives its determination from this content.

Thus faith, implanted in one's heart, can be defended by the testimony of the indwelling spirit of truth. Hegel's thoroughgoing rationalism ultimate yields a form of panentheism in which all finite beings, though distinct from natural necessity, have no existence independent from it. Thus faith is merely an expression of a finitude comprehensible only from the rational perspective of the infinite. Faith is merely a moment in our transition to absolute knowledge. Physics and astronomy were the primary scientific concerns for theologians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the sciences of geology, sociology, psychology, and biology became more pronounced. Kant's understanding of God as a postulate of practical reason - and his dismissal of metaphysical and empirical support for religion -- soon led to the idea that God could be a mere projection of practical feeling or psychological impulse.

Such an idea echoed Hobbes's claim that religion arises from fear and superstition. Sigmund Freud claimed, for example, that religious beliefs were the result of the projection of a protective father figure onto our life situations. Although such claims about projection seem immune from falsification, the Freudian could count such an attempt to falsify itself simply as rationalization: The nineteenth century biological development most significant for theology was Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

It explained all human development on the basis simply of progressive adaptation or organisms to their physical environment. No reference to a mind or rational will was required to explain any human endeavor. Darwin himself once had believed in God and the immortality of the soul. But later he found that these could not count as evidence for the existence of God. He ended up an agnostic. On the one hand he felt compelled to affirm a First Cause of such an immense and wonderful universe and to reject blind chance or necessity, but on the other hand he remained skeptical of the capacities of humans "developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals.

Not all nineteenth century scientific thinking, however, yielded skeptical conclusions. He concluded that the cultic practices of religion have the non-illusory quality of producing measurable good consequences in their adherents. Moreover, he theorized that the fundamental categories of thought, and even of science, have religious origins. Almost all the great social institutions were born of religion. He was lead to claim that "the idea of society is the soul of religion": In the context of these various scientific developments, philosophical arguments about faith and reason developed in several remarkable directions in the nineteenth century.

Friedrich Schleiermacher was a liberal theologian who was quite interested in problems of biblical interpretation. He claimed that religion constituted its own sphere of experience, unrelated to scientific knowledge. Thus religious meaning is independent of scientific fact. His Romantic fideism would have a profound influence on Kierkegaard. Karl Marx is well known as an atheist who had strong criticisms of all religious practice.

Much of his critique of religion had been derived from Ludwig Feuerbach, who claimed that God is merely a psychological projection meant to compensate for the suffering people feel. Rejecting wholesale the validity of such wishful thinking, Marx claimed not only that all sufferings are the result of economic class struggle but that they could be alleviated by means of a Communist revolution that would eliminate economic classes altogether.

Moreover, Marx claimed that religion was a fundamental obstacle to such a revolution, since it was an "opiate" that kept the masses quiescent. Religious beliefs thus arise from a cognitive malfunction: He came up with an unequivocal view of faith and reason much like Tertullian's strong incompatibilism. If Kant argued for religion within the limits of reason alone, Kierkegaard called for reason with the limits of religion alone.

1. Historical Overview

Faith requires a leap. All arguments that reason derives for a proof of God are in fact viciously circular: Hegel tried to claim that faith could be elevated to the status of objective certainty. Seeking such certainly, moreover, Kierkegaard considered a trap: The radical trust of faith is the highest virtue one can reach. Kierkegaard claimed that all essential knowledge intrinsically relates to an existing individual. The aesthetic is the life that seeks pleasure. The ethical is that which stresses the fulfillment of duties. Neither of these attains to the true individuality of human existence.

But in the ethico-religious sphere, truth emerges in the authenticity of the relationship between a person and the object of his attention. With authenticity, the importance is on the "how," not the "what," of knowledge. It attains to a subjective truth, in which the sincerity and intensity of the commitment is key.

2. Typology of Cosmological Arguments

This authenticity is equivalent to faith understood as "an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness. Kierkegaard makes a similarly paradoxical claim in holding that "nothing historical can become infinitely certain for me except the fact of my own existence which again cannot become infinitely certain for any other individual, who has infinite certainty only of his own existence and this is not something historical.

Faith involves a submission of the intellect. It is not only hostile to but also completely beyond the grasp of reason. Though he never read Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche came up with remarkable parallels to his thought. Both stressed the centrality of the individual, a certain disdain for public life, and a hatred of personal weakness and anonymity.

They also both attacked certain hypocrisies in Christendom and the overstated praise for reason in Kant and Hegel. But Nietzsche had no part of Kierkegaard's new Christian individual, and instead defended the aesthetic life disdained by Kierkegaard against both morality and Christianity.

So he critique religion not from Kierkegaard's epistemological perspective, but from a highly original moral perspective. Nietzsche claimed that religion breeds hostility to life, understood broadly as will to power. Religion produces two types of character: In The Joyful Wisdom Nietzsche proclaims that God as a protector of the weak, though once alive, is now dead, and that we have rightly killed him. Now, instead, he claims that we instead need to grasp the will to power that is part of all things and guides them to their full development completely within the natural world.

For humans Nietzsche casts the will to power as a force of artistic and creative energy. Roman Catholics traditionally claimed that the task of reason was to make faith intelligible. In the later part of the nineteenth century, John Cardinal Newman worked to defend the power of reason against those intellectuals of his day who challenged its efficacy in matters of faith. Though maintaining the importance of reason in matters of faith, he reduces its ability to arrive at absolute certainties.

In his Grammar of Assent, Newman argued that one assents to God on the basis of one's experience and principles. And one can do this by means of a kind of rational demonstration. And yet this demonstration is not actually reproducible by others; each of us has a unique domain of experience and expertise. Some are just given the capacity and opportunities to make this assent to what is demonstrated others are not.

Drawing for Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics , Newman argues that "a special preparation of mind is required for each separate department of inquiry and discussion. He claims that Locke, for example, overlooked how human nature actually works, imposing instead his own idea of how the mind is to act on the basis of deduction from evidence. If Locke would have looked more closely at experience, he would have noticed that much of our reasoning is tacit and informal.

It cannot usually be reconstructed for a set of premises. Rather it is the accumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the circumstances of the particular case. No specific consideration usually suffices to generate the required conclusion, but taken together, they may converge upon it.

This is usually what is called a moral proof for belief in a proposition. In fact, we are justified in holding the beliefs even after we have forgotten what the warrant was. Mary Magdalene alone in John, but accompanied by other women in the Synoptics goes to Jesus' tomb on Sunday morning and is surprised to find it empty.

Despite Jesus' teaching, the disciples had not understood that Jesus would rise again. Jesus' ascension into Heaven is described in Luke In the Acts of the Apostles , forty days after the Resurrection, as the disciples look on, "he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight". The Acts of the Apostles describes several appearances of Jesus after his Ascension. After Jesus's life, his followers, as described in the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles , were all Jews either by birth or conversion , for which the biblical term " proselyte " is used, [] and referred to by historians as Jewish Christians.

The early Gospel message was spread orally , probably in Aramaic , [] but almost immediately also in Greek. After the conversion of Paul the Apostle , he claimed the title of "Apostle to the Gentiles". Paul's influence on Christian thinking is said to be more significant than that of any other New Testament author. Numerous quotations in the New Testament and other Christian writings of the first centuries, indicate that early Christians generally used and revered the Hebrew Bible the Tanakh as religious text , mostly in the Greek Septuagint or Aramaic Targum translations.

Early Christians wrote many religious works, including the ones included in the canon of the New Testament. The canonical texts, which have become the main sources used by historians to try to understand the historical Jesus and sacred texts within Christianity, were probably written between 50 and AD. Prior to the Enlightenment , the gospels were usually regarded as accurate historical accounts, but since then scholars have emerged who question the reliability of the gospels and draw a distinction between the Jesus described in the gospels and the Jesus of history.

Approaches to the historical reconstruction of the life of Jesus have varied from the "maximalist" approaches of the 19th century, in which the gospel accounts were accepted as reliable evidence wherever it is possible, to the "minimalist" approaches of the early 20th century, where hardly anything about Jesus was accepted as historical.

A Roman prefect , rather than a client king, ruled the land. As an exception, the prefect came to Jerusalem during religious festivals, when religious and patriotic enthusiasm sometimes inspired unrest or uprisings. Gentile lands surrounded the Jewish territories of Judea and Galilee , but Roman law and practice allowed Jews to remain separate legally and culturally.

Galilee was evidently prosperous, and poverty was limited enough that it did not threaten the social order. This was the era of Hellenistic Judaism , which combined Jewish religious tradition with elements of Hellenistic Greek culture. Hellenistic Judaism also existed in Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period , where there was conflict between Hellenizers and traditionalists sometimes called Judaizers.

1. 2. Critique of Religion and Morality?
2. Tropic of Libra?
3. Oliver!.
4. Modernisierung des Fürsorgewesens in der Weimarer Republik (German Edition).
5. Progressive Dystopia!
6. 1. Life and Works?
7. Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Jews based their faith and religious practice on the Torah , five books said to have been given by God to Moses. The three prominent religious parties were the Pharisees , the Essenes , and the Sadducees. Together these parties represented only a small fraction of the population. Most Jews looked forward to a time that God would deliver them from their pagan rulers, possibly through war against the Romans. New Testament scholars face a formidable challenge when they analyze the canonical Gospels.

Mark, which is most likely the earliest written gospel, has been considered for many decades the most historically accurate. The non-canonical Gospel of Thomas might be an independent witness to many of Jesus' parables and aphorisms. For example, Thomas confirms that Jesus blessed the poor and that this saying circulated independently before being combined with similar sayings in the Q source. Early non-Christian sources that attest to the historical existence of Jesus include the works of the historians Josephus and Tacitus.

Scholars generally consider Tacitus's reference to the execution of Jesus to be both authentic and of historical value as an independent Roman source. Non-Christian sources are valuable in two ways. First, they show that even neutral or hostile parties never evince any doubt that Jesus actually existed. Second, they present a rough picture of Jesus that is compatible with that found in the Christian sources: Archeology helps scholars better understand Jesus' social world. Jesus was a Galilean Jew, [12] born around the beginning of the 1st century, who died in 30 or 33 AD in Judea.

The gospels offer several clues concerning the year of Jesus' birth. The years of Jesus' ministry have been estimated using several different approaches.

Jesus of Nazareth

A number of approaches have been used to estimate the year of the crucifixion of Jesus. Most scholars agree that he died in 30 or 33 AD. The dates for Paul's conversion and ministry can be determined by analyzing the Pauline epistles and the Acts of the Apostles. Scholars have reached a limited consensus on the basics of Jesus' life. Many scholars agree that Joseph, Jesus' father, died by the time Jesus began his ministry.

Joseph is not mentioned at all in the gospels during Jesus' ministry. Joseph's death would explain why in Mark 6: According to Theissen and Merz, it is common for extraordinary charismatic leaders , such as Jesus, to come into conflict with their ordinary families. Sanders, the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke are the clearest case of invention in the Gospel narratives of Jesus' life. Both accounts have Jesus born in Bethlehem , in accordance with Jewish salvation history, and both have him growing up in Nazareth.

But Sanders points that the two Gospels report completely different and irreconcilable explanations for how that happened. Luke's account of a census in which everyone returned to their ancestral cities is not plausible. Matthew's account is more plausible, but the story reads as though it was invented to identify Jesus as like a new Moses , and the historian Josephus reports Herod the Great's brutality without ever mentioning that he massacred little boys. Sanders says that the genealogies of Jesus are based not on historical information but on the authors' desire to show that Jesus was the universal Jewish savior.

Most modern scholars consider Jesus' baptism to be a definite historical fact, along with his crucifixion. Dunn states that they "command almost universal assent" and "rank so high on the 'almost impossible to doubt or deny' scale of historical facts" that they are often the starting points for the study of the historical Jesus. Most scholars hold that Jesus lived in Galilee and Judea and did not preach or study elsewhere.

According to Ehrman, Jesus taught that a coming kingdom was everyone's proper focus, not anything in this life. According to Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, these teaching sessions include authentic teachings of Jesus, but the scenes were invented by the respective evangelists to frame these teachings, which had originally been recorded without context.

First, he attributed them to the faith of those healed. Second, he connected them to end times prophecy. Jesus chose twelve disciples [] the "Twelve" , evidently as an apocalyptic message. In Ehrman's view, no Christians would have invented a line from Jesus, promising rulership to the disciple who betrayed him. While others sometimes respond to Jesus with complete faith, his disciples are puzzled and doubtful. Sanders says that Jesus' mission was not about repentance , although he acknowledges that this opinion is unpopular.

He argues that repentance appears as a strong theme only in Luke, that repentance was John the Baptist 's message, and that Jesus' ministry would not have been scandalous if the sinners he ate with had been repentant. Jesus taught that an apocalyptic figure, the " Son of Man ", would soon come on clouds of glory to gather the elect, or chosen ones Mark He referred to himself as a " son of man " in the colloquial sense of "a person", but scholars do not know whether he also meant himself when he referred to the heavenly "Son of Man". The title Christ , or Messiah , indicates that Jesus' followers believed him to be the anointed heir of King David , whom some Jews expected to save Israel.

The Gospels refer to him not only as a Messiah but in the absolute form as "the Messiah" or, equivalently, "the Christ". In early Judaism, this absolute form of the title is not found, but only phrases such as "his Messiah". The tradition is ambiguous enough to leave room for debate as to whether Jesus defined his eschatological role as that of the Messiah. Sanders associates it with Jesus' prophecy that the Temple would be totally demolished. The differences in the accounts cannot be completely reconciled, and it is impossible to know what Jesus intended, but in general the meal seems to point forward to the coming Kingdom.

Jesus probably expected to be killed, and he may have hoped that God would intervene. The Gospels say that Jesus was betrayed to the authorities by a disciple, and many scholars consider this report to be highly reliable. After Jesus' death, his followers said he rose from the dead, although exact details of their experiences are unclear. According to Sanders, the Gospel reports contradict each other, which, according to him, suggests competition among those claiming to have seen him first rather than deliberate fraud.

Michael White suggests that inconsistencies in the Gospels reflect differences in the agendas of their unknown authors. Modern research on the historical Jesus has not led to a unified picture of the historical figure, partly because of the variety of academic traditions represented by the scholars. Jesus is seen as the founder of, in the words of Sanders, a '"renewal movement within Judaism. A disagreement in contemporary research is whether Jesus was apocalyptic. Most scholars conclude that he was an apocalyptic preacher, like John the Baptist and Paul the Apostle.

In contrast, certain prominent North American scholars, such as Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan, advocate for a non-eschatological Jesus, one who is more of a Cynic sage than an apocalyptic preacher. Since the 18th century, scholars have occasionally put forth that Jesus was a political national messiah, but the evidence for this portrait is negligible.

Likewise, the proposal that Jesus was a Zealot does not fit with the earliest strata of the Synoptic tradition. Jesus grew up in Galilee and much of his ministry took place there. Modern scholars agree that Jesus was a Jew of 1st-century Palestine. The New Testament gives no description of the physical appearance of Jesus before his death—it is generally indifferent to racial appearances and does not refer to the features of the people it mentions.

The Christ myth theory is the hypothesis that Jesus of Nazareth never existed; or if he did, that he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels. Apart from his own disciples and followers, the Jews of Jesus' day generally rejected him as the Messiah, as do the great majority of Jews today. Christian theologians, ecumenical councils , reformers and others have written extensively about Jesus over the centuries.

Christian sects and schisms have often been defined or characterized by their descriptions of Jesus. Meanwhile, Manichaeans , Gnostics , Muslims, Baha'is, and others have found prominent places for Jesus in their religions. Jesus is the central figure of Christianity. These documents outline the key beliefs held by Christians about Jesus, including his divinity, humanity, and earthly life, and that he is the Christ and the Son of God.

The New Testament states that the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of the Christian faith 1 Corinthians Most Christians believe that Jesus was both human and the Son of God. However, the doctrine of the Trinity is not universally accepted among Christians. Christians revere not only Jesus himself, but also his name.

Devotions to the Holy Name of Jesus go back to the earliest days of Christianity. Judaism rejects the idea of Jesus being God, [42] or a mediator to God, or part of a Trinity. Judaic criticism of Jesus is long-standing. The Talmud, written and compiled from the 3rd to the 5th century AD, [] includes stories that since medieval times have been considered to be defamatory accounts of Jesus.

Medieval Hebrew literature contains the anecdotal "Episode of Jesus" known also as Toledot Yeshu , in which Jesus is described as being the son of Joseph, the son of Pandera see: The account portrays Jesus as an impostor. Islamic texts emphasize a strict notion of monotheism tawhid and forbid the association of partners with God, which would be idolatry. The Quran describes the annunciation to Mary Maryam by an angel that she is to give birth to Jesus while remaining a virgin.

It calls the virgin birth a miracle that occurred by the will of God. To aid in his ministry to the Jewish people, Jesus was given the ability to perform miracles , by permission of God rather than by his own power. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has several distinct teachings about Jesus. Ahmadis believe that he was a mortal man who survived his crucifixion and died a natural death at the age of in Kashmir , India and is buried at Roza Bal. In Christian Gnosticism now a largely extinct religious movement , [] Jesus was sent from the divine realm and provided the secret knowledge gnosis necessary for salvation.

Most Gnostics believed that Jesus was a human who became possessed by the spirit of "the Christ" at his baptism. This spirit left Jesus' body during the crucifixion, but was rejoined to him when he was raised from the dead. Some Gnostics, however, were docetics , believed that Jesus did not have a physical body, but only appeared to possess one.

Some Hindus consider Jesus to be an avatar or a sadhu. For example, Richard Dawkins has called him "a great moral teacher". Some of the earliest depictions of Jesus at the Dura-Europos church are firmly dated to before The depiction of Christ in pictorial form was highly controversial in the early church. Although large images are generally avoided, few Protestants now object to book illustrations depicting Jesus. The Transfiguration was a major theme in Eastern Christian art, and every Eastern Orthodox monk who had trained in icon painting had to prove his craft by painting an icon depicting it.

Before the Protestant Reformation, the crucifix was common in Western Christianity. It is a model of the cross with Jesus crucified on it. The crucifix became the central ornament of the altar in the 13th century, a use that has been nearly universal in Roman Catholic churches since then. Jesus appears as an infant in a manger feed trough in Christmas creches, which depict the Nativity scene.

The total destruction that ensued with the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 made the survival of items from 1st-century Judea very rare and almost no direct records survive about the history of Judaism from the last part of the 1st century through the 2nd century. However, throughout the history of Christianity a number of relics attributed to Jesus have been claimed, although doubt has been cast on them. The 16th-century Catholic theologian Erasmus wrote sarcastically about the proliferation of relics and the number of buildings that could have been constructed from the wood claimed to be from the cross used in the Crucifixion.

Some relics, such as purported remnants of the Crown of Thorns , receive only a modest number of pilgrims, while the Shroud of Turin which is associated with an approved Catholic devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus , has received millions, [] including popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about Jesus of Nazareth. For other uses, see Jesus disambiguation. For the Christian theological concept of the Messiah, see Christ title. For other uses, see Christ disambiguation.

For other uses, see Jesus of Nazareth disambiguation. Judea , Roman Empire [5]. Jerusalem , Judea , Roman Empire. Life in art Depiction Jesuism. In rest of the NT. Road to Damascus John's vision. Life of Jesus in the New Testament. Genealogy of Jesus and Nativity of Jesus. Baptism of Jesus and Temptation of Christ. Confession of Peter and Transfiguration of Jesus. Jesus, King of the Jews ; John Crucifixion of Jesus and Burial of Jesus.

Sayings of Jesus on the cross and Crucifixion eclipse. Historical Jesus and Quest for the historical Jesus. Sources for the historicity of Jesus. Josephus on Jesus and Tacitus on Christ. A edition of the works of Josephus, a 1st-century Roman-Jewish historian who referred to Jesus [].

Cultural and historical background of Jesus , History of the Jews in the Roman Empire , Historical criticism , Textual criticism , and Historical reliability of the Gospels. Portraits of the historical Jesus. Language of Jesus and Race and appearance of Jesus.

Religious perspectives on Jesus. Jesus in Christianity , Christ title , and Christology. Judaism's view of Jesus. Jesus in the Talmud. Relics associated with Jesus. Watts state that the crucifixion of Jesus is as certain as any historical fact can be. Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd say that non-Christian confirmation of the crucifixion of Jesus is now "firmly established". Muslims believe that she conceived her son miraculously by the command of God. Joseph was from these perspectives the acting adoptive father.

I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more". Price does not believe that Jesus existed, but agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars. Dunn calls the theories of Jesus' non-existence "a thoroughly dead thesis".

Van Voorst states that biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted. These units were later moved and arranged by authors and editors. Some material has been revised and some created by early Christians. His followers came to believe he was the promised Messiah and later split away from Judaism to found Christianity. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate for whatever reason and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be part of the bedrock of historical tradition.

If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score. Meier states that Jesus' birth year is c. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity. Neither God Nor Man. Age of Reason, , pp. Christology was a major focus of these debates, and was addressed at every one of the first seven ecumenical councils.

Some early beliefs viewed Jesus as ontologically subordinate to the Father Subordinationism , and others considered him an aspect of the Father rather than a separate person Sabellianism , both were condemned as heresies by the Catholic Church. Footnote on Contr.

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Not least, the nature of the image and how it was fixed on the cloth remain deeply puzzling". The roots of the problem and the person. Handbook of Biblical Chronology, rev. The birth of the Messiah: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels. How Jesus became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Jesus Now and Then. In Beilby, James K. An Historian's Review of the Gospels. The Oral Gospel Tradition. Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, Retrieved April 20, Oxford Companion to the Bible.

The Bible and the Future. Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Second Edition: Biblical, Historical, and Evangelical. Wipf and Stock Publishers. Archived from the original on May 1, Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. Christians, Muslims, and Jesus. A Comprehensive Guide to Belief and Practice. Retrieved June 10, The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.

Retrieved August 4, Westminster John Knox Press. Theology of the New Testament. Society of Biblical Lit. The Encyclopedia of Christianity.