Philosophy for Understanding Theology, Second Edition

by Diogenes Allen

second major problem in philosophy: the relation of change and permanence.

Heraclitus,

Parmenides,

Thus arises the famous contrast in Greek philosophy between "being" and "becoming."

Plato sought to accommodate Parmenides' insistence that what is ultimate must be-and that to be is to be fully actual or complete, and hence unchanging.

Pythagoras

Scripture, these theologians argue, is no more anthropomorphic than is Plato; both recognize the ineffability of God.

Sophist (265c)-"Does nature bring forth [animals, plants, and lifeless substances] from self-acting causes without creative intelligence; or are they from reason and divine knowledge?"-thus indicates a major division in the way the universe can be understood.

Birth suggests blind reproduction whereas "human making" out of the things of nature suggests intelligence and purpose.

But Aristotle did not believe that the Forms exist by themselves,

For Aristotle, there is no craftsman looking to a model and no father who is beyond all finding out.

distinguished what they called "the Two Books of God," namely, Nature and Scripture

Thomas Aquinas (1224-74).

Averroes (1126-98),

In the Topics there is an account of five things that may be predicated or said: definition, property, genus, differentia, and accident.

moderate realism of Thomas Aquinas

We have no direct knowledge of the divine thoughts or exemplars. Our only knowledge is of the expressed universal, and this expressed universal exists externally only in particulars and in our minds as abstract.

subject. "God exists" is a proposition in which the predicate ("exists") is part of what the subject means.

famous ontological argument

Aquinas says, the proposition "God exists" is not self-evident to us because we cannot...

Subject and predicate are shown to be connected by use...

When we reason from effect back to cause we do not reach God's essence.

being who is pure act

God is also the first efficient cause,

This being is God, who is distinguished from all other beings as a necessary being because God is not only everlasting, but God's perpetual existence grounds itself in the divine essence, being identical with the divine act of existing.

existence of a necessary being in whom essence and existence are the same.

aseity).

entitative

operative,

Aristotle's Metaphysics.

actually a single treatise) that First Philosophy is a study of being qua being.

God is not a being but being itself.

Karl Barth.

The deity in it is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who is self-revealed can be known only by revelation and not apart from it.

This criticism may be significantly mitigated if one interprets Aquinas's theology as an attempt to think...

revelation and faith, Anselm has established a prohibition: not to try to think anything greater or better than God.

Barth, in his Church Dogmatics, speaks of God's being (essence) as God's acts

We know God only as God is self-disclosed to us.

Another objection to the Thomist enterprise has been launched in recent years by process theology.

They can and do ignore, revise, and deny major Christian doctrines at least as much as, according to their criticisms, "classical theism" does.

limitation. But Whitehead says in a famous remark that we are not to pay God any "metaphysical compliments."

I regard nominalism as part of the beginning of the modern world,

Its greatest representative was William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1347).

Moderate realism is the philosophical position which holds that we are able to abstract from sensible particulars their essences.

The problem of universals is that objects of thought are universal (apply to more than one individual), yet everything that exists is a particular or an individual.

Duns Scotus created the second type of moderate realism.

haecceitas

The universal (the concept) exists only as an abstraction; for though the common nature can be abstracted from matter in thought, it does not exist apart from matter in reality.

With the rejection of forms, matter for Ockham is not a potentiality but is actual in its own right.

but Ockham relegates the existence of God, along with everything else in theology, to the sphere of faith.