{"title":"What is the Connection Between the Tree of Life and Logic?","authors":"D. Shorkend","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.3.113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.3.113","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I explore the relationship between the kabbalistic Tree of Life and that of Logic. I begin defining my terms, then analyze the question posed through that of science; philosophy; art and the concept of knowledge in general. I conclude that while a unified and complete account of knowledge cannot be gained, one can get a semblance of this knowledge. This I call a tending towards infinity or more precisely – a calculus of infinity. I conjecture that this may lead to world-bettering, a wise kind of knowledge if you like that is neither of the Tree of Life nor that of the Tree of Knowledge as such, but the light itself which remains unnamable, that is to say beyond the realm of human knowledge.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129484009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mithra and the Evil Eye: Another Interpretation of the Mithraic Bas-Reliefs","authors":"D. Persoons","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.3.106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.3.106","url":null,"abstract":"The ritual tympanum of the god Mithra has no clear interpretation to date. In particular, the animals under the bull remain mysterious. If they have been considered as representations of certain constellations, this esoteric hypothesis remains disputed. Could the god Mithra, symbol of the Roman army, be attracted by the stars? Another hypothesis is to consider this religion as pragmatic. These small animals would be familiar to the Romans. They would symbolise trust. To understand Mithra, don't we have to change our way of seeing the Roman mentality?","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126379573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Community Discernment as an Educational Process for Synodality","authors":"Allan Da Silva Coelho","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.101","url":null,"abstract":"Pope Francis calls for a “synodal church”. Synodality is not just a way of participating in decisions, but a way of being in community. Today we face different difficulties for the synodal practice, arising from the Christian tradition itself and from the way we live under a radically individualistic economic system and little used to social and community ties. However, such articulation leads to a catastrophic social and climate crisis and favors fascist alternatives. Faced with this, an educational process is needed for a new way of living together, in social friendship. Such learning, in the conception that derives from Pope Francis' documents, is based on the process of discernment that takes place in the community. It will only be possible to prepare a new world, with justice and peace, if at the same time we form different men and women. It is not a matter of a purely intellectual formation, in the transmission of truths, but in the modification of images of humanity and models of desire, today colonized by mercantile logic. Discernment as an educational process is constant, like a journey, and stems from the decision to incarnate oneself to reality, demanding a social place for all today's outcasts.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115021617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Exposition of 2 Corinthians 5:20 from a Ghanaian (Akan) Perspective","authors":"Ernest Nyarko","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.104","url":null,"abstract":"2 Corinthians 5:20 belongs to a long chain of verses beginning from 5:11 to 6:13. These verses at large deal with the subject of reconciliation. A concept that emerges from Paul’s teaching is that God through the redemptive work of Christ on the cross is restoring the whole world to himself and has given us also this ministry of reconciliation. However, this paper focuses on three Greek words extracted from the text: Christou, presbeoumen, and katallasso. The study is done mainly through literary activities from existing materials such as Biblical and Akan literature. It first examines, in brief, the background data on Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians to provide a historical milieu for understanding the issues Paul raises. It then continues to discuss the above-mentioned Greek words. It will also be seen that the explanation of the text has been looked at from Akan (Asante Twi) reading of the same text and then engages them within the Akan context. The paper concludes with an invitation to see ourselves as key players in what God is doing in the world.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"116 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114274170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. R. K. Khasri, M. M. Syamsuddin, Siti Murtiningsih
{"title":"Ontological Commitment and Its Implication to Semantical Objects of Religious Language","authors":"M. R. K. Khasri, M. M. Syamsuddin, Siti Murtiningsih","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.96","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.96","url":null,"abstract":"This research is aimed at explaining and analyzing the ontological status of semantical objects of religious language. This ontological status concern how every term in religious language refers to an object and how we interpret those terms, whether it represents the object itself or merely its sensual or constructive properties. This finding lies in the disputation between religious realism and non-realism. The results of this research are (1) every believer is exactly a realist because he or she has the ontological commitment to the object of the utterance, but (2) God exists independently from human thought and consciousness, (3) it is possible to put God as the object of intentional and semantic but only represents sensible qualities of the real object, and (4) the meaning of religious language depends on believer's ontological commitment on God's existence.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115944379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Personal Construction of the “Ego”: A Prenatal Discovery of the Body","authors":"D. Persoons, Jette I. Bryde","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.97","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.97","url":null,"abstract":"For Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, the Unconscious is characterized by the fact that it is born from the repression of impulses. For Carl Jung, on the other hand, the Unconscious is made up of everything that is not conscious. According to Jung: “It is inherent to reality and to the communication of the conscious with the Unconscious, and allows the becoming of the individual”. He called it “collective” because its pictorial manifestations, the archetypes, were common to all human beings. For 20 years he searched, with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, for an extra-personal origin of the Unconscious, called “synchronicity”. The study of near-death experiences sheds new light on this question: the last image the dying man/woman sees would be himself a few weeks before his birth. The ego is believed to be built in the fetal stage around the discovery of the body, and to remain unchanged until brain death. Personalism would describe the fetus’ access to self-consciousness by discovering his body.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123623782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Paul Tillich on History and Socialism","authors":"Elena Ene Draghici-Vasilescu","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.98","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.2.98","url":null,"abstract":"Paul Tillich believes that the sacred and human history undergo a parallel development, which is ‘punctuated’ from time to time by the ‘breaking’ of the former within the latter during moments of special significance, kairoi; these become “centers” of human history. Such a ‘center’ must not be comprehended either in terms of quantity, or as a midpoint between past and future, or as a particular moment, but as something that makes coherent the manifestation of the Kingdom of God within the human collective existence. One of the understanding the German Theologian has concerning human history is that it is a succession of such ‘centers’. This is an ‘evolutionary’ view within the history of ideas, and a topic I dealt with in my work.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"444 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122885013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Problems with Molina’s Account of the Scientia Media","authors":"Kevin Kimble","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.1.94","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.1.94","url":null,"abstract":"The Medieval problem of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and contingent truths about the future can be expressed by posing two closely intertwined questions: (1) how can God infallibly know causally indeterminate future events? (2) how is divine foreknowledge, which is fixed and infallible, to be reconciled with the contingency of future events? Molina’s doctrine of scientia media (middle knowledge) is an attempt to provide a substantive and plausible answer to these questions. I briefly sketch Molina’s theory of the scientia media and then go on to assess the extent to which his approach satisfactorily answers the two questions about divine foreknowledge.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125154925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Apostle Paul in Ephesus: Christianity’s Clash with the Cult of Artemis","authors":"James W. Ellis","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.1.86","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.1.86","url":null,"abstract":"This essay contextualizes the apostle Paul’s pivotal missionary residence in Ephesus, giving particular attention to the intriguing confrontation between Paul’s associates and devotees of the cult of Ephesian Artemis. The essay begins by examining aspects of the city of Ephesus and its residents that presented Paul both with unique challenges and unique evangelical opportunities. Specific attention is given to the shift in Paul’s locus of evangelism, from the Ephesian synagogue to residential house churches. This is followed by an exploration of the Ephesians’ distinctive adoration of Artemis. Finally, the dramatic clash between Christians and pagans in the Ephesian amphitheatre is scrutinized, with emphasis placed on the people involved and implications for the first century expansion of the Christian Church.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120981817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Prohibition of Meat and Milk Mixing in the Same Meal: A Brief Theological and Medical Approach to a Jewish Dietary Law","authors":"E. Mazokopakis","doi":"10.24018/theology.2023.3.1.85","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24018/theology.2023.3.1.85","url":null,"abstract":"According to Jewish dietary laws, known as Kashrut, the meat and milk mixing in the same meal is prohibited. This article examines this prohibition from a theological and modern medical viewpoint.","PeriodicalId":337472,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Theology and Philosophy","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131809496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}