{"title":"Religious Protest and Religious Loyalty","authors":"A. Sagi, Nir Sagi","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3337","url":null,"abstract":"In the accepted view, the basic disposition of believers is one of absolute obedience, humility, and lack of critique, doubt, or, indeed, defiance of God. Only through such a disposition do believers convey their absolute faith and establish the appropriate hierarchy between God and humans. This article challenges this view and argues that, in mainstream rabbinic tradition, the believer is not required to renounce his or her moral autonomy and certainly not his or her understanding of God and the world. Indeed, faith rests on such understanding; moreover, human autonomy is the mechanism through which humans convey God’s goodness and perfection. Their questions and criticism are part of a persistent effort to close the evident gap between their assumptions about God’s goodness and the flawed imperfect reality. The analysis focuses on rabbinic tradition but its implications go beyond it, presenting a model of a life of faith that compels subjects, as believers, to preserve their constitutive foundations as rational autonomous creatures.","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132186987","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 Void of God, or The Paradox of the Pious Atheism: From Scholem to Derrida","authors":"A. Bielik-Robson","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3327","url":null,"abstract":"My essay will take as its point of departure the paragraph from Gershom Scholem’s “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in which he depicts the modern religious experience as the one of the \"void of God\" or as \"pious atheism\". I will first argue that the \"void of God\" cannot be reduced to atheistic non-belief in the presence of God. Then, I will demonstrate the further development of the Scholemian notion of the ‘pious atheism’ in Derrida, especially in his Lurianic treatment of Angelus Silesius, whose modern mysticism emerges in Derrida’s reading as the ‘almost-atheism’ (presque-atheisme). The interesting feature of this development is that, while for Scholem, the ‘void of God’ is a predominantly negative experience, for Derrida, it becomes an affirmative model of modern – not just Jewish, but more generally, Abrahamic – religiosity which, on the one hand, touches upon atheistic non-belief in the divine presence here and now, yet, on the other, still insists on commemorating the ‘withdrawn God’ through his ‘traces.’ What, therefore, for Scholem, constitutes the ultimate cry of despair, best embodied in Kafka’s work – for Derrida, reveals the more positive face of the modern predicament in which God has absented himself in order to make room for the creaturely reality. And while Scholem envisages redemption as the full restoration of the divine presence – Derrida redefines redemption as the ‘pious’ work of deconstruction to be undertaken in the ‘almost-atheistic’ condition of irreversible separation between God and the world.","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126848338","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 Talmudist Enlightenment: Talmudic Judaism’s Confrontational Rational Theology","authors":"M. Fisch","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3310","url":null,"abstract":"Robert Brandom's \"The Pragmatist Enlightenment\" describes the advent of American pragmatism as signaling a sea-change in our understanding of human reason away from the top-down Euclidian models of reasoning, warrant and knowledge inspired by the physical sciences, toward the far more bottom-up, narrative, inherently fallible and dialogical forms of reasoning of the life and human sciences. It is against this backdrop that Talmudic Judaism emerges not only as an early anticipation of the pragmatist enlightenment, but as going a substantial and radical step beyond it, that in the context of religious commitment and reasoning, is unprecedented.","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129497105","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 Imperfect God","authors":"R. Margolin","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3329","url":null,"abstract":"This paper focuses on the Hasidic view, namely, that human flaws do not function as a barrier between a fallen humanity and a perfect deity, since the whole of creation stems from a divine act of self-contraction. Thus, we need not be discouraged by our own shortcomings, nor by those of our loved ones. Rather, seeing our flaws in the face of another should remind us that imperfection is an aspect of the God who created us. Such a positive approach to human fallibility arouses forgiveness, mutual acceptance, and a hope for repair, and, therefore, has much to recommend itself. In the first part of the paper, I argue that the notion of a perfect God derives from the Greeks rather than the Hebrew Bible. A review of classical philosophies and the idea of God’s imperfection is followed by a consideration of several Jewish attempts to resolve the dichotomy between Divine perfection and an imperfect creation. I focus on Lurianic Kabbalah, Hans Jonas, and on the Hasidic concept of \"Ayin \" or “nothingness” as the very source of redemption. This Hasidic idea, which was further expanded upon by the Baal Shem Tov’s students, appears in a tale recounted by his great-grandson R. Nachman of Bratslav called “The Hanging Lamp.” I focus on the tale, which illustrates the idea that knowledge of human imperfection is itself a means of perfection and redemption.","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"22 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114046504","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":"Seeing and not Seeing the Face of God: Overcoming the Law of Contradiction in Biblical Theology","authors":"Steven Kepnes","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3312","url":null,"abstract":"This paper attempts to illuminate and interpret the contradictory portrait of God as both seen and unseen in the Torah. Thus Moses is commanded not to look on the face of God yet also praised for having spoken to God “face to face\". We seek ways to reconcile the contradictory portraits of God through the use of the term “doubled-mindedness” in the theology of Jerome Gellman, in the logic of “thirdness” in C.S. Peirce’s semiotics, and in the use of both particle and wave models in Einstein’s physics of light. The paper concludes by disusing the practical consequences of theological double-mindedness for the religious life and the philosophical meaning of redemption as the time when the contradiction of the unseen and seen God is resolved.","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124473430","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":"Embracing Paradox: Maimonides and Kierkegaard on Divine Transcendence and Immanence","authors":"N. Verbin","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i2.3313","url":null,"abstract":"Negotiating the relation between divine transcendence and divine immanence lies at the heart of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and of Kierkegaard's philosophical works. The purpose of the paper is to explore the manners in which they do so. I argue that despite various differences between them, both engage with the tension between divine transcendence and immanence by turning away from objectivity to subjectivity and, moreover, by placing paradox, riddle and secret at the heart of their philosophical works. In other words, I argue that they do not attempt to solve or dissolve the great paradox of God's immanent transcendence but to present it in its most acute forms as the paradox within which the religious life is lived.","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128850429","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":"Review of Daniel-Hughes Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities: Charles Peirce, Signs, and Inhabited Experiments, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018","authors":"R. Ward","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.3253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.3253","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116246689","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 Coherence of Naturalistic Personal Pantheism","authors":"Asha Lancaster-Thomas","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.2886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.2886","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the coherence of naturalistic personal pantheism (NPP) in an attempt to reconcile pantheism, naturalism, and a personal concept of God. NPP proposes that i) God is identical with the universe, ii) the universe is entirely natural, and iii) God is personal. Several critics of accounts of a God such as this have voiced concerns about a natural — as opposed to a supernatural — God, since a natural God cannot be worship-worthy. In response, I propose a controversial premise — physical primacy — to justify the worship-worthiness of a natural God. Physical primacy maintains that physical existence is a great-making property, therefore a God that exists naturally is greater than a God that exists supernaturally. I maintain that NPP is an attractive alternative to other theisms because it bypasses the pairing problem, presents a worship-worthy concept of God, and boasts ontological simplicity.","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134342083","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":"Review of Jonathan L. Kvanvig, Faith and Humility, Oxford Univ. Press, 2018","authors":"J. Bishop","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.3188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.3188","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132847101","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":"Review of Michael Austin, Humility and Human Flourishing: A Study in Analytic Moral Theology, Oxford Univ. Press, 2018","authors":"Jeanine M. Grenberg","doi":"10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.3251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v12i1.3251","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":428491,"journal":{"name":"European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion","volume":"354 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134101702","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}