Saving God: Religion after idolatry

Saving God: Religion after Idolatry

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages 1-198

  Johnston, Mark ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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References (77)

1. See Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Harvard University Press, 1980).
2. The Pythagoreans might have disagreed. But then, the little we know of Pythagoreanism makes it look more like a quasi-religion than like a mere philosophy.
3. See sec. 17 of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics: "The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion." An extremely helpful retranslation and introduction to this work is provided by Garrett Green under the title On Religion (T & T Clarke, 2006). See especially pt. 2 of sec. 17, "Religion as Faithlessness" (53-84 in Green), and the long footnote to pt. 3, "The True Religion," where Barth makes the point about 1 Corinthians 13.
4. This explains why it was not necessarily idolatrous to construct the Ark of the Covenant and adorn it with Golden Angels. God himself had ordained the design; it was not an attempt on the part of the Israelites to contain Divinity. Or if it was, then it was idolatrous.
5. Compare Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (Schocken Books, 1971).
6. See also R. M. Adams's Magisterial, in the ordinary secular sense of that term, Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford University Press, 1999), which begins with this identification. Particularly relevant to the present discussion is his very helpful chapter "Idolatry." Another writer whose views on religion and idolatry are usefully considered in this context is Wolf 7. For a nuanced treatment of the Jewish understanding of Jesus, see Peter Schafer's Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton University Press, 2007).
7. Compare Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1951), 216.
8. "Somali Cleric Calls for Pope's Death," The Age, September 17, 2006.
9. Is Jesus here appropriating the tetragrammaton, the divine name revealed to Moses, for himself? Harold Bloom, against the informed convictions of leading mainstream New Testament scholars, argues that he is. See Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (Penguin USA, 2005), 75-78.
10. Sam Harris, The End of Faith (Norton, 2004);.
11. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Muffin, 2006);.
12. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Hachette Book Group, 2007).
13. For a defense of this, see the remarks below about religious experience and seeing as.
14. For example, we must also take account of passages like "After I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee" (14:28) and the echo of this at 16:7.
15. For more on Mark's intentions, see the papers collected by Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Patrick D. Miller in The Ending of Mark and the Ends of God (Westminster John Knox, 2005), particularly the lead essay by Donald Juel. Does the original ending of Mark with its empty tomb present a question to the reader as to just what the promised anastasis or rising up consists in?.
16. For detailed argument to this effect, see Surviving Death (Princeton University Press, 2009).
17. The concept of religion used here is akin to the family resemblance concept of religion that is understandably deployed by a secular sociology of religion. On the more demanding use of "religion" outlined in the first footnote in this chapter, any clash between religion and science will be a clash between appropriate worship of the Highest One and the true description of nature. But that seems impossible, since the Highest One cannot require that we believe or act on falsehoods.
18. See, for example, Hermann Cohen's essential Ethics of Maimonides, now translated with a commentary by Almut Sh. Bruckstein (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).
19. Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
20. Of course, philosophers have had an enormous amount to say about this, and perhaps the best account on the other side would be an adaptation of Peter Railton's naturalistic moral realism to the case of epistemic norms. See his "Moral Realism," Philosophical Review 85 (1986).
21. See "Causal Relations" and "The Material Mind," in Davidson's Essays on Action and Events (Oxford University Press, 1980). He writes as if the laws were not probabilistic, but this is no great matter.
22. For a defense of something that harmonizes with Marcion's distinction between the god of creation and the god of salvation, see Peter Forrest's Developmental Theism: From Pure Will to Unbounded Love (Oxford University Press, 2007).
23. Again, I thank Jan Cover for reminding me of this passage. He, however, places a quite different construction on it.
24. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Everyman's Library, 1994).
25. See their friendly dialogue The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (Ignatius Press, 2006).
26. The pope might also have mentioned Paul's remarkable sermon on Mars Hill as to the true identity of the Athenians' unknown god.
27. www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september.
28. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (Princeton University Press, 1954).
29. C. Hempel, "Provisos," in The Limits of Deductivism, ed. A. Grunbaum and W. Salmon (University of California Press, 1988).
30. For different but related views of the connection between what is valuable and what substantive reasonableness upholds, see John Rawls's "Outline of a Decision Procedure in Ethics," Philosophical Review 60 (1951), and the Aristotelian Society Symposium on "Dispositional Theories of Value" consisting of David Lewis, Michael Smith, and myself. See Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. (1989).
31. John Stuart Mill, "The Utility of Religion," in Three Essays on Religion (Hackett, 1998), 119.
32. For a brilliant anatomization of this theme of supersession, and an extended treatment of its inadequacies, see Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2008).
33. A question taken up in my Surviving Death.
34. On affect as ostensible disclosure of value see my "The Authority of Affect," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2001).
35. Compare Leviticus 19:18: "You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD." 8. See Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton University Press, 1975).
36. See, for example, Susan Wolf, "Moral Saints," Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982).
37. R. M. Adams's reply, "Saints," Journal of Philosophy 81, no. 7 (1984).
38. See Peter Ungar, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford University Press, 1996).
39. For a detailed defense of this, see John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (Oxford University Press, 1998).
40. For a telling exploration of this theological theme of incurvature, from its roots in Augustine, through Luther and Karl Barth, see Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on Homo incurvatus in se (T & T Clark, 2007).
41. For Kant, what is supposed to overcome the centripetal force of self-will is the "feeling" of respect for the moral law. But the question is why such a feeling should be effective as a motive. Without an answer to that, "respect for the moral law" can sound simply like the proper outcome, though wrongly invoked as if it were an actual cause of that outcome.
42. "Divine Simplicity," Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991).
43. I follow those interpreters of Plato who treat the eide as preeminent particulars, not properties or attributes. For a discussion of why monotheism makes little sense if God is a property or attribute, see Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Marquette University Press, 1980).
44. Guide for the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (University of Chicago Press, 1963), 111-47.
45. See Summa Theologica 1.13.2, "Whether Any Name Can Be Applied to God Substantially?" 7. Notice that this argument for the nonidentity of God's attributes goes through even if we take seriously the Thomistic thought that all such relations of analogy are "really" grounded in our thought about God.
46. An example of Kit Fine's.
47. See Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
48. My theological readers will be more than familiar with the precursors of this idea, in particular Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (Free Press, 1979).
49. Charles Hartshorne's A Natural Theology for Our Time (Open Court, 1967).
50. See also Arthur Peacocke, All That Is (Fortress Press, 2007), and the articles in Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being (Erdman's Publishing, 2004). John W. Cooper has provided a very useful overview of panentheistic thought in his recent Panenetheism: The Other God of the Philosophers-From Plato to the Present (Baker Academic Press, 2006).
51. For a careful philosophical exploration of the two minds thesis, see Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Cornell University Press, 1986).
52. See, for example, the heroically explicit discussion of the afterlife provided by Marilyn McCord Adams in her wonderful work Christ and Horrors (Cambridge University Press, 2004). That McCord Adams's kind of afterlife is not accessible to us, either by way of the postmortem survival of the soul or by way of the bodily or the psychological criteria of personal identity, is one thesis of Surviving Death.
53. For a development of this view, see "Constitution Is Not Identity," Mind 101 (1991).
54. "Manifest Kinds," Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997).
55. Talk of "addition" should not be taken too seriously here. Once we understand the larger whole that includes the other realm, the natural realm will appear as a certain sort of abstraction from that whole.
56. Which is not to say that the words, as they figure in my thoughts, are contingently related to their conventional meanings. The words that figure in my thoughts, figure as semantically interpreted words. So here, too, there is no room for a verbalized thought's turning out to be contingently related to the proposition it is directed at.
57. See, in particular, Dennis Stamp, "Towards a Causal Theory of Linguistic Representation," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2 (1977);.
58. Hartry Field, "Mental Representation," Erekentnis 13 (1978);.
59. Michael Devitt, Designation (Cambridge University Press, 1981);.
60. Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (MIT Press, 1981).
61. A point also made by Hilary Putnam. See his important work Representation and Reality (Bradford Books, 1991) for a similarly skeptical treatment of the very idea of natural representation.
62. Several theorists have been careful to make the distinction between a naturalistic reduction of intentionality by way of "representations" and the status of the idea of representational content in cognitive science. See Robert Cummings, Meaning and Mental Representation (MIT Press, 1989);.
63. Stephen Stitch, "What Is a Theory of Mental Representation?" Mind 101 (1992);.
64. Michael Tye, "Naturalism and the Mental," Mind 101 (1992).
65. See Ruth Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (MIT Press, 1984).
66. "In Defense of Proper Functions," Philosophy of Science 56 (1989).
67. See "The Thought," in The Frege Reader, ed. Michael Beaney (Blackwell, 1997).
68. See G. Vattimo, After Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2002).
69. R. Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2004).
70. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford University Press, 1987), a translation of Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978).
71. See also René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
72. One performance is to be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs. Holiday appears to find the applause at the end an embarrassment, an attempt on the part of the audience to pretend that what they have just witnessed is a mere piece of entertainment. The words of the song are by Abel Meeropol, who along with his wife adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
73. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Hackett, 1981), 82.
74. "Eternity" expresses a highly developed and technical notion in Spinoza, which in no way compromises Spinoza's thoroughgoing rejection of supernaturalism.
75. Compare pt. 3 of Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984). My differences with Parfit are discussed in detail in lecture 5 of Surviving Death.
76. See lectures 4 and 5 of Surviving Death.
77. Mill, Three Essays on Religion, 119.