The dominance of logical empiricism’s verification principle in the middle part of the twentieth century forced philosophy of religion almost entirely out of the philosophy curriculum, and, with a few notable exceptions, few philosophers willingly identified themselves as Christians. However, logical empiricism collapsed under the weight of its own principles, and in the spring of 1980 Time m…
This book has its origins in two ideas: first, that a central, if neglected, concept at the heart of philosophical inquiry is that of place; and, second, that the concept of place is also central to the thinking of the key twentieth-century philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Originally the material dealt with in these pages was intended to form part of a single investigation into the nature and sig…
The present volume brings together philosophical essays that were written between 1996 and 2000 and pick up on a line of thought that I had set aside since Knowledge and Human Interests. With the exception of the final essay (“The Relationship between Theory and Practice Revisited”), they deal with issues in theoretical philosophy that I have neglected since then. Of course, the formal prag…
This book is not a personal memoir. Rather, to coin a term, it is a conceptual memoir. It is an attempt, based on cumulative life experience, to develop a frame of reference within which to understand the mysteries of the Jewish condition and the interaction, or rather friction, of the Jewish people and the rest of the world. I have devoted much of my professional career to studying these arena…
The use of the term “Septuagint” in the title of A New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS) requires some justification. According to legend1 it was seventy(-two) Jerusalem elders who at the behest of King Ptolemy II (285–246 BCE) and with the consent of High Priest Eleazaros translated the Scriptures of Egyptian Jewry into Greek from a Jerusalem manuscript inscribed in gold. The …
The history of moral dilemma theory often ignores the medieval period, overlooking the sophisticated theorizing by several thinkers who debated the existence of moral dilemmas from 1150 to 1450. In this book Michael V. Dougherty offers a rich and fascinating overview of the debates which were pursued by medieval philosophers, theologians and canon lawyers, illustrating his discussion with a div…
Discover for yourself the pleasures of philosophy! Written both for the seasoned student of philosophy as well as the general reader, the renowned writer Roger Scruton provides a survey of modern philosophy. Always engaging, Scruton takes us on a fascinating tour of the subject, from founding father Descartes to the most important and famous philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgens…
Answers questions pertaining to the teachings, rituals, practices, and history of Catholicism.
Now in its fourth revised edition, The Christian Writer's Manual of Style provides answers to writers', editors', and proofreaders' most pressing questions about language, style, and usage, focusing on the particular issues involved in religious writing.
Seneca's Letters to Lucilius are a rich source of information about ancient Stoicism, an influential work for early modern philosophers, and a fascinating philosophical document in their own right. This selection of the letters aims to include those which are of greatest philosophical interest, especially those which highlight the debates between Stoics and Platonists or Aristotelians in the fi…
The Basics of New Testament Syntax provides concise, up-to-date guidance for intermediate Greek students to do accurate exegesis of biblical texts. Abridged from Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament, the popular exegetical Greek grammar for studies in Greek by Daniel B. Wallace, The Basics of New Testament Syntax offers a practical grammar for second-year s…
The story of Ted Honderich, philosopher, a story of a perilous philosophical life, marked by critical examination, and a compelling personal life full of human drama.
Presents an exploration of how a sense of being 'a Christian', or of 'Christian identity', was shaped within the setting of the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world. This book shows that there were similarities and differences in the ways Jews and others were thinking about themselves, and asks what made early Christianity distinctive.
Provides students with a comprehensive guide through the Greek text of the Gospel of Luke. Together Culy, Parsons, and Stigall explain the text's critical, lexical, grammatical, and linguistic aspects while revealing its carefully crafted narrative style.
Having begun as an attempt to reform the perceived abuses and errors of the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation affected many aspects of daily life, including marriage and divorce, the role of the clergy, and the prevalence of persecution and bloodshed on both sides of the divide.
This volume includes three classic works by John Owen on sin, temptation, and repentance in the Christian life. Editors Justin Taylor and Kelly Kapic have made this difficult-to-read Puritan accessible for the modern reader without sacrificing the wonderful content of Owen's work.
David Zeisberger (1721-1808) was the head of a group of Moravian missionaries that settled in the Upper Ohio Valley in 1772 to minister to the Delaware Nation. For the next ten years, Zeisberger lived among the Delaware, becoming a trusted adviser and involving himself not only in religious activities but also in political and social affairs. During this time he kept diaries in which he recorde…
There is little doubt that Thomas Forsyth Torrance (1913–2007) is one of the most significant English-speaking theologians of the twentieth century. According to Alister McGrath, those outside of Great Britain generally regard Torrance “as the most significant British academic theologian of the twentieth century” and, in his view, “one of the most productive, creative and important theo…
y own interest in the history and doctrine of the filioque spans nearly a decade and a half prior to writing this book. The initial impetus for studying the filioque controversy first arose for me in 1994 in a historical theology class taken at Briercrest Seminary under Dr Bruce Hindmarsh, who encouraged me to pursue the topic. It was as I researched and wrote a paper on the ante-Nicene precede…
Even though millions of people world-wide read the New Testament—whether from curiosity or religious devotion—very few ask what this collection of books actually is or where it came from, how it came into existence, who decided which books to include, on what grounds, and when.
Some years ago Professor Martin Hengel, now in Tübingen, suggested that I should gather my widely scattered papers on Jewish and Christian history. Other pressing obligations delayed the preparation of my Scripta Minora, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Hengel and to Mr. F.C. Wieder Jr. and Mr. F.Th. Dijkema of Brill’s house for help, patience and understanding. Some papers have be…
God is Infinite, but language finite; thus speech would seem to condemn him to finitude. In speaking of God, would the theologian violate divine transcendence by reducing God to immanence, or choose, rather, to remain silent? At stake in this argument is a core problem of the conditions of divine revelation. How, in terms of language and the limitations of human understanding, can transcendence…
A defining work of moral philosophy, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals has been highly influential and famously difficult. Dieter Schönecker and Allen Wood make clear the ways this work forms the basis of our modern moral outlook and how moral law relates to freedom and free will within Kant's overall philosophy.
Much of what we know we cannot say. And much of what we do we cannot describe. For example, how do we know how to ride a bike when we can't explain how we do it? These abilities, which we are unable to articulate, were labeled "tacit knowledge" by chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. This book analyzes the term, and the behavior, in detail.
We have only two substantial eyewitness accounts of the life of Martin Luther. Best known is a 9,000-word Latin memoir by Philip Melanchthon published in Latin at Heidelberg in 1548, two years after the Reformer’s death.1 In 1561, ‘Henry Bennet, Callesian’ translated this pamphlet into English; the martyrologist John Foxe adopted Bennet’s text into his Memorials verbatim, including a nu…
At the end of the book of Ecclesiastes, a wise father warns his son concerning the multiplication of books: “Furthermore, of these, my son, be warned. There is no end to the making of many books!” (12:12). The Targum to this biblical book characteristically expands the thought and takes it in a different, even contradictory, direction: “My son, take care to make many books of wisdom witho…
Before we can define “Judaism” for the purpose of our study of the New Testament, we had best say what we mean by any religion, the genus of which Judaism forms a species (and, we shall argue, with earliest Christianity as a subspecies of that same species of religion). Defining religion comes before defining a particular religion, just as defining a particular religion takes priority over …
The Christian Church possesses in its literature an abundant and incomparable treasure. But it is an inheritance that must be reclaimed by each generation. THE LIBRARY OF CHRISTIAN CLASSICS is designed to present in the English language, and in twenty-six volumes of convenient size, a selection of the most indispensable Christian treatises written prior to the end of the sixteenth century.
Christians should use and develop their minds. The mental faculties of the human mind—the power to think, to discover, to wonder, and to imagine—are precious gifts of God. The Christian who pursues knowledge, seeks education, and explores even the most “secular” subjects is fulfilling a Christian vocation that is pleasing to God and of great importance to the Church. The Bible, by prece…
Does God play games with his kids? Of course, He does! I totally believe this and that is why the volume switch is on His end and not yours! Up and down the volume level goes. Real time experience goes something like this: real loud to deafening soft. And seemingly not much between! Zooming in and out with His telescopic lens, the Holy Spirit creates close encounters and yes, far away ones. He …
The Christian Church possesses in its literature an abundant and incomparable treasure. But it is an inheritance that must be reclaimed by each generation. THE LIBRARY OF CHRISTIAN CLASSICS is designed to present in the English language, and in twenty-six volumes of convenient size, a selection of the most indispensable Christian treatises written prior to the end of the sixteenth century...
The systematic philosophy presented in this book has arisen from two insights, formulable as two theses, resulting from a long and intensive occupation with the fundamental philosophical conceptions from history and of the present. The first thesis is that, in terms of its intention, self-understanding, and accomplishments, the theoretical enterprise that for over two thousand years has been de…
A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and…
If the philosophy of Levinas has one fundamental idea, it is the following: human existence should not be thought of as “self-orientated,” but as a “reception of the other.” Spinoza’s principle of the conatus essendi, the will to maintain oneself, as the basic form of existence is constantly undermined in Levinas’ texts by the reference to another layer in the subject which is just …
There is only too much truth in the frequent complaint that history, as compared with the physical sciences, is neglected by the modern public. But historians have the remedy in their own hands; choosing problems of equal importance to those of the scientist, and treating them with equal accuracy, they will command equal attention.......
The idea of this project came to me over fifty years ago, and the reading and research have continued fairly steadily since then, though the writing began less than ten years ago during my third sojourn at the Institute for Advanced Study and was finished just as I retired both from Rutgers University and from my editorship of the Journal of the History of Ideas. For me at least this marks inde…
Takes the readers on a tour of the many faces of envy. This book considers what great thinkers have written about envy; distinguishes between envy, yearning, jealousy, resentment, and schadenfreude; and catalogs the many things that are enviable, including wealth, beauty, power, talent, knowledge and wisdom, extraordinary good luck, and youth.
Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right is one of the greatest works of moral, social, and political philosophy, comparable in scope and profundity of insight to Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and, in the twentieth century, Rawls’s Theory of Justice.........
We all engage in the process of reasoning, but we don’t always pay attention to whether we are doing it well. This book offers the opportunity to practice reasoning in a clear-headed and critical way, with the aims of developing an awareness of the importance of reasoning well and of improving the reader’s skill in analyzing and evaluating arguments.
Music has been an object of philosophical enquiry since the beginning of philosophy. Reading Plato’s Republic for the first time, students are often surprised to find that he devotes so much space to music’s influence on personal character and social harmony. For Plato and his contemporaries, an account of music was important to issues in metaphysics and epistemology, and philosophy of musi…
This is a major study of the theological thought of John Calvin, which examines his central theological ideas through a philosophical lens, looking at issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics. The study, the first of its kind, is concerned with how Calvin actually uses philosophical ideas in his work as a theologian and biblical commentator. The book also includes a careful examination o…
What has theology to do with economics? They are both sciences of human action but have traditionally been treated as very separate and isolated disciplines. Divine Economy is the first book to directly address the need for an active dialogue between the two.
The works translated here deal with two major themes in the thinking of St Augustine (354-430): free will and divine grace. On the one hand, free will enables human beings to make their own choices; on the other hand, God's grace is required for these choices to be efficacious. 'On the Free Choice of the Will', 'On Grace and Free Choice', 'On Reprimand and Grace' and 'On the Gift of Perseveranc…
A companion to ethics should be a companion for two kinds of inquirers. The first consists, of course, of students and teachers of philosophy. The second comprises a much wider group– anyone who is interested in the state of philosophical ethics today, and the history of how we got to where we are....
Editing and compiling this historical and critical review of twentieth-century philosophy has been extremely challenging, but ultimately it has been a rewarding task. The project was conceived in 2002 with the aim of drawing together experts in the various subject areas who could comment both authoritatively and critically on the current condition of their respective disciplines and on the natu…
The collapse of positivism and its attendant verification principle of meaning was undoubtedly the most important philosophical event of the twentieth century. Their demise heralded a resurgence of metaphysics, along with other traditional problems of philosophy that verificationism had suppressed. Accompanying this resurgence has come something new and altogether unanticipated: a renaissance i…
The book illuminates Calvin's thought by placing it in the context of the theological and exegetical traditions--ancient, medieval, and contemporary-- that formed it and contributed to its particular texture. Steinmetz addresses a range of issues almost as wide as the Reformation itself, including the knowledge of God, the problem of iconoclasm, the doctrines of justification and predestination…
In September 1989 the Solidarity party, an arm of the Polish anticommunist labor movement, took control of the government in Poland after the party had earlier won all parliamentary seats. In the same month, Hungary opened its borders with Austria, thus permitting huge numbers of refugees to flee Eastern Europe and particularly East Germany.......
In a recent ecumenical study, the Wesleyan theologian Edgardo Colón-Emeric observes that ‘predestination cannot simply be treated as a historical artifact...but as an abiding structural element of a sound doctrine of Christian perfection’.1 By contrast, the American religious historian Peter Thuesen speaks for the majority of contemporary theologians when he warns that predestinarian contr…
In the Gospels, Christ predicts to his disciples that the end of days is approaching and will bring about a great tribulation marked by war, pestilence, famine, and the appearance of false prophets. He also declares that his message of salvation will be preached throughout the entire world and will reach all of its peoples before the consummation of history. Although this promised course of eve…