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10 results

  • 6 - Artificial Intelligence and Christianity

  • from Part I - Religions and AI
  • Edited by Beth Singler, Universität Zürich, Fraser Watts, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence
    Published online:
    20 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024, pp 88-108

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the various trajectories of Christian reflection on current and potential developments in artificial intelligence (AI). It reviews the theological questions generated by the emergence of intelligent machines and explores some of the most interesting solutions proposed in response to these quandaries. The first part is dedicated to inquiries about hypothetical AI developments and their potential implications for Christian theology. Could intelligent machines become authentic selves? If so, could they also partake in the image of God? Could the Christian imaginary envisage a future where robots develop their own religiosity and robotheologies? Could robots also aspire to be saved? The second section adopts a theological anthropological angle of inquiry, considering how insights gained from AI may contribute to refining this approach. What do our fascination with AI and our deep desire to create an intelligent other reveal about human nature? How would our theological self-understanding change if intelligent machines became ubiquitous?

Theology and the Mythic Sensibility
  • Human Myth-Making and Divine Creativity
  • Andrew Shamel
  • Published online:
    07 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • How do stories change the way we see both ourselves and the world? That question is the starting-point of this accomplished new contribution to narrative theology. Dr Shamel addresses what he calls mythopoieic fantasy: the fictionalised myth-making occupying those twilight borderlands between contemporary secularity and a religious worldview. Exploring key writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, and J. K. Rowling, the author argues that the mythic turn of popular culture signals an ongoing hunger for something 'more': more dense, more present, more 'real'. For Dr Shamel, mythopoieic fantasy and Christian theology represent the same human impulse: a desire to participate in the divine. Despite the avowed secularity of many authors of fantasy literature, the creativity of their mythic fictions reveals something of the theological character of all human making. The stories we tell in order to encounter the world as meaningful, argues Dr Shamel, in fact emerge within a theological horizon.

Learning from Other Religions
  • David Brown
  • Published online:
    30 October 2023
    Print publication:
    16 November 2023
  • One common argument against taking the notion of divine revelation seriously is the extraordinrary diversity which exists betwen the world's major religions. How can God be thought to have spoken to humanity when the conclusions drawn are so very different? David Brown authoritatively and persuasively tackles this issue head-on. He refutes the idea that all faiths necessarily culminate in Christianity, or that they can be reduced to some facile lowest common denominator, arguing instead that ideas may emerge more naturally in one context than another. Sometimes, because of its own singular situation, another religion has proved to be more perceptive on a particular issue than Christianity. At other times, no religion will hold the ultimate answer because what can be asserted is heavily dependent on what is viable both scientifically and philosophically. Although complete reconciliation is impossible, a richer notion of revelation – so the author suggests – can be the result.

Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence
  • Daniel H. Weiss
  • Published online:
    30 March 2023
    Print publication:
    06 April 2023
  • Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers – Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin – in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition.

  • Chapter 2 - The Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Problem

  • from Part I - Modern Historians on ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’
  • Edited by Peter Harrison, University of Queensland, John Milbank, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    After Science and Religion
    Published online:
    05 May 2022
    Print publication:
    19 May 2022, pp 35-58

  • Summary

    In the latter half of the nineteenth century science came to be seen as providing the model for seeking truth. This led to a reorganization of all of the disciplines, including theology. We have also come to see the nineteenth century as a period in which a new set of assumptions about science and religion was introduced that continues to shape how we currently view their relationship. The appearance of Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion in 1874, in which the conflict thesis is fully developed for the first time, is no coincidence. One of the things that historians can do is open up current discussions by showing the paths not taken that were live options at one point, before new assumptions constrained and narrowed thinking. This chapter examines how scientific naturalists like T. H. Huxley attempted to constrain thinking about science and religion, how those constraints began to shape debates, and how major Christian theologians of the period responded to this development, whether through resistance or conformity.

  • 14 - Process Theology and a Pluralistic Foundation for Human Rights

  • Edited by Pamela Slotte, John D. Haskell, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    Christianity and International Law
    Published online:
    17 May 2021
    Print publication:
    20 May 2021, pp 281-316

  • Summary

    Historical accounts of human rights in the West readily acknowledge a deep indebtedness to the conceptions of human dignity found in religious traditions – particularly Christianity and Judaism. Modern conceptions of human rights, however, usually avoid religious justifications and implicitly or explicitly rely on a secular justification. For example, most scholars mark the beginning of modern human rights law with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the UDHR) in 1948. The UDHR sets forth an extensive list of rights including the “right to life, liberty and the security of person,” the “right to marry and to found a family,” the “right to own property,” and “freedom of thought, conscience and association.” While the Preamble of the UDHR maintains that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” the UDHR does not posit a justification for its claim of inherent human dignity or for its list of rights.

Aquinas, Original Sin, and the Challenge of Evolution
  • Daniel W. Houck
  • Published online:
    22 February 2020
    Print publication:
    12 March 2020
  • Is original sin compatible with evolution? Many today believe the answer is 'No'. Engaging Aquinas's revolutionary account of the doctrine, Daniel W. Houck argues that there is not necessarily a conflict between this Christian teaching and mainstream biology. He draws on neglected texts outside the Summa Theologiae to show that Aquinas focused on humanity's loss of friendship with God - not the corruption of nature (or personal guilt). Aquinas's account is theologically attractive in its own right. Houck proposes, moreover, a new Thomist view of original sin that is consonant with evolution. This account is developed in dialogue with biblical scholarship on Jewish hamartiology and salient modern thinkers (including Kant, Schleiermacher, Barth, and Schoonenberg), and it is systematically connected to debates over nature, grace, the desire for God, and justification. In addition, the book canvasses a number of neglected premodern approaches to original sin, including those of Anselm, Abelard, and Lombard.

  • 24 - Monotheism and creation

  • from Part V - The Shaping of Christian Theology
  • Edited by Margaret M. Mitchell, University of Chicago, Frances M. Young, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 January 2006, pp 434-451

  • Summary

    Monotheism was a fundamental article of faith from the beginning of the church. God was defined as omnipotent, as the ruler of the universe, leading the human race on the way to salvation. Creation out of nothing was originally a Hellenistic-Jewish formula expressing the power of the creator God. The most influential philosophical school in the first two centuries after Christ was Stoicism. Philo was probably from one of the noble families of Jewish Alexandria and had received an extensive philosophical training. A little later than Justin, in the seventies of the second century, Athenagoras of Athens wrote his apology: Legatio pro Christianis. His book is more sophisticated than Justin's apologies. During the second half of the second century the 'Great Church' began to resist the propaganda of Marcionites and Gnostics more and more rigorously. The most important Christian theologians of the time before and around 200 were Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, and Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons.

  • 10 - Self-definition vis-à-vis the Jewish matrix

  • from Part III - Community Traditions and Self-Definition
  • Edited by Margaret M. Mitchell, University of Chicago, Frances M. Young, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 January 2006, pp 214-229

  • Summary

    To speak of early Christian self-definition is to recognise that the sense of self always implies differentiation from one or more 'others'. This chapter identifies those significant 'others' as the 'Jewish matrix' and the 'Graeco-Roman world', differentiation from 'Gnostic' groups is arguably different in kind. Paul's was not the only model developing during the first century. Although constrained by the quasi-biographical gospel genre, Matthew denies any rupture with a genuine faithfulness to the past, either in his presentation of the person of Jesus, whom he describes in ways recalling Moses. Now that rabbinic Judaism is no longer taken as the controlling norm for any reconstruction of Jewish thought throughout the period one can also recognise that Christian theology's attempts to address the Hellenistic world continued to owe much to the earlier and perhaps continuing efforts made by Jews to speak of their God in the same context.

  • 17 - Plotinus

  • from III - Plotinus and the new Platonism
  • Edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity
    Published online:
    28 May 2011
    Print publication:
    01 January 2000, pp 301-324

  • Summary

    Plotinus was assisted by Amelius and Porphyry in dealing with the criticisms of him coming from Greece and with the more subversive threat to some members of the school represented by Gnosticism. The author suggests the movement of thought whereby Plotinus came upon and explored some of the ideas characteristic of his philosophy. The brief sketch of Plotinus' theory of first principles raises many questions, some of which are discussed. One of these questions concerns the sense and way in which Intellect is constituted from the One, Soul from Intellect, and the world from Soul. In later Platonism, however, the formalism of scholastic structures and the recourse to other means of ascent, such as theurgy, considerably reshaped Plotinus' approach. The way for the soul to reach the Good in Christian theology would follow other paths than those afforded by the study of Plato and the practices of pagan religion.