Amber L. Griffioen

In the "Ethics", Abelard discusses the example of a judge who knowingly convicts an innocent defendant. He claims that this judge does rightly when he punishes the innocent man to the full extent of the law. Yet this claim seems counterintuitive, and, at first glance, contrary to Abelard’s own ethical system. Nevertheless, I argue that Abelard’s ethical system cannot be viewed as completely subjective, since the rightness of an individual act of consent is grounded in objective standards established by God. Likewise, any particular civil government must derive its authority objectively from the natural and/or Christian laws, which ground its possibility and function. In this paper, I examine Abelard’s explication of the natural law, discoverable through reason, and the divine laws, knowable only through revelation, in order to explore what form an adequate civil law would have to take under which the judge could be said to have acted rightly.

The term religion is indispensable to the subject matter of both religious studies and theology. Many approaches attempt a reductive, essentialist, functionalist, or other type of unifying definition, but these approaches tend to rest on various, often controversial sets of presuppositions. Indeed, it seems impossible to overcome the vast plurality of understandings of religion as the academic fields that deal with religion splinter and proliferate, thereby inhibiting the rational treatment of a very important dimension of modern society. The present volume undertakes an intense interdisciplinary examination of a seminal modern text that religious scholars agree helped spawn religious studies and modern theology as we know it, namely Schleiermacher's Reden über die Religion, which lays out the most important and controversial themes under discussion by theologians and religious studies scholars: first, the significance of emotion for the understanding of religion; second, the role of imagination and religious utterances in religious belief; third, the importance of religion for the social world; and fourth, the political implications of religion