Marcel Sarot

In the West, we are aware that we have added the filioque to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed without the authority of an ecumenical council. Some of us may be aware that the Council of Nicaea (325) also took important decisions regarding the computation of the Easter date. We are mostly unaware, however, of the fact that prayer was an important topic at the Council of Nicaea, and that Orthodox churches charge the West with contempt for the decisions of the Council of Nicaea on kneeling while praying on Sundays and in the Easter season. In Canon 20, Nicaea bans kneeling during prayer on Sundays and during the fifty days commencing on Easter because kneeling is considered a penitential attitude and incompatible with celebrating Christ’s resurrection. Here I discuss Canon 20, its background, meaning, and reception, and provide some theological considerations on the relevance of Canon 20 for today.

In this chapter I discuss a project on the enduring significance of liberal Protestantism that was initiated and completed by Wim Drees. In this project, Dr3ees rejected the all-or-nothing approaches to Christian theology that are often endorsed by ‘orthodox’ Christians and atheists alike, and argues in favor of a liberal approach that is open to scientific developments and changing moral intuitions. Drees also argues against the prejudice that liberal Christians believe less, and argues that they rather have a different style of believing. Drees himself, however, squarely rejects belief in the Ascension of Christ. In my response, I use speech act theory as a method to analyze doctrine, and argue that the fundamental nature of the act one performs when one confesses a creed is commissive and could best be compared to taking a marriage vow. Speech act theory can not only be used to clarify the general nature of what it is to confess a creed, but also to analyze the complex illocutionary load of individual doctrines. I illustrate this by a brief analysis of the Ascension of Christ and argue that by a speech-act-analysis one can also, in the case of individual doctrines, avoid all-or-nothing approaches and yes-or-no discussions.

In this article, I analyse C.S. Lewis’s attitude towards the theology and the theologians of his time. Lewis often emphasised that he was not a theologian. Sometimes he does so out of modesty, to excuse minor errors that a specialist in the field would not have made. More often than not, however, something else plays a role: Lewis’s dislike of the theology and the theologians of his time. Although he intended not to become a party in theological controversies, Lewis occasionally took sides. He expressed himself in extremely negative terms about the liberal... movement, which in his experience... dominated the theology of his time. By assuming them to be in error, and showing how they had arrived there, he participates in the practice he elsewhere rejected as ‘Bulverism’. Moreover, he employed pejorative, sexually tinged metaphors. Only on one occasion did Lewis provide arguments for his rejection of liberal theology, and on that occasion he limited himself to New Testament exegesis. On another occasion, Lewis states that he allows only marginal, religiously irrelevant revisions of Christian doctrine. Ironically, his own revisions sometimes went beyond this – for example, in the case of the traditional doctrine of hell. In this article I suggested that for Lewis, the practice of faith implicitly is the ultimate criterion.

In our days, the creedal phrase 'I believe in God the Father almighty' is interpreted primarily along Trinitarian lines: It is applied to God as the Father of Jesus Christ. Here I argue that it has a dual background: in Jesus' prayer practice, in which He consistently addressed God as 'Father', and in the Hellenistic habit of referring to the Creator as 'Father'. I discuss Jesus' use of the term 'Father' against its Old Testament background, and argue that it primarily points to the intimacy of Jesus' relationship with His father. Against the Hellenistic background, however, the metaphor 'Father' means 'he who brings forth effortlessly'. Finally, I discuss some gender issues connected with the use of the term 'Father' for God.

In Bijdragen 59 Rudi te Velde argued that our appeal to St. Anselm in elucidating the tenets of the ‘Utrecht school’ in philosophical theology is unjustified, because of a presumed anti-realist tendency in our thinking. In our reply we point out that this accusation is the result of a confusion between the disciplines of philosophical theology and religious epistemology. Philosophical theology accepts from an insiders-perspective belief claims which are not directly accessible to reason or observation – such as the claim that God exists. From the fact that the Utrecht philosophical theologians do not attempt to prove these claims, but interpret them as the constitutive presuppositions of the Christian form of life, it does not follow that they doubt their truth. On the contrary, in quite a number of writings representatives of the Utrecht school have insisted on a realist reading of the belief claims of the Christian faith. Our realism goes even further than Te Velde’s. According to Te Velde our religious language is inadequate to such an extent, that it doesn’t enable us to give correct descriptions of reality. We show that this view necessarily leads to agnosticism. Next, as to religious epistemology we point out that since the collapse of foundationalism realists as well as others have reasons to be suspicious of attempts to prove the existence of God. In any case, we don’t needto prove such belief claims in order to be intellectually entitled to accept them – which is not to say that arguments for the existence of God have no value at all. Finally, it is precisely this complementarity of philosophical theology and religious epistemology which we find supremely exemplified in Anselm’s Proslogion. Whether one interprets the ontological argument as functioning sola ratione, i.e. independently of faith in God, or rather as functioning within the framework of the faith seeking understanding programe, the main part of the Proslogion’s ‘single argument’ is devoted to philosophical theology in the sense advocated and illustrated by the Utrecht School, i.e. to the search for insight into the reality and the attributes of God rather than for proof.

Dutch: Bij alle aandacht die er op dit moment is voor de aard van zingevingsvragen is de analogie tussen de betekenis van taal enerzijds en leven en werkelijkheid anderzijds wel opgemerkt, maar nog nergens uitvoerig doorgelicht. Marcel Sarot voorziet in dit gemis door een zorgvuldige analyse van de structurele overeenkomsten tussen verschillende theorieën over beide vormen van betekenis. Vervolgens past hij de gemaakte onderscheidingen toe in een weerlegging van de argumenten tegen de theïstische vorm van zingeving van Elmar D. Klemke en Jaap van Heerden. English: The question of the meaning of life is the subject of a lively scholarly debate both in the Netherlands and abroad. I concentrate on an aspect of this question that has often been mentioned but is still waiting for a careful treatment: the analogy between linguistic meaning and the meaning of life. With respect to linguistic meaning, I distinguish between two types of theories of meaning. According to the first type of theory words are names for concepts and hence also for the structural divisions of reality to which our concepts correspond, and the meaning of a word is the concept (or thing or class of things) to which it refers. According to the second type of theory, words are tools which we use to exercise conceptual skills, and the meaning of a word is the conceptual skill exercised with that word. Corresponding to these theories of linguistic meaning, I distinguish between two types of theories of the meaning of life. According to the first type of theory, externalism, the meaning of life is determined by its relation ("reference") to a transcendent primary determinant of meaning; it is therefore independent of the "use" we make of it. According to the second type of theory, internalism, the meaning of life is determined by the use we make of it: life cannot acquire meaning without our giving meaning to it. Just as the theory which construes words as tools does not imply that we cannot use words to refer to extra-linguistic objects, internalism does not imply that reality does not provide objective grounds upon which to build our meaning. Subjective internalists argue that there is no such ground and that man has to create his own meaning ex nihilo, but objective internalists, most theists among them, argue that there are such grounds. Finally I employ the distinctions made above in a counter-argument against the anti-theistic arguments of two subjective internalists, Jaap van Heerden and Elmar D. Klemke. I show that they mistakenly suppose that the theistic alternative has to be construed along externalist lines, whereas theists themselves construe their theory of meaning along objective internalist lines, which renders it much more plausible.

In this article, I apply the theory of tradition Karl Popper developed in an article on the rationalist tradition to Christianity. Popper helps us to distinguish between four functions of the Christian tradition. The Christian tradition helps people to order their perceptions by suggesting distinctions between what is important and what is less important. The Christian tradition provides people with guidelines for their behaviour. The Christian tradition provides a framework that helps us to understand the past of our own culture, and can also function as a background against which we may form our own authentic views of life. The Christian tradition is closely connected to the Christian community, which functions as a social group to which people may belong and by reference to which they can define their identity. These four functions shed light on the question why people attach value to participating in the Christian tradition, and why they deplore the decline of the Christian tradition

My conclusions are the following:We can distinguish between two sorts of kowledge: intellectual knowledge (knowledge of true propositions) and experiential knowledge (knowledge of how certain experiences feel).If we want the doctrine of divine omniscience to be theologically relevant, we will have to assert that divine omniscience involves experiential as well as intellectual omniscience.In order to be omniscient, God does not need to share all the feelings of His creatures with them. However, in order to be experientially omniscient, God must have undergone at least some experiences Himself.If God would be able to have these experiences only by becoming incarnate, God would need the incarnation in order to become omniscient. In this respect human nature would then be more perfect than the divine nature: it would be capable of knowing things which God could only come to know by becoming human. It is therefore preferable to maintain that the divine nature itself is capable of undergoing certain experiences.If the divine nature were incapable of undergoing any experience, God would nevertheless be able to have a vast knowledge of true propositions concerning experiences. For descriptions of experiences and for the evaluation of these descriptions, however, He would be dependent in principle upon His creatures

Theology and science pose different questions about the same reality. Science is concerned with the factual nature of the physical world around us, whereas theology is concerned with its meaning. This means that theology is in some respects dependent upon science: science provides theology with information about the factual nature of the reality of which theology has to make sense. How this factual information affects theology is shown for the example of divine omniscience. It is argued that (1) the temporal nature of the world in which we live requires an omniscient God to be temporal as well; (2) the real openness of the future makes it in principle impossible even for a perfect knower to know all its details; (3) the factual nature of some experiences makes it impossible for anyone who has not had similar experiences himself to have perfect knowledge of them. It is concluded from this example that it should be one of the main aims of th dialogue between theology and science to find out in which respects our scientific knowledge of physical reality should lead to a revision of theological doctrines