Michelle Lynn Panchuk

In this paper I consider what a person who finds herself religiously incapacitated ought to do. More specifically, I address people who have come to God asking for bread, but who seem to have received stones and serpents in its place. This is a manifestation of the phenomenon that I call religious trauma. My goals in this paper are twofold. First, I aim to demonstrate that, because religious trauma can be genuinely religiously incapacitating, (1) it can result in non-culpable failure to worship God, and (2), if ought implies can, a religious trauma survivor may find themself in a position where they ought to deconvert, whether or not the individual’s religion is true. My second goal in this paper is to illustrate that religious trauma deserves serious consideration from philosophers and theologians.

This paper demonstrates that the skeptical theist’s response to the problem of evil deprives the analytic theologian of theoretical resources necessary to avoid accepting as veridical merely apparent divine commands that endorse cruelty. In particular, I argue that the same skeptical considerations that lead analytic theologians to endorse skeptical theism also lead to what I call “divine command skepticism”—an inability to make certain kinds of judgements about what a good God would or would not command. The danger of divine command skepticism is not that it generates new reasons to think that God has commanded horrors, but, rather, that it undercuts the defeaters we might otherwise have for thinking that God has commanded those horrors. It does so both by rendering illicit certain theological and hermeneutical methodologies employed within liberatory frameworks and by depriving the theologian of some of the more “traditional” mechanisms for resolving such apparent conflicts.

This article explores the relationship between hermeneutical injustice in religious settings and religious trauma and spiritual violence. In it I characterize a form of hermeneutical injustice that arises when experiences are obscured from collective understanding by normatively laden concepts, and I argue that this form of HI often plays a central role in cases of religious trauma and spiritual violence, even those involving children. In section I, I introduce the reader to the phenomena of religious trauma and spiritual violence. In section II, I describe the role normatively laden concepts play in shaping our social experience. I then elucidate how they can contribute to HI. In section III, I provide a brief overview of the history of some significant identity prejudices in the history of Christianity and argue that children can properly be understood as victims of HI within some religious communities. I then return in section IV to the examples of religious trauma and spiritual violence offered throughout the article and demonstrate that HI plays an important causal role in each of them. HIs sometimes constitute spiritual and religious harms; at other times they create an epistemic environment conducive to spiritual abuse.

Over the past several decades, scholars working in biblical, theological, and religious studies have increasingly attended to the substantive ways that our experiences and understanding of God and God's relation to the world are structured by our experiences and concepts of race, gender, disability, and sexuality. These personal and social identities and their intersections serve as a hermeneutical lens for our interpretations of God, self, the other, and our religious texts and traditions. However, they have not received nearly the same level of attention from analytic theologians and philosophers of religion, and so a wide range of important issues remain ripe for analytic treatment. The papers in this volume address the various ways in which the aforementioned social identities intersect with, shape, and might be shaped by the questions with which analytic theology and philosophy of religion have typically been concerned, as well as what new questions they suggest to the discipline. We focus on three central areas of analytic theology: methodological principles, the intersection of social identities with religious epistemology, and the connections among eschatology, ante-mortem suffering, and ante-mortem social perceptions of bodies.

There has been little discussion of the compatibility of Theistic Conceptual Realism with the doctrine of divine simplicity. On the one hand, if a plurality of universals is necessary to explain the character of particular things, there is reason to think this commits the proponent of TCR to the existence of a plurality of divine concepts. So the proponent of the DDS has aprima faciereason to reject TCR. On the other hand, many mediaeval philosophers accept both the existence of divine ideas and the DDS. In this article I draw on mediaeval and contemporary accounts of properties and divine simplicity to argue that the two theories are not logically incompatible.

In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato launches an extensive critique of art, claiming that it can have no legitimate role within the well-ordered state. While his reasons are multifac- eted, Plato’s primary objection to art rests on its status as a mere shadow of a shadow. Such shadows inevitably lead the human mind away from the Good, rather than toward it. How- ever, after voicing his many objections, Plato concedes that if art “has any arguments to show it should have a place in a well-governed city, [he] would gladly welcome it back.” Over two millennia later, the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev implicitly responded to this challenge in his Lectures on Godmanhood (1881). Solov’ev cited the phenomenon of art as additional proof in favor of his model of the metaphysical foundations of reality. According to Solov’ev, art is not three steps removed from ultimate reality; rather, an artist creates true art only when he has experienced a vision of the univer- sal and substantial ideas that stand over and above particular things, and then conveys them to the viewer directly, via the artistic medium. Hence, the artist is able to sidestep the in- termediate shadow and produce something that is more than a shadow—a clear reflection of that higher reality. If Solov’ev is correct, the artist should enjoy the elevated status of sage, per- haps even philosopher-king, rather than face exile from Plato’s republic, because the artist both knows the Good and guides the less enlightened toward it. After a brief sketch of the metaphysical grounds for Plato’s critique of art, I provide an analysis of Solov’ev’s ontology, as represented in his Lectures on Godmanhood. Next, I describe Solov’ev’s concept of the three-fold mission of art and its relationship to human nature, drawing both from the Lectures and from The Universal Meaning of Art (1890). Finally, in the last section, I demonstrate how the afore-mentioned account comprises Solov’ev’s robust and successful response to Plato’s challenge, from within a platonic framework.

Theistic activism and theistic conceptual realism attempt to relieve the tension between transcendent realism about universals and a strong aseity-sovereignty doctrine. Paradoxically, both theories seem to imply that God is metaphysically prior and metaphysically posterior to his own nature. In this paper I critique one attempt to respond to this worry and offer a neo-Augustinian solution in its place. I demonstrate that Augustine’s argument for forms as ideas in the mind of God strongly suggests that only created beings need universals to ground their character. For them, divine concepts can do all of the work that universals are typically invoked to do in the contemporary literature. An uncreated being’s character needs no such grounding and can be accounted for in terms of his own concepts. If this is correct, theists may be realists about universals while maintaining the traditional read of God’s aseity and sovereignty.