Worship and Command of Faith within the Framework of Theological Voluntarism: Maimonides and Crescas

This chapter reconstructs the topic of universals in the English Platonists’ epistemologies and ontologies. More and Cudworth restrict universals to the mental realm, stating that whatsoever exists without the mind is singular. Despite this nominalistic principle, universal concepts are not inductive constructions, but primarily divine thoughts and secondarily a priori innate ideas in the human mind. The archetypal theory of creation and the connection of finite minds to God’s Mind ensure their objective validity, in antithesis to Hobbes’ phenomenalism and sensationalism. Norris shares the archetypal theory of creation, but refuses innatism, and his doctrine of universals is framed in terms of his theory of the ideal world inspired by Malebranche. Both the Cambridge Platonists and Norris, opposing theological voluntarism, discuss the status of ideas in God’s mind, which oscillate from being merely thoughts of the divine intellect to being its eternal objects.

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Could God Love Cruelty?

Faith and Philosophy ◽

10.37977/faithphil.2021.38.1.3 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 38 (1) ◽

pp. 26-44

Author(s):

Laura Frances Callahan

Keyword(s):

God's Will ◽

Moral Agents ◽

Moral Systems ◽

Logical Constraints ◽

Theological Voluntarism ◽

Moral Facts

One of the foremost objections to theological voluntarism is the contingency objection. If God’s will fixes moral facts, then what if God willed that agents engage in cruelty? I argue that even unrestricted theological voluntarists should accept some logical constraints on possible moral systems—hence, some limits on ways that God could have willed morality to be—and these logical constraints are sufficient to blunt the force of the contingency objection. One constraint I defend is a very weak accessibility requirement, related to (but less problematic than) existence internalism in metaethics. The theological voluntarist can maintain: Godcouldn’t have loved cruelty, and even though he could have willed behaviors we find abhorrent, he could only have done so in a world of deeply alien moral agents. We cannot confidently declare such a world unacceptable.

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Theological voluntarism

God and Moral LawOn the Theistic Explanation of Morality ◽

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199693665.003.0005 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 100-132

Author(s):

Mark C. Murphy

Keyword(s):

Theological Voluntarism

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Key Texts: A Different kind of Reformation: Revisiting the Lynn White thesis

NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion ◽

10.5117/ntt2017.71.277.jeda ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 71 (3) ◽

pp. 277-286

Author(s):

Christoph Jedan

Keyword(s):

Science And Technology ◽

Historical Narrative ◽

Western Science ◽

Environment Interaction ◽

Human Environment ◽

Constructivist View ◽

Environmental Virtue ◽

History Of ◽

Specific Thrust ◽

Theological Voluntarism

Summary This commentary revisits Lynn White’s article, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ (1967), and questions the assumption that there is a unified ‘Lynn White thesis’. Instead, it proposes a complex narrative in which four key elements can be identified: (1) the long history of human impact on the environment; (2) the claim that the human-environment interaction took on a new, destructive quality around 1850 through the ‘marriage’ of specifically Western science and technology; (3) an historical narrative of how Latin Christianity is responsible for the specific thrust of Western science and technology, in which White identifies Latin theological voluntarism as key trigger; and (4) a constructivist view of religion as malleable. It argues, further, that White’s narrative itself relies on a radical variant of the Latin theological voluntarism that he attacks, and it points towards Christian environmental virtue ethics as an underexplored way forward.

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