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Inclusive worship and group liturgical action
Get PDFThe author acknowledges the Templeton Religion Trust for their generous funding whilst writing this article.In this article, I consider how recent work on the philosophy of group-agency and shared-agency can help us to understand what it is for a church to act in worship. I argue that to assess a model’s suitability for providing such an account, we must consider how well it handles cases of non-paradigm participants, such as those with ASD and young infants. I suggest that whilst a shared-agency model helps to clarify how individuals coordinate actions in cases of reading or singing liturgy, it does not handle non-paradigm cases well and so cannot be considered a suitable model of group liturgical action. Instead, I suggest that a model of group-agency, in which a plurality of action types can contribute to the actions of a group as a whole, is better suited to explaining a church’s actions in worship.Peer reviewe
Analytic ecclesiology : the social ontology of the church
Get PDFThe author thanks the Templeton Religion Trust for generous funding during the writing of this paperIn this paper, I aim to show that analytic philosophy can contribute to the theological discussion of ecclesiology. By considering recent analytic work on social ontology, I outline how we might think of the Church as one entity, constituted by many disparate parts. The paper begins with an overview of the theological constraints for the paper, and then proceeds to examine recent work on the philosophy of social ontology and group agency. Drawing on this literature, I outline three models of social ontology from the history of philosophy and suggest reasons why all of them fail to provide an account of the Church’s agency. Finally, I develop an alternative model which, I suggest, better fits the conditions stipulated.Peer reviewe
The God-Relationship:A Kierkegaardian Account of the Christian Spiritual Life
Get PDFBy drawing on the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, I address the question of what it is to live in relationship with God. In answering this question, it is important to recognise that God, as he is described in the Christian tradition, is a personal God. For this reason, the account of the Christian spiritual life I outline is described as a life of coming to know God personally, rather than as a life of coming to know about God by learning about him. As I argue, a minimal condition for knowing God personally in this way is that an individual has a second-person experience of God. However, one of the barriers which prevents relationship with God from occurring in this life is that the human will is defective in such a way that human beings cannot will to be in union with God. Because of this problem, human beings cannot live in union with God in this life. And so, in order to allow for the possibility of union with God in the life to come, the human will must be repaired; consequently, one of the key tasks of the spiritual life is this task of repairing a person’s will by re-orienting it so that union with God is possible. Since a person cannot be in union with God in this life, it is important to give an account of what it is to be in relationship with God in the spiritual life. I present this relationship in terms of being in union with Christ which I describe, drawing from Kierkegaard, in terms of ‘being contemporary with Christ’. To be contemporary with Christ, as I explain it, is to experience what psychologists call ‘shared-attention’ with Christ; one way of experiencing Christ in this way, I argue, is by a person’s engagement in spiritual practices. It is by stressing the importance of this concept of contemporaneity with Christ that we can see how an individual engages in the task of re-orientating their will. The reason for this, is that the experience of Christ’s presence allows a human being to imitate Christ and thereby heal the damage caused by sin. Finally, I argue, even in experiences of God’s absence, a person can develop a deeper relationship with God. In withdrawing his presence from individuals, God allows for a kind of weaning process to occur in which persons develop a more independent, and eventually deeper God-relationship.
Smelling God : olfaction as religious experience
Get PDFThe Templeton Religion Trust is acknowledged for their generous funding during the writing of this paper.Although it is commonplace within many religious traditions to talk of ‘hearing God’s voice’ or ‘seeing God at work,’ or even ‘being touched by God,’ it is less common to talk of people using olfactory language, even metaphorically, to describe their encounters with the divine, even though, if God is immaterial, it is surely true that God no more has a specific scent than he does an appearance or a sound. Yet, as this chapter will explore, there is a rich history of thinking of the olfactory sense in relation to religious experience. The chapter begins by exploring the role of olfactory experience in the Christian tradition; here we see the prominence of non-metaphorical descriptions of olfactory religious experience from a number of sources. However, a cursory glance at contemporary philosophical work on the nature of religious experience demonstrates that philosophy of religion has typically excluded olfactory experiences from their analyses of religious experience. This chapter offers a contemporary, non-metaphorical account of olfactory religious experience which draws from work in the philosophy of smell, and the cognitive penetration of perception
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