Abstract
Theological non-realism presents a fundamental challenge to objective theism. Its attraction comes from the fact that the move to non-realism is justified by appealing to ethics. And coming from within the theological circle, in important respects this new challenge supplants even the longstanding challenge of atheism.
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Notes
Don Cupitt, The New Christian Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1988), p. 36.
Gordon D. Kaufman, Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), p. 111.
John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 97.
Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), pp. x and 183.
Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 9.
Gordon D. Kaufman, Theology for a Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. viii.
See Gordon D. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), for example, Chapter 9.
Don Cupitt, Crisis of Moral Authority (London: SCM Press, 1972), pp. 27–28.
William James, Pragmatism and Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth [New York: New American Library of World Literature, Meridian Books, 1955], p. 145
Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice (New York: Bramhall House, 1960), p. 269.
Julian Huxley, ‘The Creed of a Scientific Humanist’, in The Meaning of Life, ed. E. D. Klemke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 68 and 65.
A rigorous defence of divine command theory ethics against the charge that it must undermine autonomy is offered in Philip L. Quinn’s Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy, 1978).
See Robert M. Adams, ‘Autonomy and Theological Ethics’, in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 125–6.
Dorothy Sayers, ‘Dilemma’, from In the Teeth of Evidence (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), p. 98.
For a clear exposition of these just-war criteria, see David Hollenbach, SJ, Nuclear Ethics: A Christian Moral Argument (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983), Ch. 4.
For a thoughtful treatment of this position, see John Langan, SJ, ‘Between Religion and Politics’, in William V. O’Brien and John Langan, SJ, The Nuclear Dilemma: The Just War Tradition (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath & Co., 1986).
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© 1993 Joseph Runzo
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Runzo, J. (1993). Ethics and the Challenge of Theological Non-Realism. In: World Views and Perceiving God. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23106-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23106-5_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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