The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that God is a " substantia seu natura simplex omnino " —an " altogether simple substance or nature " —and the First Vatican Council reiterated the teaching. The doctrine of divine simplicity is at the center of Thomas's natural theology, since it is essentially involved in his attempt to show that the First Cause that he has proved to exist in the Five Ways ha...

Joseph Selling proposes a contemporary revision of natural law ethics, making it more person-centered. Earlier James Gustafson insisted that natural law ethics was too egoist or anthropocentric, so his work proposed theocentrism as a corrective. Richard Gula in turn proposed an ethics that centers on imitating God’s relationships. This essay combines the merits of all three with the author’s ow...

various opinions have been put forward about achaemenian beliefs and thoughts, especially about the religious beliefs of the achaemenian kings such as cyrus the great. scholars rely on herodotus’s statements that “they didn’t look at building temples and altars as a religious tradition, they refer believing in these things as ignorance and foolishness in the converse opinion to greeks. they did...

In this article I argue that the effects of sin for our cognition of God primarily consist in a lack of knowledge by acquaintance of God and the relevant ensuing propositional knowledge. In the course of my argument, I make several conceptual distinctions and offer analyses of 1 Cor 13:9–12 and Rom 1:18–23. As it turns out, we have ample reason to think that sin has had and still has profound c...

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