Despite the long scholarly discourse in Western theology and philosophy on religion, spirituality, and faith, explanations of what a belief and what believing is are still lacking. Recently, cognitive neuroscience research addressed the human capacity of believing. We present evidence suggesting that believing is a human brain function which results in probabilistic representations with attribu...

Despite the long scholarly discourse in Western theology and philosophy on religion, spirituality, and faith, explanations of what a belief and what believing is are still lacking. Recently, cognitive neuroscience research addressed the human capacity of believing. We present evidence suggesting that believing is a human brain function which results in probabilistic representations with attribu...

Contemporaries of Charles Darwin were divided on reconciling his theory of natural selection with religion and morality. Although Alfred Russel Wallace stands out as a spiritualist advocate of natural selection who rejected a natural origin of morality, the science popularizer and spiritualist Arabella Buckley (1840–1929) offers a more representative example of how theists, whether spiritualist...

During the 1640s, the Irish Franciscan theologian John Punch taught his theology students in Rome that war against Protestants was made just by their religion alone. Jesuits like Luis de Molina identified the holy war tradition in which Punch stood as a Scotist one, and insisted that the Scotists had confused the natural and supernatural spheres. Among Irishmen, Punch was unusual. The main Iris...

Fifteen volumes long, Against the Christians was written by the Roman pagan Porphyry circa 280 and was an educated man's studied attack on Christian theology. An exceedingly powerful and successful work, it and commentaries on it were condemned by the imperial church in 448 and burned. Only remnants which were contained in books that were primarily about other matters have survived until the pr...

25 years ago, in a provocative reconsideration of English political and social history, English Society 1688–1832, J. C. D. Clark advanced the then contentious claim that until the end of the long 18th century England remained what he styled a ‘confessional state’.(1) Missing from the wave of prior work by social and political historians of 18th-century England, Clark argued, was a close attent...

“All humanists agree that religion is not based on reason” [1a]. This statement, in many different forms, has been popularized for hundreds of years. A major purpose for the 1978-1979 modeling procedures introduced into theology is to establish that all such statements are false. Jesus Christ is Scripturally described as the “great God and Saviour,” “the only-begotten God,” “the image of the in...

This essay argues that New Testament Theology (NTT) is an indispensable mediating discipline between historical exegesis and systematic theology. It defends NTT against claims that: (1) should be replaced by the study of early Christian religion; (2) The NT too diverse disparate to sustain any unifying theology; (3) has been over-done so there nothing new said. proceeds defense contending theol...