Kelly, Gerard There has always been a tension between the justice and the mercy of God. The two seem very uneasy companions. In the mind of some, justice and mercy are mutually exclusive. This, then, plays out in society and the way we practise justice. From my point of view, as a theologian, there is a genuine theological question here and it concerns how we understand God, and as a consequence how we understand the relationship between justice and (...) mercy. On the one hand, the traditional metaphysical starting point for the doctrine of God leaves little room for the mercy of God since God as perfect Being cannot suffer-to suffer would be a deficiency.1 On the other hand, there is a strong tradition, particularly since the Reformation, of the justice of God, where justice is an expression of the mercy of God. Yet this tradition struggles today to have an impact on religious consciousness. The theological question also has implications for the wider society. If Western society is no longer being shaped by the Christian faith, then the meaning of both mercy and justice may undergo change in such a way that they become incompatible. I will explore this question by referring to three articles that have appeared in popular journalism. This will lead me to a theological examination of mercy and justice. (shrink)

When the texts selected for the tenth Sunday after Pentecost are examined in the context of each other, one idea emerges which might sustain them all : God, not the Promethean Abraham, nor the persistent faithful petitioner, nor the believer “rooted and built up,” is the authentic subject of all three.

This essay deals with the early discussion of Molyneux’s question - which may hopefully cast some light on the contemporary debate – and is written from an historical point of view. I will claim that, in the eighteenth century history of Molyneux’s question, there is a leading figure: Denis Diderot; the most original and fruitful answer is given in his Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749). From the historical background of Diderot’s analysis, both the merits (...) and limitations of the negative and positive answers, along with the inadequacy of the standard classification between “empiricists” and “rationalists”, will also emerge. Diderot’s “relativistic” solution is a turning point in the whole philosophical discussion of Molyneux’s question, in that it has been confirmed by clinical reports of surgical operations of blind people, starting from Cheselden’s case. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to extract the Shariah principles from the verses in which the Qur'an addressed the Children of Israel with the phrase: "O Children of Israel." Although the Qur'anic discourse was originally directed at the Children of Israel, but it also addresses Muslims indirectly, as its mention in the Holy Qur'an is for reflection and admonition, as well as for deriving legal principles and rulings. Therefore, the objective of this research is to enlighten Muslims about the (...) Shariah principles derived from the Qur'anic discourse directed at the Children of Israel, to benefit them in their practical lives. The research focuses on two specific types of principles: doctrinal and ethical. (shrink)

Mercy is the defining characteristic of Pope Francis’s leadership. Francis’s words and actions have made visible a discipline of mercy, which does more than illuminate God’s character and purpose; it offers an expansive imaginative framework to spark new possibilities for moral agency and growth. Before Francis, mercy received limited attention in the canon of Catholic social thought. Francis’s signature message of mercy retrieves a central moral duty in Scripture, provides a focal lens for Catholic social thought, (...) and aims to inspire a “revolution of tenderness” capable of inspiring personal conversion and social change. This essay moves forward in three steps. It first unpacks the rich and diverse meaning of the word mercy and explores its undervalued role in CST; it then analyzes how mercy functions as the crux of Francis’s moral imagination; and finally, it explores how mercy expands possibilities for living the principles of Catholic social thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mercy in Aquinas: Help from the Commentatorial TraditionRomanus Cessario O.P. and Cajetan Cuddy O.P.Omnes semitae Domini misericordia et veritas(Psalm 24:10)IN QUESTION 21, article 3 of the first part of the Summa theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas outlines the dynamics of mercy:A person is said to be merciful [misericors], as being, so to speak, miserable at heart [miserum cor]; being affected with sorrow [tristitia] at the misery of another (...) as though it were his own. Hence it follows that he endeavors to dispel the misery of this other, as if it were his; and this is the effect of mercy.1However, when explaining the mercy of God, Aquinas carefully distinguishes the effective and the affective within mercy: “Mercy is especially to be attributed to God, as seen in its effect, but not as an affection of passion.”2 “It does most properly belong to Him to dispel that misery,” but “to sorrow, therefore, over the misery of others belongs not to God.” How then can one claim that God is merciful? Aquinas locates the formal nature of God’s mercy within his power to relieve the misery of the miserable: “in so far as perfections given to things by God expel defects, it [i.e., the communication of perfection] belongs [End Page 329] to mercy.”3 Aquinas, therefore, situates the divine mercy within the divine perfection—a perfection powerful enough to remove all defects.Contemporary theologians may find this account of the divine mercy somewhat unsatisfying. In our conception, a sharing in the misery of another stands as an essential element of authentic mercy. Hence, our untutored experience may incline us to press Aquinas and to ask, Why, exactly, does sorrow over the misery of others not belong to God? If one seeks clarification regarding this point within the abovementioned passage, one does not find it. Aquinas does not here expound at any length upon the reasons why God does not share the misery of the miserable.Thankfully we are not the first students of theology to approach the writings of Aquinas. Nor are we the first to observe the prima facie oddness of a seemingly impassive God within Aquinas’s consideration of mercy. Throughout history, theologians of profound elegance and insight have sought wisdom from the Angelic Doctor. Some have even devoted their academic lives to the task of studying, expounding, and “commenting” upon the Thomistic text. In this essay, we intend to rely upon—and thereby highlight—a few of the valuable insights into divine mercy these Thomist commentators offer within their commentaries. Because the Thomist commentatorial tradition includes far too many figures to summarize in a few pages, we have decided to draw from only a small handful of the major Thomist commentators within a limited period of theological history, roughly from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.4 Moreover, while the Thomist commentators exhibit a wide range of uniqueness and nuance amongst themselves, we might observe in our analysis a fundamental first principle uniting these major figures: the real distinction between act and potency (as well as between form and matter). [End Page 330] While philosophical in nature, this key Thomistic principle serves as the hermeneutical key for understanding what drew the commentators to Aquinas and the essential unity of their theological project.I. Infinitely Powerful MercyWhy does God’s mercy lack any misery? The sixteenth-century Thomist commentator Thomas de Vio Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534) explains that “misery” implies some defect in the commiserating subject.5 God is actus purus. His being admits to no potentiality and no passivity within himself. The seventeenth-century Carmelite commentators, the Salmanticenses, note the relevance of the act-potency distinction for understanding the divine mercy: “In God, mercy is not given through the mode of a potency, but through the mode of the highest actuality... which extends to the relieving of all misery.”6 The defect of misery requires some degree of potentiality and passivity within its subject. Therefore, God can experience no misery—or even co-misery.7The seventeenth-century French Dominican Jean-Baptiste Gonet (1616–81) quotes with approval Cardinal Cajetan’s commentary on question... (shrink)

If God exists, why isn't His existence more apparent? In recent analytic philosophy this longstanding question has been developed into an argument for atheism typically referred to as the 'problem of divine hiddenness'. My goal here is to put forward a new reply. The basic idea is that there is some reason to think that for many of us, our moral conduct would not improve even if God's existence were not subject to doubt. However, immoral conduct in such a state (...) of affairs would be even more immoral, and hence justly subject to greater punishment, than it is in a state of affairs in which God's existence is subject to doubt. As such, God mercifully remains 'hidden' in order to limit our moral culpability. (shrink)

The term ra ḥ ma/mercy is one of the key terms of the Holy Qur’ ā n and it has many connotations. Two names of God, ra ḥ mān and ra ḥ ῑm and their manifestations are contained in these connotations. So the two names explicitly tackled in our paper. While ra ḥ mān is the proper name indicating the absolute being and the source of all existence, ra ḥ ῑm is much narrower. The exegetical tradition emphasizes that God (...) is ra ḥ mān, i.e. provides existence and sustenance to all creatures in this world while ra ḥ ῑm gives guidance and salvation to those who just deserve it here. Ra ḥ mān and ra ḥ ῑm are used in the Qur’ān asyndetonically, i.e. without the copula wāw ( ﻭ ): in the form of ar-ra ḥ mān ar-ra ḥ ῑm not ar-ra ḥ mān va ’r- ra ḥ ῑm, indicating that these two names signify One (God) and that they appear in His actions simultaneously and instantaneously, not consecutively. Key Terms: Ra ḥ ma/mercy; rule of mercy; principle of hope; divine assistance; heaven and hell. (shrink)

Can God be entirely and supremely just and also entirely merciful, without these two characteristics ending up in contradiction with each other? Anselm of Canterbury considers this question in several places in his works and provides rational resolutions demonstrating the compatibility of divine justice and mercy. This paper considers Anselm's treatment of the problem in the Cur Deus Homo, noting distinctive features of his account, highlighting the seeming incompatibilities between mercy and justice, and setting out his resolution of (...) the problem. (shrink)

Lam, Joseph On 11 April 2015 Pope Francis called for a special of Year of Mercy, which subsequently was symbolically inaugurated with the opening of the Holy Doors of the Basilicas of St Peter and of St John in Rome on 8 December. According to the Argentinian Pontiff, upon whose episcopal ministry is placed the maxim miserendo atque eligendo, mercy is the key element leading to the rediscovery of the spiritual joy that appears to have faded away in (...) the life of the church. To counter this pessimism, Francis reminds his flock of the affectionate and tenderhearted look of God, whose merciful and loving gaze enriches and liberates the life of every Christian: 'Thanks solely to this encounter or renewed encounter with God's love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption'. Yet, Francis in his major teaching documents seems to caution against the concept of happiness, even though his description of the effects produced by the mercy and joy of the Gospel leads to human growth, within which human happiness is understood as a right. He has called for an integral development that includes society's most neglected members,6 and that respects and includes all forms of existence. Nonetheless, it is not a soft choice, as if mercy opens the door to all forms of pleasure as long as they make people happy. (shrink)

I offer a solution to an old puzzle about how God can be both just and merciful at the same time—a feat which seems required of God, but at the same time seems impossible since showing mercy involves being more lenient than justice demands. Inspired by two of Jesus’ parables and work by Feinberg, Johnson and Smart, I suggest that following a “principle of merciful justice”—that persons ought to receive what they deserve or better—delivers mercy and justice simultaneously, (...) certainly in cases of distributions of goods, and even in cases of distribution of harms as well, if we can accept some qualifications. (shrink)

Believers regularly refer to God as “forgiving and merciful” when praying for divine forgiveness. If one is committed to divine immutability and impassability, as Maimonides is, one must deny that God is capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving manner. If one rejects divine impassability, maintaining that God has a psychology, as Muffs does, one must reckon with biblical depictions of divine vengeance and rage. Such depictions suggest that while being capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving way, (...) God has a difficulty to manage God’s anger and do so in practice. Employing a Wittgensteinian perspective, I argue that utterances, e.g., “God merciful and gracious, slow to anger. . . forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”, need not be understood as involving mistaken or confused descriptions of God’s nature and manner of acting. Rather, they can be understood as speech-acts of various types and functions: mystical, theurgic and others, that purport to bring about or transform various states of affairs in this world and/or beyond it. As such, they can function as non-semantic instruments that purport to elevate the believer to the “upper worlds”, or as anger-management devices that purport to help God implement His second order desire to act in a forgiving manner, despite His difficulty to do so. (shrink)

Anslem raised a puzzle about mercy: How can anyone (God, say, or a judge) be both just and merciful at the same time? For it seemed to Anselm that justice requires giving people what they deserve, while being merciful involves treating people less harshly than they deserve. This puzzle has led to a number of analyses of mercy. But a strange thing emerges from discussions of this topic: people seem to have wildly divergent intuitions about putative cases of (...) mercy. Examples that are taken by some to be paradigm cases of mercy are seen by others to be clear instances of non-mercy. This phenomenon gives rise to a new puzzle: Why is it that people seem to have such wildly divergent intuitions about putative examples of mercy? This paper proposes a new analysis of mercy that provides solutions to both of these puzzles about mercy. (shrink)

An important issue raised and resolved in St. Anselm’s Proslogion is the compatibility between justice and mercy as divine attributes. In this paper I argue (1) that Anselm’s discussion of divine justice and mercy is an exploration of God’s nature as quo maius cogitari non potest, and (2) that his discussion contributes to a better understanding of the complicated relationship between God and creatures—including the creatures attempting to know or argue about God. It seems at first that God’s (...) mercy must be in contradiction with God’s justice. On the basis of a more adequate way of framing the issue, however—one that requires reference to other parts of the Proslogion and is supported by the Monologion—we can grasp, though not fully comprehend, the harmony between divine justice and divine mercy. (shrink)

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." --Genesis 1:24-26 In this crucial passage from the Old Testament, God grants mankind power over animals. But with this privilege comes the grave responsibility to respect life, to treat animals with (...) simple dignity and compassion. Somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong. In Dominion , we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We attend the annual International Whaling Commission conference, where the skewed politics of the whaling industry come to light, and the focus is on developing more lethal, but not more merciful, methods of harvesting "living marine resources." And we visit a gargantuan American "factory farm," where animals are treated as mere product and raised in conditions of mass confinement, bred for passivity and bulk, inseminated and fed with machines, kept in tightly confined stalls for the entirety of their lives, and slaughtered in a way that maximizes profits and minimizes decency. Throughout Dominion , Scully counters the hypocritical arguments that attempt to excuse animal abuse: from those who argue that the Bible's message permits mankind to use animals as it pleases, to the hunter's argument that through hunting animal populations are controlled, to the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions, and are not conscious of their own lives. The result is eye opening, painful and infuriating, insightful and rewarding. Dominion is a plea for human benevolence and mercy, a scathing attack on those who would dismiss animal activists as mere sentimentalists, and a demand for reform from the government down to the individual. Matthew Scully has created a groundbreaking work, a book of lasting power and importance for all of us. (shrink)

The exegetical stories of Genesis Rabbah 8 portray God as engaged in an ethical debate over the implications of humanity's creation. These stories narrativize the necessity of favoring mercy over justice. The Deity must mobilize the attribute of mercy to overcome the justice problem of human fallibility. These stories rehearse the conflict of values in an "organic" fashion as opposed to discursive argumentation over abstract principles, and suggest a virtue theory grounded in mercy and kindness without being (...) inflexible or absolutist. As such, mercy and kindness should be inculcated not over and above Jewish law but prior to the law. (shrink)

Pope Francis has called for the Church to be a sign of mercy and hope to the world. Mercy stands at the center of the Gospel, and the family is a fundamental seat of mercy within the culture, responsible for bestowing the most valuable of God’s gifts, human life. Because of its mission to bestow life, marriage is necessarily a “lifelong covenant of love and fidelity between a man and a woman”. As the Church upholds the view (...) of marriage exclusively as the union of a man and a woman who are capable of reaching the deepest kind of unity, she also affirms that persons of the same sex can achieve unity in meaningful ways. Upholding the traditional, comprehensive view of marriage does not belittle the dignity of homosexual persons, because all are our brothers and sisters. (shrink)

Through the insights of author and Bible expert R. A. Torrey, you will come to know God in His power, His love, His faithfulness, and His great mercy, all of which He longs to share with you. And as you come to know God better, you will enter into a closer, more confident relationship with Him, in which you will… Have Someone you can always count on Have all your needs supplied by Him Receive God’s continual protection Use God’s (...) power to defeat Satan Stand perfectly righteous before God Witness more easily and successfully Benefit from a deeper walk with the Lord Accept an invitation to nurture and develop the greatest relationship you will ever have. As you are drawn into the everlasting, loving arms of the Savior, you will experience the complete joy and strength of the Lord. (shrink)

This chapter (5) focuses on the concept of the forgiving God in Islamic religion and theology and claims that Islamic thinking about divine forgiveness accommodates two different views that emphasize two different attributes of God: justice and mercy. The first view is associated with a rationalist school of theology known as Mu'tazilism, while the second is associated with a fideistic school known as Ash'arism. The author argues that the first view, which is based on a strict calculus of desert, (...) leaves little or no room for mercy, and that the second view is more true to our ordinary notion of forgiveness. (shrink)

In the last few decades there has been no more controversial a papal document than that of 'Amoris Laetitia'. The controversy revolves around divorce, in particular allowing the divorced and remarried, with no annulment, to communicate at the Eucharist.1 The critics of 'Amoris' argue that Pope Francis, under the claim to be exercising mercy, is effectively undermining the truths of the faith. The defence of 'Amoris', however, is that in answer to the exigencies of the time mercy is (...) being applied in such a way that it develops the truths of the faith and expands their reach and pastoral application. It is clear from the New Testament itself that from the very beginning of the church the issue of how grace operates to extend the reach and application of God's mercy is one that has given rise to much dispute and even division. It is a process that prompts reflection upon theological givens, and the disputes that arise are occasioned by the question: Is the development that flows from this reflection one of an organic continuity, or is it instead a corrupt imposition? It is no exaggeration to say that this is exactly what is at issue today in respect of 'Amoris'. (shrink)

The book has so far shown that Thomas Aquinas had plenty to say about what we need to affirm of God from a philosophical viewpoint and without explicit reference to, or dependence Christian revelation. According to him, there are good philosophical grounds for saying that God is the creator of the world, and that he is perfect, good, ubiquitous, eternal, unique, powerful, and knowledgeable. This chapter turns to his philosophical treatment of God's will, God's love, and God's justice and (...) class='Hi'>mercy, for what he has to say presupposes, and connects with, much that he teaches concerning God's changelessness, power, and knowledge. His philosophical case for ascribing will to God rests, for example, on his view of God's knowledge or understanding, and he develops it by drawing on the conclusion that God is wholly immutable. (shrink)

In The Living God, Fr. Romano Guardini enables you to understand (and finally to experience) God's consoling presence in your soul. When your sins and imperfections weigh you down, turn to the awesome reality of God's love and mercy -- which is just one of the many remarkable themes in Romano Guardini's magnificent book, The Living God.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Difference Divine Mercy Makes in Aquinas’s ExegesisMichael DauphinaisIN THEIR ESSAY, “Mercy in Aquinas: Help from the Commentatorial Tradition,”1 Romanus Cessario and Cajetan Cuddy have masterfully performed the task of presenting the rich and voluminous commentatorial tradition on Aquinas, distilled into central philosophical and theological themes. In particular they identify the “real distinction between act and potency (form and matter)” as “the key philosophical principle” that created (...) the “essential unity of their theological project.” This principle expresses the fundamental distinction between God and creation. Yet the prominence of this philosophical principle in Aquinas and his commentators raises a question: To what extent can a philosophical principle be prior to a theological project?2 Would not it be more faithful to the witness of Scripture and the creeds to begin with revealed theological principles and then adopt philosophical principles that fit within that theological worldview? [End Page 341]This way of approaching the problem reveals both a profound misunderstanding and a profound concern. First, nervousness over philosophical principles reveals a profound misunderstanding since human beings always remain within language and the world and thus the meaning of that language and its references to the world around us must necessarily be part of the reception and transmission of divine revelation. To avoid philosophical principles would be tantamount to adopting a philosophical principle of pluralism or eclecticism.3 Second, there is a legitimate concern that some philosophical principles or understandings of God and human beings could constrain the newness of divine revelation along the lines of a rationalistic deism as was attempted by Locke and others. This concern also takes the form of the desire to bring theology back to its central relationship with sacred Scripture, with the concern that a philosophically determined theological hermeneutics would distance theology from the world of biblical revelation.Aquinas’s presentation of theology, or sacra doctrina, as a scientia helps here by distinguishing between philosophical truths about God and human beings and philosophical principles by which human beings receive theological truths about God and human beings.4 Aquinas shows that the principles of the scientia of sacra doctrina are taken properly from divine revelation received by the faith.5 Thus, the principled understandings of God and the human creature come from revelation, not from natural reason or philosophy, by which only a few could come to know some truths, after a long time, with an admixture of error.6 Nonetheless, the human creature cannot but receive this revelation as true. As Aquinas says, the virtue of faith attains to God as the prima veritas. The judgment that something is true and not false presupposes the application [End Page 342] of philosophical principles about the nature of the human intellect and the nature of the intelligibility of that which the intellect apprehends. The key philosophical principles here would be, first, the principle of non-contradiction and, second, the real distinction between act and potency. The first is necessary for the human intellect to reach a true judgment; the second is necessary for that judgment to be a trustworthy judgment about a constantly changing world.7 By making this distinction between philosophical truths about God and human beings and philosophical principles by which human beings receive theological truths about God and human beings, the Thomistic tradition avoids the deistic rationalism that occludes the biblical revelation.Even if philosophical principles are necessary for the human reception of revelation, there remains the concern that emphasizing the philosophically laden superstructure of the theological project obscures or weakens the ability of the theological project to attend to the biblical witness and the existential situation of human beings. To address this concern, I want to examine Aquinas’s own practice of biblical interpretation as it applies to questions of God’s mercy. This examination will also consider how the philosophical principle of the distinction between God and his creation, highlighted by Cessario and Cuddy, illumines the biblical revelation. I will examine three occasions on which Aquinas speaks about mercy in its biblical context: first, his commentary on Ephesians 2:4, which describes God as “rich in mercy”; second, his commentary on Matthew 5:7, which speaks of “Blessed are the... (shrink)

In his discussion of the virtue of mercy , Thomas Aquinas draws upon two seemingly opposed sources. On the one hand, Thomas takes Aristotle as an authority on the subject of compassion. Aristotle maintains in his discussion of pity in the Rhetoric that pity is felt for those who suffer undeservedly since we do not pity but rather blame those who suffer as a result of their own wicked actions. On the other hand, Jesus in Matthew's gospel feels pity (...) for the crowds. ‘At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them for they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd’ . In his commentary on this text from Matthew, Thomas identifies two possible interpretations for the troubled and abandoned condition of the crowd. The crowd is said to be troubled in so far as it is vexed by demons and abandoned in so far as it lies prostrate because of infirmities. The crowd can also be said to be troubled in so far as it is vexed by errors and to be abandoned in so far as it is fallen because of sin.1 Jesus, then, according to Thomas and contrary to Aristotle's claim, feels pity for the crowds as a result of the crowd's misery brought on by their own sinful deeds.In this paper, I examine how Thomas harmonizes these conflicting sources. More specifically, I hope to show both how Thomas uses Aristotle's observations on pity and at the same time transforms those observations in light of Christ's mercy on sinners. Thomas' use and transformation of Aristotle's account of pity provides an enlightening perspective from which to interpret Thomas' initially troubling claim that God feels no pity over the suffering of creatures, which we will consider briefly by way of a conclusion to this paper. (shrink)

In a recent issue of Religious Studies , 1 Thomas Talbott argues against what he takes to be an Augustinian picture of God, pointing out what he believes to be its more important weaknesses and thereby trying to lend credibility to an alternative picture. Much of what he argues turns on questions of the nature and requirements of justice. I shall confine myself to his claims about the relation of justice and mercy, which are not only central to the (...) essay but also probably the weakest and least well developed part of his larger project of defending a universalist view of salvation. 2. (shrink)

The first premise of J. L. Schellenberg’s Hiddenness Argument equates God’s love with a positive relationship to human beings. To illustrate this relationship, the human model of parental love is used, based on the standards of the modern American liberal world, not on the biblical standard. As a result, we attribute to God a narrowly understood horizontal relationship towards people, which is completely alien to the understanding of love developed in the Christian tradition. When we refer to the classical theism (...) that recognized love as the central attribute of God, we will see that it should be understood in a vertical model, consisting in the offering of good and mercy. This understanding undermines the benevolent theism and replaces it with the merciful theism or theism of mercy. Ultimately, this makes the first premise of the Hiddenness Argument very questionable and the whole argument calls for a significant revision. (shrink)

It's not about any person who's going to pick it up. No, these addresses fix on a much more glorious, worthy, and fascinating topic: the God, the Creator, the Redeemer as revealed in the Bible. The study of God is like a brilliant diamondwe should keep holding it up to the light to see new details ofits beauty. Before the awe of such a God, what room is there to focus on man? Our only place is to respond to himand (...) even our response does not depend on us! We must not only worship him, but alsoif our worship is to be meaningful and not cheapenedlearn how he is to be worshiped. The Princeton Regional Conference on Reformed Theology presents the following pastor-scholars, who delve into the glory of God and into his grace in making sinners into worshipers: Bryan Chapell - God's Glory Revealed Charles D. Drew - Called by God to Worship Richard D. Phillips - Sought by Christ to Worship Joseph "Skip" Ryan - Guided by God's Sovereign Providence Philip Graham Ryken - Redeemed by God's Sovereign Mercy Michael S. Horton - Sanctifying Grace Richard D. Phillips - Our Holy Redeemer Michael A. G. Haykin - The Spirit of Holiness R. Albert Mohler - Know the Truth D. A. Carson -I Am the Truth Learn from these teachers about the glory of, the providential work of, and our proper response to the amazing God we worship. (shrink)

If God is good, then why did he do that? Violent wars, harsh laws, pronounced judgments. Christianity proclaims God's goodness, yet the Bible is filled with passages that seem to paint a different picture. On the surface, such depictions can hinder our confidence in God's goodness. But when we're willing to look deeper, we discover a consistent purpose behind everything God does--and that he is greater than we could ever imagine. Alongside bestselling author Josh McDowell, Matthew Tingblad invites you to (...) discover how a good God has good reasons for his challenging actions in the Bible. Throughout, you will uncover the reality of God's consistent motives and purposes: holiness, justice, and radical mercy. Whether you have your own questions about God or are ministering to those who do, Matthew and Josh will guide you through these difficult passages and ideas, all the while pointing to God's power and redeeming love. Find confidence and joy in discovering that God is good--always good--even in the passages of Scripture that appear to convey otherwise." - back cover. (shrink)

Ever since the time of Pascal men have feared that the ‘God’ worshipped by believers and the ‘God’ contemplated by philosophers were somehow different. The former was personal, historically active, slow to anger and plentiful in mercy: the latter was dubiously able to be described in personal terms at all, and infinite in such a way as to baffle the imagination. The ‘God’ of the former at least had the advantage of complying with what was alleged to be religious (...) experience: and so it was not surprising that religious men feared that the ‘God’ of philosophy threatened that experience itself; whereas at times philosophers have fed such suspicions by denying to God various properties not on logical grounds but because close involvement with man seemed to them not to comport with the divine dignity. (shrink)

Jean Vanier is the founder of two major international community-based organizations for people with intellectual disabilities: the L’Arche Communities and the “Faith & Light” movement. He is a great Catholic and a teacher of merciful love. His life is a message to the world that each person is an infinite value for who they are, not for what they can do, and that each person is unique and sacred, no matter of their health condition, disability or fragility. Each person is (...) created in God’s image and each one has an inner beauty, a capacity to love and to be loved, and possesses inherent qualities of belonging, bonding, friendship and spirituality. Persons with intellectual disabilities are a gift for the society. Thanks to the testimony of his life, Jean Vanier has developed the international network of L’Arche Communities all over the world. The communities are based on family-like residential communities, where people with and without intellectual disabilities share life together in the spirit of faith, dignity of every human being, understanding, love and joy. The L’Arche homes and communities are rooted in the ideas of “living with,” and not just “doing for” those with mental disabilities. Weakness carries a secret power within, it can open up the hearts to God’s grace. Our contemporary world strongly needs the weak, as they evangelize us, transform us and help us to be more human. They help us discover that the good news of Jesus is announced not to those who serve the poor, but to those who are themselves poor and need God’s merciful love and forgiveness. (shrink)

On the God of the Christians tries to explain how Christians conceive of the God whom they worship. No proof for His existence is offered, but simply a description of the Christian image of God. The first step consists in doing away with some commonly held opinions that put them together with the other "monotheists," "religions of the book," and "religions of Abraham." Christians do believe in one God, but they do not conceive of its being one in the same (...) way as other "monotheists," like the first of them, the pharaoh Akhenaton (18th century before J.C.), like some philosophers, e.g., Aristotle, or like Islam. Christians admit the authority of a Holy Book, but don't consider it as being the peak of God's revelation. For them, revelation culminates in the person, life, and doings of Jesus - including his passion and resurrection. Christians acknowledge the exemplary figure of Abraham, but the stories they tell about him they share with Jews, but not with Muslims, who see in him the first Muslim. The Trinity is not a way to loosen the exclusivity of the only God. It is the very way in which God is one, i.e., in the inner richness and fecundity of love. The God of the Christians is Father, but not male. Human males become fathers through the mediation of a female. God is so radically the Father of everything and, in a very special sense, of the eternal Son, that He is not in need of a partner. His fatherhood can in no way legitimate the superiority of the male over the female sex. The God of the Christians doesn't want us to obey Him in order to enslave us; He expects us to act freely according to what is good for us. Now, the Good is not something that He has in store and bestows on His creatures. The Good is what He is and He is the Good of His creatures. The God of the Christians is merciful, but He takes seriously man's freedom, even when man doesn't accept Him. Hence, He doesn't content Himself with forgiving fromthe outside. He has to contrive a system (technically speaking: salvation history or "economy of salvation") that will enable Man freely to accept His love. (shrink)

Justice is a divine attribute to which the sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions attest frequently and to which people attach great importance. However, it is the express subject of comparatively few contemporary studies. It has been argued that this is symptomatic of a long-standing trend in Christian theology, which has tended to conceive justice narrowly, as retributive. This paper makes the case that, mediaeval theologians, from Anselm to Aquinas, address the divine attribute of justice in depth and with philosophical (...) sophistication, viewing it primarily as God’s merciful and gracious distribution of merits and goods. It seeks to identify Aquinas’s contribution to the mediaeval analysis of this divine attribute and assess what he may have to contribute to current philosophy of religion. In particular, pointing to natural teleology, he offers more fully worked out metaphysical reasons for calling God just and considering all his works just. The existence of creatures can only be explained as an act of divine mercy, with the result that, since existence is the fundamental gift, all God’s works are merciful and just. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Note on Thomas and the Divine MercyMark JohnsonA PUZZLING THING about the topic of the divine mercy as presented in the early part of the Prima pars, especially in light of the detailed commentaries presented by Cessario and Cuddy, 1 is how relatively little Thomas speaks about it. Pope Francis devoted the entire 2016 year to a Jubilee of Mercy. The Catholic Theological Society of America (...) followed suit by devoting its 2016 conference to the topic. Yet Thomas does not devote a single Scholastic question to it in the Summa. The topic of the divine names gets question 13 (12 articles), the divine knowledge gets question 14 (16 articles), and the divine will gets question 19 (12 articles). Our anchor text, question 21, is a four-article-long question that emerges from the larger issue of God’s will in itself (absolute). Yet the question is not about the divine mercy on its own, but is rather about features or properties of the divine act of love, a topic to which the whole of question 20 is devoted. God’s justice and mercy are considered in question 21 as quasi-virtues that perfect the divine act of love (question 20), which in turn is the proper act of God’s will (question 19).2 The divine will of question 19 [End Page 355] is Halley’s Comet, and mercy is the tail of dust trailing in its wake. When God’s mercy does appear it seems to vie with God’s justice for our attention.Cessario and Cuddy help us understand why this is, both with their two-part structure and with the sources they employ, the commentators. My focus here will be on the original text in its own light, before the varnish of the commentators. Thomas’s original is a dense chiaroscuro, which both raises questions and offers opportunities.First, while Thomas is still well within the consideration of the divine being and action (STh I, qq. 3–26), he is sensitive to our human understanding. For us humans an element of suffering seems to be built into any consideration of mercy. It is the first hurdle that needs to be jumped in question 21, article 3; objection 1 frets about mercy because it is a subset, a species, of sorrow—and that cannot be in God. In the body of the article, Thomas alludes to sorrow via a consideration of the quid nominis of mercy. The term misericordia means having a miserum cor, a heart afflicted by the sufferings of another. Thomas dismisses this right away; in the body of the article he says “being saddened at the misery of another does not befit God” (tristari... de miseria alterius non competit Deo). He does not say more. Similarly, in addressing the first objection he notes that the objection was invoking mercy as a kind of “being affected by suffering” (obiectio illa procedit de misericordia, quantum ad passionis affectum). Again, he gives no further commentary.3 [End Page 356]With the concern about God’s “co-suffering” with us dispatched, Thomas addresses a second objection, the satisfying of which will allow for the existence and procedure of the next article (a. 4). The objection focuses upon the divine justice and worries that mercy seems to mean some kind of “loosening up” of the divine justice (relaxatio iustitiae), in which God seems to act contrary to himself, to his utterances or dictates (dicta sua). Thomas addresses this concern head-on; there is no loss or relaxation of the divine justice, but rather a fulfilling and indeed exceeding of the dictates of divine justice. An example both explains and foreshadows: the man who owes someone a hundred dollars but who fulfills the debt when he pays him two hundred dollars of his own money, has both met the demands of justice and acted with liberality and mercy. He has acted above and beyond justice (supra iustitiam operando). 4 Remembering that objection 2 had included a concern about acting against one’s own self and dictates, Thomas adds that remitting an offense made against oneself by another—he may have had peccatum originale originans in mind—has the... (shrink)

In his later years, Puritan pastor Richard Baxter developed a perspective on spiritual formation that highlighted the centrality of the love of God. Interestingly, Baxter emphasized the ways in which a delight in earthly pleasures—such as nature, relationships, and food—could help Christians cultivate the love of God. He viewed these pleasures as “love-tokens” from God, sent in order to help human beings see his goodness and expand their love for the giver of these gifts. While he recognized the potential of (...) such earthly delights to lure hearts away from God, he also recognized that they could serve as powerful “glasses” through which earth-bound creatures could see God’s beauty and goodness and thus grow in godly delight. In the end, Baxter was able to forge a pathway between asceticism and materialism, encouraging Christians to grow their love for God by tracing earthly mercies back to their divine source. (shrink)

How can suffering and injustice be reconciled with the idea that God is good, that he loves humans and is merciful to them? Job's question runs through the history of the three monotheistic religions. Time and again, philosophers, theologians, poets, prophets and laypersons have questioned their image of God in the light of a reality full of hardship. Some see suffering as proof of God's existence, others as a demonstration that there can be no God, while others still respond by (...) rebelling against Him. In this remarkable book Navid Kermani - a distinguished Islamic scholar of Iranian origin - sees this revolt against God as the central motif of one of the great but neglected works of literature: _The Book of Suffering _by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Faridoddin Attar. Through the prism of Attar's text Kermani tells the story of a religious faith that knows God but is angry with Him: a counter-theology that runs through many religions and connects Judaism, Islam and modernity. With astonishing range and stylistic brilliance Kermani brings Attar to life as one of us, enabling the great Persian poet to speak directly to us today despite the time that separates us. (shrink)

The main lines of this exploration are quite simply drawn. That the God whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship outstrips our capacities for characterization, and hence must be unknowable, will be presumed as uncontested. The reason that God is unknowable stems from our shared confession that ‘the Holy One, blessed be He’, and ‘the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth’, and certainly ‘Allah, the merciful One’ is one ; and just why God's oneness entails God's being unknowable deserves discussion, (...) though that will occur as we move along. The issue facing us is the one which preoccupied al-Ghazali: how does a seeker respond to that unknowability? The root meaning of the Arabic word for ‘student’ means ‘seeker’, and that attitude of ‘seeking the face of God’, along with the indescribability of the face, will be presumed throughout our discussion. That's why we are struck with the clumsy term ‘unknowable’ rather than its more euphonious Greek form ‘agnostic’. For Western agnostics are such largely because they cannot find God sufficiently compelling, while they ‘would not have the impudence to claim to be atheists’ – as one contemporary seeker puts it. So theologians feel it necessary to enclose the term in quotation marks when discussing, say, Aquinas' ‘agnosticism’ regarding divinity. Yet a genuine unknowing does lie at the heart of the inquiry of the Jew, Christian or Muslim seeking after God; indeed, it is the unknowing which distinguishes a search for God from lusting after idols. So let us follow al-Ghazali in an effort to discover the lineaments of both search and seeker after an unknowable God. (shrink)

In our postmodern, secular, and liberal society, many individuals are struggling with a crisis of meaningful desire. In response, the goal of preaching Catholic bioethics should be to help people to order their desires so that they are all oriented toward their authentic good. This is done by infusing their intellects with truth and by exhorting them to order their appetites and emotions with virtue. Specifically, preachers should speak about bioethics in a way that shows our brothers and sisters that (...) the moral truths of the Gospel will help them to find joy. However, it is not enough to speak about joy. One should never speak about these controversial and deeply personal issues without also speaking about the mercy of God. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14.2 : 217–226. (shrink)

Hope is crucial human agency, but its fragility grounds a substantive challenge to Christian belief. It is not clear how a perfectly loving God could permit despairinducing experiences of divine silence. Drawing upon a distinctively Christian psychology of hope, this paper seeks to address this challenge. I contend that divine silence can act as a corrective to misplaced natural hopes. But there are risks in God’s choice to allow a person to lose all natural hope. Thus, if God is perfectly (...) loving, God ought to find a way to demonstrate goodness to those who are tempted by theological despair. I argue that the Church demonstrates God’s goodness through its merciful care and hope for the afflicted. The local community can act to sustain or recover a person’s capacity to remain open to the gift of hope even in the midst of divine silence. (shrink)

Writing to the young emperor Nero, Seneca elaborates a sophisticated distinction between compassion and mercy for use in forensic contexts, agreeing with earlier Stoics that compassion is a vice, but adding that there is a virtue called mercy or 'clemency.' This Stoic repudiation of compassion has won the attention of Nussbaum, who argues that it was motivated by a respect for persons as dignified agents, and was of a piece with the Stoics' cosmopolitanism. This chapter engages Nussbaum's presentation (...) of the Stoics, examining Seneca’s On Clemency and Epictetus' use of the term prohairesis, showing that while there is some truth in her characterization, it needs to be qualified in important ways. It also analyzes Augustine's engagement with Seneca's On Clemency in the City of God 9.5, and in his letters concerning punishment for vandalism, theft, and human trafficking. It argues that Augustine has a nuanced mercy ethic that is deeply informed by Seneca's position, but that he intentionally improves upon it. (shrink)