Eugene Webb

Ernest Becker and the Psychology of Worldviews

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski offer experimental confirmation for Ernest Beckers claim that the fear of death is a powerful unconscious motive producing polarized worldviews and scapegoating. Their suggestion that their findings also prove Sigmund Freuds theory of repression, with worldviews as its irrational products, is questionable, although Beckers own statements about worldviews as “illusions” seem to invite such interpretation. Their basic theory does not depend on this, however, and abandoning it would enable them to take better advantage of their finding that worldviews incorporating the values of rationality and tolerance tend to counteract polarization effects.

Eric Voegelin's Theory of Revelation

I N VIEW OF the intensity, as well as the frequently nonrational character, of both political and religious commitments, a writer who would attempt to explore these areas and to raise reflection on them to the level of genuinely theoretical understanding would have to be courageous-willing to endure unreasoned reactions, as well as to face clearly and take account 0:£ reasoned criticism. That Eric Voegelins studies of the history 0:£ order in several of the major civilizations of

Augustine’s new Trinity: The anxious circle of metaphor

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) would hardly have been pleased to hear himself described as an innovator. Like any other Church leader of his time, he would certainly have preferred to be thought of as a voice of the Church’s tradition rather than an originator of any aspect of it. Recent scholarship, however, has come increasingly to see him as the source of some of the most distinctive features of the Western Christian tradition. He is now recognized not only as the originator of the doctrine of Original Sin and the peculiarly western interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity, but also as a major force in shaping for subsequent generations of Christians the relationship between the Church’s spiritual role and its role as a power in the social and political world. With this recognition of the innovativeness of Augustine’s thought has also come the question of how his original contributions are to be evaluated. How well, for example, did he understand the tradition he was trying to interpret? How well considered were his innovations? Did they introduce not only new perspectives, but perhaps also distortions of the tradition? Elaine Pagels, for example, in her recent book, Adam, Eve, and The Serpent , has said, regarding the influence of his doctrine of Original Sin: “Augustine would eventually transform traditional Christian teaching on freedom, on sexuality, and on sin and redemption for all future generations of Christians. Where earlier generations of Jews and Christians had once found in Genesis 1–3 the affirmation of human freedom to choose good or evil, Augustine, living after the age of Constantine, found in the same text a story of human bondage.”1 She describes this as a “cataclysmic transformation in Christian thought” (Ibid.) and suggests that it is time Augustine’s distinctive contributions in this area were reexamined and reevaluated. “Since graduate school,” she says, “I had taken for granted. . . the conventional orthodox view of Pelagius and his followers as superficial rationalists who stubbornly