Thomas F. O'Meara

Christian Theology and Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life

The author considers the basic theological issues regarding the possible existence of extraterrestrials, i.e. intelligent and free beings with some form of body or matter. After reviewing the considered opinions of five theologians chosen from the history of theology, he then asks whether any biblical passages (e.g. Colossians 1:15-18) might counter the existence of non-tellurians. If extraterrestrials do exist, how would this affect our understanding of supernatural grace and redemption from evil?

Divine Grace and Human Nature as Sources for the Universal Magisterium of Bishops

[Theologians have discussed for a century and a half the ecclesial institution of the ordinary universal magisterium of bishops when it functions apart from an ecumenical council. Teaching by bishops from the entire world involves the activity and identity of the bishop and his relationship to other Christians who ponder and teach the faith. Analysis of how grace impacts the bishops in their scattered college has been little developed in theology as well as in the psychology and social interaction of the teaching. The author here looks at this activity of an episcopal teacher within the worldwide college as it flows from human nature and from divine grace.]

The Theology and Times of William of Tripoli, O.P.: A Different View of Islam

The 13th century, the age of universities and cathedrals, was a time when Europeans journeyed to unknown realms and encountered different religions. It was also the age of Crusades. William of Tripoli spent his life and ministry in the world around Acre in the Latin Kingdom, a crossroads for art, trade, and contacts between Christians and Muslims. His writings offer not only a positive presentation of Muslim life and faith but also traces of a Christian theology of that religion.

The Dominican School of Salamanca and the Spanish Conquest of America: Some Bibliographical Notes

SALAMANCA, northwest of Madrid and Avila and not far from Spains border with Portugal, preserves the atmosphere of a medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque university even as it develops the schools and clinics of a contemporary center of studies. There are associations with Teresa of Avila, who spent the night there just after her reform was approved by Rome, with the young Cervantes, with Luis de Leon and Ignatius Loyola, and with John of the Cross, who was a student there. A bridge from the time of Trajan spans the river Tormes, and the Romanesque cathedral still reserves a chapel for the Mozarabic rite.

The Presence of Meister Eckhart

T O BECOME ACQUAINTED with the writing of Eckhart of Hochheim, a master of our inner atmosphere, is to be surprised. Looking hack at him and his thought from the perspective of seven centuries, we see in Eckhart not one intellectual world but several, and each is still present in our own time. There is the methodology of scholastic philosophy as well as the theology and the commentaries on the _Fathers and the Scriptures; there are the booklets for the life of the spirit, and especially, the brief but potent sermons. As a Dominican he was devoted to his brothers, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, hut the dominant philosophical framework of his thought is not that of Aristote1ianism (new to the West) but that of the NeoPlatonism preserved in the mystics of the Greek Church. Eckhart is a Catholic spiritual director; yet, his ideas resemble at times those of the German idealists while his language can be existentialist. Eckhart was a medieVial scholastic as well as a mystic. A university professor at home in the intellectual world of the thirteenth century, he was nonetheless a preacher and counselor concerning the inner spaces where communion with God touches possibility. M agister at the centers of academic life, Cologne and Paris, nevertheless he is famous because of his preaching to monasteries of cloistered nuns who were part of the movement towards a new spirituality. Meister Eckhart was an innovator in the desert of mystical prayer, as he called it (and for his original phraseology he was condemned by episcopal and papal authorities), but he was also a church

Tillich and Heidegger: A Structural Relationship

THE evaluation of Tillichs theological system in America and Great Britain (incipient in Germany but almost nonexistent in France) inevitably takes a stand on two questions. It asks whether Tillich is a theologian or a philosopher, and it asks whether he is an existentialist, an idealist, or, perhaps, both. The second question has almost as many opinions as answers. Is Tillich solely or basically a product of the German nineteenth century? Is he an existentialist despite his system, or an idealist despite his demand for existential theology? Or is Tillich merely an existentialist in his general terminology, while the horizon and form of his thought (because of ontology and system) is of the nineteenth century? The following study attempts to analyze the relationship of Tillichs systematic theology his theology as a whole and, in particular, his theology of God (the initial areas of the Systematic Theology) to the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger. An evaluation of the structural relationship of Heideggers ontology to areas of Tillichs systematic theology should help answer the questions mentioned above. It may also illustrate another facet of the increasing influence of Heidegger on contemporary theology.

Book Review: Karl Rahner: The Philosophical FoundationsKarl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations. By SheehanThomas. Athens: Ohio University, 1987. Pp. xi + 320.

remains in F.s lengthy attempt at harmonizing the newly discovered attributes of God. (3) Classical theism is criticized for its inadequate presentation of God to the modern world. One wonders how much this notion of a suffering God improves upon tradition. In spite of all F. says, I am not convinced the modern person is any better off with the God of Being who conquers the alienation of nonbeing in a dialectical process than he is with the transcendent impassible God of traditional Christianity. All in all, a remarkable, dazzling study, that will bend the mind a little, even of a classical theist.

24.95.

This essay will explore the modern union of revelation and history, the interpretation of Christianity as a historical unfolding of a divine idea and power. We will see how the view of revelation as a process of disclosure reaches from the great idealist systems grounded in science and art to Roman Catholicism’s new self-understanding after Vatican 11. Our first purpose is to understand how a union of revelation and history entered Western modern thought in the years after 1800 through Schelling, the philosopher of both idealism and romanticism. Thereby we will learn something of modern philosophy’s rapid development from Kant through the radical transcendentalism of Fichte to Schelling, surpassing both the new natural science and a temporal culmination in aesthetics. History enters Schelling’s thought in his Lectures on Academic Studies, a work which brings also his first formal consideration of religion and Christianity. These pages have a second goal: to show the impact of the Academic Lectures upon Roman Catholic theology in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The influence of Schelling upon Johann Adam Mohler in the 1820s and Yves Congar in the 1930s leads to the momentous religious and cultural event of the Second Vatican Council and raises questions about the role of modern philosophy today in Catholic life and thought. Schelling’s philosophy at the time of the Lectures is at the crossroads of many forces, being not only the source for a single transcendental foundation for all of science but the backdrop for the new criticism of literature and art in the sudden advent of romanticism. With a dialectic of absolute and history, we already have in 1803 the idealist system often ascribed solely to HegeI. So motifs from German idealism were formative of Vatican I1 and then at work in the post-conciliar world: motifs like subjectivity as process; revelation as history; the absolute in dialectical forms.

Revelation and History : Schelling, Mohler and Congar

our own preoccupations and concerns into their work. I am tempted to say that we ought not to read back the sexual preoccupations of the late 20th century into Renaissance art, except that every age has been sexually preoccupied to some degree. Finally, although orthodox or conventional theology need not be determinative for an artist, nonetheless it would be something to be taken seriously into account, particularly in a society that was as theologically aware as Renaissance Europe. Neither Augustine (cf., e.g., De civ. Dei 14, 23) nor Thomas Aquinas (cf., e.g., ST 3, q. 14, a. 4; q. 15, a. 2) would have allowed Christ either masturbation or erection. Consequently, if masturbation and erection are indeed what some of these artists intend us to see, and if they are not just employing, e.g., realistic methods of depicting a sleeping baby with his hand at his crotch or artful ways of draping and bunching cloth, then the artists in question were venturing beyond what the two great preceptors of Renaissance theology would have considered acceptable. Given this, the viewer of the paintings and sculpture that S. uses to illustrate his thesis must still, even when he or she confronts what seems like irrefutable visual evidence, ask the question: Is it likely that so many artists would have broken the conventions of theology, to say nothing of seemliness (or reverence), and must we not rather look for another solution to the apparent problem posed by these works of art? Sexuality being what it is, do we not risk seeing sexual meaning everywhere once we have been told that it can be an acceptable theme in some religious art? Much more deserves to be said about this highly interesting and original book, both for and against. Certain it is that anyone who reads it will thenceforth look at the depiction of Christ in art with eyes wider open. The danger, however, is that he or she will be looking for and finding something that the artist never put there in the first place.