商品簡介
Can religions supply an ethics that can unite rather than divide peoples? W. Royce Clark argues that an answer to that question requires engaging a modern narrative about the development of religions. In ancient times, many people believed in superhuman powers spatially beyond them, whether above or below them. They conceived of them in anthropomorphic terms, and because they felt dependent upon these powers for certain essentials of daily living such as warmth, water, or good health, they developed symbols, rituals, and general ways of life to court their favor. Some deities were believed to have personally intervened in human history, whether by taking human form to fight a people's enemies, providing humans with rules for living, or renewing or even re-creating the world after its degeneration or destruction. As time passed, these claims became more comprehensive, finally universal, even Absolute, even as the process of questioning the claims, "desacralization," became more widespread. Many sensed that if their absolutized deity were dislodged by doubt, the world would flounder without an ethic. Thus, some religions tried to defend their deity by emphasizing that it was really beyond any "attributes," beyond human reason. It became the Ineffable, the Incommensurable, even the "Wholly Other." If the deity was thought to have become Incarnate, that had to be defended in a similar way. Developing a universal ethic thus requires understanding how four prominent Christian theologians and philosophers engaged the problem of the religious Absolute. He discusses the arguments of Friedrich Schleiermacher, G.W.F. Hegel, Paul Tillich, and Robert P. Scharlemann as providing the grounds for a possible universal ethic.
