Cosmic Order And Divine Activity

Theologian Harry Lee Poe and chemist Jimmy H. Davis argue that God's interaction with our world is a possibility affirmed equally by the Bible and the contemporary scientific record. Rather than confirming that the cosmos is closed to the actions of the divine, advancing scientific knowledge seems to indicate that the nature of the universe is actually open to the unique type of divine activity portrayed in the Bible.

The treatise De mundo offers a cosmology in the Peripatetic tradition which subordinates what happens in the cosmos to the might of an omnipotent god. Thus the work is paradigmatic for the philosophical and religious concepts of the early imperial age, which offer points of contact with nascent Christianity.

This book offers a fresh interpretation of the relation between Greek thought and ancient Christian theology through an analysis of three foundational and controversial thinkers: Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Athanasius. As an urban teacher, civic apologist, and ascetic bishop, each of the three theologians offered a distinctive Christian response to the religious and ecclesiastical issues of the third and fourth centuries. Each cosmology and Christology therefore reveals particular concerns about individual and social identity and salvation in the developing Christian community.

St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662), was a major Byzantine thinker, a theologian and philosopher. He developed a philosophical theology in which the doctrine of God, creation, the cosmic order, and salvation is integrated in a unified conception of reality. Christ, the divine Logos, is the centre of the principles (the logoi ) according to which the cosmos is created, and in accordance with which it shall convert to its divine source. Torstein Tollefsen treats Maximus' thought from a philosophical point of view, and discusses similar thought patterns in pagan Neoplatonism. The study focuses on Maximus' doctrine of creation, in which he denies the possibility of eternal coexistence of uncreated divinity and created and limited being. Tollefsen shows that by the logoi God institutes an ordered cosmos in which separate entities of different species are ontologically interrelated, with man as the centre of the created world. The book also investigates Maximus' teaching of God's activities or energies, and shows how participation in these energies is conceived according to the divine principles of the logoi. An extensive discussion of the complex topic of participation is provided.

This last book by the Bishop of Durham is the text of the Zenos Lectures that he gave in Chicago in 1966. In them, Dr Ramsey applied his well-known approach of models and disclosure situations to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The first lecture considers the origin and use of the model of wind, breath, air, from which the Spirit is named; subsequent lectures consider the models of "economy" and presence. In the discussion, a number of important issues are touched on: the personality of the Holy Spirit, the ubiquity of God, and the relationship of prayer to the presence of God. The final lecture goes on to counter criticisms that have been made of Dr Ramsey's theology. Are models and disclosures not a substitute for God? Is not this approach virtually atheistic, with perhaps not much "virtual" about it? Because Dr Ramsey's writings have appeared in a great many books and journals, it has also been thought fitting to include a comprehensive bibliography, and this book ends with a complete list of all his published works.

Nine new essays examine the close connection between theology and cosmology in Stoic philosophy. The contributors discuss the nature of god, his relation to the material world, fate and causation, rival cosmologies, and the ethical and religious consequences of the Stoic theories of god and cosmos.

An investigation into two basic concepts of ancient pagan and early Christian thought, activity and participation, through detailed discussion of the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas.