Natural theology, once also termed physico-theology, is a type of theology that seeks to provide arguments for theological topics based on reason and the discoveries of science, the project of arguing for the existence of God on the basis of observed natural facts, and through natural phenomena viewed as divine, or complexities of nature seen as evidence of a divine plan or Will of God, which includes nature itself.
Theology is the study of religious belief from a religious perspective, with a focus on the nature of divinity. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the supernatural, but also deals with religious epistemology, asks and seeks to answer the question of revelation. Revelation pertains to the acceptance of God, gods, or deities, as not only transcendent or above the natural world, but also willing and able to interact with the natural world and to reveal themselves to humankind.
Monarchianism is a doctrine that emphasizes God as one indivisible being, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism, which defines the Godhead as three co-eternal, consubstantial, co-immanent, and equally divine hypostases.
Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God. It forms a pair together with cataphatic theology, which approaches God or the Divine by affirmations or positive statements about what God is.
Christianity and Hellenistic philosophies experienced complex interactions during the first to the fourth centuries.
Philosophical theology is both a branch and form of theology in which philosophical methods are used in developing or analyzing theological concepts. It therefore includes natural theology as well as philosophical treatments of orthodox and heterodox theology. Philosophical theology is also closely related to the philosophy of religion.
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary Platonists do not necessarily accept all doctrines of Plato. Platonism has had a profound effect on Western thought. At the most fundamental level, Platonism affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism. This can apply to properties, types, propositions, meanings, numbers, sets, truth values, and so on. Philosophers who affirm the existence of abstract objects are sometimes called Platonists; those who deny their existence are sometimes called nominalists. The terms "Platonism" and "nominalism" also have established senses in the history of philosophy. They denote positions that have little to do with the modern notion of an abstract object.
Christian apologetics is a branch of Christian theology that defends Christianity.
The Alexandrian school is a collective designation for certain tendencies in literature, philosophy, medicine, and the sciences that developed in the Hellenistic cultural center of Alexandria, Egypt during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
The unmoved mover or prime mover is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause or "mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. He equates this concept also with the active intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the unmoved mover in the Quinque viae.
Aeterni Patris was an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in August 1879. It was subtitled "On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy in Catholic Schools in the Spirit of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas". The aim of the encyclical was to advance the revival of Scholastic philosophy.
Against Celsus, preserved entirely in Greek, is a major apologetics work by the Church Father Origen of Alexandria, written in around 248 AD, countering the writings of Celsus, a pagan philosopher and controversialist who had written a scathing attack on Christianity in his treatise The TrueWord. Among a variety of other charges, Celsus had denounced many Christian doctrines as irrational and criticized Christians themselves as uneducated, deluded, unpatriotic, close-minded towards reason, and too accepting of sinners. He had accused Jesus of performing his miracles using black magic rather than actual divine powers and of plagiarizing his teachings from Plato. Celsus had warned that Christianity itself was drawing people away from traditional religion and claimed that its growth would lead to a collapse of traditional, conservative values.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to metaphysics:
Byzantine philosophy refers to the distinctive philosophical ideas of the philosophers and scholars of the Byzantine Empire, especially between the 8th and 15th centuries. It was characterised by a Christian world-view, closely linked to Eastern Orthodox theology, but drawing ideas directly from the Greek texts of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists.
Neoplatonism is a version of Platonic philosophy that emerged in the 3rd century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The term does not encapsulate a set of ideas as much as a series of thinkers. Among the common ideas it maintains is monism, the doctrine that all of reality can be derived from a single principle, "the One".
The True Word is a lost treatise in which the ancient Greek philosopher Celsus addressed many principal points of early Christianity argued against their validity. In The True Word, Celsus attacked Christianity in three ways: by attacking its philosophical claims, by marking it as a phenomenon associated with the uneducated and lower class, and by cautioning his audience that it was a danger to the Roman Empire. Information concerning the work exists only in the extensive quotations from it in the Contra Celsum, written some seventy years later by the Christian Origen. These are believed to be accurate as far as they go, but may not give a fully comprehensive picture of the original work.
Philosophical theism is the belief that the Supreme Being exists independent of the teaching or revelation of any particular religion. It represents belief in God entirely without doctrine, except for that which can be discerned by reason and the contemplation of natural laws. Some philosophical theists are persuaded of God's existence by philosophical arguments, while others consider themselves to have a religious faith that need not be, or could not be, supported by rational argument.
Articles related to philosophy of religion include:
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy that existed through the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century until after the Renaissance in the 13th and 14th centuries. Medieval philosophy, understood as a project of independent philosophical inquiry, began in Baghdad, in the middle of the 8th century, and in France and Germany, in the itinerant court of Charlemagne in Aachen, in the last quarter of the 8th century. It is defined partly by the process of rediscovering the ancient culture developed in Greece and Rome during the Classical period, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate sacred doctrine with secular learning. This is one of the defining characteristics in this time period. Understanding God was the focal point of study of the philosophers at that time, Muslim and Christian alike.
Joseph Stephen O’Leary is an Irish Roman Catholic theologian. He studied literature and theology at Maynooth College. He also studied at the Gregorian University, Rome (1972-3) and in Paris (1977–79). Ordained for the Diocese of Cork and Ross in 1973, he was a chaplain at University College Cork (1980–81). He taught theology at the University of Notre Dame (1981–82) and Duquesne University (1982–83) before moving to Japan in August, 1983. He worked as a researcher at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nanzan University, Nagoya (1985–86), where he later held the Roche Chair for Interreligious Research (2015–16). He taught in the Faculty of Letters at Sophia University, Tokyo, from 1988 to 2015.
