Abstract: Christianity, Alfred North Whitehead observes, 'has always been a religion seeking a metaphysics'.1 What makes theology inherently metaphysical are the truth-claims which center on the nature and acts of God. Metaphysics is comprised of ontology and cosmology. Many of the specialized concepts of theology such as 'God', 'incarnation', and 'omnipotence', are directly ontological notions; other central notions concerning the human relation to God are common notions in general ontology, such as the ideas of 'free will' and a 'soul'. And many of the concepts dealing with God's relation with the world, like the notions of 'creation' and 'miracle', are matters of cosmology. Additionally, besides the direct use of metaphysical concepts, numerous theological conceptions indirectly involve metaphysical presuppositions. Thus the notions of the eschaton and of the immortality of the soul cannot be understood apart from an analysis of these ideas in terms of a wider background scheme in metaphysics, a scheme which would both give meaning to these notions and show how such states of affairs could be possible.KeywordsConceptual RelativismConceptual SchemaAnalytic PhilosophyOrdinary LanguagePhilosophic SystemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 1986
Publication Date: 1986-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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