Bücher von James Kellenberger

This book addresses the place of religious knowledge in religion, particularly within Christianity. The book begins by examining the difference between the general concepts of knowledge and belief, the relation between faith and knowledge, and reasons why belief as faith, and not knowledge, is central to the Abrahamic religions.The book explores the ambivalence about religious knowledge within Christianity. Some religious thinkers explicitly accepted and sought religious knowledge, as did St. Thomas Aquinas, while others, notably Soren Kierkegaard, cast knowledge and seeking it as incompatible with faith. The book also examines two antithetical religious intuitions about knowledge, both at home in the Christian tradition. For one, faith requires a struggle with doubt. For the other, faith requires a certainty that excludes doubt. For the first, religious knowledge would destroy faith. For the second, religious knowledge is compatible with faith and completes it.Though the book focuses on the Christian tradition, it also considers other traditions, including a chapter on the place of religious knowledge in nontheistic religious traditions. The final chapter examines how coming to Wisdom as personified in the Jewish and Christian traditions may be distinct from attaining religious knowledge.

In The Asymptote of Love, James Kellenberger develops a theory of religious love that resists essentialist definitions of the term and brings into conversation historical debates on love in Western philosophy and Christian theology. He argues that if love can be likened to a mathematical asymptote, which is a straight line that infinitely approaches a curve but never quite reaches it, then the asymptote of love reaches toward the infinite endpoint of love at its uttermost, namely, God's love. Drawing upon a broad range of thinkers who have put forth classic debates on love-such as St. Augustine of Hippo, Anders Nygren, and St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as some lesser known figures in the debate, such as Leo Tolstoy and Albert Schweitzer-Kellenberger explains the profound connection between human agape and God's infinite love in its capacity to offer both directive guidance and to exist beyond human conception.

Discusses the complexities and paradoxes of love as represented in the history of Western philosophy and Christianity.

This book addresses the different forms that religious belief can take. The book addresses the issue of the relation between belief and faith, the issue of what Soren Kierkegaard called the subjectivity of faith, and the issue of the relation between religious belief and religious experience.

This book addresses several dimensions of religious revelation. In the book's final chapter a particularly significant form of religious revelation is identified and examined: pervasive revelation.

This book explores religious epiphanies in which there is the appearance of God, a god or a goddess, or a manifestation of the divine or religious reality as received in human experience.

This book is about religion, pacifism, and the nonviolence that informs pacifism in its most coherent form. Although moral support for pacifism is presented, a main focus of the book is on religious support for pacifism, found in various religious traditions.

As it is possible for individuals to come into the presence of God - to have this phenomenal experience - so it is possible for them to come into the presence of persons. Kellenberger explores how coming into the presence of persons is structurally analogous with coming into the presence of God.