LEGATO...

As a matter of first principles in apologetics, we can ask, “What does the unbeliever know about God?” However, the biblical apologetic is shaped not only by what Scripture says the unbeliever knows, but also by what it reveals he can know; is capable of knowing, as a believer. So we might also ask, “Is it our hope that the unbeliever can know God as God knows himself or that he can know God reflectively, in a creaturely way?” This is the univocal/analogical problem in Christian epistemology.  The question arises in the context of the structure of human thought. It bears its own unique dilemma. If we stress too excessively that knowledge of God is univocal we run the risk of lowering the incomprehensible God to the level of the finite and make God as one of us. But if we stress too emphatically knowledge of God per analogiam we may very well deprive God of all likeness to the humanity he has created with the result that all we are left with is a barren, abstraction. To a cons...

Long before Arendt, we have Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempting freedom without authority in society. Once Rousseau experienced the conversion of his soul from academies and culture to the freedom and warm sentiment of nature, in 1750, he wrote his Discourse (First Discourse), in which he tried to show that the arts and sciences were the result of human vice, not virtue, and the cause of the slippery slope in Europe toward moral decline. He developed this thought further in his second Discourse on the Origins of Inequality , where he set over and against the genuine misery of the social conditions of his day the ideal of the “nature state.”  Here the potential for people living together with the charm of nature as the central defining emblem of life compelled them to live as a free, sane, and good; in peace and solidarity, not in warlike aggression.   In his Social Contract , he envisions the state emerging from a hypothetical contract in which the citizens do not surrend...