By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
The conceptuality/ terminology of theistic religion includes distinctive concepts/terms of two main types: one type for the strictly ultimate reality that "God" is not the only, but only one "optional" way of re-presenting; and the other type for the realities -- persons or things -- that, in turn, re-present God (as strictly ultimate reality). Meister Eckhart's "deitas" is an example of the first type of concept/term, the New Testament, "υιος του θεου" of the second.
Significantly, "deitas" is as "'God-dependent" as "υιος του θεου." And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the Mahayana Buddhist distinction between "dharmakaya-as-suchness" and "dharmakaya-as-compassion."
The task of the philosopher of religion, presumably, is to introduce a "novel verbal characterization, rationally coordinated," that is, as one could say in Hick's terms, "less upayic." I submit that "the whole," in the sense of "the one that is all," or "the one from, through, and to (or for) which are all things" is just the concept/term that is called for.
24 May 2009
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