Revelation and the Veridicality of Narratives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.2021.3734Abstract
On Christian doctrine, God is love; and the love of God is most manifest in Christ’s passion. The passion of Christ thus matters to philosophical theology’s examination of the divine attribute of love. But the passion of Christ is presented in a biblical story, and there are serious methodological questions about the way in which a biblical story can be used as evidence in philosophical theology. And these questions in turn raise deeper epistemological questions. How does any narrative transmit knowledge? And what counts as veridicality in a narrative? This paper deals with some of the questions for philosophical theology and then concentrates on the more general epistemological questions about narratively transmitted knowledge.
References
Armstrong, Regis J., J. A. W. Hellmann, and William Short, eds. 1999. Francis of Assisi: The Saint. New York: New City Press.
Cousins, Ewert. 1978. Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God. New York: Paulist Press.
Cruz, Helen de, and Johan de Smedt. 2018. “Emotional Responses to Fiction: An Evolutionary Perspective”. In The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy, edited by Richard Joyce, 387–98. New York, London: Routledge.
Currie, Gregory. 2010. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
—. 2020. Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Hill, Edmund, Michael Fiedrowicz, Matthew O’Connell, and John E. Rotelle, eds. 2002. Saint Augustine: On Genesis. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press.
Landy, Joshua. 2012. How to Do Things with Fictions. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Stump, Eleonore. 1999. “Orthodoxy and Heresy”. Faith and Philosophy, no. 16: 487–503. doi:10.5840/faithphil199916217.
—. 2010. Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
van Fraassen, Bas C. 2002. The Empirical Stance. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
