NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 64, Issue 2, 2010

The author argues that individual usage and appropriation of religious traditions has become increasingly important. Therefore, church leaders and pastors should pay more attention to the psychological functions of religion. On the one hand religion serves as a source of existential meaning-making and on the other hand as a powerful glue of group identities. By discussing the psychological theories of Erik H. Erikson, Hubert Read More

This article offers a bird’s-eye view of the position of the church towards the state, ending in a description of the church’s relationship to democracy. In addition, the authors sketch Dingemans’s view of the role of the church in society and describe possibilities for relevant speaking and acting of the church in the public domain, both at the national level and at the local level of villages and housing estates. Special attentio Read More

Current discussions about religion and the pre-political foundations of liberal democracies tend to distinguish only between the private and the public realm. In order to do more justice to the meaning of religion, a plea is held to discern and explore a dimension beyond the private and the public: the domain of the sacred. Inspired by the work of Rudolf Otto and Eric Voegelin, the relevance of the sacred for both the private Read More

The argument of this article falls into three parts. In the first part, three models are outlined that describe the relationship between religious ethics and secular reason: (i) a ‘proprium model’ stating that religious ethics has a specific content that cannot be supplied by secular reason, (ii) a ‘harmony model’ stressing the overlap of religious values and secular reason, and (iii) a ‘separation model’ emphasizing the disjunction Read More

The author questions Gijs Dingemans’s account of a pluralist morality for the world by arguing that he disregards the crucial relation between basic moral rules and secondary rules and therefore overlooks the problem of the radical pluralism that follows from local interpretations of those basic rules. Showing in what ways pluralism differs from monism or dogmatism as well as from radical relativism, the author proceeds to deve Read More

In this response to the contributions in this special issue dedicated to his latest book In vredesnaam, Gijs Dingemans first indicates several major recent changes in the world views of western societies. Next, he indicates how the role of churches and religions has changed over the last 25 years, from ‘dominance’ to ‘dialogue’. Finally, he analyzes how a theological position that puts the concept of the covenant central stage Read More