Wolfgang Achtner

Protestantism has always been at odds with a mystical encounter with God. It is true that Luther had struggled hard to go the mystical ladder towards God. However he abandoned this way when he realized his spiritual break through in 1517 and formulated then his doctrine of justification. Ever since there has been a continuing fight of protestants against the mystic way. However, recent scholarship has tried to recover the mystic tradition for protestants and even for Luther himself. In this article for the first time a thorough docmatic justification is offered to reconcile the mystic way with the doctrine of justification.

This article gives in its the first part an account of the famous "Mystical Nights" which were celebrated from 2011-2015 at various locations in Giessen/Germany, such as various churches but also in the assembly hall of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen Germany. These "Mystical Nights" were designed as synesthesia events including scientific lectures, music, vidioinstallation, theater, art, literature and public meditation. In the second part of the paper the theological problem is raised what kind of experience mystical experiences are. The answer to this question is of utmost importance for Christian Theology, because it touches the very core of salvation and how mysticism is theologically judged. The answer depends on what is experienced in mystical encounters. Does the mystic, psychologically interpreted, his self, does he, philosophically interpreted, pure being, or does he, theologically interpreted, God? Possible answers are being discussed.

Hermann Grassmann is known to be the founder of modern vector and tensor calculus. Having as a theologian no formal education in mathematics at a university he got his basic ideas for this mathematical innovation at least to some extent from listening to Schleiermacher's lectures on Dialectics and, together with his brother Robert, reading its publication in 1839. The paper shows how the idea of unity and various levels of reality first formulated in Schleiermacher's talks about religion in 1799 were transformed by him into a philosophical system in his dialectics and then were picked up by Grassmann and operationalized in his philosophical-mathematical treatise on the extension theory (German: Ausdehnungslehre) in 1844.

This article treats three topics. First it shows that the problem of free will depends on a specific anthropology. The Greek philosophy and the natural science in the first part of the 20th century did not have a concept of will at all. Second it describes the development in the Occidential Church which elaborates an anthropology culminating in the concept of the liberum arbitrium in St. Thomas Aquinas encompassing volutas and ratio. In contrast to that development William of Occam's voluntrism rejects the very idea of liberum arbitrium. These two basic theological concepts of anthropology/will are compared with modern findings about will activity in neuroscience. The article contends that six levels of liberty of will activity can be discerned. rea

This paper is about the role of images and metaphors in the writings and sermons of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. It tries to point out why at the one hand Eckhart uses a whole buch of images and at the other side criticises the usage of images and metaphors

Four types of free will are identified from the history of theology: The type of the liberum arbitrium, the type of nominalism, the type of mysticism and the type of justification. For the first three types a psychological interpretation in terms of pre-autonomy, autonomy, and trans-autonomy is offered, based on self-transcendence as a religious feature. Two basically opposing interpretations of the same empirical data favoring free will and favoring a non-free will are discussed and compared with the theological tradition. A new notion of the person, based on the system theory, is suggested as a bridging concept to link the theological and neuro-scientific ideas of free will.

This paper in German deals about three forms of human time-consciousness, mythological-cyclical, rational-linear, and mystic-holistic consciousness. It turns out in an cross coltural comparison that the mystic-holistic consciousness of time can be identified in all world religions.

This article is about the question whether or not human religiousness can be interpreted and explained by evolution. First four concepts of evolution are introduced and discussed (general, teleological, functional, Darwinian). It turns out that a purely functional understanding of evolution proves to be to narrow. It is argued that only a combination between an essentialist and functionalist understanding of religion is sustainable. From this perspective a taxonomy of religions is developed to classify them. The core of the argument is that religion can be understood as a continuing process of selftranscendence. Thus the aspects of rite, myth, mysticism can be understood as results of this process of selftranscendence. Finally the relation between human religiousness and Christian belief is being discussed.

In modern philosophy of religion the distinction between functional and essential understanding of religion is important. In this paper I argue that this distinction is superficial because both aspects are always intertwined. In addition the first scholar who tried to reconcile evolution and religion with regard to the evolution of religion, Gustab Jäger 19th century zoologist is introduced

In this paper I discuss the problem if the theory of evolution is compatible with a religious interpretation of creation or necessarily leads to atheism. Various models to combine evolution with theism which were developed in history are being discussed in their weaknesses and strength. It turns out however that the most difficult problem is the reconciliation of salvation history with the contingency of evolutionary developments. They seem mutually exclusive

This article is about the relation between God and time. After tracking the history of the relation between God and time in theology time concepts in modern physics are related to theology. The main argument of the article is that talking about God and time is only possible under the auspicies of holding a certain time-perspective

The paper shows the histroy of the concept of in infinity starting with the Aristotelian understanding and the way it was perceived by the church fathers. The watershed in the writings of Nicolaus of Cusa (Cusanus) is elucidated and show how continually it changes from theology to metaphysics and mathematics culminating in Georg Cantors revolutionary mathematics

The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher is regarded as the Church father of Protestant Theology in the 19th century. It is not well known that he was a highly gifted lay-mathematician. In his book "Talks on religion..." he contends a mystically oriented notion of religion which reoccurs in his later lecture on dialectis. This obviously influenced and inspired Hermann Grassmann, also a theologian and lay mathematician to develop a new kind of mathematics - precurser of modern vector an tensor analysis - in his groundbreaking book "Ausdehnungslehre" from 1844 (second edition 1862). Thus we have here an interesting influence of theologogy/religion on the development of mathematics.

The talk argues that human consiousness has three types of time experience, mythological-cyclic, linear-rational and mystic-holistic. It favours the integration of all three of them and shows that they are existing in a cross - religious comparison

This paper gives an overview about the development of evolutionary theories of religion. It distinguishes four types namely: (i) a common sense understanding of evolution, (ii) evolution as proceeding to higher levels, (iii) the teleological model of evolution, and (iv) the functional evolutionary notion of religion. Every category is illustrated by an important historical example. Examples are from: for category (i) antiquity and historicism; for category (ii) Schleiermacher, Hegel, Comte, Tylor, Frazer, Bachofen, and Bellah; for category (iii) Aristotle, Paley, and Chardin; and for category (iv) Jäger, Malinowski, D.S. Wilson, E.O. Wilson, Voland. A certain development in complexity of these theories can be observed. The sequence in this development is like this: (a) level of religious consciousness (Schleiermacher, Hegel); (b) correlation between religious consciousness and society (Comte, Tylor); (c) function of particular religions in particular societies (Malinowski). Though functional evolutionary theories of religion dominate the current discussion, their shortcomings are being discussed in Sect. 18.3 and a model is proposed to combine functional and essential features of religion in order to come to a comprehensive understanding of religion, which is not exhausted by its function . Various possibilities to understand the essence of religions are proposed, such as doctrines, transcendence , and experience.

In this article the author ponders the question as to whether there is an intrinsic relation between mathematics and theology with regard to their understanding of truth. Various concepts of truth drawn from philosophy (Plato, Aristotle) and theology (e.g. scripture, apophatic theology, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Ockham, Luther, Scholz, Barth, Pannenberg) are introduced. The concept of truth in mathematics with its relation to proof is discussed with regard to results in proof theory acquired by Gödel and Gentzen. The basic idea is that there is an interesting analogy between the way mathematical truth is sought in Gentzen's work and in apophatic theology.

In diesem Paper, das ein Probekapitel eines neuen Buchprojektes ist, wird der Begriff der Ewigkeit erläutert. Dabei werden drei vierschiedene Konzepte von Ewigkeit vorgestellt und geistesgeschichtlich verortet, Ewigkeit als unendliche Zeit, Ewigkeit als Zeitlosigkeit und Ewigkeit als Allzeitlichkeit