Prophecy and Our Return to God: Dialogue or Theory?
[Thesis]
Peters, Mark Randall
Ramelow, Anselm
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
2020
119 p.
M.A.
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
2020
The biblical prophets are believed to have spoken for God so that men and women in all times and places may know his will, turn toward him in repentance, and thereby have the knowledge to live according to their full created nature. How the prophets came to possess this knowledge was understood to have both natural and supernatural characteristics. Human dignity as revealed through the Hebrew prophets concerned the dialogue between heaven and earth in terms of the exitus-reditus. Platonic and Aristotelian theories on the structure of the soul's intellectual powers led the medieval thinkers of the Abrahamic tradition to divergent conclusions regarding human beings' return to God. Competing paradigms of divine emanation led to varying conclusions regarding human freedom. Aquinas's metaphysics of the human intellect developed from his disputations between c.1259-1273 contributes to a more unambiguous account of the intellect's freedom than did earlier writers on the reception of prophecy. It, therefore, provides a more accurate analysis of the prophetic act in divine revelation.