Jonathan Rutledge

img_1374Hometown
Arlington, Texas (USA)

Education
PhD in Divinity, University of St Andrews (2018)
MA & PhD in Philosophy, University of Oklahoma (2013, 2016)
BA in Philosophy, Baylor University (2010)

About
Jonathan’s research in theology focuses on the nature of divine-human reconciliation with a specific emphasis on the importance of forgiveness & sacrificial theories atonement. His interests also include important issues in moral & political theology; most noticeably, a push to allow notions of restorative justice to supplant a common assumption that strong retributivism characterizes the moral realm.

He previously received a PhD from the University of Oklahoma, under the supervision of Linda T Zagzebski, where he specialized in epistemology and philosophy of religion. He has particular interests in theories of epistemic rationality that fall within the tradition inspired by Richard Foley, especially in applying such theories to the debate concerning skeptical theism as a response to the problem of suffering. Additional areas of interest in philosophy for him include Philosophical Arminianism as an epistemic model of creation and providence and meta-epistemology; that is, questions concerning the place of various epistemic concepts (e.g. intellectual virtues, evidence, justification vs. rationality) and their importance for figuring out what we should do or think.

Thesis Topic
I’m writing on the nature of forgiveness as it has been informed by the Christian tradition. The project is partly exegetical in deriving the fundamental understanding of Christian forgiveness from Biblical texts, partly theological in implementing that understanding of forgiveness as a constraint on the adequacy of other theological topics such as atonement and eschatology, and partly philosophical insofar as all of the above work requires a careful analysis of theological models and an acute sensitivity to the vast resources of the philosophical literature on the nature of forgiveness.

Publications
 “Analyzing the Muddles of ‘Analysis’: (Some of) What Analytic Theologians Can Learn  from the History of Analytic Feminism,Modern Theology (forthcoming).
“Tempering the Cosmic Scope Problem for Christian Soteriology: Hylemorphic Animalism and Gregory of Nazianzus,” Religious Studies (forthcoming).

“Perspectival Skeptical Theism,” Faith and Philosophy (forthcoming).

“Purgatory, Hypertime and Temporal Experience,” Journal of Analytic Theology (forthcoming).

“Retributivism Rejected: A Restorative Hope for Justice in the Age to Come,” in Being Saved: Explorations in Soteriology and Human Ontology, edited by Marc Cortez, Joshua Farris, and Mark Hamilton (London: SCM Press, forthcoming).

“Original Sin, the Fall, and Epistemic Self-Trust,” TheoLogica (forthcoming).

“Commonsense, Skeptical Theism, and Different Sorts of Closure of Inquiry Defeat,” Faith and Philosophy 34.1 (2017): 17-32.

“Skeptical Theism, Moral Skepticism & Epistemic Propriety,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81.3 (2017): 263-272.

“The Parent Analogy: A Reassessment,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (forthcoming)

“An Epistemological Corrective for Doctrines of Assurance,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9.1 (2017): 163-177.

Review of Locating Atonement, edited by Oliver Crisp & Fred Sanders (Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies)

Review of The Problem of Evil, by Peter van Inwagen (Gifford Lecture Book Review)

Review of Exemplarist Moral Theory, by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (Gifford Lecture Book Review)

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