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The Shape of Anglican Theology: Faith Seeking Wisdom by ScottMacDougall (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), viii + 153 pp. Modern Theology Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Brian Douglas
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The Experience of God: A Phenomenology of Revelation by RobynHorner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), ix + 226 pp. Modern Theology Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Brian W. Becker
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Living on This Earth as in Heaven: Time and the Ecological Conversion of Eschatology Modern Theology Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Gunnar Gjermundsen
Eschatological and apocalyptic patterns of thought are today prominent in environmental discourse, across multiple disciplines and media. Yet some theologians criticise these thought patterns for their role in perpetuating and even causing the environmental degradation we now witness. This article argues that the construal of salvation and the Kingdom as a future state is rooted in a misinterpretation
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The Resurrection of the Flesh: the ‘Peculiar Treasure’ of the Church Modern Theology Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Jon W. Thompson
This paper presents an argument for the recovery of the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. I argue that the doctrine accords with creedal and doctrinal tradition (§2), as well as the scriptural witness about the goodness and destiny of human flesh (§3). I then outline what it means to say – minimally – that the flesh (or ‘numerically the same body’) will be raised (§4). In §5, I argue that
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Aquinas on Prayer in the Eternal Trinity Modern Theology Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Michael Joseph Higgins
According to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr, the divine Persons eternally pray to each other. According to Thomas Aquinas, they do not. Thomas allows for ways in which the divine Persons worship, glorify, contemplate, and give thanks to each other. Yet he defines prayer as petition, and he teaches that the divine Persons cannot petition each other—which means that They cannot pray to
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Hindu-Christian Comparative Theology in a Decolonial Key Modern Theology Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Michelle Voss
This article imagines how the discipline of comparative theology might sound in a decolonial key. Focusing on implications for Hindu-Christian comparative theology, this article puts the sacramental theological approach of Indian Christian artist and theologian Jyoti Sahi into conversation with Michi Saagiig (Mississauga) Nishnaabeg theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's notion of land as pedagogy
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Confluences of the Islamic in Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics: Toward a Comparative Theo-Poetics with Islam Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Axel M. Oaks Takacs
This essay is an excavation of Islamic theological confluences in Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics. It likewise demonstrates how comparative theology facilitates the de-essentialization of religious traditions. This essay uses the Swiss theologian as a case study in exposing how someone apparently closed off from interreligious learning is still inadvertently shaped by non-Christian
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God as the Condition of Speech: An Interpretation of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's and Franz Rosenzweig's New Thinking Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Ron Katwan
The article offers an interpretation of the New Thinking of Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig. It first explains the New Thinking in juxtaposition with a philosophical tradition that views reality as a problem of knowledge and conceptualizes the I's relation to reality as accomplished primarily through thought. The New Thinking is defined by its effort to understand the human being's relation to reality
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Speaking (about) Substance: The Metaphysics of Rowan Williams and some Russian Philosophers Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Joshua Pulin Elvy Heath
Russian religious culture has been a constant and prominent element of Rowan Williams’ work. This article demonstrates the affinity of Williams’ metaphysics with the work of two Russian philosopher-theologians, whose influence on Williams is explicit: Sergii Bulgakov and Aleksei Losev. This affinity is drawn out by a close attention to the significance of the concept of substance in Williams’ metaphysics
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Metaphysics and Poetics Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-11-28 C.J.C. Pickstock
Metaphysics concerns the whole of reality, including the human spiritual response to reality. Pre-reflectively we do not divide these two, but reality includes the moment of reflection. For this reason, metaphysics and poetry are identical, and yet also distinguished. As distinguished, metaphysics must treat all as found, including the poetic, and link individual monads to the single infinite entirety
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Ahead by a Century Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-11-17 John Perry, D.T. Everhart
Paul Tyson's A Christian Theology of Science has convinced me that David Hume would not be able to affirm the Nicene Creed, though admittedly I didn't need much convincing. In fact, Tyson persuaded me of nearly all his claims about matters before, say, 1922. It is not as though I disagree with the rest, but that in telling the sweeping story of theology's fate in modernity—on which I agree with Tyson—he
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Response to Reviews of A Christian Theology of Science Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Paul Tyson
I am delighted and humbled that my exploratory thoughts on a Christian theology of science have received such serious attention from these five remarkable scholars, and in this Modern Theology forum. One could not hope for a more eminent set of reviewers or a more noble forum.
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Performative Theodicy: Edith Stein and the Recovery of Lamentation Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Peter Nguyen, Nicolae Roddy
In the context of contemporary mass atrocities and the search for justice, we offer a contemporary reading of the Book of Lamentations—a heartbreaking poem about a devastated city—through the witness of Edith Stein, a Jewish Catholic philosopher, educator, feminist, and Carmelite martyr of the Holocaust. Stein's own story of suffering gender and racial discrimination and her writings on empathy can
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Theology and Economy ‘after’ Barth Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Jared Michelson
The relation of theology and economy is a perennial theological challenge. Many contemporary theologians' understanding of this challenge is shaped by Karl Barth's attempt to resolve a set of tensions problematising this relation inherited from figures like Kant and Feuerbach. Barth ‘identified’ God's decision to be God with God's decision to be human. Further, he inconsistently but insistently claimed
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Language of Form, Form of Language, and the Poetic Christ Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-10-14 Olivier-Thomas Venard
This essay begins with a phenomenological outline of the interchangeability of the terms ‘form’ and ‘matter’, and the transitivity of their relationship in metaphysics and aesthetics, when placed in the context of linguistic deconstruction. It then argues for an operative, rather than resultative, approach to ‘form’, pointing out that in a created cosmos created minds only ever approach substantial
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Pelagianism Redivivus: The Free Will Theodicy for Hell, Divine Transcendence, and the End of Classical Theism Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Roberto J. De La Noval
This article argues against the “free will theodicy” for hell. It demonstrates how St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas considered this theodicy to be Pelagian and opposed to divine transcendence. It is shown that by claiming that God cannot cause the conversion of sinners without violating their freedom, the free will theodicy denies divine omnipotence, empties divine predestination of meaning, undermines
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Linguistic Interval as Spiritual Interplay: Przywara's “Dynamic Polarity” and Christian Language Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-09-19 Samuel Bickersteth
This article aims to reflect on how Erich Przywara's concept of the analogical “dynamic polarity” can contribute to contemporary discussions regarding the role of language in postmodern theology. By opposing Przywara to the philosophies of the likes of John Caputo and Jacques Derrida—in particular their concept of the khôra, and the former's “weak theology” —it intends to elucidate the possibility
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Augustinian Roots of Rawls's Second Principle of Justice: Grace and Fair Equality of Opportunity Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Paolo Santori
The debate over John Rawls's two principles of justice is ongoing. Among the many controversies, there is a hierarchal relationship within the second principle of justice. Scholars have long discussed the meaning and desirability of the lexical priority of the principle of fair equality of opportunity over the difference principle. The present article explores this topic from an unusual and underdeveloped
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The Trinity and the Arts: Toward a Christian Poetics Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-09-10 John R. Betz
The purpose of this essay is to explore the question of a Christian poetics, and to see what, if anything, the doctrine of the Trinity has to do with it. Our conclusion is that the doctrine of the Trinity, far from being accidental to Christian poiesis, is fundamental to any account of it—if indeed all phenomena are analogues of the eternal phenomenality of the Son vis-à-vis the Father, and if all
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Freedom and Necessity of the Creative Act: The Cosmological Aspect of Kandinsky's Principle of Inner Necessity Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Isabelle Moulin
This article argues that freedom in the divine creative act is better understood as a freedom of consent rather than freedom of will. However, even if some conundrums are thus avoided, one has to face the apparent antinomy between both God's creative act from His very nature and God's absolute freedom. Freedom of consent, as defined in David Burrell's works, finds a resonance with the French spiritualist
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Negation in Poetics and Theology Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-08-21 John Milbank
There is a certain parallel between ‘negative capability’ in poetics and negation in theology. However, the former should be understood after Coleridge, not Keats, as blending empathetic self-estrangement with expressive subjective involvement. Yet this only makes sense in terms of a participation in the transcendent. Similarly, negation in mystical theology is one moment in oscillation with the cataphatic
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The Nothing of Mallarmé with the Anxiety of Heidegger Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Jean-Luc Marion
In this short essay, Jean-Luc Marion pays fitting homage to Pierre Cahné by reading Stephen Mallarmé's “With her pure nails offering their onyx high, …/Ses pur ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx, …” sonnet of 1887 with Martin Heidegger's phenomenological concept of anxiety. On the speculative hypothesis that Mallarmé and Heidegger encounter the same phenomenon, as void and anxiety respectively, Marion
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After the World's End, before the Resurrection: Thinking Mourning and Christian Hope after Jacques Derrida Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Sarah Horton
In light of Jacques Derrida's writings on death and mourning, it may seem that the Christian teaching that the dead will be raised is a betrayal of others, a failure to take up one's responsibility to testify to those who have died. In conversation with Emmanuel Falque's work on finitude, Martin Heidegger's reading of 1 Thessalonians, and Søren Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham, I respond in two movements
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Transformation and Annihilation: Emmanuel Falque and Søren Kierkegaard on the Dialectic of Philosophy and Theology Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere, Elizabeth X. Li
In his recent work Hors phénomène, Emmanuel Falque identifies the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard as both a progenitor and exemplifier of his account of the way philosophy becomes more rigorously itself through an encounter with theology. However, this article challenges the affinity Falque claims to share with Kierkegaard. It argues instead that there is a fundamental philosophical discrepancy underlying
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Jesus Was a Refugee: Unpacking the Theological Implications Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Barnabas Aspray
This article is an in-depth exploration of the divine purpose for Jesus’ refugeehood (recorded in Matthew 2) and its theological implications. Part One finds three reasons for Jesus’ displacement: (1) to recapitulate the displacement in Israel's story, (2) to recapitulate the exile of Adam and Eve, (3) to point forward to the Church's calling to be ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world. From this basis
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Method in Mimetic Theory: René Girard and Christian Theology Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Anthony J. Scordino
This article elucidates the persistently nebulous methodological and disciplinary status of René Girard's mimetic theory, particularly vis-à-vis Christian theology. Whether “Girardian theology” strikes one as tautologous or oxymoronic, the proliferation of Girardian theological scholarship warrants a sustained analysis of Girard's methodological self-understanding as it is both proclaimed and performed
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Burrell's Critical Thomism: Aquinas and Kant Revisited Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Jack E. V. Norman
David Burrell's version of Aquinas was written with Kantian parallels in mind. This is the accusation of John Milbank that was questioned by Nicholas Lash and Paul DeHart in a series of articles. ‘Burrell's Critical Thomism’ shows beyond doubt that Milbank's claim is correct: Burrell cites Kant throughout his oeuvre and finds parallels between Aquinas and Kant's philosophies. However, this article
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A Letter that Killeth: Gregory of Nyssa on How (Not) to Read Scripture, Platonically Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-07-12 ISIDOROS C. KATSOS
In this essay, I explore the emergence of multicolumn Bibles in late antiquity, with a particular emphasis on Origen's Hexapla and its use by Gregory of Nyssa. I contextualise Gregory's use of multicolumn Bibles within the Origenian tradition and show that, in this intellectual context, multicolumn Bibles functioned as hermeneutical rather than text-critical devices. I argue that the best explanation
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The Who, What, and How of Wisdom: An Exploration in Karl Barth and his ‘Descendants’ Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Kyle McCracken
In light of recent interest among theologians in the category of wisdom, I offer my own reflection on the theme vis-à-vis the theology of Karl Barth, as well as two of his theological 'descendants' who have given a programmatic place to 'wisdom’ in their seminal projects: David Ford and David Kelsey. I structure this exploration according to three fundamental questions: 1. With whom is wisdom identified
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‘In Contemplation only’: Revisiting the Debate between the Chalcedonians and Anti-Chalcedonians on the Reality of the Natures of Christ Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Sebastian Mateiescu
Although a theological exchange of ideas between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians flourished at the end of the twentieth century, the ecumenical achievements of these discussions have been met with notable objections and critiques by theologians. This article focuses on one key notion that was highlighted for having been left unresolved in the ecumenical discussions, namely the concept
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Confederate Theology: Robert Lewis Dabney and the Theological Afterlife of Slavery Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-05-07 Matt R. Jantzen
In the wake of social movements to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces and expose suppressed legacies of white supremacy in the United States, this article uncovers an influential and overtly white supremacist tradition of US Christian theology through a case study of the Reformed theologian Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898). Regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most prolific theological
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Theological Genealogies of Modernity: An Introduction Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-05-07 Darren Sarisky
This special issue of Modern Theology gathers together full research essays that were first presented, in summary form, at the 2021 online conference Theological Genealogies of Modernity. For both the original event and now this collection, theological genealogies of modernity serves as a term of art referring to any complex, broad-sweep narrative account of the rise of a modern Western cultural order
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Football, Mysticism, Thomistic Poetics Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Jose Isidro Belleza
This essay will especially consider the role of the cogitative power and affectivity in the formation of vocal utterances, showing how the Thomistic account of the integration of passion with reason provides a fascinating apparatus for assessing different uses of language—from the Eucharistic hymns of Aquinas, to the poetry of his Franciscan contemporaries Bonaventure and Iacopone da Todi, and even
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Election, Favoritism, and Freedom: Towards a Modern Jewish Theology of Matrilineal Descent Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-04-09 Judah Isseroff
This article offers an account of the broad theological contours of the Jewish practice of matrilineal descent. I make the case that matrilineality epitomizes God's contingent preference in favoring and electing Israel. I link Mara Benjamin's recent work to recuperate asymmetrical power relations for feminist theology to the asymmetrical relationship inherent in God's election of Israel. With Benjamin
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Forgiveness and the Novelty of Christian Ethics Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-04-02 Andrew Errington
Christian faith, and particularly Christian Ethics, must wrestle with the questions of novelty and continuity posed by Scripture's declaration that a new thing has occurred with the advent of Jesus Christ. The contrasting perspectives on the Law by Thomas Aquinas and Herman Bavinck focus these questions and suggest that forgiveness is an important point of reference for answering them. The importance
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Neither Progress nor Regress: The Theological Substructure of T. F. Torrance's Genealogy of Modern Theology Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Darren Sarisky
T. F. Torrance's corpus of historical and theological writings contains genealogical reflections on the field of Christian doctrine. The basic shape of the genealogy is determined by what Torrance calls certain “ultimates,” theological commitments that derive their justification not from other beliefs that possess more authority than they themselves do, but from the way in which they seek to depict
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Witnesses to the Living God: Three Paradigms for Approaching the Politics of Nouvelle Théologie* Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Samuel Pomeroy
The figures associated with nouvelle théologie were shaped by, and in turn gave shape to, their own chapter of the modernist crisis, which Étienne Fouilloux defines as “the rereading of the foundational message [of the gospel] in the light of [nineteenth-century] scientific advancements.”1 Insofar as this crisis of dogmatic authority and religious experience called into question the relationship of
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Normativity and the Critical Functions of Genealogy: The Case of Modern Science1 Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-03-15 Peter Harrison
The first part of this article offers some general remarks about genealogical approaches to history, focusing on historical narratives that stress the role played by theological considerations in the formation of aspects of secular modernity. A central question is whether such genealogies can serve to critique the present without drawing upon contestable moral or religious commitments. I suggest that
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Employing Genealogies Responsibly in Theology: A Proposal Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Silvianne Aspray
Genealogical writing has become influential in theology in the past decades. This article critically evaluates the use of the genre of ‘genealogy’ in theology, suggesting that theologians should employ genealogies in (1) an involved and (2) conjectural way. It argues that it generally benefits any genealogy to be involved and conjectural, before showing why there are genuinely theological reasons for
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Negative Theology: Some Misunderstandings Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-03-06 Rowan Williams
Much discussion of ‘negative theology’ seems to assume that it is simply a policy of not making strong truth-claims about God, even of refusing the positive content of revelation. This essay proposes a typology of negative theologies—grammatical, qualificatory, metaphysical and descriptive—looking at the various points from which negation may arise as an appropriate strategy for adequate or truthful
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The Spirit of Modernity and its Fate Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-02-24 Ragnar M. Bergem
This article presents an interpretation of the rise of theological genealogies as a response to the sense in modern theology that modernity is afate. It suggests that theologians began to write genealogies to ease this sense that modernity is an inescapable condition. While it recognises that some of these genealogies have been partly successful in this endeavour, it also points out how a number of
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Genderealogy: Erasure and Repair Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-02-19 Christine Helmer, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft
This essay addresses the problem of the sexed and gendered subject of genealogy, and the binary central to the fixing of male agents in the self-narration of disciplines in genealogy. Feminist and womanist theories are considered for their strategies of repair, such as the retrieval of women erased from genealogy, the repositioning of women as transgressive subjects from an hermeneutical perspective
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Metaphysics as Prayer: Introducing Ferdinand Ulrich Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-02-13 D. C. SCHINDLER
Adapting Hegel's division of poetry into the three modes, epic, lyric, and drama, Hans Urs von Balthasar characterized his own distinctive approach to theology as “dramatic,” indicating by that term an integration of the objective, conceptual dimension of the epic mode and the subjective, existential dimension of the lyric mode. This essay proposes that the German thinker Ferdinand Ulrich (1931-2020)
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Barth's Repetition* Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Timothy Stanley
In chapter three of volume 1.2 (§19-21) of the Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth provided one of his most thoroughgoing accounts of the concept of scripture. Throughout, he held in tension the Word of God with the frailty of the Bible's human words. As Barth explored this two-fold aspect of the Bible, he relied upon the concept of repetition. However, what has not been fully appreciated is how repetition
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Imagining God Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Judith Wolfe
This article interrogates the role of the human imagination in ordinary perception and orientation, in encounters with art, and in practices of faith. Philosophers and psychologists have long argued that perception is irreducibly imaginative, in the sense that to perceive intelligibly is, in part, to integrate sensory data into forms or wholes that are not simply given. The ability to do this is what
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Being Wounded: Finitude and the Infinite in Jean Louis Chrétien and Gregory of Nyssa Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Thomas Breedlove
Wounds appear throughout the writings of Jean-Louis Chrétien and Gregory of Nyssa. Most well known in Chrétien's corpus is his description of prayer as a “wounded word,” a phrase that seeks to describe an ungraspable dimension of phenomenal life in which the contingency and groundlessness of finitude appear as gifts. Gregory, in turn, draws upon the language of wounding in the Song of Songs to describe
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Discerning Providence: How the Reign of God in Liberation Theology Explicates Divine Struggle as a Feature of Providence Modern Theology Pub Date : 2023-01-15 Andrew Hayes
Recently there has been rising interest in the doctrine of providence with a number of significant texts being published in English. In general, these and past treatments consolidate established discussions (such as those concerning divine action and causality, human and divine agency and the problem of suffering) rather than engaging liberative theologies of any variety. This article aims to demonstrate
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Either (Nietzsche) / Or (Aristotle)? Macintyre's modernity and the enduring relevance of Kierkegaard Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-12-14 Joel D. S. Rasmussen
This essay situates Alasdair MacIntyre's typology of moral enquiry in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry relative to his critique of Søren Kierkegaard in After Virtue to offer an alternative reading of Kierkegaard's Either/Or to the one MacIntyre proposes. The essay shows that MacIntyre's reading of Kierkegaard's Either/Or fails to register that in important respects Kierkegaard's counterpoint of
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Conceiving Mary's Agency: Towards a Barthian Mariology Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-12-13 Christopher PAUL de Stigter
This essay argues for the possibility of a ‘Barthian’ Mariology particularly through an analysis of human agency. I first show that Karl Barth's articulation of Mary in I/2 of the Church Dogmatics marginalizes Mary's agency in part due to his anti-Roman Catholic polemic and his gender binary. I then correct Barth with Barth by showing how his mature Christology advances an account of human agency commensurate
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Poetics as Praise: ‘Theology and Literature’, Shakespeare and Doxology Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Valentin Gerlier
This essay challenges the assumption that ‘theology and literature’ deals with two sealed off orders of words, the former establishing a doctrinal ground to which the latter provides merely comparative or corroborative material. It argues instead that language itself, understood as a theological phenomenon, provides the ground through which these two disciplines coincide. This phenomenon can be encountered
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Occasions for Scarcity: From Ecology towards Theology by Way of Poetry Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Peter Larkin
This article begins with an examination of the contested term ‘scarcity’, tracing it through its signal presence in economics, then mutating within ecology, eventually appearing on the margins of theology. If poetry is to offer some degree of mediation, the article considers what would be the basis of an appropriate poetics, one which must be derived from the underlying material basis of composition
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Genealogies of Truth: Theology, Philosophy and History Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-11-01 John Milbank
Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This not only contradicts the Incarnation, but has its own genealogical origins in a dubious loss of Christian philosophy as an integral enterprise. In general, genealogy can be seen as negative or positive. Negative genealogy alternatively traces a break with myth, as with early philosophy, or else, as with
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Divine and Human Love in the Philosophy of Miklos Vetö (1936-2020) Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-10-29 Beáta Tóth
During recent decades there has been an upsurge of studies exploring the nature and conditions of human love. This article examines an original and consciously Christian approach by the Hungarian-French philosopher, Miklós Vetö, who builds his innovative account of love on trinitarian foundations (Court traité sur l'amour, L'Harmattan, 2020). His ‘expanded’ metaphysics lays bare the theological content
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A Jewish View of Contemporary Ideas of The Trinity Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Alan Brill
Can Jews get beyond treating the Trinity as tri-theism? The essay reviews the relationship between Jewish theological notions of God and Christian understandings of the doctrine of the Trinity to move beyond the seeming impasse. Recent scholarship shows that Jews do not possess a pristine monotheism. Instead, Jewish theology often included complex views of God. In addition, currently Jews and Christians
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Approaching God Aesthetically in Modern Jewish Thought Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Daniel Rynhold
Drawing on the writings of the twentieth-century rabbi-philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-93), and in particular his observations on the nature and value of the aesthetic, this article sketches one element of a larger project that will explore an aesthetic approach to God and religion. The claim here is that bringing Soloveitchik into dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche, and in particular Nietzsche’s
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Jewish Theology and its Sources: A Review Essay Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-10-01 Devorah Schoenfeld
The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology1 presents a wide range of sources for contemporary Jewish theology. Part of it consists of chapters that describe a thinker or a body of work, including the Bible, Rabbinic Theology, daily liturgy, Rambam, Kabbalah, Rav Kook, Rosenzweig and Levinas. A second part consists of synthetic or constructive work addressing theological questions on the nature of theology
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The Nature and Destiny of Niebuhr’s Augustine Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Martin Westerholm
This essay poses a twofold question regarding the Augustine who influenced Niebuhr’s work: to which of the many versions of Augustine was Niebuhr drawn? What has happened to this Augustine across the reception of Niebuhr’s thought? As a first matter, I argue that Niebuhr was helped to resolve long-standing questions not by Augustine the pessimistic realist, but rather by the distinctively analogical
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Redeeming Poetics Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Steven Toussaint
In this essay, I argue that ‘poetics’—defined as ‘poet-criticism’, a practitioner’s firsthand reflection on poetic composition (poiēsis) and verse technique (technē)—makes possible for philosophical theology something that has heretofore been overlooked. I contend that Martin Heidegger’s rendition of the poetic ‘afflatus’, which travesties technē variously as an eidetic, violent, and inauthentic aspect
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The End of Macro-Narratives of Progress? History, Christian Theology, and the Anthropocene Modern Theology Pub Date : 2022-09-26 Brad S. Gregory
The dominant modern Western macro-narrative of historical change from the Middle Ages to the present has been a positive one of progress, all things considered. Most of those critical of the trajectory’s imperfect realization nevertheless defend its central ideals and the extension of opportunities to unjustly excluded persons. Such ideals include the politically protected right of individuals to live