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The concept of human dignity has been stripped from its traditional context in Christian thought, becoming "a moral trump frayed by heavy use," but a compelling alternate vision has not yet emerged. "God and Human Dignity" offers a fresh restatement of the nature and scope of human dignity in Christian perspective. Theologians, ethicists, and biblical scholars from around the world here examine the dimensions of human worth in the light of sacred Scripture, doctrine, and ecclesial practice. In contrast to modernity's often monochromatic accounts of human dignity in terms of freedom or rationality, these essays argue that human dignity in Christian perspective is a "many-splendored thing" reflecting humanity's participation in the divine drama of creation, redemption, and new creation. Representing disciplines across the academic spectrum, the essays in "God and Human Dignity" offer systematic and scriptural perspectives on human dignity that connect to a host of pressing contemporary issues. Contributors: C. Clifton Black, Russell Botman, Don Browing, J. Kameron Carter, Elaine Graham, Robert W. Jensen, James L. Mays, M. Douglas Meeks, Esther Menn, Peter Ochs, John Polkinghorne, Hans Reinders, Gerhard Sauter, Christoph Schwvbel, R. Kendall Soulen, Fraser Watts, Michael Welker, and Linda Woodhead.D
How can the psychotherapist think about not knowing? Is psychoanalysis a contemplative practice? This book explores the possibility that there are resources in philosophy and theology which can help psychoanalysts and psychotherapists think more clearly about the unknown and the unknowable. The book applies the lens of apophasis to psychoanalysis,
This book introduces students to Christian mysticism and modern critical responses to it. Christianity has a rich tradition of mystical theology that first emerged in the writings of the early church fathers, and flourished during the Middle Ages. Today Christian mysticism is increasingly recognised as an important Christian heritage relevant to today's spiritual seekers. The book sets out to provide students and other interested readers with access to the main theoretical approaches to Christian mysticism – including those propounded by William James, Steven Katz, Bernard McGinn, Michael Sells, Denys Turner and Caroline Walker-Bynum. It also explores postmodern re-readings of Christian mysticism by authors such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-François Lyotard. The book first introduces students to the main themes that underpin Christian mysticism. It then reflects on how modern critics have understood each of them, demonstrating that stark delineation between the different theoretical approaches eventually collapses under the weight of the complex interaction between experience and knowledge that lies at the heart of Christian mysticism. In doing so, the book presents a deliberate challenge to a strictly perennialist reading of Christian mysticism. Anyone even remotely familiar with Christian mysticism will know that renewed interest in Christian mystical writers has created a huge array of scholarship with which students of mysticism need to familiarise themselves. This book outlines the various modern theoretical approaches in a manner easily accessible to a reader with little or no previous knowledge of this area, and offers a philosophical/theological introduction to Christian mystical writers beyond the patristic period important for the Latin Western Tradition.
Dionysius the Areopagite, the early sixth-century Christian writer, bridged Christianity and neo-Platonist philosophy. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume surveys how Dionysius’s thought and work has been interpreted, in both East and West, up to the present day. One of the first volumes in English to survey the reception history of Dionysian thought, both East and West Provides a clear account of both modern and post-modern debates about Dionysius’s standing as philosopher and Christian theologian Examines the contrasts between Dionysius’s own pre-modern concerns and those of the post-modern philosophical tradition Highlights the great variety of historic readings of Dionysius, and also considers new theories and interpretations Analyzes the main points of hermeneutical contrast between East and West
This book examines the writings of an early sixth-century Christian mystical theologian who wrote under the name of a convert of the apostle Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, and argues that the pseudonym and the corresponding influence of Paul are the crucial lens through which to read this influential corpus.
The project of an Apophatic Anthropology (1952) was one of the most significant philosophical concerns of Andre Scrima. Pascalian in essence, the approach departs from the Augustinian roots of Western Christian theology and develops a Christian anthropology based on Eastern Orthodoxy. The endeavor of a human being to understand oneself does not lead, as in the case of Pascal, to identification with Jesus Christ's suffering, but further, to an attempt of deification, theosis, in which the main concept is Incarnation. This attempt opens to man the possibility to conceive himself as interior to God. Man becomes therefore the physical and metaphysical bridge between creation and the uncreated, the only creature that bears the image of God. His mysterious inner being thus forms his unity that is transcendent to nature. Scrima's perspective is nourished by the great sources of Eastern spirituality, from Gregory of Nyssa to Maximus the Confessor. Here, philosophy becomes a chapter of Christology. Scrima believed that, by conceiving the person of the Savior, all problems of human nature and human thought have already been asked. In having both divine and human nature, Christ is the paradigm for any human person. The two natures of Christ which, according to the Council of Chalcedon, are unmixed, unchanged, undivided, and inseparable, represent also the encounter between uncreated grace and human nature in the depths of a deified being. An apophatic anthropology is deeply connected with the trials of the modern world. Scrima considers ontological theocentrism to be the only philosophical attitude that is capable to render the dynamic and fertile element of mystery to a human being. This perspective restores a man in the anagogical tension of profound knowledge and brings him back home. Scrima believes also that ignoring this mystery leads to the tragedy of "losing" the image of God in us, which ends in the separation of the paradoxical unity that is essential to any creature."
The book explores ancient interpretations and usages of the famous Delphic maxim “know yourself”. The primary emphasis is on Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman sources from the first four centuries CE. The individual contributions examine both direct quotations of the maxim as well as more distant echoes. Most of the sources included in the book have never previously been studied in any detail with a view to their use and interpretation of the Delphic maxim. Thus, the book contributes significantly to the origin and different interpretations of the maxim in antiquity as well as to its reception history in ancient philosophical and theological discourses. The chapters of the book are linked to each other by numerous cross-references which makes it possible to compare the different views of the maxim with each other. It also helps readers to notice relationships and trajectories within the material. The explorations of the relevant sources are also set in the context of ongoing debates about the shape and nature of ancient conceptions of self and self-knowledge. The book thus demonstrates the wide variety of philosophical and theological approaches in that the injunction to know oneself could be viewed and how these interpretations provide windows into ancient discourses about self and self-knowledge.
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology provides a guide to the mystical element of Christianity as a theological phenomenon. It differs not only from psychological and anthropological studies of mysticism, but from other theological studies, such as more practical or pastorally-oriented works that examine the patterns of spiritual progress and offer counsel for deeper understanding and spiritual development. It also differs from more explicitly historical studies tracing the theological and philosophical contexts and ideas of various key figures and schools, as well as from literary studies of the linguistic tropes and expressive forms in mystical texts. None of these perspectives is absent, but the method here is more deliberately theological, working from within the fundamental interests of Christian mystical writers to the articulation of those interests in distinctively theological forms, in order, finally, to permit a critical theological engagement with them for today. Divided into four parts, the first section introduces the approach to mystical theology and offers a historical overview. Part two attends to the concrete context of sources and practices of mystical theology. Part three moves to the fundamental conceptualities of mystical thought. The final section ends with the central contributions of mystical teaching to theology and metaphysics. Students and scholars with a variety of interests will find different pathways through the Handbook.
While traditional Christian thought and spirituality have always affirmed the divine presence in human life, Thatamanil argues we have much to learn from non-dualistic Hindu thought, especially that of the eighth-century thinker Sankara, and from the Christian panentheism of Paul Tillich. Thatamanil compares their diagnoses and prognoses of the human predicament in light of their doctrine of God or Ultimate Reality. What emerges is a new theology of God and human beings, with a richer and more radical conception of divine immanence, a reconceived divine transcendence, and a keener sense of how the dynamic and active Spirit at work in us anchors real hope and deep joy.Using key insights from Christian and Hindu thought Thatamanil vindicates comparative theology, expands the vocabulary about the ineffable God, and arrives at a new construal of the problems and prospects of the human condition.
Contemporary literature has, for several decades and in various guises, been dominated by questions of identity and the self. It has been forgotten that, until the Enlightenment, theological reflection emphasized the close connectedness of the self with God; knowledge of God is essential to knowledge of the self; and vice-versa, correct knowledge of the self is a necessary correlate to true knowledge of God. This has been called the double knowledge. Writing God and the Self examines two literary texts and lives as representative of two antithetical positions. The first, represented by Samuel Beckett's life and his Three Novels, is that the self is independent of God; the second, represented by C. S. Lewis and Till We Have Faces, is that God and the self are intimately connected. Beckett's radical apophaticism about God is shown to be tied to his extreme apophaticism about the self, whereas Lewis's sense of selfhood is demonstrated to be integrally connected to his sense of a personal and self-transcending God. Other voices--Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Charles Taylor, Rowan Williams, Mark McIntosh and Vladimir Lossky--join the chorus of theologians, psychologists, and other thinkers, past and present, that contribute to this exploration of what Christian theology has to say about the insistent problem of the self. Taken together, all these voices articulate a powerful vision of selfhood in relation to God that is desperately needed today.