So my first post "Eastern Religions in a Christian Context" was kind of disappointing. My thought was that it was in the "Controversial Theology" sub-forum and also whenever you deal with another faith/belief system people can become frightened and go into defensive postures.
I hope that because this is about the Christian tradition it won't go down that same road and will be a great open dialogue.
Princeton is known as the Barth school - Barth as hopefully most will know is an incredible theologian who managed to bring intellectuals back into the conversation regarding "revelation, the triune god, and sin/salvation". He and others writers are credited with being the founders of the "Neo-Orthodox" school and he even graced Times Magazine as the greatest theologian of his age.
Yale is known as the Post-Liberal and or Narrative school.
There are also individual theologians like Jüngel, Robert Jenson, Pannenberg, Moltmann.
I'd love to hear which theologians people are reading or have been greatly influenced by.
I know a lot of the ones I just posted are Barthian and I think that's because a background of mine is in this area.
Hopefully we can talk about some of the incredible depth these writers touched upon and what they brought into the public study.
(This was my hope when I had done my first post but it didn't turn out well Lol)
So to get it started here is a piece from Faith and Theology a Princeton oriented Theology Blog!
(My first pick is D.B.H)
David Bentley Hart's beautiful theology
Posted by Ben Myers
Gaunilo’s Island and Gower Street are currently blogging their way through David Bentley Hart’s masterpiece, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
I was talking with a friend today about Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, and I tried to persuade him that it’s one of the best books ever written by an American theologian. It really is an extraordinary book – profound, searching, beautiful, and often very humorous. In good Eastern Orthodox fashion, Hart is infinitely composed, beautifully serene – there is no Protestant anxiety, none of the darkness of Good Friday, but only the peaceful and radiant glory of the triune God.
In contrast to such light and serenity, Hart likes to shake his head at what he calls the “nihilistic” tendencies of Lutheran theology – e.g. “the ghastly Wagnerian opulence of Jüngel’s cult of Verwesung [decay] and the dark, late romantic coloratura of his unwholesome theological Liebestod [love-death]” (p. 373). If ever a book could persuade you to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, this would be the one!
Anyway, here’s one of my favourite quotes from the book:
“God is, so to speak, infinite discourse, full of the perfect utterance of his Word and the limitless variety of the Spirit’s ‘reply.’ Here, in the most elementary terms, is Christian metaphysics: God speaks God, and creation occurs within that speaking, as a rhetorical embellishment, a needless ornament” (p. 291).
And the reply from the famous kim fabricius:
kim fabricius said...
The Beauty of the Infinite is indeed an extraordinary book. To say that it is not an easy read would be an understatement. The difficulty is partly due to the density of Hart's prose (one is reminded of Milbank) and the obscurity of some of his vocabulary, but mainly it is a result of the breathtaking immensity of the author's learning.
Hart's comprehensive deconstruction of the pretensions of the doyens of (post)modern continental philosophy is excoriating, including such theologians' favourites as Foucault ("his is an ontology of force whose practical expression can only be one or another instantiation of force") and, a particular bête noire, Emmanuel Levinas ("a prodigy of incoherence", "the banal tortured into counterfeit profundity, the obviously false propounded as irresistibly true", "a view of the world that is perhaps a little depraved").
Contemporary icons of Protestant theology also come in for some severe criticism, particularly Jüngel, but also Moltmann (his "loose, rhapsodic, paraenetic expostulations") and, to a lesser extent, Pannenberg and Jenson (with their "more cautious dogmatic projects"). Not that Hart does not leave himself open to the charge of lacking exegetical charity and theological humility! He is, however, appreciative of modern Roman theologians like Rahner and, particularly (and not surprisingly), von Balthasar (his "towering achievement").
And Hart does not shy at being unfashionable in, for example, rehabilitating Anselm's soteriology and (pace DW!) insisting on "that loveliest (and most widely misunderstood) 'attribute,' [the divine]apatheia".
In spite of the pugnacity you've got to admire a theologian with such "attitude", and the theme of the divine beauty (and peace), in the end, trumps the polemics, making The Beauty of the Infinite a fitting tribute to Hart's main man Gregory of Nyssa.
A must-read for sure. And so too, by the way, is Hart's The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (2005), the best theodicy/anti-theodicy written by a theologian since Marilyn McCord Adams' Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999). And it is much more reader-friendly than The Beauty of the Infinite, and a quarter of the length.
I hope that because this is about the Christian tradition it won't go down that same road and will be a great open dialogue.
Princeton is known as the Barth school - Barth as hopefully most will know is an incredible theologian who managed to bring intellectuals back into the conversation regarding "revelation, the triune god, and sin/salvation". He and others writers are credited with being the founders of the "Neo-Orthodox" school and he even graced Times Magazine as the greatest theologian of his age.
Yale is known as the Post-Liberal and or Narrative school.
There are also individual theologians like Jüngel, Robert Jenson, Pannenberg, Moltmann.
I'd love to hear which theologians people are reading or have been greatly influenced by.
I know a lot of the ones I just posted are Barthian and I think that's because a background of mine is in this area.
Hopefully we can talk about some of the incredible depth these writers touched upon and what they brought into the public study.
(This was my hope when I had done my first post but it didn't turn out well Lol)
So to get it started here is a piece from Faith and Theology a Princeton oriented Theology Blog!
(My first pick is D.B.H)
David Bentley Hart's beautiful theology
Posted by Ben Myers
Gaunilo’s Island and Gower Street are currently blogging their way through David Bentley Hart’s masterpiece, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
I was talking with a friend today about Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, and I tried to persuade him that it’s one of the best books ever written by an American theologian. It really is an extraordinary book – profound, searching, beautiful, and often very humorous. In good Eastern Orthodox fashion, Hart is infinitely composed, beautifully serene – there is no Protestant anxiety, none of the darkness of Good Friday, but only the peaceful and radiant glory of the triune God.
In contrast to such light and serenity, Hart likes to shake his head at what he calls the “nihilistic” tendencies of Lutheran theology – e.g. “the ghastly Wagnerian opulence of Jüngel’s cult of Verwesung [decay] and the dark, late romantic coloratura of his unwholesome theological Liebestod [love-death]” (p. 373). If ever a book could persuade you to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, this would be the one!
Anyway, here’s one of my favourite quotes from the book:
“God is, so to speak, infinite discourse, full of the perfect utterance of his Word and the limitless variety of the Spirit’s ‘reply.’ Here, in the most elementary terms, is Christian metaphysics: God speaks God, and creation occurs within that speaking, as a rhetorical embellishment, a needless ornament” (p. 291).
And the reply from the famous kim fabricius:
kim fabricius said...
The Beauty of the Infinite is indeed an extraordinary book. To say that it is not an easy read would be an understatement. The difficulty is partly due to the density of Hart's prose (one is reminded of Milbank) and the obscurity of some of his vocabulary, but mainly it is a result of the breathtaking immensity of the author's learning.
Hart's comprehensive deconstruction of the pretensions of the doyens of (post)modern continental philosophy is excoriating, including such theologians' favourites as Foucault ("his is an ontology of force whose practical expression can only be one or another instantiation of force") and, a particular bête noire, Emmanuel Levinas ("a prodigy of incoherence", "the banal tortured into counterfeit profundity, the obviously false propounded as irresistibly true", "a view of the world that is perhaps a little depraved").
Contemporary icons of Protestant theology also come in for some severe criticism, particularly Jüngel, but also Moltmann (his "loose, rhapsodic, paraenetic expostulations") and, to a lesser extent, Pannenberg and Jenson (with their "more cautious dogmatic projects"). Not that Hart does not leave himself open to the charge of lacking exegetical charity and theological humility! He is, however, appreciative of modern Roman theologians like Rahner and, particularly (and not surprisingly), von Balthasar (his "towering achievement").
And Hart does not shy at being unfashionable in, for example, rehabilitating Anselm's soteriology and (pace DW!) insisting on "that loveliest (and most widely misunderstood) 'attribute,' [the divine]apatheia".
In spite of the pugnacity you've got to admire a theologian with such "attitude", and the theme of the divine beauty (and peace), in the end, trumps the polemics, making The Beauty of the Infinite a fitting tribute to Hart's main man Gregory of Nyssa.
A must-read for sure. And so too, by the way, is Hart's The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (2005), the best theodicy/anti-theodicy written by a theologian since Marilyn McCord Adams' Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999). And it is much more reader-friendly than The Beauty of the Infinite, and a quarter of the length.
