Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy

Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy
Author: Nahum Brown
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2017-11-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319659006

In this volume, scholars draw deeply on negative theology in order to consider some of the oldest questions in the philosophy of religion that stand as persistent challenges to inquiry, comprehension, and expression. The chapters engage different philosophical methodologies, cross disciplinary boundaries, and draw on varied cultural traditions in the effort to demonstrate that apophaticism can be a positive resource for contemporary philosophy of religion.

Negative Theology

Negative Theology
Author: Johannes Aakjær Steenbuch
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 91
Release: 2022-09-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 166674218X

How do we speak about God if God is ineffable? This paradoxical question lies at the heart of one of the strangest traditions of philosophical and theological thought: negative theology. As a tradition of thought, negative (or apophatic) theology can be traced back to the convergence of Greek philosophy with Jewish and Christian theology in the first century CE. Beginning with a seemingly simple claim about the ineffability or unsayability of God, negative theology evolved into a complex tradition of thought and spirituality. Today, together with a growing interest in patristic and medieval studies, negative theology enjoys renewed attention in contemporary philosophy and theology. This short introduction presents an overview of how the tradition developed from antiquity until present.

Flight of the Gods

Flight of the Gods
Author: Ilse Nina Bulhof
Publisher:
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2000
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780823220342

Contemporary continental philosophy approaches metaphysics with great reservation. A point of criticism concerns traditional philosophical speaking about God. Whereas Nietzsche, with his question "God is dead; who killed Him?" was, in his time, highly 'unzeitgemäß' and shocking, the twentieth century by contrast, saw Heidegger's concept of 'onto-theology' and its implied problematization of the God of the metaphysicians quickly become a famous term. In Heidegger's words, to a philosophical concept or 'being' we can neither pray, nor kneel. Heidegger did not, however, return to the God of Christian faith. He tried to initiate a new way of speaking about God--a way that reveals the limits of philosophical discourse. Derrida, Marion, Bataille, Adorno, Taubes and Bakhtin, each in their own way, continue this exploration begun by Nietzsche and Heidegger. This book takes a fresh look at these developments. The 'death of God' as the editors say in an introductory study, announces not so much the death of the 'old God'--the God of philosophers, theologians and believers--but rather the death of the god who put himself on His throne: autonomous human reason. In listening to the reactions to this dethronement of autonomous reason, the editors believe they hear the echoes of an experience of an embarrassment rooted partly in an old medieval tradition: negative theology. With the death of this 'new god', might a sensitivity reappear for transcendence? Here the editors want to offer a platform where contemporary philosophers of culture can again pose the question of speaking about God.

Silence and the Word

Silence and the Word
Author: Oliver Davies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2002-08-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1139434837

Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with contemporary secular philosophy. Leading Christian thinkers explore in their own way the extent to which the concept of the apophatic illumines some of the deepest doctrinal structures of Christian faith, and of Christian self-understanding both in terms of its historical and contemporary situatedness, showing how a dimension of negativity has characterised not only traditional mysticism but most forms of Christian thought over the years.

Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis

Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis
Author: Simon Hewitt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-08-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030496023

This book is the first treatment at length of negative, or apophatic, theology within the analytic tradition. Apophatic theology holds that there is a significant sense in which we cannot say what God is. Important negative theological elements are present in a host of Christian thinkers, from Gregory of Nyssa to Aquinas, and yet apophaticism is neglected in philosophical theology as practiced within the analytic tradition. By contrast, Hewitt shows how apophatic theology is integral to how Christians have thought about God, and how it can be defended against standard attacks in the philosophical literature. Hewitt diagnoses the unease with apophaticism amongst contempory philosophical theologicans as rooted in a certain picture of how language functions, here called referentialism. Arguing that this picture is not compulsory, an account of language which sits more comfortably with negative theology (originating from work of later Wittgenstein) is invoked, and applied to key themes in philosophical theology including divine personhood, the Trinity, the Incarnation and the afterlife.

The Unknown God

The Unknown God
Author: Deirdre Carabine
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2015-01-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725232723

"This book contains a careful, thorough, and where necessary skeptical as regards doubtful evidence (especially in the case of Plato and the Old Academy) of the beginnings in European thought of the negative or apophatic way of thinking and its relations to more positive or kataphatic ways of thinking about God. One of its greatest strengths, perhaps the greatest, is that the author makes clear that none of the persons concerned, Hellenic, Jewish or Christian, was engaged in the pursuit of a philosophical abstraction, or the heaping of rhetorical superlatives on God. They were rather concerned to present the origin of the universe as an intimately present living reality which infinitely transcends our thought and speech. This, combined with careful attention to the varieties of negative theology and its relations with positive, and the particular difficulties experienced by the members of the various traditions involved, makes the book the best introduction to the negative theology available." -A. H. Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of Greek, University of Liverpool, England. Emeritus Professor of Classics, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Senior Fellow of the British Academy.

A Theology of Failure

A Theology of Failure
Author: Marika Rose
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823284085

Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology’s failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity’s violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church. The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite’s uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius’s legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.

Apophatic Bodies

Apophatic Bodies
Author: Chris Boesel
Publisher: Transdisciplinary Theological
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2010
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780823230815

The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis--the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness--has taken on new life in the concern with language and its limits that preoccupies much postmodern philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. How does this mystical tradition intersect with the concern with material bodies that is simultaneously a focus in these areas? This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the "cutting edge" but rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caught up in various ideological mechanisms--religious, theological, political, economic--that threaten their dignity and material well-being. The contributors, a diverse collection of scholars in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies, rethink the relationship between the concrete tradition of negative theology and apophatic discourses widely construed. They further endeavor to link these to the theological theme of incarnation and more general issues of embodiment, sexuality, and cosmology. Along the way, they engage and deploy the resources of contextual and liberation theology, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, process thought, and feminism. The result not only recasts the nature and possibilities of theological discourse but explores the possibilities of academic discussion across and beyond disciplines in concrete engagement with the well-being of bodies, both organic and inorganic. The volume interrogates the complex capacities of religious discourse both to threaten and positively to draw upon the material well-being of creation.

Cloud of the Impossible

Cloud of the Impossible
Author: Catherine Keller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2014
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780231171151

A progressive reading of the history of the unknown that projects a hopeful future.