Divine Enticement Theological Seductions

Divine Enticement argues for a reconception of theology and it subject matter as modes of seduction, of both body and mind. Theological language as evocation opens onto rereadings of faith, sacrament, ethics, prayer and scripture. The conclusion argues for a sense of theology as calling upon infinite possibility.

Theology usually appears to us to be dogmatic, judgmental, condescending, maybe therapeutic, or perhaps downright fantastical - but seldom enticing. Divine Enticement takes as its starting point that the meanings of theological concepts are not so much logical, truth-valued propositions - affirmative or negative - as they are provocations and evocations. Thus it argues for the seductiveness of both theology and its subject - for, in fact, infinite seduction and enticement as the very sense of theological query. The divine name is one by which we are drawn toward the limits of thought, language, and flesh. The use of language in such conceptualization calls more than it designates. This is not a flaw or a result of vagueness or imprecision in theological language but rather marks the correspondence of such language to its subject: that which, outside of or at the limit of our thought, draws us as an enticement to desire, not least to intellectual desire. Central to the text is the strange semiotics of divine naming, as a call on that for which there cannot be a standard referent. The entanglement of sign and body, not least in interpretations of the Christian incarnation, both grounds and complicates the theological abstractions. A number of traditional notions in Christian theology are reconceived here as enticements, modes of drawing the desires of both body and mind: faith as "thinking with assent"; sacraments as "visible words" read in community; ethics as responsiveness to beauty; prayer as the language of address; scripture as the story of meaning-making. All of these culminate in a sense of a call to and from the purely possible, the open space into which we can be enticed, within which we can be divinely enticing. -- Publisher's website.

Grau reconsiders the relationship between "logos" and "mythos" as a precondition to opening theological hermeneutics to discourse from other cultures and genres, other modes of telling and retelling.

This book focuses on the relationships between phenomenology and theology, which have been varied and complex but seem currently in an inconclusive and loosely defined state. Methodological rigor is not much in evidence, and the two disciplines continue to defy any authoritative synthesis. While both disciplines grapple with questions concerning the fundamental structures of human experience, their relationship is troubled by the elusive roles of Revelation and faith, which threaten the scientific autonomy of philosophy on one side and disable theologians for consistent philosophical discourse on the other. This volume revisits that conundrum from various perspectives, as it at once repristinates some of the most vibrant points of encounter and opens possibilities for new beginnings. It begins with the theological musings into which leading phenomenologists have been drawn from the start, with special reference to Husserl, Heidegger, and Michel Henry, as well as backward glances to Fichte, Schelling, and Blondel. A second section takes up specific theological themes and examines how phenomenological approaches can refine thinking on them. These include the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Eucharist, Grace, and Prayer. A dialogue between phenomenology and classical theologians is staged in the third section: Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, and Karl Rahner. The closing section ranges more widely, discussing atheism, non-realist theology, and Hinduism from phenomenological angles, and showing how these topics too come within the ambit of theology.

This book aims to put modern continental philosophy, specifically the sub-fields of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory and genealogy, into conversation with the field of contemporary theology. Colby Dickinson demonstrates the way in which negative dialectics, or the negation of negation, may help us to grasp the thin (or non-existent) borders between continental philosophy and theology as the leading thinkers of both fields wrestle with their entrance into a new era. With the declining place of “the sacred” in the public sphere, we need to pay more attention than ever to how continental philosophy seems to be returning to distinctly theological roots. Through a genealogical mapping of 20th-century continental philosophers, Dickinson highlights the ever-present Judeo-Christian roots of modern Western philosophical thought. Opposing categories such as immanence/transcendence, finitude/infinitude, universal/particular, subject/object, are at the center of works by thinkers such as Agamben, Marion, Vattimo, Levinas, Latour, Caputo and Adorno. This book argues that utilizing a negative dialectic allows us to move beyond the apparent fixation with dichotomies present within those fields and begin to perform both philosophy and theology anew.

Autobiographical writings on faith frequently come from the lives of ordinary persons whose struggles with faith are often lived at the margins of the church, academy, and society. Yet these voices have the potential to reshape the ways in which each of these fields function. To find out what it means to stand before God with all of one's humanity on display is to engage in not only the act of confession, but to demonstrate a bold theological reflection that needs to be more explicitly understood. By turning to spiritual autobiographies as theological source texts, we learn to place our emphasis where it matters most, on the people whose lives of faith move us deeply and cause us to re-examine our own lives in light of their witness. Moving through a range of ancient, early modern, and contemporary spiritual writers in order to demonstrate a profound connection that unites them all, this book portrays how a critical self-examination of one's most personal, internal fractures (our "poverty" as it were) is the only way to develop a life of faith--the dual meaning of the word "confession," which expresses both a revealing of one's sins, or brokenness, and the articulation of what one believes.

Exploration of the interface between mystical theology and continental philosophy is a defining feature of the current intellectual and even devotional climate. But to what extent and in what depth are these disciplines actually speaking to one another; or even speaking about the same phenomena? This book draws together original contributions by leading and emerging international scholars, delineating emerging debates in this growing and dynamic field of research, and spanning mystical and philosophical traditions from the ancient, to the medieval, modern, and contemporary. At the heart of which lies Meister Eckhart, perhaps the single most influential Christian mystic for modern times. The book is organised around significant historical and contemporary figures who speak across the intersections of philosophy and theology, offering new insights into key interlocutors such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Isaac Luria, Eckhart, Hegel, Heidegger, Marion, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Laruelle, and Žižek. Designed both to contribute to current trends in mystical theology and philosophy, and elicit dialogue and debate from further afield, this book speaks within an emerging space exploring the retrieval of the mystical within a post-secular context.

Way to Water has two primary intentions: to trace the development of the nascent field of theological inquiry known as theopoetics and to make an argument that theopoetics provides both theological and practical resources for contemporary people of faith who seek to maintain a confessional Christian life that is also intellectually critical. Beginning with the work of Stanley Hopper in the late 1960s, and addressing the early scholarship of key theopoetics authors like Rubem Alves and Amos Wilder, this text explores how theopoetics was originally developed as a response to the American death-of-God movement, and has since grown into a method for engaging in theological thought in a way that more fully honors embodiment and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. Most of the extant literature in the field is addressed to allow for a cumulative and comprehensive articulation of the nature and function of theopoetics. The text includes an exploration of how theopoetic insights might aid in the development of tangible church practices, and concludes with a series of theopoetic reflections.