Gestures Of Grace

Gestures of Grace is a celebration of the life and career of Robert Sweetman, H. Evan Runner Chair in the History of Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies (2001-present). These essays, written by students and colleagues, testify to the remarkable breadth and depth of Sweetman's research and teaching, from his early scholarly career at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies to his time at ICS. Throughout the volume, there is extensive engagement with Sweetman's influential historical scholarship on topics such as the emergence and development of the Dominican order in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, medieval women authors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and indeed on Sweetman's own systematic contribution to the nature and promise of Christian scholarship today.

This book analyzes the writings of Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika to disclose how each construes "piety" and "responsibility" as integral to each other. Each theologian expresses a fundamental unity of love of God and love of neighbour. Sheveland explores this unity in ecumenical and interreligious frameworks, showing how these authors privilege theology as practice, enactment, or simply as ethical. He uses the Renaissance genre of musical polyphony as a methodological tool by which to explore the aesthetic quality and the similarity-in-difference of the theological voices being compared. Polyphony's application to comparative theology includes the avoidance of caricature, domestication, and antagonism. In place of these is offered a fundamentally aesthetic paradigm by which to hear theological voices in terms of their unity-in-distinction.

To Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Torrances, grace is not an abstract truth; it is reality itself. By God's revelation in Jesus Christ we are given the blessed assurance to know that all human beings are included in the humanity of the Savior. And in Christ we discover the movements of grace, a double movement at once God-humanward and human-Godward, all by the Holy Spirit. These theologians were keen to remind us that Christ's ongoing mediatorship includes all appropriate human responses to God. In fact, only by grace and in union with Christ do we have true response-ability. It is this "going with the flow" of the Holy Spirit en Christo that makes Christo-realism so dynamic and life-giving.