Christopher Denny | St. John's University (original) (raw)
Videos by Christopher Denny
This classroom lecture analyzes developments in religious life and scholastic theology during the... more This classroom lecture analyzes developments in religious life and scholastic theology during the 13th century.
4 views
This lecture, given in the spring 2021 semester, provides a theological overview of Endo's novel.
8 views
In this online lecture, I review Abelard's life and the theological innovations he introduced int... more In this online lecture, I review Abelard's life and the theological innovations he introduced into medieval Christian theology, and explain the backlash from Bernard of Clairvaux.
14 views
This lecture, given in the spring 2021 semester, provides a theological overview of Endo's novel.
3 views
Books by Christopher Denny
A Realist's Church: Essays in Honor of Joseph Komonchak
This festschrift honoring Joseph Komonchak includes numerous academic essays in which his colleag... more This festschrift honoring Joseph Komonchak includes numerous academic essays in which his colleagues and former students work to extend his scholarly work in a variety of directions. The book honors the achievements of Komonchak, but more importantly, it gathers well-known researchers to advance current scholarship on the transformations of the Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth century.
Finding Salvation in Christ brings together some of the most important figures in contemporary th... more Finding Salvation in Christ brings together some of the most important figures in contemporary theology to honor the work of William Loewe, systematic theologian and specialist in the theology of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. For over three decades Loewe's writings have sought to make classic christological and soteriological doctrines comprehensible to a Catholic Church that is working to integrate individual subjectivity, communal living, and historical consciousness in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Essays included in this volume assess Loewe's reinterpretation of patristic and medieval Christology from Irenaeus to Anselm of Canterbury, and explain the significance of the theology of Lonergan and Loewe for the fields of soteriology, economics, family life, and interreligious theology.
While some recent postliberal theologies have polarized the church's relationship with contemporary culture by minimizing similarities between Christianity and other worldviews, the contributors in this volume continue Lonergan's project of integrating the findings of various intellectual disciplines with Christian theology, and use Loewe's historical and systematic work as a guide in that endeavor. While Lonergan's "transcendental Thomism" has been criticized by both traditionalists and revisionists, essays in this collection apply Loewe's theological methodology in a variety of ways to demonstrate that time-honored doctrines about Christ can be transplanted into new cultural contexts and gain intelligibility and credibility in this process. Having lived and labored through the far-reaching changes in Catholic thought introduced in recent decades, Loewe's career provides a model for theologians attempting to build bridges between the past and the present, and between the church and the world.
Special Journal Issue by Christopher Denny
Religions, 2019
The past century has witnessed a flowering of aesthetic and literary methodologies taking root wi... more The past century has witnessed a flowering of aesthetic and literary methodologies taking root within the soil of Christian theology. Beginning with the writings of Henri Bremond, Jacques Maritain, and T. S. Eliot, through the mid-century works of Nathan Scott, William Lynch, and Amos Wilder, to the theological appropriations of literature by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Paul Fiddes, theology has reached the point at which William Franke can write in his recent book A Theology of Literature that “the older practice of reading the Bible as literature has gone through a remarkable ‘conversion’ into reading literature as theology.”
Originally fostered as a counterweight to theologies that critics deemed overly rationalistic and abstract, Christian theologies of literature have made common cause with postliberal theologies that have emphasized the irreducible particularity of Christianity. George Lindbeck’s 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine paved the way for a generation of scholars who promoted cultural-linguistic theologies as a preferable alternative to doctrinal or experiential expressions of religious belief. Imaginative literature escaped cognitive abstractions that threatened to domesticate the gospel within universalist categories, and so literature proved to be a valuable medium for Christians seeking to explain how human encounters with the transcendent God could overlap with unique narratives, symbols, and images.
In the twenty-first century, however, Christian theology has continued to be challenged by a subaltern critique that claims to expose the manner in which Christians throughout history have made common cause with structures of power and domination. Pioneers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, and Rosemary Reuther have pointed out Christian theology’s collaboration with colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, and patriarchy, a charge amplified in recent books on postcolonialism by Kwok Pui-lan and Catherine Keller.
Are the Christian theologies of literature developed over the last century complicit with the targets of liberationist critiques? Does theological aesthetics aid those on the margins who struggle to maintain personal and collective identities in the face of globalization and neoliberalism? Or are Christian theologies of literature too indebted to neoplatonic and ahistorical understandings of transcendence to be of use for such Christian praxis?
This issue of Religions, “Christian Literary Imagination: Seeking Transcendence in an Age of Identity,” is open to theologians and scholars of literature who desire to take a stance on any side of these questions. Literary, historical-critical, and theological methodologies are welcomed in the quest to broaden current scholarship in the theology of literature. Our goal will be to bring voices from different academic specializations together to examine whether the contemplative and aesthetic roots of Christian theologies of literature can find common ground with identity politics in the twenty-first century.
Papers by Christopher Denny
Saint Anselm, 2024
Much theological scholarship continues to characterize Anselm's soteriology as primarily based up... more Much theological scholarship continues to characterize Anselm's soteriology as primarily based upon the transactional payment of the God-Man's death. In response, this article explicates how post-Kantian advocates of “interiorized soteriology” project modernity’s schism between human interiority and worldly exteriority onto Anselm’s medieval theology. In so doing, Anselm’s critics overlook the importance of Christ's incarnation and the role of social justice in Cur Deus Homo's argument. Instead of seeing the Cur Deus Homo, with its emphasis on the honor Dei and satisfaction, as a culturally-bound limitation on the extent of Anselm's argument, the social world presumed by Anselm gives Cur Deus Homo a social and communitarian resonance lacking in the more individualistic soteriologies of his modern critics. Contemporary theologians who appreciate the communitarian ethos in Cur Deus Homo would do better to appreciate how Anselm’s use of the debt metaphor is best inscribed in interpersonal terms of self-gift rather than in the terms of neoliberal economics. Anselm’s culturally-situated feudalist context has within it a powerfully-articulated christocentric framework of justice that can serve as a foundation for specifically Christian social ethics.
Theology and Media(tion): Rendering the Absent Present, ed. Stephen Okey and Katherine G. Schmidt. Orbis., 2024
Grace-Filled Naturalism? Deep Pantheism? Panentheism? The ecological crisis of the twenty-first... more Grace-Filled Naturalism? Deep Pantheism? Panentheism? The ecological crisis of the twenty-first century has provoked theologians and philosophers of religion to develop metaphysical frameworks designed to counteract centuries of presumed anthropocentric narratives allegedly complicit in humanity's destruction of the natural world. Ever since Lynn White delivered the lecture "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" in 1966, there have been a plethora of indictments against both classical theism and biblical creation accounts that have supposedly fostered indifference and hostility towards the environment. There is an ironic element in these charges made by theologians and philosophers, however, as they are often more rooted in presenting theoretical metanarratives than in uncovering empirical reasons for the causes of ecological damage. In The Great Work, for example, Thomas Berry insists that "the deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being." Yet as fossil fuel consumption, carbon emissions, and the resulting environmental degradation have spread throughout the world--from developed to emerging versions of late capitalist economies--monocausal intellectual explanations of the reasons for ecological degradation become less plausible. Furthermore, confessionalist eco-theologies are of limited efficacy in a world in which pollution, habitat loss, and climate change threaten human beings from all religious and secular traditions. Rather than remaining trapped in the theoretical antinomies fostered by certain varieties of postliberal theology that eschew interreligious theology and insist upon the preeminence of their respective traditions, theologians and other scholars in the humanities would do better to develop constructive proposals that will be viable in interreligious and philosophically pluralist contexts.
This essay builds upon the philosophical theology of Wesley Wildman and the theological ethics of Willis Jenkins to argue that eco-theologies should be built upon praxes that can be shared across religious boundaries. Challenging superficial arguments that appeal to a shared communion of anthropomorphized living and non-living entities, I argue that the phenomenological approach of Robert Corrington privileges direct observation of the cosmos above theoretical speculation. When the attentiveness and respect for genuine biological diversity fostered by such phenomenology is combined with evolutionary and emergent explanations of cosmic development offered by Philip Clayton and Roger Haught, a dynamic foundation is laid to embrace ongoing theological and interdisciplinary changes, both in the field of eco-theology and in interreligious theology. As a practical test case for the efficacy of such an approach, the essay concludes by appealing to the work of Sallie McFague for an interreligious praxis rooted in sacrifice. Such sacrifice, however, should not be confined to traditional definitions of placating divinities, reenacting the passion of a savior understood to live in heaven, or securing a blessed afterlife in a world currently invisible to current human beings. Rather, attentive eco-theological sacrifice must honor the present world and promote socioeconomic resistance to the plague of overconsumption threatening the well-being of our planetary home.
Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society, Nov 23, 2015
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Feb 13, 2018
Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society, 2009
Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society, 2011
History of Christianity, official blog of the American Society for Church History., 2012
Two decades ago I graduated from a liberal-arts school whose curriculum is based upon reading cla... more Two decades ago I graduated from a liberal-arts school whose curriculum is based upon reading classic texts from Western Civilization—the so-called Great Books. Students read them in roughly chronological order, from Homer to Heidegger. Having decided that I needed to postpone entry into the real world for a tad longer, after I left college I embarked upon a more ambitious reading project. Beginning with surviving fragments of ancient Egyptian literature from the Old Kingdom period, I planned to work my way chronologically through influential texts from the succeeding four and one-half millennia of human history, this time branching out beyond the West and also reading texts from China, India, the Middle East, and Japan. The detail with which I drew up the reading list was not matched by a corresponding level of interest in the need to earn enough money upon which I could live, and so after three years I decided to head to graduate school in religious studies, where I could embark upon a profession in which I could combine teaching, writing, and reading. I put aside my reading list, having only reached Herodotus’s History. In the succeeding years I finished graduate school, earned a doctorate, and assumed a post teaching historical theology at St. John’s University in New York City. My cherished reading list was relegated to a file cabinet, until this past year, when I decided to return to Herodotus, picking up right where I left off twenty years ago—in the middle of the History’s third book. . .
Theology Without Walls, 2019
This classroom lecture analyzes developments in religious life and scholastic theology during the... more This classroom lecture analyzes developments in religious life and scholastic theology during the 13th century.
4 views
This lecture, given in the spring 2021 semester, provides a theological overview of Endo's novel.
8 views
In this online lecture, I review Abelard's life and the theological innovations he introduced int... more In this online lecture, I review Abelard's life and the theological innovations he introduced into medieval Christian theology, and explain the backlash from Bernard of Clairvaux.
14 views
This lecture, given in the spring 2021 semester, provides a theological overview of Endo's novel.
3 views
A Realist's Church: Essays in Honor of Joseph Komonchak
This festschrift honoring Joseph Komonchak includes numerous academic essays in which his colleag... more This festschrift honoring Joseph Komonchak includes numerous academic essays in which his colleagues and former students work to extend his scholarly work in a variety of directions. The book honors the achievements of Komonchak, but more importantly, it gathers well-known researchers to advance current scholarship on the transformations of the Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth century.
Finding Salvation in Christ brings together some of the most important figures in contemporary th... more Finding Salvation in Christ brings together some of the most important figures in contemporary theology to honor the work of William Loewe, systematic theologian and specialist in the theology of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. For over three decades Loewe's writings have sought to make classic christological and soteriological doctrines comprehensible to a Catholic Church that is working to integrate individual subjectivity, communal living, and historical consciousness in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Essays included in this volume assess Loewe's reinterpretation of patristic and medieval Christology from Irenaeus to Anselm of Canterbury, and explain the significance of the theology of Lonergan and Loewe for the fields of soteriology, economics, family life, and interreligious theology.
While some recent postliberal theologies have polarized the church's relationship with contemporary culture by minimizing similarities between Christianity and other worldviews, the contributors in this volume continue Lonergan's project of integrating the findings of various intellectual disciplines with Christian theology, and use Loewe's historical and systematic work as a guide in that endeavor. While Lonergan's "transcendental Thomism" has been criticized by both traditionalists and revisionists, essays in this collection apply Loewe's theological methodology in a variety of ways to demonstrate that time-honored doctrines about Christ can be transplanted into new cultural contexts and gain intelligibility and credibility in this process. Having lived and labored through the far-reaching changes in Catholic thought introduced in recent decades, Loewe's career provides a model for theologians attempting to build bridges between the past and the present, and between the church and the world.
Religions, 2019
The past century has witnessed a flowering of aesthetic and literary methodologies taking root wi... more The past century has witnessed a flowering of aesthetic and literary methodologies taking root within the soil of Christian theology. Beginning with the writings of Henri Bremond, Jacques Maritain, and T. S. Eliot, through the mid-century works of Nathan Scott, William Lynch, and Amos Wilder, to the theological appropriations of literature by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Paul Fiddes, theology has reached the point at which William Franke can write in his recent book A Theology of Literature that “the older practice of reading the Bible as literature has gone through a remarkable ‘conversion’ into reading literature as theology.”
Originally fostered as a counterweight to theologies that critics deemed overly rationalistic and abstract, Christian theologies of literature have made common cause with postliberal theologies that have emphasized the irreducible particularity of Christianity. George Lindbeck’s 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine paved the way for a generation of scholars who promoted cultural-linguistic theologies as a preferable alternative to doctrinal or experiential expressions of religious belief. Imaginative literature escaped cognitive abstractions that threatened to domesticate the gospel within universalist categories, and so literature proved to be a valuable medium for Christians seeking to explain how human encounters with the transcendent God could overlap with unique narratives, symbols, and images.
In the twenty-first century, however, Christian theology has continued to be challenged by a subaltern critique that claims to expose the manner in which Christians throughout history have made common cause with structures of power and domination. Pioneers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Cone, and Rosemary Reuther have pointed out Christian theology’s collaboration with colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, and patriarchy, a charge amplified in recent books on postcolonialism by Kwok Pui-lan and Catherine Keller.
Are the Christian theologies of literature developed over the last century complicit with the targets of liberationist critiques? Does theological aesthetics aid those on the margins who struggle to maintain personal and collective identities in the face of globalization and neoliberalism? Or are Christian theologies of literature too indebted to neoplatonic and ahistorical understandings of transcendence to be of use for such Christian praxis?
This issue of Religions, “Christian Literary Imagination: Seeking Transcendence in an Age of Identity,” is open to theologians and scholars of literature who desire to take a stance on any side of these questions. Literary, historical-critical, and theological methodologies are welcomed in the quest to broaden current scholarship in the theology of literature. Our goal will be to bring voices from different academic specializations together to examine whether the contemplative and aesthetic roots of Christian theologies of literature can find common ground with identity politics in the twenty-first century.
Saint Anselm, 2024
Much theological scholarship continues to characterize Anselm's soteriology as primarily based up... more Much theological scholarship continues to characterize Anselm's soteriology as primarily based upon the transactional payment of the God-Man's death. In response, this article explicates how post-Kantian advocates of “interiorized soteriology” project modernity’s schism between human interiority and worldly exteriority onto Anselm’s medieval theology. In so doing, Anselm’s critics overlook the importance of Christ's incarnation and the role of social justice in Cur Deus Homo's argument. Instead of seeing the Cur Deus Homo, with its emphasis on the honor Dei and satisfaction, as a culturally-bound limitation on the extent of Anselm's argument, the social world presumed by Anselm gives Cur Deus Homo a social and communitarian resonance lacking in the more individualistic soteriologies of his modern critics. Contemporary theologians who appreciate the communitarian ethos in Cur Deus Homo would do better to appreciate how Anselm’s use of the debt metaphor is best inscribed in interpersonal terms of self-gift rather than in the terms of neoliberal economics. Anselm’s culturally-situated feudalist context has within it a powerfully-articulated christocentric framework of justice that can serve as a foundation for specifically Christian social ethics.
Theology and Media(tion): Rendering the Absent Present, ed. Stephen Okey and Katherine G. Schmidt. Orbis., 2024
Grace-Filled Naturalism? Deep Pantheism? Panentheism? The ecological crisis of the twenty-first... more Grace-Filled Naturalism? Deep Pantheism? Panentheism? The ecological crisis of the twenty-first century has provoked theologians and philosophers of religion to develop metaphysical frameworks designed to counteract centuries of presumed anthropocentric narratives allegedly complicit in humanity's destruction of the natural world. Ever since Lynn White delivered the lecture "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" in 1966, there have been a plethora of indictments against both classical theism and biblical creation accounts that have supposedly fostered indifference and hostility towards the environment. There is an ironic element in these charges made by theologians and philosophers, however, as they are often more rooted in presenting theoretical metanarratives than in uncovering empirical reasons for the causes of ecological damage. In The Great Work, for example, Thomas Berry insists that "the deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being." Yet as fossil fuel consumption, carbon emissions, and the resulting environmental degradation have spread throughout the world--from developed to emerging versions of late capitalist economies--monocausal intellectual explanations of the reasons for ecological degradation become less plausible. Furthermore, confessionalist eco-theologies are of limited efficacy in a world in which pollution, habitat loss, and climate change threaten human beings from all religious and secular traditions. Rather than remaining trapped in the theoretical antinomies fostered by certain varieties of postliberal theology that eschew interreligious theology and insist upon the preeminence of their respective traditions, theologians and other scholars in the humanities would do better to develop constructive proposals that will be viable in interreligious and philosophically pluralist contexts.
This essay builds upon the philosophical theology of Wesley Wildman and the theological ethics of Willis Jenkins to argue that eco-theologies should be built upon praxes that can be shared across religious boundaries. Challenging superficial arguments that appeal to a shared communion of anthropomorphized living and non-living entities, I argue that the phenomenological approach of Robert Corrington privileges direct observation of the cosmos above theoretical speculation. When the attentiveness and respect for genuine biological diversity fostered by such phenomenology is combined with evolutionary and emergent explanations of cosmic development offered by Philip Clayton and Roger Haught, a dynamic foundation is laid to embrace ongoing theological and interdisciplinary changes, both in the field of eco-theology and in interreligious theology. As a practical test case for the efficacy of such an approach, the essay concludes by appealing to the work of Sallie McFague for an interreligious praxis rooted in sacrifice. Such sacrifice, however, should not be confined to traditional definitions of placating divinities, reenacting the passion of a savior understood to live in heaven, or securing a blessed afterlife in a world currently invisible to current human beings. Rather, attentive eco-theological sacrifice must honor the present world and promote socioeconomic resistance to the plague of overconsumption threatening the well-being of our planetary home.
Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society, Nov 23, 2015
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Feb 13, 2018
Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society, 2009
Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society, 2011
History of Christianity, official blog of the American Society for Church History., 2012
Two decades ago I graduated from a liberal-arts school whose curriculum is based upon reading cla... more Two decades ago I graduated from a liberal-arts school whose curriculum is based upon reading classic texts from Western Civilization—the so-called Great Books. Students read them in roughly chronological order, from Homer to Heidegger. Having decided that I needed to postpone entry into the real world for a tad longer, after I left college I embarked upon a more ambitious reading project. Beginning with surviving fragments of ancient Egyptian literature from the Old Kingdom period, I planned to work my way chronologically through influential texts from the succeeding four and one-half millennia of human history, this time branching out beyond the West and also reading texts from China, India, the Middle East, and Japan. The detail with which I drew up the reading list was not matched by a corresponding level of interest in the need to earn enough money upon which I could live, and so after three years I decided to head to graduate school in religious studies, where I could embark upon a profession in which I could combine teaching, writing, and reading. I put aside my reading list, having only reached Herodotus’s History. In the succeeding years I finished graduate school, earned a doctorate, and assumed a post teaching historical theology at St. John’s University in New York City. My cherished reading list was relegated to a file cabinet, until this past year, when I decided to return to Herodotus, picking up right where I left off twenty years ago—in the middle of the History’s third book. . .
Theology Without Walls, 2019
Catholic Action before and after Vatican II, 2013
Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, 2013
Catholic Action before and after Vatican II, 2013
Horizons, 2011
To resolve the impasse between various competing apocalypticisms, I suggest the writings of Julia... more To resolve the impasse between various competing apocalypticisms, I suggest the writings of Julian of Norwich exemplify an eschatology that incorporates features of what Catherine Keller calls counter-apocalyptic while avoiding the risks of deconstructionist theology. Julian faced an impasse as she struggled to reconcile the traditional apocalyptic claim of the church that some human beings were damned with her own revelatory experience that “all would be well.” According to the long text of theRevelation of Divine Love, in facing this crisis Julian did not abandon the belief in divine omnipotence. Like Keller's position, Julian's apophatic counter-apocalyptices chews understandings of Christiane eschatology as the simple disclosure of divine power and justice. Instead, Julian's counter-apocalyptic is founded upon the vulnerability of Christ's body. Julian's vision of Christ's kenotic love transcends the impasse between eschatological determinism and Keller&#...
Open Theology, 2016
The Theology Without Walls (TWW) project attempts to interpret spiritual experiences without subj... more The Theology Without Walls (TWW) project attempts to interpret spiritual experiences without subjecting them to a priori criteria from religious traditions, but TWW does not substitute universalized secular criteria for religious criteria. Some have promoted “multiple religious belonging” as a prism through which to interpret the experiences of people participating in more than one spiritual path. Yet the concept of multiple religious belonging still presumes a framework in which communal traditions coordinate one’s spiritual experiences. For TWW, however, belonging does not have to be religious or interreligious or multireligious. The manner in which practitioners thematize, or refuse to thematize, their journeys is not a prerequisite for participation in TWW. Is TWW then a sect of the disaffiliated that rejects communal encounters and traditions? How does TWW operate in practice? Raimon Panikkar’s writings on the Trinity demonstrate how a theologian/practitioner well versed in two...
Horizons, 2011
economic relations among the divine persons that, taken as a clue to the divine life itself, woul... more economic relations among the divine persons that, taken as a clue to the divine life itself, would do justice to the concerns of both sides of the Filioque controversy while leading beyond it. Surprisingly, however, she proceeds to argue that contemporary attempts to develop the social and political relevance of the Trinity in itself are wrong-headed; she would look instead to Jesus’ way of life, a life of worship and service of the Father in the Spirit, as the model and basis for community. Jesus’ life ended in an execution, and Tanner seeks to meet feminist concerns by retrieving the priority of divine action in the notion of sacrifi ce. Throughout Jesus’ life, and in his death, God was uniting human existence in its plight to Godself, transforming and sanctifying it. Thus, dismissing transactional soteriological models, Tanner fi nds in the incarnation warrant for Christus Victor and Luther’s happy exchange. A fi nal chapter deconstructs the modern construal of appeals to direct divine inspiration and suggests that an incarnational understanding of the working of the Spirit opens a bridge to modern science. Tanner’s develops her claim for the centrality of the incarnation with a theological performance that is lively, acutely analytic, sometimes feisty, and always interesting. It invites and merits conversation.
Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Jun 22, 2009
This essay examines the writings of two prominent comparative theologians. Raimon Panikkar is one... more This essay examines the writings of two prominent comparative theologians. Raimon Panikkar is one of the pioneers of comparative theology, whose influence in interreligious dialogue spans five decades. Francis Clooney has made his mark in the last twenty years. Beginning with an examination of their respective proposals for defining an ideal stance from which a reader can read texts across traditions, this essay then explores their prescriptions for interreligious exegesis. Using George Lindbeck's typologies of alternative correlations between religion and doctrine, this essay delineates the divergence between Panikkar's existential stance in hermeneutics and Clooney's more insistently textual and linguistic one. The result is a divergence regarding exegesis and also a practical difference involving the definitions of self and other in reading across traditions.
Christianity and Literature, Jun 22, 2013
In three poems written on the eve of World War I, French poet Charles Péguy (1873—1914) employed ... more In three poems written on the eve of World War I, French poet Charles Péguy (1873—1914) employed the character of Jeanne d’Arc to express dissatisfaction with doctrines of judgment and damnation, exemplified for Péguy in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Péguy believed Christianity’s dominant eschatological traditions promoted bourgeois individualism and apathy in the face of suffering. Péguy’s rejection of these doctrines illustrates a paradoxical strategy of using Jeanne as an advocate in this struggle against expectation of a wrathful divine judgment. With help from theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905—1988), I explain how contemporary Christians can appropriate Péguy’s eschatological alternative.
International Catholic History Discussion List, 2007
Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville_. Translated and edited by Stephen A. B... more Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville_. Translated and edited by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xii + 475 pp. Bibliography, index. 150.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-83749-1.
Reviewed for H-Catholic by Christopher Denny, Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, St. John’s University – New York.
Catholic Books Review, 2019
Catholic Books Review , 2019
Catholic Books Review, 2018
*The Living Church* (October 18, 2015): 21-22.
Catholic Books Review, May 17, 2012
Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society., 2011
Catholic Books Review, Oct 19, 2009
International Catholic History Discussion List., May 2007
Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society., 2006
" The English word paradise derives from the Avestan word for a walled garden, pairi-daēza. In t... more " The English word paradise derives from the Avestan word for a walled garden, pairi-daēza. In the Book of Revelation the heavenly Jerusalem is surrounded by a wall marking its exclusivity, mimicking the walls that surrounded the earthly Jerusalem in the late first century CE. This etymology is apropos to our presentations this afternoon, because if there is one theological specialization that is built upon a walled conception of its subject matter, eschatology is that concentration. My remarks today for this Theology Without Walls panel will provide an alternative dialogical framework for thinking about eschatology across religious traditions, and I will do so with the help of imaginative literature, alternately called fiction or belles lettres. I turn to literature for three reasons. Those reasons are first, the value of acknowledging subjectivity; second, freedom from the burden of canonicity; and third, the hope for a future world that imaginative literature can represent."
Gregory of Nyssa’s (c. 335-394) reintroduction into the theological milieu of Western Christian s... more Gregory of Nyssa’s (c. 335-394) reintroduction into the theological milieu of Western Christian scholarship took place under the banner of nouvelle théologie and Neoplatonism. Jean Daniélou described Gregory as the founder of Christian mystical theology, and for most of the late 20th century Gregory’s intellectual contributions were characterized in terms of either fourth-century trinitarian theology or apophatic mysticism.
Over the past two decades, however, a new wave of Nyssa scholarship has complicated Daniélou’s interpretation. Sarah Coakley warned that “a false disjunction between exegesis and philosophical thinking” hinders appreciation of Gregory’s thought. In his his Life of Moses Gregory described the lawgiver’s goal in terms of the Jewish temple—the Holy of Holies. In his homilies on the Song of Songs, Gregory equated the lyric poetry of that collection with the Holy of Holies. A breakthrough in interpreting Gregory came with Ann Conway-Jones’s 2014 book on Gregory’s tabernacle imagery, which compares the Life of Moses with accounts of mystical ascent from sources ranging from the Tanakh to Philo.
When the Life of Moses is read alongside texts from the Merkabah tradition, a liturgical interpretation of Gregory’s oeuvre gains credibility. Interpreting Gregory’s exegesis as unqualified apophaticism in the service of inchoate mystical union with the divine exemplified a reading that was sympathetic to the mid-century existentialist theology with which Gregory was reincorporated into the tradition of systematics. A liturgical reading of the Life of Moses is more credible, however. Gregory’s advocacy of an embodied unio liturgica is now secured by Jewish and Christian comparative readings, and so the idea of a specific Neoplatonic or Cappadocian school of biblical interpretation must be further reexamined in order to ensure that Gregory’s liturgical mysticism is not unduly subjugated to either the conciliar doctrines of the fourth century or the individualistic mysticism of the twentieth century.
In a pair of recent books David Aers has sought to position fourteenth-century English poet Willi... more In a pair of recent books David Aers has sought to position fourteenth-century English poet William Langland as a Wycliffite sympathizer, as part of Aers’s ongoing project to employ imaginative literature as a constructive resource for historical and theological study. John Wycliffe, we will recall, was the theologian, Bible translator, and critic of ecclesiastical abuses who centuries later was hailed as a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation. Like his poetic contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland himself was also critical of corruption in the Church, but a higher bar is needed to claim the mantle of Wycliffite for Langland—namely, a constructive program of church reform along the lines set out by Wycliffe in his works. As Patrick Hornbeck has demonstrated, the category of Lollard is not transparent in studies of medieval English church history, and mere anticlericalism in Langland’s poem Piers Plowman does not suffice as evidence of Langland’s sympathy with Wycliffite platforms on church property and an invisible church of the saved. Much less does the millenarian eschatology in Langland’s poem embrace the end of “Constantinian Christianity,” a reading that has an ancestor in the early biographies of Langland by John Bales and Robert Crowley. Moving from the particular case of Langland to a more general observation, this presentation will argue that historical reconstructions employing evidence from medieval imaginative literature must not confuse criticism of clerical behavior with a positive commitment to changing church structures. Thus, it will sound another warning about the perils of interpreting critics of the medieval church as proto-Protestants, and caution against overly ambitious historical claims made on the basis of belles lettres.
Beatus of Liébana's (c. 730-c.800) Commentary on the Apocalypse incorporates a commentary of Greg... more Beatus of Liébana's (c. 730-c.800) Commentary on the Apocalypse incorporates a commentary of Gregory of Elvira (d. 392) on Noah's Ark. Noah's Ark is for Gregory an allegorical prefiguration of the Church, and Gregory does not directly expound on the Genesis flood. Text accompanying the illustrations in Beatus's commentary differs from that in other early medieval manuscripts where Noah's Ark is painted.
In contrast to other late antique and early medieval illustrations of Noah's ark, arks in the early Beatus manuscripts are open-form structures without floodwaters, loosening the connection to Genesis and to patristic apocalyptic reinterpretations of the flood. Depictions of Noah's ark in the early Beatus manuscripts differ from the iconography of the ark in the "Cotton Genesis" tradition of Noah's Ark illustrations examined by Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert Kessler.
Following an article by Marianne Besseyre, I propose that these Beatus Noah's Ark illustrations be interpreted as a medieval bestiary, and one textual source for the Beatus bestiary is Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job. Understanding these images as bestiaries explains their unique depictions of the Noahide cycle. Beatus's illustrators needed to adapt the patristic trope of ark as church to portray a differentiated boat containing both orthodox believers and heresiarchs. Since Beatus was engaged in countering the adoptionist Christology of the archbishop Elipandus of Toledo, his later illustrators needed a way to depict a more differentiated boat whose cargo included both orthodox believers and heresiarchs such as Elipandus. Precedent for a division of the church into saints and sinners could already be found in the fourth-century African Donatist theologian Tyconius, whose commentary on the Book of Revelation was a major source for Beatus's own commentary. Visualizing Noah's ark as a bestiary allowed Beatus's illustrators to complement his differentiated understanding of the no-longer pure church.
Expositions of Augustine’s theology have often emphasized the theme of interiority and the corres... more Expositions of Augustine’s theology have often emphasized the theme of interiority and the corresponding Neoplatonic influence on Augustine. The goal of this presentation is not to refute these interpretations. Rather, my intention is to examine the issues of mysticism and selfhood in Augustine’s works by balancing these emphases on Augustine’s consistent appeal to human interiority with an appreciation of how another much-analyzed aspect of his writings merges with Augustine’s conception of interiority and ascent to the divine. That aspect is sacrifice. Friends are those who sacrifice their desire for power over others, preferring instead to serve others when this is compatible with the divine will.
Augustine’s description of the soul’s ascent to the divine offers a different understanding of the relationship of self and society than that expounded by some contemporary mystical-political theologians, as Augustine rejected the late modern claim that the personal is inevitably the political.
Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar were two of the theological giants of the twentieth ce... more Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar were two of the theological giants of the twentieth century. Each was committed to a Christocentrism in which Christian revelation served as the authoritative criterion by which Christian doctrine was to be assessed. In the Heidelberg Disputation Luther described the contrast between the “theology of glory” and the “theology of the cross” in terms of the latter’s acceptance of suffering and its renunciation of what came to be known as works-righteousness. The original context of the relevant theses in the disputation dealt with the difference between law and grace and the activity of justification.
Whereas Luther’s targets in the Heidelberg Disputation were nominalist theologians, post-Kantian developments in Christian theology would lead to a new appropriation of Luther’s theologia crucis, reinterpreting it as a statement primarily about theological authority. In the aftermath of his disillusionment with liberal theology after World War I, Barth transmogrified Luther’s concerns with justification into an apologetic platform. Barth’s attack on Luther’s concept of “the hidden God” had the effect of moving beyond a doctrine of sola scriptura to eliminate any appeals to divine authority revelation outside of Christian revelation. Barth’s longtime friend Balthasar shared Barth’s concern to ground theological authority in Christian revelation, but attempted to overcome Barth’s positing of dialectical oppositions between reason and revelation by claiming that revelation stands in analogous relation to other sources of knowledge. In other words, Balthasar qualifies Barth’s theology of the cross, not by rejecting Barth’s denial of the “hidden God” but by positing asymmetrical relationships between the theological authority vested in revelation and the theological authority present in other areas of human experience.
Stephen Wigley, Jason Fout, D. Stephen Long, and Wolfgang Müller have explicated the theological exchange between Barth and Balthasar as it related to matters from ecumenism to the category of analogy. This presentation, however, will set its comparison of Barth and Balthasar’s theologies within the framework of Luther’s early concern with theological and religious authority. In the years surrounding his break with Rome, Luther worked to remove ecclesial authority from the process of penance and justification. In his Epistle to the Romans, Barth did something similar with the European nation states that had failed Christians so badly, as he worked to desacralize the political nationalisms that had led to the Great War. Though Barth was somewhat more optimistic about political authority later in his career, Balthasar was slower to embrace secular democracy in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the World Wars. In a long book on the German author Reinhold Schneider, Balthasar profiled Schneider’s historical novels that repeatedly pitted religious and political leaders against each other in a tragic setting. In this monograph, it becomes clear that Balthasar’s analogous understanding of the relationship between revelation and reason promoted a political theology in which the valid yet competing claims to authority of the sacred and the secular result in inevitable conflict, which can only be resolved when seen in the aestheticized light of a theology of the cross.
One major factor in debates about secularization and religiosity in contemporary sociology center... more One major factor in debates about secularization and religiosity in contemporary sociology centers upon the methodology used to determine affiliation. Is self-identification sufficient for establishing religious belonging, or should researchers search for markers of religious behavior such as participation in worship services, personal prayer, or knowledge of scriptures and theology? When examining the phenomenon of self-identified "multiple religious belonging" this question becomes even more acute. This essay will explain how theologies of sacrifice in Vedic and Christian traditions can articulate intellectual frameworks for multiple religious belonging that are more tangible than definitions of affiliation that rely only upon self-identification. The functional focus on ritual also provides more sociological content than alternative theological explanations of multiple religious belonging that only appeal to essentialist assertions regarding supernatural providence or internalized altruism (e.g. the categorical imperative, Gefühl, "anonymous Christians," "reality-centeredness"). I will argue that Vedic ritual and ancient Christian Eucharistic celebration provide models for reconceiving multiple religious belonging so that communal participation in sacrificial rites from different traditions embodies a visible commitment to self-transcendence that makes claims to multiple religious belonging more credible.
France’s 1905 law separating church and state intensified hostilities between laïcité and Catholi... more France’s 1905 law separating church and state intensified hostilities between laïcité and Catholicism that would last throughout Pius X’s reign, which witnessed a sharp increase in the percentage of unbaptized French children. On August 25, 1910, anxious to maintain as much control over education as possible, Pius condemned Marc Sangnier’s Le Sillon in an apostolic letter echoing his condemnations of Modernism three years earlier. Earlier that same month the Vatican decree Quam Singulari appealed to ancient traditions in promoting reception of the Eucharist by children. Quam Singulari was in part an attempt to inculcate Catholicism in a generation of French children whom the Church was losing.
At the same time, French poet and essayist Charles Péguy was appealing to the figure of the child in his struggle against “le monde moderne” [the modern world]. Péguy, however, was also a nationalist and a socialist, partaking in two strands of French thought that were vexing to the Vatican. Critical of the pope’s opposition to Henri Bergson, Péguy offered an alternative vision of childhood stressing openness to the world rather than mere obedience. Whereas Quam Singulari claimed to restore ancient practice regarding children and the Eucharist, Péguy’s poetry endowed childhood with a quasi-sacramental status and interpreted childhood as a harbinger of newness and hope.
At the close of la Belle Époque, Pius X and Péguy employed the figure of the child in different ways but toward the same goal—an alternative to growing secularism in a democratic imperialist nation headed toward global conflagration.
The ambivalence of beauty in The Idiot can be seen in a scene featuring the contrasting responses... more The ambivalence of beauty in The Idiot can be seen in a scene featuring the contrasting responses of Rogozhin and Prince Myshkin to a painting of Christ’s corpse: Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. Holbein’s unflinching depiction of Christ’s wide-eyed gaping-mouthed corpse does not deter the character Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, a lover of worldly beauty, from appreciatively singling out this artwork from the rest of the “trash” hanging in his reception room. “I like looking at that painting,” Rogozhin tells Myshkin, who wants to flee the space and warns Rogozhin, “A man could even lose his faith from that painting.” For Rogozhin the dead Christ demonstrates that God is indeed dead. After the exchange, Myshkin is on the point of leaving Rogozhin, but having already said his good-bye he stops and proceeds to blurt out a rambling sequence of four encounters that the prince had the week before. The sequence begins with a learned cynical adult and travels through Christ and through death, and concludes with a picture of a newborn child smiling at its mother.
What is the effect of the prince’s narrative on Rogozhin? He wants to exchange the gold cross that he is wearing for the tin cross that Myshkin purchased for twenty kopecks. “We’ll be brothers,” Myshkin exclaims. Yet he realizes that “the former bitter and almost derisive smile still did not seem to leave the face of his adopted brother.” Rogozhin’s smile is a counterfeit smile by comparison with the smile of the newborn infant toward its mother. Rogozhin has failed to recognize the cross as the symbol of divine love. Prince Myshkin is not duped by such routine piety; he knows the difference between external forms and interior devotion. As a Russophile his narrative does not stop with the cross itself, as in so much staurocentric Western Christian spirituality, but moves to a mother-child relationship symbolizing the love of the crucified Christ.
German Romanticism marks the intrusion of aesthetic theology into Western history, and its sacral... more German Romanticism marks the intrusion of aesthetic theology into Western history, and its sacralized vision of literature provoked Balthasar to evaluate the German classics from a theological standpoint, beginning with his dissertation in 1927. Balthasar believed that the classicism embraced by Goethe contained within itself the latent contradiction between an organic vision of human beings beholding the forms of nature within the theatre of the world, and a Faustian exaltation of self that marks the ascent of irreligious anthropocentrism.
Early Franciscans moved beyond previous literary constructions of non-Christians to interaction w... more Early Franciscans moved beyond previous literary constructions of non-Christians to interaction with them in mission fields. Francis of Assisi’s meeting with Malik al-Kamil was an exceptional if ineffective milestone in medieval Christian-Muslim relations. Francis’s attempt to convert the Sultan or to be martyred was unsuccessful. His marginalization amidst the armies in Egypt foreshadowed the eclipse of Francis’s insistence on strictly interpreting Franciscan poverty. As the Spiritual Franciscans were ecclesially marginalized during the thirteenth century, their apocalyptic understandings of Francis’s significance were intertwined with intensifying eschatological presentations of Islam.
Nick Havely demonstrated Dante’s increasing sympathy with the Spiritual Franciscans and the corresponding escalation of his anti-papal rhetoric in the Paradiso, where excoriation of the usurious John XXII’s campaign against the Spirituals is coupled with denunciation of the crusades, increasingly unpopular after the fall of Acre. During the years Dante was writing the Commedia, a Vita coetana of Ramon Llull appeared, describing how years earlier Llull asked to receive the Franciscan habit prior to a voyage to Tunis, even at the cost of his own damnation. This source recounts how Llull, like Francis, conversed with Muslims in North Africa, a counterpoint to the crusade Clement V would promote at the Council of Vienne. Llull’s The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men differs from earlier medieval interreligious dialogues in the prominence given to eschatological themes. After his death, Llull and the Spiritual Franciscans gave inspiration to a group in Valencia, earning Llull the posthumous censure of the Aragonese inquisitor general.
Theological shifts since 1965 make the foundations undergirding Nostra Aetate questionable. Raim... more Theological shifts since 1965 make the foundations undergirding Nostra Aetate questionable. Raimundo Panikkar’s call for modern remythicization is a helpful example of what Nostra Aetate calls “the inexhaustible wealth of myths” in Hinduism, along with Panikkar’s assertion that reality discloses a triadic relationship of which the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is one specific manifestation. Robert Magliola’s writings on connections between deconstructionist philosophy and Buddhism can demonstrate how the Declaration’s reference to Buddhism’s acknowledgment of “the radical inadequacy of this changeable world” can be a corrective to static understandings of the church.
Applying these lenses to Nostra Aetate provides an opportunity to broaden the Church’s construction of salvation history. In the twenty-first century the Catholic Church must try to forge a shared understanding of salvation history with Hindus and Buddhists. Such history will need continuous revision in response to new experiences of the “ray of that truth which enlightens everyone.”
Paul Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil appeared at the center of a mid-twentieth century swirl of p... more Paul Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil appeared at the center of a mid-twentieth century swirl of philosophical and theological appropriations of tragedy. In the last quarter century, however, criticisms of tragic theology have emerged from two postliberal quarters.
John Milbank charged Ricoeur with creating a “neo-Kantian” division between explanation and understanding, one wedded to privatized structuralist accounts of meaning. David Bentley Hart claimed theodicies that develop parallels between tragedy and providence lead to masochistic resignation.
Pointing to the biblical text, Ricoeur believed that understanding evil was not as simple as speculative theologians would believe. For example, Job’s friends demanded he condemn himself and vindicate the ethical God. Yet Job refused to bring his suit against the “wicked God” to a premature conclusion, and Job’s deity shuns any moral criterion for divine activity, not because God embraces an “ontology of violence” but because human verstehen cannot encompass any source of revelation.
Anselm of Canterbury's Proslogium marked a crucial turning point in European intellectual history... more Anselm of Canterbury's Proslogium marked a crucial turning point in European intellectual history. Anselm tried to balance monastic theology, which regarded religious faith as self-sufficient, with a nascent speculative and dialectical method that saw rational inquiry as essential to theology. This balanced position presupposed Christian faith among readers, but faith that attempted to use all rational means to elucidate religious doctrine, an exercise in "fides quaerens intellectum" rather than in religious apologetics since atheism was socially marginal to Anselm's historical context. Anselm's monastery at Bec was distinctive in the eleventh century for admitting secular students to theological study, providing a pedagogical rationale for a more expansive use of the trivium than was typical in Benedictine monastic education. Some contemporary accounts of marginalization of religion and the liberal arts in American higher education, including those by George Marsden and James Burtchaell, have bemoaned the loss of church and denominational oversight of colleges and universities. Yet hopeful opportunities exist for studying classical religious texts such as Anselm's *Proslogion* at non-confessional secular institutions. Without a need to defend or apologize for an ecclesiastical past, secular colleges and universities are free to engage directly with Anselm's argument in classrooms free of collective a priori assumptions, whether theological or naturalistic assumptions. Moreover, increased religious diversity and cultural pluralism among today's students, analogous to that of the students at Bec, makes Socratic-style pedagogy in the classroom a more appealing approach than initiatives that stake religious and theological study to projects of institutional and cultural revanche.
As a poetic encapsulation of the only realm of the afterlife deemed temporary by Roman Catholic C... more As a poetic encapsulation of the only realm of the afterlife deemed temporary by Roman Catholic Christianity, Dante’s Purgatorio provides a helpful venue in which to test the intersection of selected modern philosophies of language and religion. Whereas the eschatological imagination of medieval Christians invested hell and heaven with the status of eternal destinations for human beings, Dante’s Mount Purgatory impels both its narrator and its inhabitants to undergo diachronic transformations in response to selected aesthetic stimuli. Christopher Kleinhenz describes the Commedia as a “totalizing vision,” but the narrator’s ascent to God continually describes a tension between his faculties of perception and the mysterious revelation that bedazzles the poet’s comprehension. Interpreters of Dante often attempt to sublate one pole of this kataphatic-apophatic conflict beneath the other pole, judging the self as either the recipient or as the ground of revelation. For example, Douglas Hedley has described Dante’s imaginative use of symbols as a “Neoplatonic fantasy,” while Christian Moevs sees in the closing cantos of the Paradiso the poet’s self-awareness melding into disembodied union with ultimate reality.
I take a cue from Denys Turner’s and William Franke’s expositions of language and ineffability to argue that the Purgatorio exemplifies a via media between eidetic presentations and the subjective agency of the poet-narrator. The poem’s tenth and fifteenth cantos especially demonstrate how Dante’s moral purgation and aesthetic illumination comprise a mutually reinforcing dialectic performance in which imagery and symbolism trigger moral conversions, conversions that in turn shape subsequent aesthetic encounters with God in the narrator’s journey. The poetics of the Purgatorio therefore transcend definition as a synchronic metaphysical system amidst post-Cartesian attempts to ground aesthetic experience in either subjects or objects. Because of its unique eschatological and dialectical temporality, the Purgatorio addresses the later ethical concerns of philosophers such as Lévinas, who was alarmed by aesthetics’ capability to foster passivity, while the poem at the same time meets the challenges of Marion, who warned against the solipsistic imposition of the ego’s concerns upon the mysterious icons that call out from the divine depths to make genuine community possible.
Against the backdrop of contemporary debates regarding a "hermeneutics of rupture" versus a "herm... more Against the backdrop of contemporary debates regarding a "hermeneutics of rupture" versus a "hermeneutics of continuity" in the interpretation of Vatican II, John Courtney Murray's writings on Catholic Action provide another interpretive model for 20th-century American Catholic history. While the lion's share of attention regarding Murray's part in Vatican II centers upon his contribution to Dignitatis Humanae, his earlier writings on Catholic Action develop a understanding of church history as an ongoing succession of communities in changing relationship to the world. While other historiographies often center upon doctrinal developments or changing power relationships, Murray's writings on Catholic Action placed this lay movement within a historical trajectory demonstrating how the Church moved from a predominantly institutional conception towards a self-definition of emancipated Catholics acting for the greater good within a properly differentiated society. Decades before Lumen Gentium retrieved the biblical image of the People of God to describe the Church, Murray's writings on Catholic Action provided an example of what Robert Doran has called "a theological theory of history," albeit one in which history is not the movement of static principles or material forces but of organic communal development. In this interpretation, scholars can read Murray’s early writings on Catholic Action as a historically-conscious building block for a nascent communio ecclesiology, in which lived relationships within the community of faith induced the church to provide a new model for understanding the church’s orientation to the modern world. This presentation will examine (1) Murray’s writings and lectures on Catholic Action’s role in the historical relations between church and society, (2) the American communitarian context of Murray’s writings on religious freedom in the 1950s and early 1960s, and (3) how Murray’s writings on Catholic Action and his communal understanding of liberty demonstrate a singular interpretation of Vatican II’s understanding of the church.
"Critics have urged Christians to abandon substitutionary theories of atonement that distort God ... more "Critics have urged Christians to abandon substitutionary theories of atonement that distort God into a wrathful patriarch appeased by the violent death of his Son. Though the biblical evidence does not support such interpretations, centuries’ worth of tradition and pastoral practice make it unlikely that mere biblical scholarship will vanquish many Christians’ allegiance to heteronomic substitutionary theories.
I claim modern concepts of selfhood constitute a problem in responsibly retrieving a Christian doctrine of sacrificial atonement. By studying Vedic sacrificial texts, which describe sacrifice as world constituting, community constituting, and person constituting rather than as substitutionary or atoning, Christian theologians can appreciate how sacrifice’s primary significance may lie in its ability to construct a human person and a human community rather than simply redeeming them. Operating outside of a theistic framework, the Vedas keep the focus of the brahmins’ sacrificial actions in a perspective simultaneously immanent and religious.
"
Christopher Denny’s "Perusha Sukta / Nirvana / Holy Saturday: Alternative Paths to Spiritual Keno... more Christopher Denny’s "Perusha Sukta / Nirvana / Holy Saturday: Alternative Paths to Spiritual Kenosis," will use the work of S. Mark Heim (Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion) to frame the soteriological issues at stake. Afterwards, Denny will explicate Panikkar’s commentary on the “Purusha Sukta” hymn and sacrifice in The Vedic Experience, along with Panikkar’s presentation on “ontological apophaticism” in The Silence of God, to forge a critical comparison. This comparison will evaluate the compatibility between these positions of Panikkar and the christological kenosis promoted by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his writings on Christ’s descent to hell on Holy Saturday, especially as found in Mysterium Paschale and Theo-Drama. Though Balthasar operates within a Barthian-inflected discontinuity between Christianity and other religions, Denny argues that Balthasar’s account of Christ’s descent is in some respects compatible with Panikkar’s understanding of kenosis in Vedic and Buddhist traditions, and that Panikkar’s accounts can broaden Christian understandings of kenosis.
It has been forty years since the second edition of Umberto Eco’s book The Aesthetics of Thomas A... more It has been forty years since the second edition of Umberto Eco’s book The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas appeared, and since that time the discipline of theological aesthetics has achieved recognized stature as a distinct specialization in theological study. Theological aesthetics’ rise to prominence coincided with the collapse of neo-Thomistic hegemony in mid-20th century Catholic theology, but several of the seminal thinkers in Christian theological aesthetics relied on interpretations of Aquinas’s commentary on The Divine Names that subsequent Aquinas scholars have judged incorrect. In his Glory of the Lord, for example, Hans Urs von Balthasar veers away from earlier Thomistic interpretations of Aquinas’s relationship to the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, such as that of Etienne Gilson, by asserting that Aquinas’s metaphysical distinction between esse and essentia is a mere clarification of an existing Christian Neoplatonic ontology. Asserting a fundamental continuity between the cataphatic and apophatic ontologies of Denys and Aquinas, Balthasar notes that “for the most part [Thomas’s] discussion is dependent on material presented to him by tradition.” Although Jean-Luc Marion offers a different interpretation of Aquinas’s ontology than that of Balthasar’s “Heideggerian Thomism” (to use the description of Fergus Kerr), in his more recent work Marion too has drawn a genealogical link between Aquinas’s exposition of the divine esse and a God without being who subsists beyond the realm of onto-theology. Such a theological move allows Marion to place Thomas within the orbit of Dionysian-saturated theological aesthetics that Marion had explicated earlier in his book The Idol and the Distance, and from which he had excluded Thomas in his later God without Being.
While these theological attempts to surmount neo-Thomism’s earlier overemphasis on Aquinas’s differences from the patristic Neoplatonic tradition were valuable, more recent scholarship has challenged the claim that Denys’s ontology can be credibly translated into the language of analogy that Aquinas employs without a loss of Denys’s original meaning. By the early 1960s Vladimir Lossky had already charged Western theologians such as Aquinas with underestimating the radical quality of Denys’s apophaticism, writing that Denys’s God cannot be understood in ontological categories, unlike Aquinas’s deity. Eberhard Jüngel followed suit with a critical assessment of Denys’s radical apophaticism in God and the Mystery of the World, holding that Denys’s views undermined the positive content of divine revelation. In his book The Darkness of God, Denys Turner also argued against an interpretation of Denys that understood Pseudo-Dionysian apophaticism as a corrective to the analogies employed by cataphatic theology, in the manner of 20th-century dialectical theology. Instead Turner argues that Denys is not merely using negative propositions to qualify human knowledge of God via the language of analogy; rather, Denys intends to subvert propositional language itself, and thereby move beyond the language of form and icon currently employed by contemporary Christian theological aesthetics.
These more recent interpretations of Denys are convincing, and they open the door to a more balanced and nuanced interpretation of the Denys-Thomas relationship that respects Thomas’s debt to Denys while acknowledging the major differences in their respective understandings of God. The challenges that this recent Dionysian scholarship poses to theological aesthetics, however, have not been adequately explicated by theologians, insofar as the radical apophaticism that Denys advocates undermines recent attempts to make aesthetics a foundational, or even the foundational, category for Christian theology. Given this apophatic challenge, theologians can understand the ambiguous relationship that Aquinas has to transcendental beauty as a partial function of his ambiguous relationship to Denys’s writings. Understood correctly, the Dionysiac corpus provides no support for making beauty a foundational ontological category in theology, and Thomas’s exposition of beauty—conceptually distinct from the transcendental properties of being yet linked to the good in reality—exemplifies Thomas’s humility in simultaneously realizing the value and the limitations of beauty in its relationship to the Godhead.
Over the past three decades John Hick has established himself as a seminal Christian theologian i... more Over the past three decades John Hick has established himself as a seminal Christian theologian in the Christian theology of religions. Operating from a Kantian epistemological perspective, Hick’s early work—seen in books such as The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), God Has Many Names (1980), and The Myth of Christian Uniqueness (1987)—is governed by specifically Christian anxieties over the eschatological destinations of human beings who do not identify themselves as Christians. In his more recent work, Hick has not fundamentally revised his position that the historical and doctrinal differences among religious traditions, whatever their value for subjective devotion and piety, are best understood as epiphenomena unified under the umbrella of “Ultimate Reality.”
The recent death of Raimundo Panikkar, one of the contributors to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, provides scholars with an opportunity to understand how allegedly tolerant universalizing theologies of religion have too often narrowed their focus to soteriological concerns that are primarily the province of Christian theologians. Both postliberal philosophers of religion and the so-called comparative theologians have demonstrated that one cannot intelligibly frame questions about universal salvation without asking the more fundamental question, “What is salvation?” By examining works such as Panikkar’s The Silence of God and Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics, along with S. Mark Heim’s Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion, we can see that other soteriological possibilities emerge that cannot be neatly encompassed within the religious typologies established by Hick. Moreover, we need to recognize that the very category of “salvation” is not necessarily relevant to other religious paths outside of a Christian orbit. These other a/soteriological possibilities are especially valuable for helping religious pluralists overcome Christian eschatological anxieties, which have too often induced them to ignore past and present religious diversity in their attempts to establish the fairness of some future divine kingdom to be inaugurated at an indeterminate date.
Only by squarely confronting the irreducibility of soteriological pluralism can philosophers and theologians clear sufficient space to accept the broader reality of religious pluralism, in which the study of religious experiences, doctrines, institutions, and histories begins with an attempt to understand them on their own terms, rather than using Kantian epistemology to smooth out their differences through a priori categories.