Unspeakable Cults: An Essay in Christology Hardcover – August 1, 2021 by Paul J. DeHart

Description

Author: DeHart Paul J.

Package Dimensions: 0x229x788

Number Of Pages: 271

Release Date: 15-07-2021

Details: Review A brilliantly original, profound, witty, provocative book inviting us to look again at the connections between a full-blooded traditional Christology and the work of critical historical scholarship. It is one of the freshest and most stimulating works of theology I have read for a long time. Whether you agree or not, it will make you think harder about the need to see belief in the incarnation of the Word as more than just some kind of judgment on an individual human life. — Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of CanterburyIn this highly original and theologically-challenging volume, Paul DeHart returns afresh to an issue that no thinking Christian can afford to ignore: what exactly is the relation between critical historical scholarship about Jesus and the later, conciliar, ?orthodox? claims made about the incarnation and the ?hypostatic union’? This problem consumed generations of liberal theologians, but was then curiously sidelined by conservative ones who relied on ?revelatory positivism’ as an escape from it, or who come to eschew the whole project of theological ‘foundationalism.? Returning afresh to the fray, DeHart redefines the issues at stake in a most ingenious and spiritually releasing way: the link between the two poles of reflection on Jesus must be via a rich theory of ?signs,? inflected by a theology of the Spirit that ever undergirds the path to true christological recognition. This is a remarkably rich, wise, and demanding book, full of surprising novelties right to the end. — Sarah Coakley, Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, Emerita, University of Cambridge, and Senior Research Fellow, Australian Catholic UniversityThere are few who are better positioned than Paul DeHart to take theology beyond the mutual exclusivities that have plagued Christology. Long besieged by the Harnackian either/or, DeHart carves out a linguistic path toward a Christology that unites the ontological and the historical. Rather than negating orthodox affirmations of the full divinity of Jesus, DeHart sees the emergence of modern historical consciousness as part of the synergistic response to extend in language and culture the incarnation of the divine Word in the single, historically particular individual, Jesus. Insightful, probing, and daring?DeHart has provided a strikingly original exploration of Christology that is grounded in tradition and attuned to the present. — Aristotle Papanikolaou, Professor of Theology and Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, Fordham University Product Description The incarnation of God in Jesus poses numerous challenges for the historical consciousness. How does a particular human at a particular time embody the eternal? And how does that embodiment work itself out in faith across the centuries? A gulf would appear to stand between what Christians say about Christ and the historical event of the man Jesus; indeed, the true reality of the incarnation seems unspeakable.Unspeakable Cults considers the nature and potential resolution of the conflict between the relativistic assumptions of the modern historical worldview and the classical Christian assertion of the absolute status of Jesus of Nazareth as God’s saving incarnation in history. Paul DeHart contends that an understanding of Jesus’ history is possible, proposing a model of the relation of divine causation to historical causation that allows the affirmation of Jesus’ divinity without a miraculous rupture of the world’s immanent causal patterns. The book first identifies classic articulations of the conflict in nineteenth-century German thought (Troeltsch, D. F. Strauss), and then draws on the history of religions to suggest possible relevant motifs in first-century culture that mitigate the axiomatic “tension” between Jesus’ humanity and his deified status in early Christianity. With a creative appropriation of Thomas Aquinas, the heart of the argument aims to understand the eternal Word’s presence i