New opportunities for discourse about God have arisen, along with new challenges to the mainstream Catholic theology of God. In order to take advantage of these opportunities, a truly contemporary Catholic theology of God must critically appropriate three ‘events’ which have affected its approach to the subject matter: Heidegger's periodizing critique of ontotheology; the ‘contemporary’ viewed as the arena of contention between modern and postmodern claims; the presence of the Kingdom of God and the revelation of the nature of God (...) in the person and work of Jesus Christ, which alter our understandings of time and being. The present essay sketches a program for an authentically Catholic response to the issues raised by these occurrences, emphasizing the Catholic commitment to incarnation and sacramentality and the necessary effort to retrieve redemptive images of God from modernity, despite the present tendency of some postmodern theologians and philosophers to dismiss aspects of the past as unusable. (shrink)

God - believers - questions -- How God became a problem in western culture -- The Christian response, I: natural theology -- The Christian response, II: theological theology -- The presence and absence of God.

For the inaugural session of the Consultation on Mysticism and Politics at the 1995 convention of the College Theology Society, the consultation’s conveners, David Hammond and Kris Willumsen (both of Wheeling Jesuit College) organized a panel presentation on John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. The panelists were John Berkman (then of Sacred Heart University, now of the Catholic University of America), Anthony Godzieba (VillanovaUniversity), Paul Lakeland (Fairfield University), and William Loewe (Catholic University of America).The choice of text (...) was a fortunate one as panelists and audience members alike recognized something emphasized by previous reviewers of the book: no matter how one evaluates Milbank’s proposal, he makes a major contribution to contemporary theology by plunging theology into the thick of the contemporary debates over the status of modernity and postmodernity. In doing so, Milbank avoids employing any of the means normally used in these debates, such as the correlationmethod. Rather, his deeply reflective analysis reaches back into the Christian theological tradition in order to retrieve its Augustinian moment for the post-Nietzschean present. From his dialogue with contemporary Western culture and the social and political theories which undergird it, Milbank pointedly proposes a provocation: not only an alternative theological reading of the history and status of modernity/postmodernity, but also nothing less than a truly theological reconstruction of the contemporary.This review symposium presents the panelists’ contributions, which have been revised for this publication. (shrink)

For the inaugural session of the Consultation on Mysticism and Politics at the 1995 convention of the College Theology Society, the consultation’s conveners, David Hammond and Kris Willumsen (both of Wheeling Jesuit College) organized a panel presentation on John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. The panelists were John Berkman (then of Sacred Heart University, now of the Catholic University of America), Anthony Godzieba (VillanovaUniversity), Paul Lakeland (Fairfield University), and William Loewe (Catholic University of America).The choice of text (...) was a fortunate one as panelists and audience members alike recognized something emphasized by previous reviewers of the book: no matter how one evaluates Milbank’s proposal, he makes a major contribution to contemporary theology by plunging theology into the thick of the contemporary debates over the status of modernity and postmodernity. In doing so, Milbank avoids employing any of the means normally used in these debates, such as the correlationmethod. Rather, his deeply reflective analysis reaches back into the Christian theological tradition in order to retrieve its Augustinian moment for the post-Nietzschean present. From his dialogue with contemporary Western culture and the social and political theories which undergird it, Milbank pointedly proposes a provocation: not only an alternative theological reading of the history and status of modernity/postmodernity, but also nothing less than a truly theological reconstruction of the contemporary.This review symposium presents the panelists’ contributions, which have been revised for this publication. (shrink)

Tilley argues that since religions are not summaries of bloodless beliefs but embodied communal practices, the heuristic for the justification of beliefs must shift. Although some of the lines of this shift to practical wisdom remain vague, Tilley has taken philosophy of religion in an excellent direction. Attention to these questions would sharpen his sketch: Why abandon linguistic philosophy with no attention to the help one might receive from the embodied linguistic practice of the later Wittgenstein? What grounds the wisdom (...) we seek to practice? Can community outsiders argue with insiders? Do these embodied philosophical arguments differ from theological arguments? (shrink)

Radical Orthodoxy offers insight into the relationship between Christianity and culture. But it errs in its one-sided reading of modernity, its attempt to reduce philosophy to theology, and its prescription of a pre-modern metaphysics as the only authentic theological foundation. These suggest a fear of contingency and a desire for the immediate grasp of the divine which might circumvent history’s messiness. The result is a construal of reality that is in general inimical to an authentic Catholic reading of reality. Catholic (...) theology must be more faithful to the incarnational and eschatological structure of revelation—and thus to contingency—than either it or Radical Orthodoxy has been in the past. Aquinas’ defense of philosophy and Metz’s principle of “dangerous memory” offer ways to overcome this fear and to enjoy created contingency, secure in hope for the eschatological transformation which God in Christ has promised to all persons and all epochs. (shrink)

This paper proposes a wider framework for the diagnostic and evaluative readings of Fides et Ratio. Each commentator has provided an exit from the impasse of the encyclical’s rhetoric of affirmation and denial in the form of a double reading of the text. In a wider framework, John Paul II holds up Antonio Rosmini among those whose works he considers paradigmatic for the fruitful relation between faith and reason. This displays a period of a prolonged struggle between an Augustinian and (...) a Thomist style of theology which finds expression in a Christ-versus-culture approach in Catholic theology. The reading of Fides et Ratio reveal something of a “third way” in their affirmative readings of the encyclical. (shrink)