I studied literature and philosophy ("Amirim") at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and first literature and then philosophical theology in Oxford. After spending two years as a post-doc in Berlin, I was college tutor in theology at St John's College, Oxford, before moving to the University of St Andrews, where I am now Professor of Philosophical Theology.
My main research interest is an ongoing enquiry into the ontological, epistemological and anthropological implications of Christian eschatology. So far, this has yielded two strands of published research. The first are theological interactions with the philosophical traditions of Heidegger and Wittgenstein (including particularly Stanley Cavell); the second are engagements with literary expressions of eschatological expectation, particularly the late plays of Shakespeare and the novels of C.S. Lewis. Phone: 01334 462832 Address: St Mary's College
University of St Andrews
St Andrews KY16 9UB
UK
The Edinburgh Critical History of Christian Theology (vol. 6: The Twentieth Century), 2021
This chapter re-evaluates the sources and directions of twentieth-century eschatological thought,... more This chapter re-evaluates the sources and directions of twentieth-century eschatological thought, that is, of reflections on the Christian hope for 'the last things'. The chapter opens with a sketch of the sources of 20 th-century developments in the 19 th century. Although 19 th-century eschatology was dominated by assimilation to the age's general meliorism, the roots of early 20th-century eschatologies of crisis are found here, for example in the work of Franz Overbeck. A second section examines in depth the eschatological responses of theologians to the crisis of the First World War, both existential (Barth, Bultmann, Gogarten) and political (Peterson). A third section details the dominant eschatologies of the postwar years, particularly Moltmann's and Pannenberg's, which rethink the eschatological future as retroactive. A fourth and final section examines the shift of eschatological discourse from a speculative to a pragmatic register in confrontation with the 'eschatological' ambitions of biological and digital technology.
T&T Clark Encyclopaedia of Christian Theology, 2020
Philosophical theology is the study of the conditions, forms, claims and significance of religiou... more Philosophical theology is the study of the conditions, forms, claims and significance of religious faith with methods and approaches characteristic of philosophy. It may be understood in one of three overlapping senses: to denote philosophical prolegomena to theology; approaches within theology that prioritize sources and methods independent of revelation; and a field within theology partly co-extensive with systematic theology. This encyclopaedia article briefly sets out the uses of 'philosophical theology', the history of the field, and key areas of study.
The critique of ontology defined twentieth-century philosophy in both the Anglo-American and the ... more The critique of ontology defined twentieth-century philosophy in both the Anglo-American and the European traditions. In Europe, the most generative form of this critique was phenomenology’s commitment to drawing the limits of human knowledge from within human experience. Theological responses to this critique have often centred on a phenomenology of human desire which, for de Lubac, C.S. Lewis and others, naturally breaks open the immanent realm in the pursuit of its supernatural end in God. These responses have been ontologically rooted in accounts (whether neo-Platonic or analogical in emphasis) of participation in the Trinitarian ground of being. This work of re-constructing an ontology of finite reality by participation in the Trinity is vital but precarious. One persistent risk is insufficient attention to the force of phenomenology’s account of human temporality and mortality as conditions that cannot simply be outpaced towards participation in plenitude. Participatory ontology, in other words, is too often over-realized eschatology. This short paper argues that the phenomenological critique demands an eschatological turn in Trinitarian ontology: a theology of participation that takes more seriously the eschatological preliminariness of human knowing and being.
This article argues that modern European philosophy was significantly shaped by the transposition... more This article argues that modern European philosophy was significantly shaped by the transposition of eschatology from a theological into a philosophical register. By ‘eschatology’, I here mean thought about the ‘last things’ as they relate to present systems of life and action; and about those systems as determined, at least in part, by their end. I take as my starting point the claim that the scepticism regarding revelation that was such a central characteristic of the Enlightenment did not eradicate the importance of eschatology as a structuring frame of historical and moral thought, but merely changed it. Modern theologians and philosophers tended to shift the ground of eschatology from revelation to the inner logic of a system; eschatology was seen as legitimated by, and in turn legitimating, the shape of a given philosophical account of history. The questions and challenges arising from this shift were important drivers of early 20th-century European philosophy. This article works out this claim through indicative accounts of several large debates of early 20th-century philosophies of history and of politics as contestations about the meaning of eschatology: the crisis of historicism, the rise of existentialism, and the surge of political religions. It concludes with a discussion of Martin Heidegger’s eschatological thought of the 1930’s, illuminated by the recent publication of his Black Notebooks.
Stephen Mulhall has distinguished himself as one of the most rigorous and constructive contempora... more Stephen Mulhall has distinguished himself as one of the most rigorous and constructive contemporary thinkers on European philosophy and its complicated relationship to Christian theology. A prominent locus of that relationship in his work is the Christian doctrine of original sin, and its criticism but also structural recapitulation in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and others. This article begins with an overview of relevant themes and their development in Mulhall's writings. I then offer an account of the internal tensions Mulhall identifies in Heidegger et al's ambivalent contestation of original sin, and of his own response. The centre of this response is a reconfig-uration of the character of the divine, and of human participation in that divine, as radical self-abnegation. I conclude with an appreciative critique of Mulhall's proposal as insufficiently responsive to the eschatological framework within which original sin has its doctrinal and ontological place in Thomist thought.
In the autumn of 1931, Martin Heidegger began to record his private thoughts and intellectual str... more In the autumn of 1931, Martin Heidegger began to record his private thoughts and intellectual struggles in small black oilcloth diaries that he called the schwarze Hefte, or “Black Notebooks.” One of the many striking lessons of the Notebooks is the extent to which Heidegger’s attraction to Nazism – and his later rejection of it – was animated by a quarrel with the Catholic Church. “Contemporary Catholicism,” Heidegger wrote to a friend in 1929, “must remain to us a horror.” The history of that quarrel is, to some extent, the history of Heidegger’s philosophical life.
Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, 2017
This paper traces trends in 19th-century thought, both theological and philosophical, about escha... more This paper traces trends in 19th-century thought, both theological and philosophical, about eschatology and apocalypticism.
A corrected and formatted version has now been published in the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, edited by Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe and Johannes Zachhuber (OUP, 2017).
All rights reserved.
Black Thoughts: Heidegger and the Future of Theology, Nov 2017
This essay analyses the role of religion in the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's evo... more This essay analyses the role of religion in the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's evolving attitude to both Christianity and Nazism. The introduction summarizes Heidegger's developing theology and later counter-theology of the 1910's and 1920's, which converges (as I have argued elsewhere) on the formulation of an 'eschatology without eschaton' in Being and Time's central concept of being-unto-death. The first main part presents and analyses the strong anti-Christian polemics of the Black Notebooks in their biographical, institutional and philosophical contexts. The second part examines Heidegger's evolving attitude to the role of National Socialism vis-à-vis this critique of Christianity, focusing on competing appropriations of nineteenth-century secular apocalypticism by neo-Fichteans, Nazis, and Heidegger himself. The third part discusses his reconfiguration of eschatology in more detail, delineating its continuities and departures from Being and Time's being-unto-death.
Why C.S. Lewis remains underrated among academics; an "Underrated" column for Standpoint Magazine... more Why C.S. Lewis remains underrated among academics; an "Underrated" column for Standpoint Magazine (https://www.standpointmag.com/taxonomy/term/30)
This essay queries and extends Stanley Cavell’s reading of
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale by a c... more This essay queries and extends Stanley Cavell’s reading of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale by a close investigation of the character and language of Hermione. Far from being merely a passive victim of Leontes’s madness (or, in Cavellian terms, “skepticism”), I argue, Hermione is an active contributor to the disintegration of their relationship by “sophistically” refusing to distinguish between language as conversation and language as mere play. The play’s conspicuously metatheatrical engagement with Hermione’s (as Leontes’s) repudiation of vulnerability shows that the threat of “theatricalization” or sophism cannot (as Cavell or Rush Rhees might wish) simply be excised but must be integrated in ordinary relationships.
"In his early work, the philosopher Stanley Cavell offers a sustained engagement with
the threat... more "In his early work, the philosopher Stanley Cavell offers a sustained engagement with
the threat of epistemological scepticism, shaped by the intuition that although (as the
late Wittgenstein shows) ordinary language use is the practice within which alone
meaning is possible (and which can thus not be further analysed or rationalised), it is
also a basic human inclination to wish to escape the limitations of the ‘ordinary’. This,
for Cavell, is the root of scepticism. Scepticism, on this view, thus appears not
primarily as an epistemological but as an (injurious) moral stance, which cannot be
refuted but must be continually confronted and overcome. Vis-a` -vis scepticism,
‘acknowledgement’ is the practice-based recognition of the world and other people in
their continuing elusiveness, which ineluctably involves risk, but just so is the only
way of knowing that is appropriate to and honours the (finite) human condition. One
problematic aspect of this (very fertile) approach is that Cavell’s secular viewpoint
makes it difficult for him to say both why the desire for a ‘beyond’ arises in the first
place, and why its expression as denial is morally wrong (rather than merely
misguided). His approach thus invites a theological ‘supplementation’ which grounds
the human condition in an original and real relation to God that is meant to draw the
believer, through Christ, into the divine life itself. Such a reinterpretation both
elucidates the concepts of scepticism and acknowledgement, and makes these
concepts available for a theological outlook that is able to accommodate Cavell’s
profound insights into ‘the human’."
Minerva -- An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, Nov 2013
This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley ... more This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley Cavell, beginning with their competing interpretations of J. L. Austin¹s thought on ordinary
language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valor isation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two philosophers’ approaches are, in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to
furnish its background.
Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. Nick Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (OUP 2012), 2013
The Judeo-Christian concept of Messianism has been a shaping influence on modern European thought... more The Judeo-Christian concept of Messianism has been a shaping influence on modern European thought. This chapter focuses on its permutations within German intellectual and political history: in philosophers from Hegel to Heidegger, poets from Hoelderlin to Schumann, political thinkers from Fichte to Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and even Adolf Hitler, and (in contrasting ways) Jewish thinkers such as Karl Kraus and Walter Benjamin. The chapter both shapes a narrative of appropriations of 'Messianism' in modern Germany and offers necessary tools for the further study of this concept within other areas of modern European thought.
The Edinburgh Critical History of Christian Theology (vol. 6: The Twentieth Century), 2021
This chapter re-evaluates the sources and directions of twentieth-century eschatological thought,... more This chapter re-evaluates the sources and directions of twentieth-century eschatological thought, that is, of reflections on the Christian hope for 'the last things'. The chapter opens with a sketch of the sources of 20 th-century developments in the 19 th century. Although 19 th-century eschatology was dominated by assimilation to the age's general meliorism, the roots of early 20th-century eschatologies of crisis are found here, for example in the work of Franz Overbeck. A second section examines in depth the eschatological responses of theologians to the crisis of the First World War, both existential (Barth, Bultmann, Gogarten) and political (Peterson). A third section details the dominant eschatologies of the postwar years, particularly Moltmann's and Pannenberg's, which rethink the eschatological future as retroactive. A fourth and final section examines the shift of eschatological discourse from a speculative to a pragmatic register in confrontation with the 'eschatological' ambitions of biological and digital technology.
T&T Clark Encyclopaedia of Christian Theology, 2020
Philosophical theology is the study of the conditions, forms, claims and significance of religiou... more Philosophical theology is the study of the conditions, forms, claims and significance of religious faith with methods and approaches characteristic of philosophy. It may be understood in one of three overlapping senses: to denote philosophical prolegomena to theology; approaches within theology that prioritize sources and methods independent of revelation; and a field within theology partly co-extensive with systematic theology. This encyclopaedia article briefly sets out the uses of 'philosophical theology', the history of the field, and key areas of study.
The critique of ontology defined twentieth-century philosophy in both the Anglo-American and the ... more The critique of ontology defined twentieth-century philosophy in both the Anglo-American and the European traditions. In Europe, the most generative form of this critique was phenomenology’s commitment to drawing the limits of human knowledge from within human experience. Theological responses to this critique have often centred on a phenomenology of human desire which, for de Lubac, C.S. Lewis and others, naturally breaks open the immanent realm in the pursuit of its supernatural end in God. These responses have been ontologically rooted in accounts (whether neo-Platonic or analogical in emphasis) of participation in the Trinitarian ground of being. This work of re-constructing an ontology of finite reality by participation in the Trinity is vital but precarious. One persistent risk is insufficient attention to the force of phenomenology’s account of human temporality and mortality as conditions that cannot simply be outpaced towards participation in plenitude. Participatory ontology, in other words, is too often over-realized eschatology. This short paper argues that the phenomenological critique demands an eschatological turn in Trinitarian ontology: a theology of participation that takes more seriously the eschatological preliminariness of human knowing and being.
This article argues that modern European philosophy was significantly shaped by the transposition... more This article argues that modern European philosophy was significantly shaped by the transposition of eschatology from a theological into a philosophical register. By ‘eschatology’, I here mean thought about the ‘last things’ as they relate to present systems of life and action; and about those systems as determined, at least in part, by their end. I take as my starting point the claim that the scepticism regarding revelation that was such a central characteristic of the Enlightenment did not eradicate the importance of eschatology as a structuring frame of historical and moral thought, but merely changed it. Modern theologians and philosophers tended to shift the ground of eschatology from revelation to the inner logic of a system; eschatology was seen as legitimated by, and in turn legitimating, the shape of a given philosophical account of history. The questions and challenges arising from this shift were important drivers of early 20th-century European philosophy. This article works out this claim through indicative accounts of several large debates of early 20th-century philosophies of history and of politics as contestations about the meaning of eschatology: the crisis of historicism, the rise of existentialism, and the surge of political religions. It concludes with a discussion of Martin Heidegger’s eschatological thought of the 1930’s, illuminated by the recent publication of his Black Notebooks.
Stephen Mulhall has distinguished himself as one of the most rigorous and constructive contempora... more Stephen Mulhall has distinguished himself as one of the most rigorous and constructive contemporary thinkers on European philosophy and its complicated relationship to Christian theology. A prominent locus of that relationship in his work is the Christian doctrine of original sin, and its criticism but also structural recapitulation in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and others. This article begins with an overview of relevant themes and their development in Mulhall's writings. I then offer an account of the internal tensions Mulhall identifies in Heidegger et al's ambivalent contestation of original sin, and of his own response. The centre of this response is a reconfig-uration of the character of the divine, and of human participation in that divine, as radical self-abnegation. I conclude with an appreciative critique of Mulhall's proposal as insufficiently responsive to the eschatological framework within which original sin has its doctrinal and ontological place in Thomist thought.
In the autumn of 1931, Martin Heidegger began to record his private thoughts and intellectual str... more In the autumn of 1931, Martin Heidegger began to record his private thoughts and intellectual struggles in small black oilcloth diaries that he called the schwarze Hefte, or “Black Notebooks.” One of the many striking lessons of the Notebooks is the extent to which Heidegger’s attraction to Nazism – and his later rejection of it – was animated by a quarrel with the Catholic Church. “Contemporary Catholicism,” Heidegger wrote to a friend in 1929, “must remain to us a horror.” The history of that quarrel is, to some extent, the history of Heidegger’s philosophical life.
Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, 2017
This paper traces trends in 19th-century thought, both theological and philosophical, about escha... more This paper traces trends in 19th-century thought, both theological and philosophical, about eschatology and apocalypticism.
A corrected and formatted version has now been published in the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, edited by Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe and Johannes Zachhuber (OUP, 2017).
All rights reserved.
Black Thoughts: Heidegger and the Future of Theology, Nov 2017
This essay analyses the role of religion in the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's evo... more This essay analyses the role of religion in the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's evolving attitude to both Christianity and Nazism. The introduction summarizes Heidegger's developing theology and later counter-theology of the 1910's and 1920's, which converges (as I have argued elsewhere) on the formulation of an 'eschatology without eschaton' in Being and Time's central concept of being-unto-death. The first main part presents and analyses the strong anti-Christian polemics of the Black Notebooks in their biographical, institutional and philosophical contexts. The second part examines Heidegger's evolving attitude to the role of National Socialism vis-à-vis this critique of Christianity, focusing on competing appropriations of nineteenth-century secular apocalypticism by neo-Fichteans, Nazis, and Heidegger himself. The third part discusses his reconfiguration of eschatology in more detail, delineating its continuities and departures from Being and Time's being-unto-death.
Why C.S. Lewis remains underrated among academics; an "Underrated" column for Standpoint Magazine... more Why C.S. Lewis remains underrated among academics; an "Underrated" column for Standpoint Magazine (https://www.standpointmag.com/taxonomy/term/30)
This essay queries and extends Stanley Cavell’s reading of
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale by a c... more This essay queries and extends Stanley Cavell’s reading of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale by a close investigation of the character and language of Hermione. Far from being merely a passive victim of Leontes’s madness (or, in Cavellian terms, “skepticism”), I argue, Hermione is an active contributor to the disintegration of their relationship by “sophistically” refusing to distinguish between language as conversation and language as mere play. The play’s conspicuously metatheatrical engagement with Hermione’s (as Leontes’s) repudiation of vulnerability shows that the threat of “theatricalization” or sophism cannot (as Cavell or Rush Rhees might wish) simply be excised but must be integrated in ordinary relationships.
"In his early work, the philosopher Stanley Cavell offers a sustained engagement with
the threat... more "In his early work, the philosopher Stanley Cavell offers a sustained engagement with
the threat of epistemological scepticism, shaped by the intuition that although (as the
late Wittgenstein shows) ordinary language use is the practice within which alone
meaning is possible (and which can thus not be further analysed or rationalised), it is
also a basic human inclination to wish to escape the limitations of the ‘ordinary’. This,
for Cavell, is the root of scepticism. Scepticism, on this view, thus appears not
primarily as an epistemological but as an (injurious) moral stance, which cannot be
refuted but must be continually confronted and overcome. Vis-a` -vis scepticism,
‘acknowledgement’ is the practice-based recognition of the world and other people in
their continuing elusiveness, which ineluctably involves risk, but just so is the only
way of knowing that is appropriate to and honours the (finite) human condition. One
problematic aspect of this (very fertile) approach is that Cavell’s secular viewpoint
makes it difficult for him to say both why the desire for a ‘beyond’ arises in the first
place, and why its expression as denial is morally wrong (rather than merely
misguided). His approach thus invites a theological ‘supplementation’ which grounds
the human condition in an original and real relation to God that is meant to draw the
believer, through Christ, into the divine life itself. Such a reinterpretation both
elucidates the concepts of scepticism and acknowledgement, and makes these
concepts available for a theological outlook that is able to accommodate Cavell’s
profound insights into ‘the human’."
Minerva -- An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, Nov 2013
This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley ... more This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley Cavell, beginning with their competing interpretations of J. L. Austin¹s thought on ordinary
language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valor isation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two philosophers’ approaches are, in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to
furnish its background.
Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. Nick Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (OUP 2012), 2013
The Judeo-Christian concept of Messianism has been a shaping influence on modern European thought... more The Judeo-Christian concept of Messianism has been a shaping influence on modern European thought. This chapter focuses on its permutations within German intellectual and political history: in philosophers from Hegel to Heidegger, poets from Hoelderlin to Schumann, political thinkers from Fichte to Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and even Adolf Hitler, and (in contrasting ways) Jewish thinkers such as Karl Kraus and Walter Benjamin. The chapter both shapes a narrative of appropriations of 'Messianism' in modern Germany and offers necessary tools for the further study of this concept within other areas of modern European thought.
A three-volume, authoritative history of German theology from Kant to the present.
To be publis... more A three-volume, authoritative history of German theology from Kant to the present.
To be published by Oxford University Press in 2022.
Through various realignments beginning in the Revolutionary era and continuing across the ninetee... more Through various realignments beginning in the Revolutionary era and continuing across the nineteenth century, Christianity not only endured as a vital intellectual tradition, but also contributed importantly to a wide variety of significant conversations, movements, and social transformations across the diverse spheres of intellectual, cultural, and social history. The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought proposes new readings of the diverse sites and variegated role of the Christian intellectual tradition across what has come to be called 'the long nineteenth century'. It represents the first comprehensive examination of a picture emerging from the twin recognition of Christianity's abiding intellectual influence and its radical transformation and diversification under the influence of the forces of modernity.
Part one investigates changing paradigms that determine the evolving approaches to religious matters during the nineteenth century, providing readers with a sense of the fundamental changes at the time. Section two considers human nature and the nature of religion. It explores a range of categories rising to prominence in the course of the nineteenth century, and influencing the way religion in general, and Christianity in particular, were conceived. Part three focuses on the intellectual, cultural, and social developments of the time, while part four looks at Christianity and the arts-a major area in which Christian ideas, stories, and images were used, adapted, and challenged during the nineteenth century. Christianity was radically pluralized in the nineteenth century, and the fifth section is dedicated to 'Christianity and Christianities'. The chapters sketch the major churches and confessions during the period. The final part considers doctrinal themes registering the wealth and scope through broad narrative and individual example. This authoritative reference work offers an indispensible overview of a period whose forceful ideas continue to be present in contemporary theology.
Martin Heidegger is the 20th century theology philosopher with the greatest importance to theolog... more Martin Heidegger is the 20th century theology philosopher with the greatest importance to theology. A cradle Catholic originally intended for the priesthood, Heidegger's studies in philosophy led him to turn first to Protestantism and then to an atheistic philosophical method. Nevertheless, his writings remained deeply indebted to theological themes and sources, and the question of the nature of his relationship with theology has been a subject of discussion ever since.
This book offers theologians and philosophers alike a clear account of the directions and the potential of this debate. It explains Heidegger's key ideas, describes their development and analyses the role of theology in his major writings, including his lectures during the Nazi era. It reviews the reception of Heidegger's thought both by theologians in his own day (particularly in Barth and his school as well as neo-Scholasticism) and more recently, suggesting throughout directions for theology's possible future engagement with Heidegger's work.
Heidegger's Eschatology is a ground-breaking account of Heidegger's early engagement with theolog... more Heidegger's Eschatology is a ground-breaking account of Heidegger's early engagement with theology, from his beginnings as an anti-Modernist Catholic to his turn towards an undogmatic Protestantism and finally to a resolutely a-theistic philosophical method. The book centres on Heidegger's developing commitment to an eschatological vision, derived from theological sources but reshaped into a central resource for the development of an atheistic phenomenological account of human existence. This vision originated in Heidegger's attempt, in the late 1910s, to formulate a phenomenology of religious life that would take seriously the inherent temporality of human existence. In this endeavour, Heidegger turned to two trends in Protestant scholarship: the discovery of eschatology as a central preoccupation of the Early Church by A. Schweitzer and the 'History of Doctrine' School, and the 'existential' eschatology of Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, indebted to Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Franz Overbeck. His synthesis of such trends within a phenomenological framework (elaborated primarily via readings of Paul and Augustine in his lecture courses of 1921-2) led Heidegger to postulate an existential sense of eschatological unrest as the central characteristic of authentic Christian existence. His description of this expectant restlessness, however, was now inescapably at odds with its Christian sources, since Heidegger's commitment to a phenomenological description of the human situation led him to abstract the 'existential' experience of expectation from its traditional object: the 'blessed hope' for the Kingdom of God. Christian hope thus for Heidegger no longer constitutes, but rather negates 'eschatological' unrest, because such hope projects an end to that unrest, and thus to authentic existence itself. Against the Christian vision, Heidegger therefore develops a systematic 'eschatology without eschaton', paradigmatically expressed as 'being-unto-death'. Judith Wolfe tells the story of his re-conception of eschatology, using a wealth of primary and newly available original-language sources, and offering in-depth analysis of Heidegger's relationship to theological tradition and the theology of his time.
* A unique collection of first-hand essays and memoirs on C.S. Lewis and those in his literary... more * A unique collection of first-hand essays and memoirs on C.S. Lewis and those in his literary circle * Selected from the archive of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society * Authors include former Inklings, close friends, and important thinkers
CONTENTS: Foreword, Gregory & Suzanne Wolfe (Founders of the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society) Preface, Roger White, Judith Wolfe, and Brendan Wolfe
Part I. Essays C. S. Lewis, Defender of the Faith, Alister McGrath (Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, University of Oxford)
C. S. Lewis' Rewrite of Chapter III of 'Miracles', Elizabeth Anscombe (Leading twentieth-century philosopher)
C. S. Lewis and the Limits of Reason, Stephen Logan (Musician, poet; Principal Supervisor in English, Clare College, Cambridge)
Sacramentalism in C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, Kallistos Ware (Metropolitan Bishop of Diocleia; Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies (Emeritus), University of Oxford)
Charles Williams and the Problem of Evil, Paul Fiddes (Professor of Systematic Theology, Oxford University)
'That Hideous Strength': A Reassessment, Rowan Williams (Baron Williams of Oystermouth, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, previously 104th Archbishop of Canterbury)
Yearning for a Far Off Country, Malcolm Guite (Poet, singer-songwriter; Chaplain at Girton College, Cambridge)
W. H. Auden and the Inklings, Michael Piret (Dean of Divinity, Magdalen College, Oxford)
The Lewis Diaries: C. S. Lewis and the English Faculty in the 1920's, Thomas Shippey (Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities (Emeritus), Saint Louis University)
It All Began with a Picture: The Making of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, Walter Hooper (Editor and biographer of C. S. Lewis; literary advisor to the C. S. Lewis Estate)
II. Memoirs The Lewis Family, Joan Murphy (A Lewis Family Cousin) Recollections of Lewis, George Sayer (Former student, friend, and biographer of C. S. Lewis)
Lewis as a Parishioner, Ronald Head (Formerly Vicar of Holy Trinity Church Headington Quarry, where C. S. Lewis attended)
Marrying C. S. Lewis, Peter Bide (Friend and priest of C. S. Lewis, officiate of Lewis's marriage to Joy Davidman)
Memories of the Socratic Club, Stella Aldwinckle (Founder of the Oxford Socratic Club)
The Inklings, Walter Hooper (Editor and biographer of C. S. Lewis; literary advisor to the C. S. Lewis Estate)
Lewis and/or Barfield, Owen Barfield (Friend of C. S. Lewis, Inklings member, solicitor, philosopher, poet)
Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of W. H. Lewis, John Wain (Friend of C. S. Lewis, Inklings member, poet, novelist)
Nevill Coghill and Lewis: Two Irishmen at Oxford, John Wain (Friend of C. S. Lewis, Inklings member, poet, novelist)
Afterword: A Brief History of the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society Michael Ward (Senior Member of the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society)
C. S. Lewis considered his novel Perelandra (1943) among his favorite works. A triumph of imagina... more C. S. Lewis considered his novel Perelandra (1943) among his favorite works. A triumph of imaginative science fiction writing, Perelandra—part of Lewis’s “Space Trilogy”—is also theologically ambitious. C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra: Reshaping the Image of the Cosmos argues that point and also how the novel synthesizes the three traditions of cosmology, mythology, and Christianity. The first group of essays considers the cosmological implications of the world Lewis depicts in Perelandra while the second group examines the relationship between morality and meaning in Lewis’s created cosmology of the world of Perelandra.
This work brings together a world-class group of literary and theological scholars and Lewis specialists that includes Paul S. Fiddes, Monika B. Hilder, Sanford Schwartz, Michael Travers, and Michael Ward. The collection is enhanced by Walter Hooper’s reminiscences of his conversations with Lewis about Perelandra and the possible provenance of the stories in Lewis’s imagination.
C. S. Lewis scholars and devoted readers alike will find this volume indispensible to the understanding of this canonical work of speculative fiction.
C.S. Lewis, himself a layperson in the Church of England, has exercised an unprecedentedly wide i... more C.S. Lewis, himself a layperson in the Church of England, has exercised an unprecedentedly wide influence on the faithful of Anglican, Roman Catholic, Evangelical and other churches, all of whom tend naturally to claim him as 'one of their own'. One of the reasons for this diverse appropriation is the elusiveness of the church—in the sense both of his own denomination and of the wider subject of ecclesiology—in Lewis' writings. The essays contained in this volume critically examine the place, character and role of the Church in Lewis' life. The result is a detailed and scintillating picture of the interactions of one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century theology with the contemporaneous development of the Church of England, with key concepts in ecclesiology, and with interdenominational matters.
Inklings Studies Supplements is a new series of never-before-published texts by the Inklings, pub... more Inklings Studies Supplements is a new series of never-before-published texts by the Inklings, published by the Journal of Inklings Studies.
Inklings Studies Supplements is a new series of never-before-published texts by the Inklings, published by the Journal of Inklings Studies.
From the special collections of Oxford's Bodleian Library and archives around the world, we bring out the most important unpublished manuscripts by C.S. Lewis and his circle in limited-run scholarly editions.
The first volume is Owen Barfield and C.S. Lewis's "Great War" about the nature of reason and imagination. It is being published in February 2015 in a limited, critical text edition edited and introduced by Norbert Feinendegen and Arend Smilde.
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This encyclopaedia article briefly sets out the uses of 'philosophical theology', the history of the field, and key areas of study.
This work of re-constructing an ontology of finite reality by participation in the Trinity is vital but precarious. One persistent risk is insufficient attention to the force of phenomenology’s account of human temporality and mortality as conditions that cannot simply be outpaced towards participation in plenitude. Participatory ontology, in other words, is too often over-realized eschatology. This short paper argues that the phenomenological critique demands an eschatological turn in Trinitarian ontology: a theology of participation that takes more seriously the eschatological preliminariness of human knowing and being.
Originally a press article for The Tablet (2017); re-published as a post on the blog The Roundel (2018). Available at http://theology.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2019/01/21/martin-heidegger-and-the-catholic-church-the-unexpected-enemy-in-the-black-notebooks/.
A corrected and formatted version has now been published in the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, edited by Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe and Johannes Zachhuber (OUP, 2017).
All rights reserved.
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale by a close investigation of the character
and language of Hermione. Far from being merely a passive victim
of Leontes’s madness (or, in Cavellian terms, “skepticism”), I argue,
Hermione is an active contributor to the disintegration of their relationship by “sophistically” refusing to distinguish between language
as conversation and language as mere play. The play’s conspicuously
metatheatrical engagement with Hermione’s (as Leontes’s) repudiation
of vulnerability shows that the threat of “theatricalization” or sophism
cannot (as Cavell or Rush Rhees might wish) simply be excised but must
be integrated in ordinary relationships.
the threat of epistemological scepticism, shaped by the intuition that although (as the
late Wittgenstein shows) ordinary language use is the practice within which alone
meaning is possible (and which can thus not be further analysed or rationalised), it is
also a basic human inclination to wish to escape the limitations of the ‘ordinary’. This,
for Cavell, is the root of scepticism. Scepticism, on this view, thus appears not
primarily as an epistemological but as an (injurious) moral stance, which cannot be
refuted but must be continually confronted and overcome. Vis-a` -vis scepticism,
‘acknowledgement’ is the practice-based recognition of the world and other people in
their continuing elusiveness, which ineluctably involves risk, but just so is the only
way of knowing that is appropriate to and honours the (finite) human condition. One
problematic aspect of this (very fertile) approach is that Cavell’s secular viewpoint
makes it difficult for him to say both why the desire for a ‘beyond’ arises in the first
place, and why its expression as denial is morally wrong (rather than merely
misguided). His approach thus invites a theological ‘supplementation’ which grounds
the human condition in an original and real relation to God that is meant to draw the
believer, through Christ, into the divine life itself. Such a reinterpretation both
elucidates the concepts of scepticism and acknowledgement, and makes these
concepts available for a theological outlook that is able to accommodate Cavell’s
profound insights into ‘the human’."
language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valor isation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two philosophers’ approaches are, in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to
furnish its background.
This encyclopaedia article briefly sets out the uses of 'philosophical theology', the history of the field, and key areas of study.
This work of re-constructing an ontology of finite reality by participation in the Trinity is vital but precarious. One persistent risk is insufficient attention to the force of phenomenology’s account of human temporality and mortality as conditions that cannot simply be outpaced towards participation in plenitude. Participatory ontology, in other words, is too often over-realized eschatology. This short paper argues that the phenomenological critique demands an eschatological turn in Trinitarian ontology: a theology of participation that takes more seriously the eschatological preliminariness of human knowing and being.
Originally a press article for The Tablet (2017); re-published as a post on the blog The Roundel (2018). Available at http://theology.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2019/01/21/martin-heidegger-and-the-catholic-church-the-unexpected-enemy-in-the-black-notebooks/.
A corrected and formatted version has now been published in the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, edited by Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe and Johannes Zachhuber (OUP, 2017).
All rights reserved.
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale by a close investigation of the character
and language of Hermione. Far from being merely a passive victim
of Leontes’s madness (or, in Cavellian terms, “skepticism”), I argue,
Hermione is an active contributor to the disintegration of their relationship by “sophistically” refusing to distinguish between language
as conversation and language as mere play. The play’s conspicuously
metatheatrical engagement with Hermione’s (as Leontes’s) repudiation
of vulnerability shows that the threat of “theatricalization” or sophism
cannot (as Cavell or Rush Rhees might wish) simply be excised but must
be integrated in ordinary relationships.
the threat of epistemological scepticism, shaped by the intuition that although (as the
late Wittgenstein shows) ordinary language use is the practice within which alone
meaning is possible (and which can thus not be further analysed or rationalised), it is
also a basic human inclination to wish to escape the limitations of the ‘ordinary’. This,
for Cavell, is the root of scepticism. Scepticism, on this view, thus appears not
primarily as an epistemological but as an (injurious) moral stance, which cannot be
refuted but must be continually confronted and overcome. Vis-a` -vis scepticism,
‘acknowledgement’ is the practice-based recognition of the world and other people in
their continuing elusiveness, which ineluctably involves risk, but just so is the only
way of knowing that is appropriate to and honours the (finite) human condition. One
problematic aspect of this (very fertile) approach is that Cavell’s secular viewpoint
makes it difficult for him to say both why the desire for a ‘beyond’ arises in the first
place, and why its expression as denial is morally wrong (rather than merely
misguided). His approach thus invites a theological ‘supplementation’ which grounds
the human condition in an original and real relation to God that is meant to draw the
believer, through Christ, into the divine life itself. Such a reinterpretation both
elucidates the concepts of scepticism and acknowledgement, and makes these
concepts available for a theological outlook that is able to accommodate Cavell’s
profound insights into ‘the human’."
language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valor isation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two philosophers’ approaches are, in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to
furnish its background.
To be published by Oxford University Press in 2022.
The Table of Contents can be viewed here: https://ohmgt.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/contents/.
Part one investigates changing paradigms that determine the evolving approaches to religious matters during the nineteenth century, providing readers with a sense of the fundamental changes at the time. Section two considers human nature and the nature of religion. It explores a range of categories rising to prominence in the course of the nineteenth century, and influencing the way religion in general, and Christianity in particular, were conceived. Part three focuses on the intellectual, cultural, and social developments of the time, while part four looks at Christianity and the arts-a major area in which Christian ideas, stories, and images were used, adapted, and challenged during the nineteenth century. Christianity was radically pluralized in the nineteenth century, and the fifth section is dedicated to 'Christianity and Christianities'. The chapters sketch the major churches and confessions during the period. The final part considers doctrinal themes registering the wealth and scope through broad narrative and individual example. This authoritative reference work offers an indispensible overview of a period whose forceful ideas continue to be present in contemporary theology.
This book offers theologians and philosophers alike a clear account of the directions and the potential of this debate. It explains Heidegger's key ideas, describes their development and analyses the role of theology in his major writings, including his lectures during the Nazi era. It reviews the reception of Heidegger's thought both by theologians in his own day (particularly in Barth and his school as well as neo-Scholasticism) and more recently, suggesting throughout directions for theology's possible future engagement with Heidegger's work.
* Selected from the archive of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society
* Authors include former Inklings, close friends, and important thinkers
CONTENTS:
Foreword, Gregory & Suzanne Wolfe (Founders of the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society)
Preface, Roger White, Judith Wolfe, and Brendan Wolfe
Part I. Essays
C. S. Lewis, Defender of the Faith, Alister McGrath (Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, University of Oxford)
C. S. Lewis' Rewrite of Chapter III of 'Miracles', Elizabeth Anscombe (Leading twentieth-century philosopher)
C. S. Lewis and the Limits of Reason, Stephen Logan (Musician, poet; Principal Supervisor in English, Clare College, Cambridge)
Sacramentalism in C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, Kallistos Ware (Metropolitan Bishop of Diocleia; Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies (Emeritus), University of Oxford)
Charles Williams and the Problem of Evil, Paul Fiddes (Professor of Systematic Theology, Oxford University)
'That Hideous Strength': A Reassessment, Rowan Williams (Baron Williams of Oystermouth, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, previously 104th Archbishop of Canterbury)
Yearning for a Far Off Country, Malcolm Guite (Poet, singer-songwriter; Chaplain at Girton College, Cambridge)
W. H. Auden and the Inklings, Michael Piret (Dean of Divinity, Magdalen College, Oxford)
The Lewis Diaries: C. S. Lewis and the English Faculty in the 1920's, Thomas Shippey (Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities (Emeritus), Saint Louis University)
It All Began with a Picture: The Making of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, Walter Hooper (Editor and biographer of C. S. Lewis; literary advisor to the C. S. Lewis Estate)
II. Memoirs
The Lewis Family, Joan Murphy (A Lewis Family Cousin)
Recollections of Lewis, George Sayer (Former student, friend, and biographer of C. S. Lewis)
Lewis as a Parishioner, Ronald Head (Formerly Vicar of Holy Trinity Church Headington Quarry, where C. S. Lewis attended)
Marrying C. S. Lewis, Peter Bide (Friend and priest of C. S. Lewis, officiate of Lewis's marriage to Joy Davidman)
Memories of the Socratic Club, Stella Aldwinckle (Founder of the Oxford Socratic Club)
The Inklings, Walter Hooper (Editor and biographer of C. S. Lewis; literary advisor to the C. S. Lewis Estate)
Lewis and/or Barfield, Owen Barfield (Friend of C. S. Lewis, Inklings member, solicitor, philosopher, poet)
Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of W. H. Lewis, John Wain (Friend of C. S. Lewis, Inklings member, poet, novelist)
Nevill Coghill and Lewis: Two Irishmen at Oxford, John Wain (Friend of C. S. Lewis, Inklings member, poet, novelist)
Afterword: A Brief History of the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society Michael Ward (Senior Member of the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society)
This work brings together a world-class group of literary and theological scholars and Lewis specialists that includes Paul S. Fiddes, Monika B. Hilder, Sanford Schwartz, Michael Travers, and Michael Ward. The collection is enhanced by Walter Hooper’s reminiscences of his conversations with Lewis about Perelandra and the possible provenance of the stories in Lewis’s imagination.
C. S. Lewis scholars and devoted readers alike will find this volume indispensible to the understanding of this canonical work of speculative fiction.
Inklings Studies Supplements is a new series of never-before-published texts by the Inklings, published by the Journal of Inklings Studies.
From the special collections of Oxford's Bodleian Library and archives around the world, we bring out the most important unpublished manuscripts by C.S. Lewis and his circle in limited-run scholarly editions.
The first volume is Owen Barfield and C.S. Lewis's "Great War" about the nature of reason and imagination. It is being published in February 2015 in a limited, critical text edition edited and introduced by Norbert Feinendegen and Arend Smilde.
An Interdisciplinary Symposium at Duke University, November 2-3, 2017