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A J Godzieba

Villanova University, Theology and Religious Studies, Faculty Member

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Professor Emeritus of fundamental, systematic, and philosophical theology at Villanova University. Editor Emeritus of Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society. Co-editor (with Judith Gruber [KU Leuven] and Jennifer Newsome Martin [Notre Dame]) of the series "T&T Clark Explorations at the Crossroads of Theology & Aesthetics."

Recent publications include Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence: Hermeneutics, Critique, and Catholic Theology, co-edited with Bradford E. Hinze (Liturgical Press, 2017), and A Theology of the Presence and Absence of God (Liturgical Press, 2018).

I am currently researching the intersection of art, music, theology, spirituality, and embodiment in early modern Catholicism, along with applications of this intersection for contemporary belief and practice.

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Papers by A J Godzieba

Schillebeeckx's Phenomenology of Experience and Resurrection Faith

T&T Clark Handbook of Edward Schillebeeckx, ed. S. van Erp and D. Minch, 2020

Edward Schillebeeckx's treatment of Christ's resurrection remains a potent hermeneutical reflecti... more Edward Schillebeeckx's treatment of Christ's resurrection remains a potent hermeneutical reflection on the original Easter experience as well as on resurrection faith today. This chapter examines closely Schillebeeckx's theory in its original existential-phenomenological context and highlights its continuing explanatory force.

Five Looks at Emmaus: Revelation, Resonance, and the Sacramental Imagination

Religions, 2023

The intersection between religious experience and aesthetic experience has become so obvious that... more The intersection between religious experience and aesthetic experience has become so obvious that the current “aesthetic turn” in Christian theology no longer needs to be defended. In this essay, I discuss that intersection point from the point of view of Roman Catholicism, in order to demonstrate the bold claim that the arts and the performance they evoke from us are as important as the creed for Catholicism. The essay aims to do three things: ﬁrst, to examine that intersection point and emphasize the elements of intentionality and desire; second, to analyze one expression of that intersection, namely the connection among Catholic faith claims, the visual arts, and Catholicism’s incarnational-sacramental imagination (using depictions of the post-Resurrection Emmaus story); third, to use hints from Hartmut Rosa’s recent work on “resonance” to tease out how revelation and transformation occur at this intersection.

Fides Quaerens Intellectum and Its Temporal Performative Basis

Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift, 2022

This article analyses the aftereffects of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology. In the light of s... more This article analyses the aftereffects of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology. In the light of such criticism, the question arises which form of metaphysics or ontology might be suitable for theology. The paper argues for a relational ontology that gains its basic concepts from temporal and embodied experiences, and that recognizes in these experiences the gift of the supernatural within the natural.

Adventures in Chiasmus and Sacramentality: Merleau-Ponty Saves the World

Louvain Studies, 2021

Why should contemporary theologians care about the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty? First, because ... more Why should contemporary theologians care about the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty? First, because his focus on the fundamental and inescapable materiality of the world, on the structure of perception, on the lived body, and on the chiasmus or intertwining of the embodied self and the world all help to give a contemporary voice to the incarnational and sacramental imagination of Christianity. The second reason is that the results of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological analyses, at all stages of his short career, offer theologians a way to counteract the gnostic drift--the devaluing of body and flesh--that has tempted and bedeviled Christian theology for two millennia.

Incarnation, Theory, and Catholic Bodies: What Should Post-Postmodern Catholic Theology look like?

Louvain Studies, 2003

Quaestio Disputata: The Magisterium in an Age of Digital Reproduction

When the Magisterium Intervenes, ed. Richard R. Gaillardetz, 2012

Lutherans, Catholics, and Musical Ecumenism (Pergolesi and Bach, Together Again for the First Time)

Conference paper, Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology XI (KU Leuven), 2017

One of the undoubted musical hits of the mid-eighteenth century was Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, tra... more One of the undoubted musical hits of the mid-eighteenth century was Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, transmitted throughout Europe in countless manuscript copies and prints. It became one of the exemplars of the lighter and more “sentimental” style of Roman Catholic sacred music developed in Italy in the 1730s. Ironically, “one of the earliest traces north of the Alps” of the piece “leads to Bach’s library” (C. Wolff). Thus the staunch Lutheran J. S. Bach, criticized in print for his old-fashioned and “turgid” style, actually remained stylistically ahead of the curve with his wide-ranging interests that extended even to the latest galant music from Catholic Italy. In his arrangement (“Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden”, BWV 1083), Bach removed Pergolesi’s Marian-centered text, unusable in a Lutheran context, and substituted a poetic setting of the Miserere (Psalm 50 [51]), thus creating a major shift in the doctrinal and overt affective intentionality of the work.
It was not unheard of that 17th century Lutheran composers would re-text Italian Marian motets for use in Lutheran contexts, and so Bach’s treatment of Pergolesi was not unprecedented. However, this raises a crucial question: how can a specific musical work expressing a particular set of affects support different texts with divergent religious claims? This paper takes a phenomenological approach and asks whether, beneath these religious texts and their claims, there may have been a more fundamental devotional affect and intentionality that 17th- and 18th-century Lutheran and Catholic piety shared and that might be appropriated today.

New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., 2003

The Catholic Sacramental Imagination and the Access/Excess of Grace

New Theology Review, 2008

Agnus Dei: Sin, Sacrament, and Subjectivity in the Liturgical Imagination

Louvain Studies 34, 2009

The “poetic imagination” has been defined as the ability to “think otherwise” (R. Kearney). The ... more The “poetic imagination” has been defined as the ability to “think otherwise” (R. Kearney). The quintessential instance of this imagination is religious belief, the construal of reality that subtly and radically refigures our understandings of time, human life, and the status of the self, all in relation to divine transcendence. The depth of this “refiguring” is most clearly revealed in performance, especially of religious practices. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the liturgy traditionally has been granted pride of place among its practices. This essay examines an under-valued element of the Roman Liturgy, the invocation Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”) in the Communion Rite, under three aspects: its role in the inaginative intentionality of the liturgy, its status as a prime locus of the disclosure of the “otherwise” provoked by the liturgy, and as a clue to the overall refiguration of the believer’s experience provoked by the Catholic incarnational-sacramental imagination.

Caravaggio, Theologian: Baroque Piety and Poesis in a Forgotten Chapter of the History of Catholic Theology

Theology and Lived Christianity, ed. D. Hammond, 2000

The Promise and the Burden of Natural Theology

The Theology of Cardinal Walter Kasper: Speaking Truth in Love, ed. K. M. Colberg and R. A. Krieg, 2014

Who Is the "Polis" Addressed by Political Theology? Notes on a Conundrum

Theological Studies, 2019

How does political theology, with its eschatologically themed commitment to both critique and con... more How does political theology, with its eschatologically themed commitment to both critique and constructive transformation of the social, economic, and political in the light of the Gospel, break through to a distressed Western polis focused on the immediate and the short-term, with almost no sense of a "future"? I suggest discipleship-as-performance and a temporal and sacramental "natural theology of desire," in tune with the revelation of the grace of God in Christ in time, as ways of addressing this conundrum and seconding Pope Francis's insight that "time is greater than space."

The Long Strangeness: God Lost, God Found, God Loved

Louvain Studies, 2019

This essay deals with two narratives. The first, given in a thumbnail sketch, concerns modernity'... more This essay deals with two narratives. The first, given in a thumbnail sketch, concerns modernity's long dalliance with God, a default story of the extrinsic view which results in the "loss" of God, even when God's presence was the intended assertion. Postmodern discussion of God, emphasizing negative theology, is a direct reaction to this view. But much of it leaves us with a disembodied extrinsicism no better than its catalyst. Second, I retrieve a more reticent alternative: an incarna-tional narrative played out over everyday praxis rather than in theory. This per-formative and aesthetic narrative has its more proximate roots in a post-medieval tradition, extending from Renaissance humanism to the praxis of Pope Francis. This sacramental narrative of "God found" and "God loved" connects what currently seem to be two separate considerations of God: the necessary apophatic postmodern emphasis on "impossibility," and the just-as-necessary kataphatic lived experience of everyday theophanies with their mystical and political implications.

The Question, "To What Question Is Biblical Hermeneutics the Answer?" (Time + Identity = Interpretation)

The Spirit, Hermeneutics, and Dialogues (ed. R. Bieringer, P. De Mey, M. S. Ibita, D. Pollefeyt), 2019

". . . And Followed Him on the Way" (Mark 10:52): Unity, Diversity, Discipleship

Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence: Hermeneutics, Critique, and Catholic Theology (ed. A. J. Godzieba and B. E. Hinze), 2017

Incarnation in the Age of the Buffered, Commodified Self

Questioning the Human: Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century (ed. L. Boeve, Y. de Maeseneer, E. van Stichel), 2014

Imagination, the Body, and the Transfiguration of Limits

At the Limits of the Secular: Reflections on Faith and Public LIfe (ed. W. A. Barbieri Jr), 2014

Ut Musica Christianitas: Christian Tradition as a History of Performance

The Shaping of Tradition: Context and Normativity (ed. C. Dickinson, L. Boeve, T. Merrigan), 2013

The salvific truth of the Gospel, like the “truth” of the musical work, is most adequately realiz... more The salvific truth of the Gospel, like the “truth” of the musical work, is most adequately realized in practices that link the past with a specific context in the present. The performance of discipleship, like that of music, is realized over time and in history. My earlier argument (1995) against the hegemony of the “linguistic turn” attempted to expand the Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte and Jauss’ notion of reception hermeneutics into an historically-informed “performance hermeneutic” and to account for what is “unscripted” in the constitution of the truth disclosed in the Christian tradition. In the light of subsequent analyses of this type of performance hermeneutic with regard to music (John Butt, Playing with History [2002]) and philosophy (Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue [2003]), this paper revisits my earlier proposal, fleshes it out with more detail as to its operations, and addresses directly the issue of tradition and normativity, using the normativity of the historical life of Jesus as a test case. This paper is part of a larger project that develops a theological aesthetics along hermeneutical lines.

Book Review: L. Boeve, Interrupting Tradition (2003)

Theological Studies, 2005

Schillebeeckx's Phenomenology of Experience and Resurrection Faith

T&T Clark Handbook of Edward Schillebeeckx, ed. S. van Erp and D. Minch, 2020

Edward Schillebeeckx's treatment of Christ's resurrection remains a potent hermeneutical reflecti... more Edward Schillebeeckx's treatment of Christ's resurrection remains a potent hermeneutical reflection on the original Easter experience as well as on resurrection faith today. This chapter examines closely Schillebeeckx's theory in its original existential-phenomenological context and highlights its continuing explanatory force.

Five Looks at Emmaus: Revelation, Resonance, and the Sacramental Imagination

Religions, 2023

The intersection between religious experience and aesthetic experience has become so obvious that... more The intersection between religious experience and aesthetic experience has become so obvious that the current “aesthetic turn” in Christian theology no longer needs to be defended. In this essay, I discuss that intersection point from the point of view of Roman Catholicism, in order to demonstrate the bold claim that the arts and the performance they evoke from us are as important as the creed for Catholicism. The essay aims to do three things: ﬁrst, to examine that intersection point and emphasize the elements of intentionality and desire; second, to analyze one expression of that intersection, namely the connection among Catholic faith claims, the visual arts, and Catholicism’s incarnational-sacramental imagination (using depictions of the post-Resurrection Emmaus story); third, to use hints from Hartmut Rosa’s recent work on “resonance” to tease out how revelation and transformation occur at this intersection.

Fides Quaerens Intellectum and Its Temporal Performative Basis

Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift, 2022

This article analyses the aftereffects of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology. In the light of s... more This article analyses the aftereffects of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology. In the light of such criticism, the question arises which form of metaphysics or ontology might be suitable for theology. The paper argues for a relational ontology that gains its basic concepts from temporal and embodied experiences, and that recognizes in these experiences the gift of the supernatural within the natural.

Adventures in Chiasmus and Sacramentality: Merleau-Ponty Saves the World

Louvain Studies, 2021

Why should contemporary theologians care about the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty? First, because ... more Why should contemporary theologians care about the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty? First, because his focus on the fundamental and inescapable materiality of the world, on the structure of perception, on the lived body, and on the chiasmus or intertwining of the embodied self and the world all help to give a contemporary voice to the incarnational and sacramental imagination of Christianity. The second reason is that the results of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological analyses, at all stages of his short career, offer theologians a way to counteract the gnostic drift--the devaluing of body and flesh--that has tempted and bedeviled Christian theology for two millennia.

Incarnation, Theory, and Catholic Bodies: What Should Post-Postmodern Catholic Theology look like?

Louvain Studies, 2003

Quaestio Disputata: The Magisterium in an Age of Digital Reproduction

When the Magisterium Intervenes, ed. Richard R. Gaillardetz, 2012

Lutherans, Catholics, and Musical Ecumenism (Pergolesi and Bach, Together Again for the First Time)

Conference paper, Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology XI (KU Leuven), 2017

One of the undoubted musical hits of the mid-eighteenth century was Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, tra... more One of the undoubted musical hits of the mid-eighteenth century was Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, transmitted throughout Europe in countless manuscript copies and prints. It became one of the exemplars of the lighter and more “sentimental” style of Roman Catholic sacred music developed in Italy in the 1730s. Ironically, “one of the earliest traces north of the Alps” of the piece “leads to Bach’s library” (C. Wolff). Thus the staunch Lutheran J. S. Bach, criticized in print for his old-fashioned and “turgid” style, actually remained stylistically ahead of the curve with his wide-ranging interests that extended even to the latest galant music from Catholic Italy. In his arrangement (“Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden”, BWV 1083), Bach removed Pergolesi’s Marian-centered text, unusable in a Lutheran context, and substituted a poetic setting of the Miserere (Psalm 50 [51]), thus creating a major shift in the doctrinal and overt affective intentionality of the work.
It was not unheard of that 17th century Lutheran composers would re-text Italian Marian motets for use in Lutheran contexts, and so Bach’s treatment of Pergolesi was not unprecedented. However, this raises a crucial question: how can a specific musical work expressing a particular set of affects support different texts with divergent religious claims? This paper takes a phenomenological approach and asks whether, beneath these religious texts and their claims, there may have been a more fundamental devotional affect and intentionality that 17th- and 18th-century Lutheran and Catholic piety shared and that might be appropriated today.

New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., 2003

The Catholic Sacramental Imagination and the Access/Excess of Grace

New Theology Review, 2008

Agnus Dei: Sin, Sacrament, and Subjectivity in the Liturgical Imagination

Louvain Studies 34, 2009

The “poetic imagination” has been defined as the ability to “think otherwise” (R. Kearney). The ... more The “poetic imagination” has been defined as the ability to “think otherwise” (R. Kearney). The quintessential instance of this imagination is religious belief, the construal of reality that subtly and radically refigures our understandings of time, human life, and the status of the self, all in relation to divine transcendence. The depth of this “refiguring” is most clearly revealed in performance, especially of religious practices. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the liturgy traditionally has been granted pride of place among its practices. This essay examines an under-valued element of the Roman Liturgy, the invocation Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”) in the Communion Rite, under three aspects: its role in the inaginative intentionality of the liturgy, its status as a prime locus of the disclosure of the “otherwise” provoked by the liturgy, and as a clue to the overall refiguration of the believer’s experience provoked by the Catholic incarnational-sacramental imagination.

Caravaggio, Theologian: Baroque Piety and Poesis in a Forgotten Chapter of the History of Catholic Theology

Theology and Lived Christianity, ed. D. Hammond, 2000

The Promise and the Burden of Natural Theology

The Theology of Cardinal Walter Kasper: Speaking Truth in Love, ed. K. M. Colberg and R. A. Krieg, 2014

Who Is the "Polis" Addressed by Political Theology? Notes on a Conundrum

Theological Studies, 2019

How does political theology, with its eschatologically themed commitment to both critique and con... more How does political theology, with its eschatologically themed commitment to both critique and constructive transformation of the social, economic, and political in the light of the Gospel, break through to a distressed Western polis focused on the immediate and the short-term, with almost no sense of a "future"? I suggest discipleship-as-performance and a temporal and sacramental "natural theology of desire," in tune with the revelation of the grace of God in Christ in time, as ways of addressing this conundrum and seconding Pope Francis's insight that "time is greater than space."

The Long Strangeness: God Lost, God Found, God Loved

Louvain Studies, 2019

This essay deals with two narratives. The first, given in a thumbnail sketch, concerns modernity'... more This essay deals with two narratives. The first, given in a thumbnail sketch, concerns modernity's long dalliance with God, a default story of the extrinsic view which results in the "loss" of God, even when God's presence was the intended assertion. Postmodern discussion of God, emphasizing negative theology, is a direct reaction to this view. But much of it leaves us with a disembodied extrinsicism no better than its catalyst. Second, I retrieve a more reticent alternative: an incarna-tional narrative played out over everyday praxis rather than in theory. This per-formative and aesthetic narrative has its more proximate roots in a post-medieval tradition, extending from Renaissance humanism to the praxis of Pope Francis. This sacramental narrative of "God found" and "God loved" connects what currently seem to be two separate considerations of God: the necessary apophatic postmodern emphasis on "impossibility," and the just-as-necessary kataphatic lived experience of everyday theophanies with their mystical and political implications.

The Question, "To What Question Is Biblical Hermeneutics the Answer?" (Time + Identity = Interpretation)

The Spirit, Hermeneutics, and Dialogues (ed. R. Bieringer, P. De Mey, M. S. Ibita, D. Pollefeyt), 2019

". . . And Followed Him on the Way" (Mark 10:52): Unity, Diversity, Discipleship

Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence: Hermeneutics, Critique, and Catholic Theology (ed. A. J. Godzieba and B. E. Hinze), 2017

Incarnation in the Age of the Buffered, Commodified Self

Questioning the Human: Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century (ed. L. Boeve, Y. de Maeseneer, E. van Stichel), 2014

Imagination, the Body, and the Transfiguration of Limits

At the Limits of the Secular: Reflections on Faith and Public LIfe (ed. W. A. Barbieri Jr), 2014

Ut Musica Christianitas: Christian Tradition as a History of Performance

The Shaping of Tradition: Context and Normativity (ed. C. Dickinson, L. Boeve, T. Merrigan), 2013

The salvific truth of the Gospel, like the “truth” of the musical work, is most adequately realiz... more The salvific truth of the Gospel, like the “truth” of the musical work, is most adequately realized in practices that link the past with a specific context in the present. The performance of discipleship, like that of music, is realized over time and in history. My earlier argument (1995) against the hegemony of the “linguistic turn” attempted to expand the Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte and Jauss’ notion of reception hermeneutics into an historically-informed “performance hermeneutic” and to account for what is “unscripted” in the constitution of the truth disclosed in the Christian tradition. In the light of subsequent analyses of this type of performance hermeneutic with regard to music (John Butt, Playing with History [2002]) and philosophy (Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue [2003]), this paper revisits my earlier proposal, fleshes it out with more detail as to its operations, and addresses directly the issue of tradition and normativity, using the normativity of the historical life of Jesus as a test case. This paper is part of a larger project that develops a theological aesthetics along hermeneutical lines.

Book Review: L. Boeve, Interrupting Tradition (2003)

Theological Studies, 2005