Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation

Description

Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with contemporary secular philosophy. Leading Christian thinkers explore in their own way the extent to which the concept of the apophatic illumines some of the deepest doctrinal structures of Christian faith, and of Christian self-understanding both in terms of its historical and contemporary situatedness, showing how a dimension of negativity has characterised not only traditional mysticism but most forms of Christian thought over the years.

Oliver Davies is Reader in Philosophical Theology in the University of Wales and has written a number of studies of Christian mystical writers, including Meister Eckhart: Mystical Theologian (SPCK 1991). The first volume of his Systematic Theology in three parts appeared as A Theology of Compassion (SCM Press 2001), and the second volume, On the Creativity of God, is currently under preparation. Denys Turner is the Norris-Hulse Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge and former H. G.Wood Professor at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of On the Philosophy of Karl Marx (Sceptre, 1969), Marxism and Christianity (Blackwell, 1983) and The Darkness of God (CUP, 1995). He is currently working on a book on Thomas Aquinas and the doctrine of God.

"[Davies and Turner's] contributions helpfully suggest ways in which the doctrines of the trinity and the incarnation, far from subverting negative theology, provide the conceptual framework within which Christians become most fully aware of language's inability to encompass or exhaust divinity." Religious Studies Review "Almost every essay in this fine collection is worth reading, and some are worth intense study. Kudos to Davies and Turner for compiling a collection that shows that living into God means not dogmatic triumphalism but patient humility before the plenitude of a mystery of love that is always before us and behind us, holding us but never allowing us to kill her by holding too tightly to her with our merely human concepts." Modern Theology "In terms of writing, intellectual penetration, and coverage of a topic, this is in every way a superior collection." - Cyril O'Regan, The University of Notre Dame