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Theopoetics in its modern context is an interdisciplinary field of study that combines elements of poetic analysis, process theology, narrative theology, and postmodern philosophy. Originally developed by Stanley Hopper and David Leroy Miller in the 1960s and furthered significantly by Amos Wilder with his 1976 text, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination.
In recent times there has been a revitalized interest with new work being done by two schools of thought in theopoetics.
One school values process theology and postmodern philosophy. It is led by individuals such as L. Callid Keefe-Perry, Rubem Alves, Catherine Keller, John Caputo, Peter Rollins, Scott Holland, Melanie May, Matt Guynn, Roland Faber, and others. [1]
The other school of thought values the philosophical transcendentals as informed by classical theology. [2] It is led by individuals such as Anne M. Carpenter of St. Mary’s College, [3] California, and Richard Viladesau [4] of Fordham University, with contributions from Brian Nixon of Veritas International University. [5] This school of theo-poetics is influenced by the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar as informed by a range of thinkers as divergent as Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas, Maximus the Confessor, Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand, David Bentely Hart [6] and Pavel Florensky. [7]
Postmodern Theopoetics
The first school of theopoetics suggests that instead of trying to develop a "scientific" theory of God, as systematic theology attempts, theologians should instead try to find God through poetic articulations of their lived ("embodied") experiences. It asks theologians to accept reality as a legitimate source of divine revelation and suggests that both the divine and the real are mysterious — that is, irreducible to literalist dogmas or scientific proofs.
Theopoetics makes significant use of "radical" and "ontological" metaphor to create a more fluid and less stringent referent for the divine. One of the functions of theopoetics is to recalibrate theological perspectives, suggesting that theology can be more akin to poetry than physics. It belies the logical assertion of the principle of bivalence and stands in contrast to some rigid Biblical hermeneutics that suggest that each passage of scripture has only one, usually teleological, interpretation. The dismissal of the aesthetic as a living part of language has turned the academic enterprise of biblical studies and theology into a language more at home with lawyers than poets. Theopoetics is the art of using words and thoughts that speak to the reader in an aesthetic and existential way to inspire spirituality in the reader.
Whereas those who utilize a strict, historical-grammatical approach believe scripture and theology possess inerrant factual meaning and pay attention to historicity, a theopoetic approach takes an allegorical position on faith statements that can be continuously reinterpreted. Theopoetics suggest that just as a poem can take on new meaning depending on the context in which the reader interprets it, texts and experiences of the Divine can and should take on new meaning depending on the changing situation of the individual.
Classical Theopoetics
In the second school of theopoetics, the aim is drawn “from von Balthasar’s affirmation of poetic expression: when God speaks to us in the Incarnation, all qualities of human language—even being itself—are employed as created ‘grammar’ by which God expresses himself to us…With God at the center of expression, poetry becomes capable of an authentic role in theological language.” [8]
This form of theo-poetics “requires the interplay of three massive fields of knowledge: metaphysics, language, and Christology” [9] and is to be “sharply distinguished from the agnostic overtures of the ‘theo-poetics’ movement, whose lineage is not be found in the thought of Balthasar.” [8]
The mythopoetics of the Oxford Inklings (C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, among others) would also be an example of classical theopoetics. Charles Williams gave the name "Romantic Theology" to his project of establishing a subclass of theology at the intersection of imaginative, specifically romantic, literature and classical theology; however this subclass of theology is focused on romantic love between a couple as a way of loving God. C.S. Lewis fits poetry into a broader understanding of theology in his essay "Is Theology Poetry?" Others have called it Christian Romanticism, Mythopoetics or Theopoetics. Northwind Seminary offers a doctoral degree program in the Romantic Theology of the Oxford Inklings. [www.NorthwindSeminary.edu]
Theopaschism is the belief that a god can suffer. Owing to controversies about the passion of Jesus and his divinity, this doctrine was a subject of ecumenical councils which affirmed the theopaschite formula.
Postmodern theology, also known as the continental philosophy of religion, is a philosophical and theological movement that interprets Christian theology in light of postmodernism and various forms of post-Heideggerian thought, including post-structuralism, phenomenology, and deconstruction.
ErichPrzywara was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian of German-Polish origin, who was one of the first Catholics to engage in dialogue with modern philosophers, especially those of the phenomenological tradition. He is best known for synthesizing the thought of prominent thinkers around the notion of the analogy of being, the tension between divine immanence and divine transcendence, a "unity-in-tension".
Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who is considered one of the most important Catholic theologians of the 20th century. With Joseph Ratzinger and Henri de Lubac, he founded the theological journal Communio. Over the course of his life, he authored 85 books, over 500 articles and essays, and almost 100 translations. He is known for his 15-volume trilogy on beauty, goodness (Theo-Drama), and truth (Theo-Logic).
Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and Catholic theologian. He is a former student of Jacques Derrida whose work is informed by patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy.
Radical orthodoxy is a Christian theological and philosophical school of thought which makes use of postmodern philosophy to reject the paradigm of modernity. The movement was founded by John Milbank and others and takes its name from the title of a collection of essays published by Routledge in 1999: Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, edited by Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward. Although the principal founders of the movement are Anglicans, radical orthodoxy includes theologians from a number of ecclesial traditions.
Theological aesthetics is the interdisciplinary study of theology and aesthetics, and has been defined as being "concerned with questions about God and issues in theology in the light of and perceived through sense knowledge, through beauty, and the arts". This field of study is broad and includes not only a theology of beauty, but also the dialogue between theology and the arts, such as dance, drama, film, literature, music, poetry, and the visual arts.
Sophiology is a controversial school of thought in Russian Orthodoxy which holds that Divine Wisdom is to be identified with God's essence, and that the Divine Wisdom is in some way expressed in the world as 'creaturely' wisdom. This notion has often been characterized as introducing a feminine "fourth hypostasis" into the Trinity.
Adrienne von Speyr was a Swiss Catholic convert, physician, mystic, and author of some sixty books of spirituality and theology.
Cyril J. O'Regan is an Irish theologian writer with particular expertise in mystical theology.
Mysterium Paschale. The Mystery of Easter is a 1969 book by the Swiss theologian and Catholic priest Hans Urs von Balthasar. The original German edition was published by Benziger Verlag, Einsiedeln. In 1983 it was reprinted by St. Benno-Verlag, Leipzig, including additions made to the second French edition Pâques le mystère, copyright 1981 by Les Edition du Cerf, Paris. The first English translation with an Introduction by Aidan Nichols, O.P., was published in 1990.
Counter-experience describes a perception of a non-objective phenomenon. First coined by the French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, it has been elevated to book title status by the Marion scholar Kevin Hart.
The following is a bibliography of John D. Caputo's works. Caputo is an American philosopher closely associated with postmodern Christianity.
David Bakewell Burrell was an American educator, theologian, writer and translator who was a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross. He was the Theodore Hesburgh Professor emeritus in Philosophy and Theology at University of Notre Dame, US. He wrote around thirteen books on Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions. He knew several languages; he translated two books of Al-Ghazali from Arabic into English. He also taught comparative theology, ethics and development at Uganda Martyrs University, Nkozi, Uganda; Tangaza College, Nairobi, Kenya; and Hebrew University, Jerusalem. During 1960s, he was involved in Anti-Vietnam War Movement. He was also a professor at Notre Dame University Bangladesh. Burrell died in Notre Dame, Indiana on October 1, 2023, at the age of 90.
William Franke is an American academic and philosopher, professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. A main exposition of his philosophical thinking is A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), a book which dwells on the limits of language in order to open thought to the inconceivable. On this basis, the discourses of myth, mysticism, metaphysics, and the arts take on new and previously unsuspected types of meaning. This book is the object of a Syndicate Forum and of a collective volume of essays by diverse hands in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion”: Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy. Franke's apophatic philosophy is based on his two-volume On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (2007), which reconstructs in the margins of philosophy a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos. Franke extends this philosophy in an intercultural direction, entering the field of comparative philosophy, with Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders. In On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking, Franke argues for application of apophatic thinking in a variety of fields and across disciplines, from humanities to cognitive science, as key to reaching peaceful mutual understanding in a multicultural world riven by racial and gender conflict, religious antagonisms, and national and regional rivalries.
Regina Schwartz is a scholar of English literature and elements of Jewish and Christian religion. A Professor of English and Religion at Northwestern University, she has been known historically for her research and teaching on 17th-century literature, on the Hebrew Bible, and on the interface of literature with the subjects of philosophy, law, and religion.
Mark Allen McIntosh was an American Episcopal priest and theologian. He specialized in systematic theology, historical theology, and the history of Christian spirituality, engaging especially with Christian mysticism. From 2014 until his death, he was Professor of Christian Spirituality at Loyola University Chicago. He was previously, from 2009 to 2014, the Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham University and a Canon Residentiary of Durham Cathedral.
Karen Kilby is an American lay Catholic theologian. She is currently the Bede Professor of Catholic Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.
David Louis Schindler, Jr. (pen name David Christopher Schindler is an American philosopher and translator, specializing in metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of religion, and moral and political philosophy. His work falls in the broadly Neoplatonic tradition, though he is also associated with Thomism, certain strains of German Idealism, and the Communio/Ressourcement school of theology. He is a professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C.
John Edwin Thiel is the Aloysius P. Kelley, S.J. Professor of Catholic Studies at Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut, U.S.A, where he has taught for 47 years.