P. Byrne — Companion Encyclopedia of Theology

Автор: P. Byrne
Название книги: Companion Encyclopedia of Theology
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Философия
Страницы: 1117
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

The Companion Encyclopedia of Theology provides a comprehensive guide to modern theological thought. An international team of theologians and practitioners of both the Christian and Jewish faiths investigate and consider aspects of theology in 48 self-contained articles. Neither partisan and denominational, nor detached and abstract, this Companion explores the resources and applications of theology in the light of Christianity's place in the modern world.
The Structure
The Companion Encyclopedia of Theology is divided into six parts. The first three deal with major foundational aspects of Western theological reflection:
* the Hebrew and Christian Bible
* the Tradition
* the contribution of Philosophy
The second half of the Companion is concerned with application:
* in relation to Spirituality
* in relation to contemporary Ethics
* in relation to issues in and aspects of present-day theological construction
The 48 essays are descriptive, informative and analytical; their wide-ranging content is bound into a unified perspective by the editors' general introduction and the introductions to each of the six parts. At the end of each article, there are suggestions for further reading and the work is concluded with a comprehensive index.
This Companion Encyclopedia is a valuable source of reference for students, teachers and both lay and clerical practitioners of Christian and Jewish theology.
Key Features
* Broad Coverage — contains 48 in-depth essays covering both the history and application of Western theological thought
* International Authorship — written in non-technical language by a distinguished team of editors and authors from both Christian and Jewish faiths
* Balanced Approach — discusses and analyses the key issues without imposing any single viewpoint
* Clearly Presented — at the end of each article, there are suggestions for further reading and the work contains a comprehensive index

The aim of this Companion Encyclopedia is to provide as comprehensive a
guide as possible to the present state of Christian theology in its Western
academic manifestations and in the setting of the modern world. To understand
the present, especially in the case of a long-standing phenomenon like
Christianity, it is necessary to be aware of the past. So here there is much
history as well as contemporary reflection and assessment.
The contributors are drawn from many different traditions of belief and
thought, but all reflect broadly the assumptions and methods of the modern
Western academy, and write as analysts rather than propagandists. No attempt
has been made to seek or impose a single viewpoint, and readers will sometimes
find themselves presented with different angles on the same material.
Inevitably, too, some features of the scene will recur, most notably the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment: readers will at least become convinced of
the cruciality of this episode, greater, from a modern standpoint, in many
ways than even the early period or the Reformation. At the same time, however
far-reaching the developments or the applications which it undergoes,
Christian theology never loses sight of the originating impulse given by Jesus
of Nazareth. Behind and beneath all the ideas and all the books, it rests on
the story that centres on him.
Modern Christian theology (and everything in this book is ‘modern’ in
standpoint even when it examines writings and ideas of the distant past) is
far from being a unified phenomenon. In the first place, there are significant
differences of theological agenda, ethos, priority and content between the
various Christian Churches, from the largest to the smallest; and, especially
in the case of the great Churches, there are also significant internal differences,
traceable both to history and to contemporary movements of thought and
life. Thus, the Anglican Communion contains strong ‘Catholic’, ‘Protestant’
and ‘liberal’ elements, and the Roman Catholic Church includes both
traditionalists and reformists.
Second, theology involves different styles and emphases according to the location of its practitioners: whether, for example, they operate in the context
of church life, schools or universities. In the first, there is likely to be a note of
authority and commitment and a tendency towards construction and synthesis
that would usually seem inappropriate in the academy. Matters of church
order and discipline (one has only to cite the question of the ordination of
women, often scarcely intelligible as problematic to people outside the
Churches) are likely to figure prominently in church theology, and often the
posture is dogmatic rather than critical.
In school theology, on the other hand, the agenda tends to be formed by
society at large; hence the interest in the world faiths and what they have in
common, and in currently pressing ethical issues. Here there is often a felt
need to respond to urgent social demands, fuelled perhaps by government or
parent power.
When we turn to university theology, which this book chiefly and essentially
reflects, we find a third situation, quite distinct from the other two, even
though individual theologians may well feel loyalty to the Church or sensitivity
to the needs of the school. Here, the dominant atmosphere is provided by the
secular university as a whole, as it has developed in the West, where, despite
regional variations, there is much homogeneity. While there may often be
unadmitted ideology (sometimes erupting violently as in the literary world),
the public stance is deeply antipathetic to anything that smacks of sectionalism
or propaganda: in these respects the Churches’ tarnished past is often hard to
forget and theology’s attempts to present itself as a reformed character are
not always trusted. The emphasis is on openness, the critical assessment of
all ideas, however venerable or (it may sometimes appear) trivial. More nobly,
the quest for truth, by its very nature never concluded and certainly inimical
to other authorities, is pre-eminent.
There can be no doubt that, despite setbacks and failures to penetrate
beyond the academy as widely as may be wished or expected, this style of
theology has done much to reduce bigotry and to foster human understanding.
One may point, for example, to the shaming of anti-Semitism, attributable,
at least in part, to developments in New Testament studies as conducted in
the modern academy, giving us a more balanced picture of the Judaism that
Jesus knew and inhabited; and to the ecumenical movement, where Christians
of long-warring traditions have sought to let greater comprehension of one
another’s historical positions bring about better relations in the present.
But if we look at the university from within, then theology’s situation is
undeniably complex for it owes allegiance in several different, even
conflicting, directions. (It is worth noting that even the numerous
confessional higher educational institutions, whose teachers are usually
trained in universities, are often sensitive to the complexity, even if not as
strongly.) Theology owes allegiance first to the modern secular academy in
which it is placed and which is its paymaster. This ‘parent’ may indeed be in
many ways beneficent, as has been indicated, but it may also be subversive or corrosive, for the secular university has no interest whatsoever in the claims
concerning God or ‘the Other’ which are the lively centre of theology’s
interest and, many would say, the single mainspring of its whole life.
Theology, in other words, however dispassionate and critical it may be, can
never reduce itself to purely secularist terms—to the ‘study of religion’ as a
phenomenon in human life (alongside, for instance, sport or work). It is
aware of itself, bluntly, as concerned with the holy—not only as a major
presence in the world but also as a factor whose claims (whether true or
false) are unique in kind and scale. Christian theology has its own distinctive
features, of course, but here is the nub of the matter, and the source of
theology’s strange mixture of ease and unease in the modern university—a
situation of which, despite its wide tolerance, the university itself
occasionally, though perhaps surprisingly rarely, takes cognizance. To put
the matter at a more personal level, there is something both hard and
peculiar in engaging in the study of God as if he were an object in one’s hand,
while knowing of him also as the one in whose hands one exists (whether as
idea or as reality). However, Christian theology’s own bringing together of
God as mystery and yet as involving himself radically with the world
suggests ways of resolving the difficulty.
All this is a way of saying that theology owes allegiance not only to the
university but also to the Christian tradition, even perhaps, in some settings,
to that tradition as currently instantiated in a Church. But most of that
tradition was formed and expressed in conditions far removed from the
modern post-Enlightenment academy, breathing authority and often even
compulsion for the enforcement of its teaching. Not only is this a legacy still
sometimes hard to live down (e.g. when a church seminary asks for
accreditation by a university; though either side may well blur the issues at
stake-corporate memory is often weaker than one might expect!); it is also
bound to mark the study of the Bible and the tradition, and to rub off, perhaps
quite subtly, on critical scholarship in general.
This book is about ‘thought’ rather than ‘life’; so, though the distinction
cannot be absolute without artificiality, this is not a survey of Christianity
and the Churches as social phenomena—their distribution, worship,
organization, and so forth. The book reflects the various intellectual disciplines
which have grown up over the centuries to investigate and consider aspects
of theology. It makes abundantly plain what a rich and diverse field this now
is—and indeed long has been.
Some of the forty-eight chapters that make up the book are largely
descriptive, whether of a period of past thought or of the current state of
scholarship. Others are more ambitious and deliberately sketch out new ways
of considering the matter in hand, pointing to possible and even desirable
future developments. But all through, every effort has been made to transcend
the merely informative. Even though, naturally, a great deal of essential
information is given, there could be no attempt at completeness, and contributors have sought to stimulate as well as to instruct, to suggest patterns
of comprehension rather than to burden the reader with raw data.
The book falls into six Parts. The first three deal with major foundational
aspects of Christian theological reflection: the Bible, the tradition, and the
contribution of philosophy, especially in the modern period. Though there
can be no rigid division, the other three Parts are more concerned with
application: in relation to spirituality and to contemporary ethics, and, finally,
issues in and aspects of present-day theological construction.
The editors acknowledge with gratitude the work of those who have
contributed to this book and the collaboration they have enjoyed with their
publishers, in particular Jonathan Price, who initiated the idea which now
reaches fruition, Seth Denbo and Colville Wemyss.