Conventional and Ultimate Truth
A Key for Fundamental Theology
Publication Year: 2015
Published by: University of Notre Dame Press
Cover
Title page, Copyright, Dedication
Preface
The present work is intended as a contribution to fundamental theology and sets forth as a paradigm for theology today the practice of a reflective judgment that attends to the interplay of conventionality and ultimacy within Christian tradition and in the wider inter religious...
Chapter One: Theological Judgment As Open-Ended Reflection
In two earlier contributions to fundamental theology I tried to show how the situation of religious belief today is shaped by a new “regime of truth” that obliges us to undertake a critical retrieval of Christian tradition in dialogue with the other religious traditions, appraised as...
Chapter Two: The Twofold Truth
Fundamental theology is concerned more with the method of theological judgment than with its content, though of course it is impossible to make a clean separation between the two. Some methods conduce inevitably to the abyss of skepticism, others to the fortress of...
Chapter Three: The Religious Dynamic of Modernist Literature
The ultimacy that makes itself felt in art is consubstantial with the forms that are its vehicle; in religion, the relation between the two is more tangential, and the vehicles are at the limit merely provisional means to be cast aside when they have served their purpose. It is not...
Chapter Four: Metaphysics and Its Overcoming
The path to God as origin and final goal of the world and humanity is no longer as short and easy as it once seemed. To invoke God in connection with the beginning of the universe, or of the individual soul, or as Providence at work in evolution or history or individual destinies...
Chapter Five: Scripture and Revelation
The withdrawal of God, or at least of God-as-origin, that is observed in modern cosmic and epistemological inquiry is mirrored also in the withdrawal of the historic origins of biblical and Christian tradition, which slip away from us uncannily. There is a parallel between...
Chapter Six: Religious Experience
Mystical experience claims to be an immediate encounter with something ultimate. Does it introduce a knockdown verification that discredits all we have said about indirect methods, the risk of judgment, the retreat of origins, and the conventionality of representations...
Chapter Seven: Negative Theology
When we try to approach the absolute origin of all being, we find that this origin eludes our grasp and takes on a nonfoundational, nonsubstantial character, indicated in Neoplatonism as the One beyond being, or as the Ineffable beyond even the One (Damascius); in Thomism...
Chapter Eight: Interreligious Dialogue
Religious pluralism is no longer a merely incidental “locus” for fundamental theology, or a problem to be dispatched before one gets down to the work of clarifying the Christian basis. Rather, it is increasingly becoming the governing horizon within which the Christian...
Chapter Nine: Dogma
One of the tasks of fundamental theology is to assess the function and status of dogma. In order to illustrate what a systematic theology in the key of reflective judgment, conscious of the distinction between the conventional and the ultimate, would look like, I shall venture here...
E-ISBN-13: 9780268088682
E-ISBN-10: 0268088683
Print-ISBN-13: 9780268037406
Print-ISBN-10: 026803740X
Page Count: 448
Publication Year: 2015
OCLC Number: 910219669
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Conventional and Ultimate Truth
