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From Theology to Theological Thinking

From Theology to Theological Thinking

JEAN-YVES LACOSTE
TRANSLATED BY W. CHRIS HACKETT
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JEFFREY BLOECHL
Series: Richard Lectures
Copyright Date: 2014
Published by: University of Virginia Press
Pages: 136
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wrppk
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  • Book Info
    From Theology to Theological Thinking
    Book Description:

    "Christian philosophy" is commonly regarded as an oxymoron, philosophy being thought incompatible with the assumptions and conclusions required by religious faith. According to this way of thinking, philosophy and theology must forever remain distinct.

    InFrom Theology to Theological Thinking,Jean-Yves Lacoste takes a different approach. Stepping back from contemporary philosophical concerns, Lacoste-a leading figure in the philosophy of religion-looks at the relationship between philosophy and theology from the standpoint of the history of ideas. He notes in particular that theology and philosophy were not considered separate realms until the high Middle Ages, this distinction being a hallmark of the modern era that is coming to an end. Lacoste argues that the intellectual task before us now is to work in the frontier region between or beyond these domains, work he identifies as "the task of thinking."

    With this argument, Lacoste resets our understanding of Western Christian thought, contending that a new way of thinking that is at once philosophical and theological will be the lasting discourse of Christianity.

    eISBN: 978-0-8139-3557-7
    Subjects: Religion

Table of Contents

  1. Front Matter
    (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    (pp. v-vi)
  3. INTRODUCTION: Eschatology, Liturgy, and the Task of Thinking
    (pp. vii-xxii)
    JEFFREY BLOECHL

    Our question today, and perhaps always, asks not whether God exists but what God’s relation is to the world. This question troubles the life of faith, and it challenges the theology that provides that life with its necessary intelligence. And one misses its full force if one reduces it to a matter of divine mystery, where to be sure thought does meet an essential limit. The difficulty of knowing God’s relation to the world is also rooted in the difficulty of the world itself, with its multiple and shifting opacities and the charm that they exercise on our native and...

  4. A Note on the Translation
    (pp. xxiii-xxx)
    W. CHRIS HACKETT
  5. ONE Theōria, vita philosophica, and Christian Experience
    (pp. 1-30)

    To give honor where honor is due, let the philosopher be the first to come on stage: after all, those whom we name “theologians” only adopted this label very late and, in the first centuries of Christianity, simply considered themselves philosophers. To make the gross distinction between “philosopher” and “theologian” is to be mistaken about the meaning of “philosophy” in the Greek and Greco-Roman world.¹ The first task imposed by the essence of the philosophical, or at least on any attempt to reach it, is to perplex the reader. Philosophy is not clearly defined, or better not defined at all....

  6. TWO Philosophy, Theology, and the Academy
    (pp. 31-62)

    The transition from late antiquity to the Middle Ages is obscure and remains open to any number of potential periodizations. Intellectual history customarily requires that we propose a name and in this instance the custom is not wrong. We are speaking of Boethius. Boethius matters to the history of philosophy because of his occupation as translator and commentator on Aristotle; he matters to theology because he is the author of important conceptual precisions; and he matters to the history of Christianity because he is a martyr, venerated through the ages under the name ofsan Severino.Briefly, we are interested...

  7. THREE Philosophy, Theology, and the Task of Thinking
    (pp. 63-90)

    We can affirm without any shilly-shallying that Scholastic theology is ascientia.And because the University wasuniversitas scientiarum,we can propose the equivalence ofscientiaand university discipline. This suffices for the epoch. This will also suffice later, after the appearance of the concept of science, if we are content to assign to theology a place among the various kinds of knowledge (knowledge does not mean science) handed on in the University. These various kinds of knowledge are not necessarily sciences in the modern sense of the term. Philology, history, the critical reading of texts, are all a matter...

  8. Notes
    (pp. 91-98)
  9. Index
    (pp. 99-106)