Postmodernity's Transcending: Devaluing God (Faith in Reason) - Softcover

Hemming, Laurence Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0334029929 ISBN 13: 9780334029922

Publisher: SCM Press, 2005

Synopsis

Postmodernity's Transcending: Devaluing God in one way undertakes a history of the concept of the aesthetic sublime; in another it is an exploration of the limits of theological thinking, where theology is understood either as a practice arising from faith or from thinking.

By examining concepts like soul, experience, analogy and truth, the author issues a provocative challenge to much contemporary Christian theology to return to a more serious engagement with philosophy.

Hemming explores the confrontation with God and the gods to be found in Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, often offering innovative readings of these thinkers sharply at odds with accounts to be found elsewhere.

About this title

Review

Postmodernity's Transcending is a highly ambitious and provocative work, and Hemming demonstrates impressive range and erudition in his analysis of both historical and contemporary figures. Hemming's investigations of temporality and causality in the figures he investigates are particularly insightful.' (Mary Troxell Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

'Although published as part of SCM's 'Faith in Reason' series, Postmodernity's Transcending is not intended only for readers with an interest in theology. Indeed, Hemming turns to eschatological categories in his closing remarks about Christian liturgy as appropriate theology in the postmodern context, and here he is at his most lucid.' (Tim Gibson Theology)

A highly intelligent, original and provocative study...and is bound to stimulate considerable discussion in postmodernism and, in particular, in philosophical and theological discussions of the sublime and transcendence: two areas that are central to contemporary intellectual work. The work is densely thought and nicely written: it makes significant demands of the reader, but the reader it engages is precisely the sort of person who will rise to its challenges. (Kevin Hart University of Notre Dame)

Synopsis

Devaluing God is concerned with the relationship between theology and post-modernity. To date there are three main areas of literature that discuss this relationship: British, French and American. The British, Radical Orthodoxy group which sees the secular world as a "failed theology", the complex American responses varying from the liberal acceptance of post-modernity to the reformed thinkers who feel it should be held at bay and the French, more philosophical response to dealing with post-modernity are all considered in this text. In Devaluing God, Hemming has created a way for all theologians interested in this discussion to access the sources of post-modernity, and also access a demonstration of how post-modernity can be understood as a phenomenon of thinking. The author demonstrates his belief that post-modernity is forcing a rethinking of everything, and that at the bottom of this re-thinking, as a new way of understanding the world emerges, there is an understanding of God.

He avoids showing how God becomes yet another theme in the intellectual buffet that post-modernity often appears to be; rather he argues that understanding what kinds of meanings the term "God" is acquiring in post-modernity, and who God is for post-modernity, is fundamental in gaining access to this phenomenon of thinking at all. The chapters unfold this understanding by showing how there is an understanding of God and the self throughout history, in the ways in which the Ancient and the Mediaeval cosmos, the post-Enlightenment universe and the now post-modern world provide for thinking.

About this edition

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0334029929
• ISBN 13: 9780334029922
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288