Imaginative Apologetics , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

125 pages

English

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

This timely and accessible book offers a fresh, contemporary introduction to Christian apologetics, arguing for a version that is theological, philosophical, and "catholic" and embracing the whole of human reason. It emphasizes a foundation in theology that is both confident and open and makes reference to philosophy in an accessible way. It includes contributions from authors such as Alister McGrath and Graham Ward and a foreword by John Milbank.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Christian theology

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 mai 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441238771
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2011 by Andrew Davison
Published in 2012 by Baker Academic a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakeracademic.com
First published in the UK by SCM Press (an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern) in 2011
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3877-1
The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.
This book is dedicated to two sets of friends, preachers and theologians who saved my faith as an undergraduate: to those who introduced me to the Christian philosophical tradition of the West, among them Caroline and Hans Pung, Fr Tom Weinandy and David Albert Jones, and to those who reintroduced me to the humane dignity of the Church of England, among them Fr Mark Everitt and the community at Merton College Chapel. If I owe these people a debt that I cannot repay, then I hope that I may at least join in their work.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
List of Contributors
Foreword
JOHN MILBANK
Introduction
ANDREW DAVISON
Faith and Reason Reconsidered
1 Proofs and Arguments
JOHN HUGHES
2 Christian Reason and Christian Community
ANDREW DAVISON
Christian Apologetics and the Human Imagination
3 Apologetics and the Imagination: Making Strange
ALISON MILBANK
4 Apologetics, Literature and Worldview
DONNA J. LAZENBY
5 The Good Serves the Better and Both the Best: C. S. Lewis on Imagination and Reason in Apologetics
MICHAEL WARD
Being Imaginative about Christian Apologetics
6 Atheism, Apologetics and Ecclesiology: Gaudium et Spes and Contemporary Unbelief
STEPHEN BULLIVANT
7 Christian Ethics as Good News
CRAIG HOVEY
Situating Christian Apologetics
8 Cultural Hermeneutics and Christian Apologetics
GRAHAM WARD
9 Moments and Themes in the History of Apologetics
RICHARD CONRAD OP
10 The Natural Sciences and Apologetics
ALISTER E. MCGRATH
Bibliography
Index
Notes
Back Cover
Contributors
Stephen Bullivant is Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham. He has written widely on Catholic social teaching and Catholic responses to atheism. He is the co-director of the Non-religion and Secularity Research Network. His forthcoming monograph on Catholicism and atheism is entitled The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology .
Richard Conrad is a Dominican friar. He teaches Christian doctrine and sacramental theology at Blackfriars, Oxford, where he is the vice-regent. He is also a part-time lecturer at the Maryvale Institute, Birmingham. He is the author of The Catholic Faith (Continuum, 1994) and The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (CTS, 2009).
Andrew Davison is the Tutor in Doctrine at Westcott House, Cambridge, and an affiliated lecturer of the Cambridge University Divinity Faculty. He has been Tutor in Christian Doctrine at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, a member of the Oxford University Theology Faculty and Junior Chaplain of Merton College, where he had previously studied chemistry and biochemistry.
Craig Hovey is Assistant Professor at Ashland University in Ohio, where he teaches Christian ethics and doctrine. His publications include To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church (Brazos Press, 2008), Nietzsche and Theology (T&T Clark, 2008), Speak Thus (Cascade, 2008), and the forthcoming Bearing True Witness: Truthfulness in Christian Practice (Eerdmans).
John Hughes is the Chaplain of Jesus College, Cambridge. His interests and publications span theology, philosophy and ethics. His book on the theology of work, The End of Work , was published by Blackwell in 2007.
Donna J. Lazenby is training for ordained ministry at Westcott House, Cambridge. She gained her PhD in theology from Cambridge University in 2009, writing on points of contact between Christian mysticism and the literary aesthetics of Virginia Woolf. She is author of a forthcoming book on Christian apologetics and the occult in contemporary literature (Cascade – Wipf & Stock).
Alister E. McGrath is Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education, and Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture at King’s College London. He has written extensively on the relation of Christian theology and the natural sciences, and has a special interest in the area of Christian apologetics. He also serves as President of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.
Alison Milbank is Associate Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Nottingham and Priest Vicar of Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire. Her books include Dante and the Victorians (Manchester University Press, 2009), Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians (Continuum, 2007) and (with Andrew Davison) For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (SCM Press, 2010).
John Milbank is Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. His books stand as some of the most significant contributions to recent philosophical theology and Christian political theory. They include The Future of Love (SCM Press, 2009), Being Reconciled (Routledge, 2003) and Theology and Social Theory (1990, second edition 2005). With Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock he was editor of Radical Orthodoxy (Routledge, 1998).
Graham Ward is Head of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures and Professor in Contextual Theology and Ethics at the University of Manchester. Recognized as a foremost theological commentator on culture, his many publications include The Politics of Discipleship (SCM Press, 2009), Christ and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Cities of God (Routledge, 2000) and Theology and Contemporary Culture (MacMillan, 1996). With John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock he was editor of Radical Orthodoxy (Routledge, 1998).
Michael Ward is the Chaplain of St Peter’s College, Oxford. He was previously the Chaplain of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Acknowledged as ‘the foremost living Lewis scholar’ (Tom Wright in The Times ), he is the author of Planet Narnia (Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Narnia Code (Authentic Media, 2010), and an editor of The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Foreword
An Apologia for Apologetics
JOHN MILBANK
‘Apologetics’ now has unfortunate connotations. Demotically it suggests at worse saying sorry, at best a defence of a doubtful or compromised position. Technically it has come to mean a theologically secondary exercise: not the exposition of the faith, but the defence of the faith on grounds other than faith – on one’s opponent’s territory, where one risks remaining in a weak or even a false position. The best that such a posture can hope to achieve would be the occasional demonstration that one’s adversary has somehow missed the authentic wider ground of her own standing. But calling this very standing into doubt would appear to be beyond the apologetic remit.
For these reasons apologetics often fell into disfavour within twentieth-century theology. Instead, what was recommended was an authentic exposition of faith, capable of persuading the non-believer to start to inhabit the alternative world which that exposition can invoke. In this light apologetics appeared to be a compromised exercise, unlikely in any case to succeed. And yet, the latter assumption was belied by the wide popular reach of some apologetic writing, most notably that of C. S. Lewis – the sign of the success of his Screwtape Letters being that they were often much admired even by those whom they did not convince. Meanwhile, the recent rise of the ‘new atheism’ has left many ordinary Christians feeling that they need the assistance of an upgraded apologetic weaponry in the face of newly aggressive scientistic assaults.
For both these reasons the time seems ripe to reconsider the apologetic role. And perhaps the first question to ask here is whether this role is really a secondary and subsidiary one after all. Perhaps the exposition of faith always includes an apologetic dimension? This might suggest that any successful exercise of apologetics, like indeed that of Lewis, must contain a strong confessional element which convinces precisely because it persuades through the force of an imaginative presentation of belief. Conversely, however, this possibility would equally suggest that confession has to include a reasoned claim, just as ‘argument’ denotes both the plot of a narrative and the sequential unfolding of a logical case.
A brief glance at the history of the relationship between Christianity and apologetics supplies immediately a positive answer to this question. Apolegein in Greek means ‘to tell fully’ and therefore simply to narrate, with a fullness that is acquired from a slightly detached perspective, as indicated by the prefix ‘ apo’ meaning ‘away from’, ‘off’, or ‘standing apart’. Therefore the very word would suggest that an apologia is the primary narrative testament of faith, yet with the interesting proviso that even an initial, committed, heartfelt, interior-derived confession must already stand somewhat apart from itself, rendering a reflexively felt judgement upon the spontaneously felt commitment to the Triune God and the incarnate Logos. From the very outset, therefore, the ‘ apo’ in ‘apologetics’ calls to mind the ‘ apo’ in ‘apophatic’ – etymologically the ‘away-d