Author: Dylan Schrader Publisher: CUA Press ISBN: 0813234085 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
"Examines the theory of the motive behind Christ's incarnation developed by the Samanticenses (Discalced Carmelites of Salamanca) in the 17th century, showing how it perpetuates the tradition of Thomas Aquinas and refutes the more modern theories put forward by Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar"--
Author: Mother Mary Christa Nutt, R.S.M. Publisher: Emmaus Academic ISBN: 1645853926 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 447
Book Description
What is it about the practice of obedience to God that makes it significant for human happiness and sanctity? And how should the obedience proper to vowed religious life be understood relative to the responsibilities of conscience and personal freedom? In the present day, religious obedience is often viewed either as a negative cramping of personal autonomy by an external authority, or as a positive submission to law that somehow assures one’s fidelity, but the common thread for both perspectives is a distinctly modern approach to obedience characterized by legalism and voluntarism. In Free for Christ, Mother Mary Christa Nutt, R.S.M., proposes a different approach to religious obedience that foregrounds virtue-based moral agency rooted in metaphysics and the mystery of God, examining obedience not simply in relation to commands and laws but as a spiritual, philosophical, and theological reality—one that situates the human person in relation to God, the Church, and those others who share this religious life. Taking her starting point from Thomas Aquinas, Nutt examines obedience as a dimension of prudence and worship, that is, as a way that the human being can become relative to God as first source and final end, and thus as a way that the grace of Christ can take deeper root as a path to authentic freedom and interiority. From this ground of Thomistic metaphysics and ethics emerges a theological anthropology of obedience closely tied to Aquinas’s teaching on providence and religion.
Author: The Salmanticenses Publisher: Catholic University of America Press ISBN: 0813231795 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to announce a new series, Early Modern Catholic Sources, edited by Ulrich L. Lehner and Trent Pomplun. This series – the only one of its kind – will provide translations of early modern Catholic texts of theological interest written between 1450 and 1800. The first volume in this series is On the Motive of the Incarnation, the first English translation of the seventeenth-century Discalced Carmelites at the University of Salmanca treatise on the motive of the Incarnation. Originally intended for students of their order, it became a major contribution to broader theological discourse. In this treatise, they defend the assertion that God intended Christ’s Incarnation essentially as a remedy for sin, such that if Adam had not sinned Christ would not have become incarnate, and that, at the same time, God intended all other works of nature and grace for the sake of Christ at their end. The Salmanticenses’ position thus combines elements of the Franciscan and Dominican traditions, stemming from the thought of Blessed John Duns Scotus and Saint Thomas Aquinas. This treatise is an exhaustive effort to show how the Scotistic emphasis on the primacy of Christ as the first willed and intended by God can be articulated within a Thomistic framework that acknowledges the contingency of the Incarnation on the need for redemption. In addition to the translation, the volume will include a brief introduction and extensive notes for theologians, historians, and students.
Author: Austin Stevenson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0567714403 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
In this book, Austin Stevenson argues that it is not the 'divinity' of Jesus that causes problems for historians, but his humanity. To insist that Jesus was fully human, as both theologians and historians do, still leaves us with the question of what it means to be human. It turns out that theologians and historians often have different answers to this question on both a philosophical and a theological register. Furthermore, historians frequently misunderstand the historiographical implications of classical Christology, and thus the compatibility between traditional beliefs about Jesus and critical historical inquiry. Through close engagement with the thought of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), this book offers a new path toward the reconciliation of these disciplines by focusing on human knowledge and subjectivity, which are central issues in both historical method and Christology. By interrogating and challenging the normative metaphysical assumptions operative in Jesus scholarship, a range of possibility is opened up for approaches to Jesus that are genuinely historical, but not naturalistic.
Author: Oliver Keenan Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1399404172 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Oliver Keenan brings the medieval philosophy of Thomas Aquinas to life. Thomas Aquinas is more than a medieval curiosity. He was a reluctant revolutionary, a scholar, poet and saint whose work unleashed an epoch-defining explosion of philosophical creativity in the thirteenth century. Writing at a time of war, injustice, poverty and alienation, Aquinas' thought reaches across the ages and speaks to us today. As Oliver Keenan argues, Aquinas matters now not because he was right about everything but because he can teach us a new way of looking at the world. A powerful voice for community, justice, friendship and peace, Aquinas' profoundly non-violent philosophy shows us how to be human in a deeply dehumanizing world. The era that he knew was defined by conflict and divisive politics, much like our own – his unfailing belief in the power of communication to overcome alienation and despair is an important lesson for us all. This book brings Aquinas' challenging but deeply rewarding philosophy to life for readers new to his work, as well as those already familiar. Oliver Keenan has spent his working life researching and engaging with Thomas Aquinas, culminating in this moving and original account of why he matters now – perhaps more than ever.
Author: Tracey Rowland Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134405820 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
Thomism's influence upon the development of Catholicism is difficult to overestimate - but how secure is its grip on the challenges that face contemporary society? Culture and the Thomist Tradition examines the crisis of Thomism today as thrown into relief by Vatican II, the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. Following the Church's declarations on culture in the document Gaudium et spes - the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World - it was widely presumed that a mandate had been given for transposing ecclesiastical culture into the idioms of modernity. But, says Tracey Rowland, such an understanding is not only based on a facile reading of the Conciliar documents, but was made possible by Thomism's own failure to demonstrate a workable theology of culture that might guide the Church through such transpositions. A Thomism that fails to specify the precise rôle of culture in moral fomration is problematice in a multicultural age, where Christians are exposed to a complex matrix of institutions and traditions both theistic and secular. The ambivalence of the Thomist tradition to modernity, and modern conceptions of rationality, also impedes its ability to successfully engage with the arguments of rivial traditions. Must a genuinely progressive Thomism learn to accomodate modernity? In opposition to such a stance, and in support of those who have resisted the trend in post-Conciliarliturgy to mimic the modernistic forms of mass culture, Culture and the Thomist Tradition musters a synthesis of the theological critiques of modernity to be found in the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, scholars of the international 'Communio' project and the Radical Orthodoxy circle. This synthesis, intended as a post-modern Augustinian Thomism, provides an account of the rôle of culture, memory and narrative tradition in the formation of intellectual and moral character. Re-evaluating the outcome of Vatican II, and forming the basis of a much-needed Thomist theology of culture, the book argues that the anti-beauty orientation of mass culture acts as a barrier to the theological virtue of hope, and ultimately fosters despair and atheism.
Author: John F. O'Neill Publisher: CUA Press ISBN: 0813237513 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
Venerable Fulton Sheen once famously said that "There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be ? which is, of course, quite a different thing." What is the true understanding of the mystery of the Church? In Lumen Gentium, the Church famously identifies herself as the sacrament of salvation, and various attempts have been made at developing an ecclesiology rooted in this idea. Another approach, nevertheless, prominent in the opening chapter of Lumen Gentium, is the relation of the Church to the Trinity in light of the divine missions, especially those of the Incarnation and Pentecost. Trinitarian Ecclesiology is an example of this approach to the mystery of the Church that places the divine missions at the head and the heart of the work. The order of Charles Journet's work is based on the four causes of the Church. Journet situates the treatise on the hierarchy in its proper place as belonging to the efficient cause of the Church in order to treat the more central mystery of the Church in her formal and material causes, namely the sanctifying gift of fully Christic charity and its visible manifestation. While Journet's magisterial work may already be identified as a Trinitarian Ecclesiology, recent research into the Trinitarian theology of St. Thomas Aquinas has deepened our understanding of his teaching, particularly in the way that creatures can relate to the divine persons in the divine missions. With a clearer understanding of the relation of creatures to the divine persons rooted in grace and its effects, a deeper vision of the mystery of the Church emerges, one that sees the Church as the visible mission of the Holy Spirit, inseparably joined with the visible mission of the Son in the Incarnation. The Great Mystery of Christ and the Church is the unity of the visible missions of the Son and the Spirit who have been sent into the world for our salvation.
Author: Reginald M. Lynch Publisher: CUA Press ISBN: 0813229448 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Recalling the Biblical and Patristic roots of the Church's sacramental identity, the Second Vatican Council calls the Church the 'visible sacrament' of that unity offered through Christ (LG 9). 'Sacrament' in this sense not only describes who the Church is, but what she does. In this regard, the Council Fathers were careful to establish a strong connection between the symbolic nature of the Church's sacraments and their effect on those who received them. Reginald Lynch is concerned with the cleansing of the heart—a phrase borrowed from St. Augustine and employed by Aquinas, which describes the effects that natural elements such as water or bread have on the human person when taken up by the Church as sacramental signs. Aquinas' approach to sacramental efficacy is unique for its integration of diverse theological topics such as Christology, merit, grace, creation and instrumentality. While all of these topics will be considered to some extent, the primary focus of The Cleansing of the Heart is the sacraments understood as instrumental causes of grace. This volume provides the historical context for understanding the development of sacramental causality as a theological topic in the scholastic period, emphasizing the unique features of Aquinas' response to this question. Following this, relevant texts from Aquinas' early and later work are examined, noting Aquinas' development and integration of the idea of sacramental causality in his later work. The Cleansing of the Heart concludes by contrasting alternatives to Aquinas' theory of sacramental causality that subsequently emerged. The rise of humanism introduced many changes within rhetoric and philosophy of language that had a profound effect on some theologians during the Modern period. This book provides historical context for understanding the most prominent of these theories in contrast to Aquinas, and examines some of their theological implications.
Author: Phillip A. Hussey Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0567714802 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
Phillip A. Hussey examines the scholarship of Jonathan Edwards and interrogates the relationship between Christ and the decree within Reformed Theology; and reveals the contemporary theological significance of supralapsarian Christology. In a late notebook entry, Jonathan Edwards offered a programmatic statement on the relation between Christ and predestination: “In that grand decree of predestination, or the sum of God's decrees...the appointment of Christ, or the decree respecting his person...must be considered first.” This work unpacks the scope of Edwards's statement, both in terms of setting forth an interpretation of Edwards's own theology on the relation between Christ and the decree, as well as drawing out the larger insights of Edwards's reasoning for current theological reflection.
Author: Thomas Joseph White Publisher: CUA Press ISBN: 0813238501 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 572
Book Description
What if anything can human beings know about God, either by way of philosophical reasoning or by divine revelation? How does the mystery of the Incarnation illuminate our understanding of the nature and mystery of God and the nature and destiny of the human person? The essays in this book explore topics pertaining to the nature of God, apophatic theology, divine simplicity and the holy Trinity, divine beauty, and the beauty of creation. The book also contains a series of speculative considerations of Christology: Why did God become human? How ought we understand the two natures of Christ and the topic of the communication of idioms (attribution of both divine and human properties to one person)? There is also a sustained treatment of Jesus' human knowledge and voluntary freedom. Did Jesus understand his own lordship and his unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and if so, how? Did Christ's human will always accord with the divine will, and what significance does this idea have for our understanding of the redemption affected by Christ for the whole human race? Through these explorations, principles drawn from Thomas Aquinas and from Thomistic tradition are taken into account as key resources for the adjudication of contemporary theological challenges. Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 3 is a continuation of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's collection of essays, extending over a range of fundamental topics in Catholic dogmatic theology.
Author: Dylan Schrader
Author: Mother Mary Christa Nutt, R.S.M.
Author: The Salmanticenses
Author: Austin Stevenson
Author: Oliver Keenan
Author: Tracey Rowland
Author: John F. O'Neill
Author: Reginald M. Lynch
Author: Phillip A. Hussey
Author: Thomas Joseph White