Overview
"The incarnation of God in Jesus poses numerous challenges for the historical consciousness. How does a particular human at a particular time embody the eternal? And how does that embodiment work itself out in faith across the centuries? A gulf would appear to stand between what Christians say about Christ and the historical event of the man Jesus; indeed, the true reality of the incarnation seems unspeakable. Unspeakable Cults considers the nature and potential resolution of the conflict between the relativistic assumptions of the modern historical worldview and the classical Christian assertion of the absolute status of Jesus of Nazareth as God's saving incarnation in history. Paul DeHart contends that an understanding of Jesus' history is possible, proposing a model of the relation of divine causation to historical causation that allows the affirmation of Jesus' divinity without a miraculous rupture of the world's immanent causal patterns. The book first identifies classic articulations of the conflict in nineteenth-century German thought (Troeltsch, D. F. Strauss), and then draws on the history of religions to suggest possible relevant motifs in first-century culture that mitigate the axiomatic ""tension"" between Jesus' humanity and his deified status in early Christianity. With a creative appropriation of Thomas Aquinas, the heart of the argument aims to understand the eternal Word's presence in a human being as a thoroughly cultural event, but one dependent on divine power conceived as quasi-formal rather than merely efficient cause. Such an approach undercuts opposition between the absoluteness of Jesus and the relativism of historicism. DeHart ultimately confronts the resulting challenges to traditional belief resulting from this proposed model, including the irremediable ambiguity of Jesus' ""miraculous"" performances and the constitutively unfinished nature of his human identity. Rather than treating these as scandals of modern consciousness, Unspeakable Cults vindicates them as necessary aspects of the ""offense"" perennially confronting faith in the incarnation."
Full Product Details
Author: Paul J. DeHart
Publisher: Baylor University Press
Imprint: Baylor University Press
Weight: 0.333kg
ISBN: 9781481315555
ISBN 10: 1481315552
Pages: 271
Publication Date: 30 October 2021
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
"This mature and wide-ranging work, whose character is perhaps best described as the convergence of Yves Congar and a fairly sophisticated account of dialectical theology, tackles a question that has bedeviled Christian theology for two centuries and more: how is it possible ""to affirm both classic incarnational thinking and modern historical consciousness as necessarily in tension yet not finally incompatible"" (p. 19)? DeHart's answer articulates a vision of the Christian community's fundamentally ambiguous and historically bounded exercise in the ""constructive, creative, and interpretive work"" (p. 115) that drives cultural meaningmaking, centered upon the ""pneumatic socialization into the Christian body"" that ""ultimately enables recognition of Jesus' humanity as God's self-vocalization"" (p. 117). --W. Travis McMaken, Lindenwood University ""Interpretation: Journal of Bible and Theology"" Unspeakable Cults is a novel approach to Christology, tapping into the possibilities of conceiving the divinity of Christ in terms of the Word of God as a semiotic reality that unfolds within historical communicative relationships. --Evan F. Kuehn ""Reading Religion"""
"Unspeakable Cults is a novel approach to Christology, tapping into the possibilities of conceiving the divinity of Christ in terms of the Word of God as a semiotic reality that unfolds within historical communicative relationships. --Evan F. Kuehn ""Reading Religion"""
Author Information
Paul J. DeHart is Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
