Oliver Davies – författare

Composed during a critical time in the evolution of European intellectual life, the works of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) are some of the most powerful medieval attempts to achieve a synthesis between ancient Greek thought and the Christian faith. Writing with great rhetorical brilliance, Eckhart combines the neoplatonic concept of oneness - the idea that the ultimate principle of the universe is single and undivided - with his Christian belief in the Trinity, and considers the struggle to describe a perfect God through the imperfect medium of language. Fusing philosophy and religion with vivid originality and metaphysical passion, these works have intrigued and inspired philosophers and theologians from Hegel to Heidegger and beyond.

Significant advances in science bring new understandings of the human as a unity of mind, body and world and calls into question the deep-seated dualistic presuppositions of modern theology. Oliver Davies argues that the changing framework allows a return to the defining question of the Easter Church: 'Where is Jesus Christ?'. This is a question which can bring about a fundamental re-orientation of theology, since it gives space for the theological reception of the disruptive presence of the living Christ as the present material as well as formal object of theology in the world. At the centre of this study therefore is a new theology of the doctrine of the exaltation of Christ, based upon St Paul's encounter with the exalted or commissioning Christ on the road to Damascus. This places calling and commissioning at the centre of systematic theology. It provides the ground for a new understanding of theology as transcending the Academy-Church division as well as the divide between systematic and practical theology. It points also to a new critical theological method of engagement and collaboration.This book begins to explore new forms of world-centred theological rationality in the contexts not only of scripture, doctrine, anthropology, ecclesiology and faith, but also of Christian politics and philosophy. It is a work of contemporary and global Christological promise in Fundamental Theology, and is addressed to all those who are concerned, from whichever denomination, with the continuing vitality of Christianity in a changing world.

The wide-scale rejection of metaphysics today has become the test of the postmodern. In this volume, Oliver Davies argues for a renewal of metaphysics, as the language of createdness, based not in a return to outmoded concepts of essence, but in a dynamic new understanding of ontology as narrataive and performance. His repairing of the western metaphysical tradition is grounded both in the divine self-naming in Exodus which, for the rabbis, identified God's presence in the world with God's compassionate acts, and in the compassionate resistance of Etty Hillesum and Edith Stein to the violence of the Holocaust. Building upon a new metaphysics of compassion which is attentive to the deepest histories of the contemporary world, Davies offers a renewed systematic theology of divine speech and relation, focused in Jesus Christ who, as the triadic "Word" of God, speaks creatively at the heart of human culture and action, and, as the redeeming "Compassion" of God, regenerates the world. Oliver Davies is Reader in Theology at the University of Wales, Lampeter. His previous publications have been mainly in the area of medieval mysticism, especially Meister Eckhart, and Celtic Christianity.

Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with contemporary secular philosophy. Leading Christian thinkers explore in their own way the extent to which the concept of the apophatic illumines some of the deepest doctrinal structures of Christian faith, and of Christian self-understanding both in terms of its historical and contemporary situatedness, showing how a dimension of negativity has characterised not only traditional mysticism but most forms of Christian thought over the years.

We have, as a theological community, generally lost a language in which to speak of the created-ness of the world. As a consequence, our discourses of reason cannot bridge the way we know God and the way we know the world. Therefore, argues Oliver Davies, a primary task of contemporary theology is the regeneration of a Christian account of the world as sacramental, leading to the formation of a Christian conception of reason and a new Christocentric understanding of the real. Both the Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotics of Christ as the embodied, sacrificial and creative speech of God serve the project of a repairal of Christian cosmology. The world itself is viewed as a creative text authored by God, of which we as interpreters are an integral part. This is a wide-ranging and convincing book that makes an important contribution to modern theology.

Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with contemporary secular philosophy. Leading Christian thinkers explore in their own way the extent to which the concept of the apophatic illumines some of the deepest doctrinal structures of Christian faith, and of Christian self-understanding both in terms of its historical and contemporary situatedness, showing how a dimension of negativity has characterised not only traditional mysticism but most forms of Christian thought over the years.

We have, as a theological community, generally lost a language in which to speak of the created-ness of the world. As a consequence, our discourses of reason cannot bridge the way we know God and the way we know the world. Therefore, argues Oliver Davies, a primary task of contemporary theology is the regeneration of a Christian account of the world as sacramental, leading to the formation of a Christian conception of reason and a new Christocentric understanding of the real. Both the Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotics of Christ as the embodied, sacrificial and creative speech of God serve the project of a repairal of Christian cosmology. The world itself is viewed as a creative text authored by God, of which we as interpreters are an integral part. This is a wide-ranging and convincing book that makes an important contribution to modern theology.

This book is the fruit of a close collaboration between three leading scholars with a background in systematics, philosophical theology and ethics. It sets out a new account of how incarnation is mediated in the world of space and time, leading to a new orientation of theology within the world. The doctrinal ("from above") and philosophical ("from below") sections lead to a new exposition of Christian life in confrontation with deepseated problems of ethics and justice. The three pieces closely interweave with each other in the elaboration of a new kind of practical, doctrinal theology of full philosophical integrity.