Saturday, October 06, 2007

Memo to self: look for this book


I should read this.
The Table of Contents looks intriguing.

Part 1: Three Premodern Theologies:
Aquinas, Luther and Calvin
(hmmm. I'm especially interested to see how he understands Luther and Calvin as premodern.)

Part 2: The Modern Turn: God
The Domestication of God, The Domestication of Grace

Part 3: The Modern Turn: God and the World
Nearer than we are to ourselves
Where God is and What God does: Some modern problems
Grace and Works in Modern thought
The marginalization of the Trinity

Part 4: Some Critical Retrievals
The Image of the Invisible God
Evil and Divine Transcendence

The Booklist review:
To the extent that Placher's purpose is to convince us that--in their radical visions of divine transcendence--premodern theologians have lessons to teach us, he succeeds brilliantly. The great strength of this book is its reintroduction of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin to the postmodern theological conversation. Readers will encounter them here in ways that, to Placher's credit, will render the object of postmodern criticisms of "classical theism" thoroughly strange. That object, Placher maintains, is much more appropriately identified with a wrong turn taken by philosophy and theology in the seventeenth century, which he describes as a domestication of transcendence. Even readers who are not convinced by Placher's critiques of process thought and Mark C. Taylor's a-theology will find much of value in this beautifully and thoughtfully written account of God's essential "wildness." And it is a timely meditation on human response to wildness which, paradoxically, inspires silence at the very moment that it enfolds us in a world of words. --Steve Schroeder

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