Postmodernity's Transcending

Publisher Description

Devaluing God is concerned with the relationship between theology and post-modernity. To date there are three main areas of literature that discuss this relationship: British, French and American. The British, Radical Orthodoxy group which sees the secular world as a "failed theology", the complex American responses varying from the liberal acceptance of post-modernity to the reformed thinkers who feel it should be held at bay and the French, more philosophical response to dealing with post-modernity are all considered in this text. In Devaluing God, Hemming has created a way for all theologians interested in this discussion to access the sources of post-modernity, and also access a demonstration of how post-modernity can be understood as a phenomenon of thinking. The author demonstrates his belief that post-modernity is forcing a rethinking of everything, and that at the bottom of this re-thinking, as a new way of understanding the world emerges, there is an understanding of God. He avoids showing how God becomes yet another theme in the intellectual buffet that post-modernity often appears to be; rather he argues that understanding what kinds of meanings the term "God" is acquiring in post-modernity, and who God is for post-modernity, is fundamental in gaining access to this phenomenon of thinking at all. The chapters unfold this understanding by showing how there is an understanding of God and the self throughout history, in the ways in which the Ancient and the Mediaeval cosmos, the post-Enlightenment universe and the now post-modern world provide for thinking.