The Death and Life of Speculative Theology: A Lonergan Idea
Ebook
The Death and Life of Speculative Theology argues that speculative theology can be decoupled from classicism, transformed through modern science, philosophy, and culture, and made useful for addressing intellectual problems in this cosmopolitan age. Speculative theology can provoke, organize, regulate, and invigorate intellectual pluralism and thereby contribute to making the world a home for the human spirit. Drawing on the thought of Bernard Lonergan, Ryan Hemmer narrates the rise and fall of speculative theology, anticipates how it might be renewed, and repurposes some of its forgotten achievements to show that modern theology can be a modern science for a modern culture.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Forgetting and Misremembering
Chapter 2: Form and Action
Chapter 3: Why Speculative Theology Failed
Chapter 4: Repurposing Royal Ruins
Chapter 5: Speculation, Procession, Pluralism
Conclusion: Democratizing the Regal Science
This book is a splendid analysis, recovery, expansion, and purification of speculative method to address myriads of problems confronting contemporary societies. Like no other, Hemmer’s picturesque style perfectly grasps not only the intricacies of Robert M. Doran’s thoughts on systematic theology, its retrieval of Bernard Lonergan’s pre-Method systematic/speculative theological writings but also the complexities of the specific goal of speculation as understanding of faith. A worthy response to classicism, conservatism, post-modernist claims, and liberalism. A welcome engagement with the anthropological, semiotic, and psychoanalytic challenges of the modern notion of culture, science, philosophy, and the new context for theology which is empirical and pluralistic.
Ryan Hemmer has written a ressourcement of theological method. The great victory of this book is, therefore, its insistence that only human understanding retrieves anything, and that theological speculation is the method of and for understanding. Against the nostalgia that distrusts present hands to hold the wealth of the theological past, and against the dreaming that distrusts present hands to hold the future, The Death and Life of Speculative Theology argues for a critical realism that knows how much we lose when we forget the necessity of the present and of ourselves in it. If our hands are those that must do the work of Christian theology, then Hemmer helps us by placing in our care the medieval past’s insights into the task of understanding, which is to say, he recovers speculative theological method. And so, casting down the crown of theology, TheDeath and Life renews it with neither power nor authority, but with questions, and with the theologian who must ask them.
- Title: The Death and Life of Speculative Theology: A Lonergan Idea
- Author: Ryan Hemmer
- Publisher: Fortress Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781978715288, 9781978715271, 1978715277, 1978715285
- Resource ID: LLS:9781978715288
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-11-30T12:40:36Z
Ryan Hemmer (Ph.D., Marquette University) is editor-in-chief of Fortress Press in Minneapolis, Minnesota.