Browsing by Author "Dunn, Patrick"
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- ItemDiscipleship as theological prolegomenon implications for the relation of theory and praxis in the work of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Dunn, Patrick; Vosloo, Robert; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Theology. Dept. of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Theologians in South Africa have long wrestled with how the work and activity of Christians should stand in relation to the articles of Christian belief. The hope is that a theological the-ory more responsive to the prophetic praxis of the church’s mission might save theology from the manipulative influences of oppressive agendas. The opposing concern, however, is also about ideological influences—that theology beholden to praxis can equally find itself gov-erned by agendas divorced from the self-disclosure of God. In this respect, both the radical theologian and the traditional theologian presume an anthropology in which thought is prior to action, and principles are worked out in order to guide praxis. This thesis investigates whether this needs to be the case. It sets out to explore how the notion of discipleship of-fers—from within the Christian tradition—a way of understanding God’s self-disclosure in activity. The priority of discipleship yields a different assumption, that action is the medium of God’s revelatory self-disclosure, the transcendence both within and beyond human concre-tion. Three Christian thinkers interested in the philosophical, theological, and epistemic im-plications of discipleship will be considered—Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Taken together, these three exemplify not only a critique of rationalism, but a critique of language as the medium of divine revelation. The Incarnation suggests that lived human existence is the medium for knowledge of God, and the discipleship of Christ is the space in which human particularity finds itself reconciled with divine life. The implication of their insights revises the criteria by which the truthfulness of theological language ought to be judged. Rather than being pre-determined by the primacy of autonomous notions of either theory or praxis, true theology arises from the prior unity of universal and particular in the space of discipleship. After exploring the origins of this insight in the work of Pascal, Kierke-gaard, and Bonhoeffer in chapters two, three, and four, a fifth chapter considers contempo-rary debates about embodiment as a case study for this claim. Finally, as conclusion, a sixth chapter weighs the implications for theological language after discipleship in its relation to 20th-century Catholic and Protestant debates about the relation of divine and human thought in light of the Incarnation.
- ItemTo know the real one : Christological promeity in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Dunn, Patrick; Vosloo, Robert; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Theology. Dept of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer will be examined for its potential to address the problem of God and world, i.e. to provide a conception of the transcendent God’s immanence in reality faithful to the revelation of God in Christ. Promeity is developed as the description of a pattern of thought in Bonhoeffer’s work originating in his christological commitment to the priority of Christus praesens. The pattern of Bonhoeffer’s usage forms a preliminary definition for promeity not only as a christological axiom, but as a theological method, as the repeated attempt to return our theological language to its origin in the revelation of God in Christ while taking seriously Christ’s freedom to define his own being as given to reality. Promeity as method is refined by comparing and contrasting it with various other interpretive attempts since the 1960’s to develop a Bonhoefferian approach to the God-world problem. The logic of promeity is further developed by considering its radical claim to subordinate all definitions to the priority of the Incarnate God-human. The manifestations of this claim in Bonhoeffer’s 1933 Christology lectures and Ethics manuscript are explored. Finally, the logic of promeity will be further extended and supplemented with additional resources in Bonhoeffer’s work to consider its implications for the problem of God and world in it ontological, epistemological, and ethical aspects.