Divine Empathy: A Theology of God

by Edward Farley

Overview

A major work from one of today's leading theologians, Divine Empathy attempts to "think the unthinkable," how God comes forth actively and redemptively to meet the human situation.

Apologetic but not polemical, Farley's work sympathetically engages yet moves beyond both the classical tradition as well as contemporary anti-theisms in formulating a concept of God that is strikingly original, intellectually honest, and comprehensive. Farley's treatise employs the "facticity of redemption," the actual experience of freedom and empowerment, as the primordial source for our thinking about God (Part 1), God-symbols (Part 2), and God's activity (Part 3), including the figure of Jesus. Farley's astute analysis leads inexorably to a view of divine creativity and empathy that is one of the more profound religious visions of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451407464
Publisher:	Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Publication date:	10/28/1996
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	711 KB

About the Author

Edward Farley is Buffington Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Table of Contents

Preface

PART ONE: THE COMING FORTH OF GOD AS GOD

Approaches to the Question of God

The Question of Ways to the Question of God

Five Ways to the Question of God

The Way of the Facticity of Redemption

The Classical Catholic Theology of God

Sortings

Origins

Elements

Ambiguities

Varieties of Anti-Theism

Intratheistic Critiques

Resymbolizing

Demythologizing

Deconstructive Anti-Theism

Issues and Appraisals

Meanings and Evidences

The Reality of God as a Problem for Faith

Atheism and the Problem of Meaning God

The Anselmic Principle

The Redemptive Coming Forth of God as God

Human Desire and Eternal Horizon

The Dynamics of Agential Evil

The Dynamics of Agential Redemption

Eternal Horizon as Actual

Some Concluding Matters

PART TWO: A SYMBOLICS OF GOD

The Attribute and Anti-Attribute Traditions

The Attribute Tradition

The Anti-Attribute Tradition

Is Divine Symbolics and Idolatry of God?

A Path to a Symbolics of God

Discernments and the Bespeaking of God

Meaning and Appresentation

Meaning and the Bespecaking of God

Interhuman and Social Spheres and the Bespeaking God

Ciphers and Qualifiers

Ciphers

Qualifiers

Ciphers of Redemption

Human Agency: Ciphers of Founding

The Interhuman: The Cipher of Reconciling Love

The Sociopolitical Cipher of Justice

God as Spirit

Ciphers of Creativity and Holiness

Creativity

The Holy

Unity, Trinity, and the Symbolics of God

PART THREE: THEOLOGY OF GOD AND WORLD

Metaphysics and Its Critics

Metaphysics in Classical and Neoclassical Theologies of God

Metaphysics and the Theology of God

Charges and Rejoinders

On the Way to a Paradigm

The Contributions of Anti-Theism

The Many Faces of Metaphysics

On Thinking God's Relation to the World

Elements of a Paradigm

Metaphysics and Hermeneutics: A Methodological Query

Three-Dimensional World: Cosmos and Nature

Cosmos

Nature

Structural Features of the Sphere of Life

Three-Dimensional World: History

Bears

Historical Passage

Ambiguity

Manifested World

World-For-Us

The Being of the World

World Constituents and Root Metaphors

Entities, Relations, Events, and Environments

World as Creation

Theology of World

The Genesis of World as Creation

Creation: Unpacking a Symbol

World Polarities: Implications of World as Creation

Aporias and Boundaries

The Vent of Jesus as Christ

The Event of Jesus as Christ in Its Resolution: The Ecclesia

The Event of Jesus as Christ: The Precipitating Figure

The Figure of Jesus: Universality, Pathos, and Empathy

The Universalization of the Faith of Israel

The Pathos of the As-Such

The Empathic Union

Smmary and Conclusion

Divine Empathy: Preliminary Considerations

Some Guiding Principles

Retrieving Elements from the Sources

Divine Activity Minus "quot;Christian Cosmology"

The Efficacy of the Divine Empathy

Entities in the Making

Efficacious Empathy

Some Reinterpretations

Index