The Understanding of Faith Volume V: Interpretation and criticism

✍ Scribed by Edward Schillebeeckx

• Publisher: Bloomsbury T & T Clark
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 165
• Series: Edward Schillebeeckx Collected Works
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The Understanding of Faith (1974) is certainly Schillebeeckx’s most incisive English publication on theological hermeneutics. It contains his principal ideas on this subject, in which he progressively evolved the hermeneutic thinking that he was to apply in due course in his famous Jesus books. The book centres on two issues: how should the Christian message of God’s kingdom be read in our day and age, and can a present-day interpretation of that message still be considered Christian? In short, what are the possibilities and limits of the understanding of faith in our modern age? Of course, hermeneutics as such was not new to Christian theology. Exegetes had been exploring interpretive processes for some time. Schillebeeckx’s innovation was to extend hermeneutic thinking to the possibilities and limits of interpreting the entire Christian tradition, including its definition in systematic theology. Inspired by the early Jürgen Habermas’s ‘new critical theory’, Schillebeeckx also expands criticism of ideology in various directions. This was to influence generations of theologians after him, right up the present day.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
HalfTitle
Title
Copyright
How to use this book
Contents
Introduction to Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx
Introduction to the new edition ‘The Understanding of faith’
Introduction
Chapter 1 The interpretation of the future
1. An interpretation of an interpretation
2. History and the future
3. The future as transcendence
4. God’s faithfulness
5. Eschaton and future
Chapter 2 The context and value of faith-talk
1. Relationship with lived experience as criterion for the meaning of theological interpretations
2. The doxological character of theological interpretations
Chapter 3 Linguistic criteria
1. Structuralism or structural linguistic analysis
2. Phenomenological linguistic analysis
3. Logical linguistic analysis
4. The ontological aspect of language
5. Hermeneutic understanding and criteria of meaning in linguistic analysis
Chapter 4 Theological criteria
1. Fundamental theological norms
A. Christian faith causes us to think
B. The problem of pluralism in faith
[i] Different languages for one revelation
[ii] Theological pluralism is pluralism in faith
[iii] The limits of pluralism and of its removal
2. The criteria for continuity in the orthodox understanding of faith
A. The criterion of the proportional norm
B. The criterion of Christian orthopraxis
C. The criterion of acceptance by the people of God
3. The church’s teaching office in the functioning of these criteria
Chapter 5 Correlation between human question and Christian answer
1. Reformulation of the question of God
2. Problems involved in the correlation
3. Indirect experience of the universal validity of Christian talk about God
A. Negative dialectics
B. Positive meaningful experiences
Chapter 6 The new critical theory
1. Introductory ideas
A. The term ‘critical theory’
B. The ‘new critical theory’
C. Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory of society
D. Conditions for understanding critical theory
[i] The emancipative concern of reflection
[ii] The psychoanalytical model
[iii] The continuation of Marx’s criticism of society
2. An outline of the new ‘critical theory of society’
A. A rational and empirically deduced theory
B. Critical theory as the self-consciousness of a praxis
C. Critical theory as a theory of what is actually possible
D. The hypothetical character and critical negativity of critical theory
E. Critical theory as a mediation between theory and praxis
F. The impossibility of formalising critical theory
Chapter 7 The new critical theory and theological hermeneutics
1. Preliminary critical remarks
A The implicit hermeneutic circle of critical theory
B. Objections to radical critical negativity
C. The analysis of nonsense
D. Cultural revolution or social and economic structural change?
2. Theology in correlation with a critical theory
A. The problem
B. Criticism of the church as the lever for criticism of society
C. Not theology, but a form of critical theory
D. Theology is not traceable to critical theory
E. Theology as correlative with critical theory
F. The critical power of kerygma and dogma
3. Towards a critical theology
Table of original publication
Index