- Title
- Crossing silence: the silences of the word
- Creator
- McDowell, John C.
- Relation
- St Mark's Review , Issue 215, p. 22-38
- Relation
- http://www.stmarks.edu.au/review
- Publisher
- St. Mark's National Theological Centre
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- Very occasionally conferences can offer a moment of surprise for encouraging interest and reflection. One of those moments happened to me several years ago at the Society for the Study of Theology, conducted that particular year at the University of Nottingham. Denys Turner, then the Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, asked what was the most important theological question of today. The surprise came not in answers of eschatology, nor pneumatology, nor even of theological engagement with religions and a pluralistic culture, but in Turner’s announcement that it was idolatry.² This might seem like an odd way to begin a paper on the broad theme of the ‘doctrine of God’. But no consideration of what claims about ‘God’ are doing can avoid critical reflection on the possibility of its impossibility, or what is not appropriate ‘God-talk’. One way of doing this is focused most forcefully in the doctrinal speech of God being silenced in a variety of atheist accounts of the theological project. Here the cultural investment in a Kantian silence before the Unconditioned Ideal, the noetic limit-structure of the noumenal Reality, provides a return in the form of a post-theistic liberation of autonomy – the individuated subject is now autonomous in her epistemic and moral spontaneity. At most ‘God-talk’ becomes expressive, even therapeutic, but at worst it is incarcerating and thereby denies freedom. So-called ‘masters of suspicion’ probe beyond the doxological into the reality of absent spaces located beyond speech and return with an unmasking of an illusion that transvalues values and liberates.
- Subject
- theology; religion; god; silence
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1064891
- Identifier
- uon:17696
- Identifier
- ISSN:0036-3103
- Language
- eng
- Reviewed
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