Here is a copy of my response to your question about the ‘a god of many understandings?’ blog conference:

Let us say no less that five pages on MS Word. If you can present something short, to the point, and succinct then we will take it!

You write:

“I think when most people actually take the trouble to read Rahner rather than simply rely on accounts which pretty much dismiss him wholesale, they realise he’s not half as bad as they might have first thought!”

Good idea – but how many read Plato’s Politeia in Attic or Cicero in Latin? What’s the point of Wikipaedia except to give a potted version so that you do not have to bother to read even a synthetic secondary text?

It seems to me that theologians have a duty to express themselves as clearly and unambiguously as possible. If they did this people might actually read them and not the secondary literature!

Yours,

Bryan Dunne

John

“It seems to me that we have to accept there are people who are simply born homosexual and that this appears to be a divine intention. In such cases it is, I believe, utterly wrong to deny such people sexual fulfilment. The Church needs to find a way to recognize their relationships, as was already envisaged by the great Russian Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky, and more recently by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

Of course, this may or not be in a marriage, but I think in theory, this seems more inclined to be for it than against it.

Hah, very interesting re: Turner, etc.

Yeah, it’s Conor’s Genealogy of Nihilism book. I haven’t read his just-nearly-finished book on evolution.

Peace,

Eric

I believe she’s responding to Milbank’s (and Pickstock’s) arguments in ‘Truth in Aquinas’.

I think her point is really that Milbank’s position doesn’t really seem all that different to hers yet he still wishes to present the ‘five ways’ as merely probabilistic arguments for God’s existence. Denys Turner argues that this is the case because, ironically, Milbank seems to take a Scotist line as regards the possibility of coming to a valid inference from analogical terms.

Which book by Cunningham are you speaking of? Is it in the Genealogy of Nihilism or some other book he’s currently working on?

Thanks,

David

Thanks for continuing to post on this. What article or book of Milbank’s is Murphy interacting with?

Also, the position of Murphy’s you describe at the end sounds much more like my supervisor Conor Cunningham in simultaneously maintaining both the ‘vertical’ (transcendent) as well as ‘horizontal’ (created) aspects of things. This would probably explain why Conor is much more stoked on phenomenology as opposed to John’s who tends to want to be more ‘purely’ theological (which, incidentally, Conor argues explicitly against in his book). Interesting conceptual tension between the two, anyway.

Peace,

Eric