Postmodernity's Transcending: Devaluing God(Faith in Reason)

Devaluing God is concerned with the relationship between theology and post-modernity. To date there are three main areas of literature that discuss this relationship: British, French and American. The British, Radical Orthodoxy group which sees the secular world as a "failed theology", the complex American responses varying from the liberal acceptance of post-modernity to the reformed thinkers who feel it should be held at bay and the French, more philosophical response to dealing with post-modernity are all considered in this text. In Devaluing God, Hemming has created a way for all theologians interested in this discussion to access the sources of post-modernity, and also access a demonstration of how post-modernity can be understood as a phenomenon of thinking. The author demonstrates his belief that post-modernity is forcing a rethinking of everything, and that at the bottom of this re-thinking, as a new way of understanding the world emerges, there is an understanding of God. He avoids showing how God becomes yet another theme in the intellectual buffet that post-modernity often appears to be; rather he argues that understanding what kinds of meanings the term "God" is acquiring in post-modernity, and who God is for post-modernity, is fundamental in gaining access to this phenomenon of thinking at all. The chapters unfold this understanding by showing how there is an understanding of God and the self throughout history, in the ways in which the Ancient and the Mediaeval cosmos, the post-Enlightenment universe and the now post-modern world provide for thinking.

About the Author :
Dr Laurence Paul Hemming is Dean of research students at Heythrop College, University of London.

Review :
Postmodernity's Transcending is a highly ambitious and provocative work, and Hemming demonstrates impressive range and erudition in his analysis of both historical and contemporary figures. Hemming's investigations of temporality and causality in the figures he investigates are particularly insightful.' 'Although published as part of SCM's 'Faith in Reason' series, Postmodernity's Transcending is not intended only for readers with an interest in theology. Indeed, Hemming turns to eschatological categories in his closing remarks about Christian liturgy as appropriate theology in the postmodern context, and here he is at his most lucid.' A highly intelligent, original and provocative study...and is bound to stimulate considerable discussion in postmodernism and, in particular, in philosophical and theological discussions of the sublime and transcendence: two areas that are central to contemporary intellectual work. The work is densely thought and nicely written: it makes significant demands of the reader, but the reader it engages is precisely the sort of person who will rise to its challenges.