Fortress Press

Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology

Historicism

The Once and Future Challenge for Theology

Sheila Greeve Davaney (Author)

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The 200-year-old notion that concepts, ideas, and theories are all influenced by or occasioned by historical circumstances is today a commonplace in all fields, and lays bare the historical character of our most cherished convictions, honored traditions, and dogmatic formulations.

With clarity and skill, Davaney's authoritative text traces the history of historicism and its various meanings from the German Enlightenment through its Continental and distinctly American developments to its contemporary postmodern incarnations. She demonstrates how it has forced theology to pioneer methods that specifically acknowledge social locatedness, particularity, and pragmatic intent, effectively replacing theology's metaphysical and dogmatic basis with a largely historical one. Yet, says Davaney, Christian theology has yet to come to terms fully with historicism and its imperatives, and her final chapter charts a possible future course.

  • Publisher Fortress Press
  • Format Paperback
  • ISBN 9780800632199
  • Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5
  • Pages 208
  • Publication Date March 16, 2006

Endorsements

"Sheila Davaney lays out, with all the clarity, cogency, and thorough-going intellectual honesty she is so well known for, the challenges that historicism poses to theology.... Undaunted by these challenges, she offers a powerful account of how theology can meet them and in the process brings together, in a marvelously irenic spirit, some of the best insights of contemporary theological trends in the United States."
– Kathryn Tanner, University of Chicago

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