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In God, Mystery, and Mystification, Denys Turner presents eight essays covering the major issues of philosophical and practical theology that he has focused on over the fifty years of his academic career. While a somewhat heterogeneous collection, the chapters are loosely linked by a focus on the mystery of God and on distinguishing that mystery from merely idolatrous mystifications.
The book covers three main fields: theological epistemology, medieval and early modern mystical theologies, and the relation of Christian belief to natural science and politics. Turner develops the implications of a moderate realist account of theological knowledge as distinct from a fashionable, postmodernist epistemology. This modern realist epistemology is embodied in connections between theoretical, speculative theologies and the practice of the Christian faith in a number of different ways, but mainly as bearing upon the practical, lived connections between faith and reason, between reason and the mystical, between faith and science, and among faith, prayer, and politics. Scholars and advanced students of theology, religious studies, the history of ideas, and medieval thought will be interested in this book.
"One of the thrilling things about reading Denys Turner is that, together with the clarity of his writing and the reasoned strength of his arguments which carry you through his essays, there is always the sense of the lived experience of faith under his writings. He talks movingly here in the 'stunned silence before God in that place in the soul where it is at last at prayer.'" —Journal of Theological Studies
"Turner presents important issues and shows how they could be discussed better, or at least differently, using the resources of another era. He writes with charm and occasional humor but no trace of nostalgia. (The chapter on Marguerite Porete is particularly frank in discussing the limitations and cruelties of that era.) Not only do these essays make the complexities of scholastic thought quite palatable, they may inform your pastoral life, prayer, and political praxis." —The Christian Century
“The breadth of Denys Turner’s scholarship is on display in this collection of eight mostly unpublished essays, many delivered as lectures beginning in the 1980s. . . . [it] offers stimulating new angles on familiar themes in Turner’s work.” —Scottish Journal of Theology
"Denys Turner’s new collection of essays reveals a master teacher and writer at the height of his powers. Turner has aways shown an interest in music and its relation to theology. Reading these essays is like listening to a set of virtuoso variations on themes that are found throughout Turner’s writings: faith and reason; the apophatic and the cataphatic; love and wisdom; materiality and the body; politics in its deep integral sense; and the Eucharist. This book is a major addition to Turner’s distinguished list of publications." —Bernard McGinn, University of Chicago Divinity School
“God, Mystery, and Mystification distills some of Denys Turner’s most essential insights into a few direct, untechnical meditations on classic texts and problems with their center of gravity in late medieval mysticism. Although originating largely from occasional papers, the chapters making up the book qualify each other and cohere into a unified composition through a number of connecting threads running from essay to essay. They meld together well in providing a reader-friendly introduction to negative theology not as an academic discipline but as a way of looking at certain of life’s pressing and yet unanswerable questions.”—William Franke, Vanderbilt University
“I have learned much from this remarkable book by Denys Turner. God, Mystery, and Mystification displays Turner’s usual high quality and engaging, informal presentation. His approach is philosophical theology with mystical sources; the result is theology renewed. Each one of these chapters is a full-blown study as witty as it is profound: a valedictory tome of an accomplished master.”—David Burrell, C.S.C, Hesburgh Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame
Denys Turner is the Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at Yale University and a lecturer in religion at Princeton University.
Preface
Part 1. Mystery
1 How could a good God allow evil?
2 One with God as to the Unknown: Prayer and the Darkness of God
3 Reason, the Eucharist, and the Body
Part 2. Mystery and Mysticism
4 Metaphor, Poetry, and Allegory in Bernard of Clairvaux and John of the Cross
5 Why was Marguerite Porete Burned?
6 The ‘Uniting Wisdom of Love:’ The Story of a late Medieval Controversy
Part 3. Mystification
7 Why is there Anything?
8 The Price of Truth: Herbert McCabe on Love, Politics, and Death
Index