Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God's Shadow

by Brian D. Ingraffia

• ISBN13: 9780521568401
• ISBN10: 0521568404
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-01-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book explores the relationship between postmodernism and Christianity. Whereas deconstructionists claim all religious discourses can be radically undermined, Ingraffia argues that the version of Christianity constructed by Nietzsche, Heidegger and especially Derrida ignores Christianity's unique ontological status. This truth, Ingraffia claims, is an unacknowledged influence on leading postmodernist thinkers, thereby demonstrating the priority of the Judaeo-Christian tradition over secular attempts to displace it.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Note on translations of the bible

Introduction: Postmodernism, Ontotheology and Christianity: 1. The modernist ground of postmodern theory

2. Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida on ontotheology

3. Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida on Christianity

Part I. Nietzsche's Mockery: The Rejection of Transcendence: 1. The death of God: loss of belief in the Christian God as the cause of nihilism

2. Vanquishing God's realm: Nietzsche's abolition of the true world

3. Nietzsche on the Judaeo-Christian denial of the world and the world to come in the New Testament

5. On redemption: the eternal return or biblical eschatology

Part II. Heidegger's Forgetting: The Secularisation of Biblical Anthropology: 6. From the death of God to the forgetting of Being

7. Heidegger's theological origins: from biblical theology to fundamental ontology

8. The redemptive-eschatological separation of flesh and Spirit in the epistles of the Apostle Paul

9. Inauthenticity and the flesh

10. The eigentlich Selbst or the pneumatikos anthropos

Part III. Derrida's Denials: The Deconstruction of Ontotheology: 11. From the ends of man to the beginning of writing

12. Deconstituting the subject

13. Writing and metaphysics

14. Reading the law: the Spirit and the letter

15. Scripture of é

criture

the limitations of Derrida's deconstruction of ontotheology

Conclusion: Ontotheology, Negative and the theology of the Cross: 1. Denials

negating/negative theology

2. From ontotheology to the theology of the cross

Bibliography.