The Creativity of God World, Eucharist, Reason

Theological tradition has lost its sense of the created nature of the world, leading to a complete break between the way we know God and the world. The Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotic of Christ as the embodied creative speech of God serve to reintegrate Christian cosmology. This book sets out "a new understanding" of reality, as encountered in and through Jesus Christ, and explores new modes of ecclesial reasoning.

We have, as a theological community, generally lost a language in which to speak of the created-ness of the world. As a consequence, our discourses of reason cannot bridge the way we know God and the way we know the world. Therefore, argues Oliver Davies, a primary task of contemporary theology is the regeneration of a Christian account of the world as sacramental, leading to the formation of a Christian conception of reason and a new Christocentric understanding of the real. Both the Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotics of Christ as the embodied, sacrificial and creative speech of God serve the project of a repairal of Christian cosmology. The world itself is viewed as a creative text authored by God, of which we as interpreters are an integral part. This is a wide-ranging and convincing book that makes an important contribution to modern theology.

INTRODUCTION: THE cOSMOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE; Part I. AN ARCHAEOLOGY oF CREATEDNESS: 1. The architecture of createdness; 2. The metaphysics of createdness; 3. Cosmological fragments; Part II. Scriptural Cosmology: 4. Speech revealed; 5. Spirit and letter; 6. Voice and sacrifice; Part III. Eucharistic Wisdom: 7. The abundant real; 8. Wisdom of the flesh; 9. Eucharistic reasoning; Conclusion: Cosmology and the theological imagination.

Theological tradition has lost sight of the created-ness of the world, separating knowledge of God and the world. This book works towards the reintegration of Christian cosmology, via the Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotic of Christ as the embodied creative speech of God.

Oliver Davies is Reader in Philosophical Theology at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He is also a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Silence and the Word (2002) and has co-edited, with Denys Turner, A Theology of Compassion (2001).