Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology
Vanquishing God's Shadow

This book examines the relationship between Christian theology and postmodern thinkers, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.

Brian D. Ingraffia (Author)

9780521568401, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 December 1995

304 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.7 cm, 0.447 kg

'This is a quite extraordinary book: polemical and powerfully original, but also straightforwardly written. I have not read any other book that combines in anything like the way Brian Ingraffia does the three distinct but overlapping fields of postmodern theory, biblical theology and modern metaphysics.' J. Hillis-Miller

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.

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 écriture
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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]