Discipleship as theological prolegomenon implications for the relation of theory and praxis in the work of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Theologians in South Africa have long wrestled with how the work and activity of Christians should stand in relation to the articles of Christian belief. The hope is that a theological the-ory more responsive to the prophetic praxis of the church's mission might save theology from the manipulative influences of oppressive agendas. The opposing concern, however, is also about ideological influences-that theology beholden to praxis can equally find itself gov-erned by agendas divorced from the self-disclosure of God. In this respect, both the radical theologian and the traditional theologian presume an anthropology in which thought is prior to action, and principles are worked out in order to guide praxis. This thesis investigates whether this needs to be the case. It sets out to explore how the notion of discipleship of-fers-from within the Christian tradition-a way of understanding God's self-disclosure in activity. The priority of discipleship yields a different assumption, that action is the medium of God's revelatory self-disclosure, the transcendence both within and beyond human concre-tion. Three Christian thinkers interested in the philosophical, theological, and epistemic im-plications of discipleship will be considered-Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Taken together, these three exemplify not only a critique of rationalism, but a critique of language as the medium of divine revelation. The Incarnation suggests that lived human existence is the medium for knowledge of God, and the discipleship of Christ is the space in which human particularity finds itself reconciled with divine life. The implication of their insights revises the criteria by which the truthfulness of theological language ought to be judged. Rather than being pre-determined by the primacy of autonomous notions of either theory or praxis, true theology arises from the prior unity of universal and particular in the space of discipleship. After exploring the origins of this insight in the work of Pascal, Kierke-gaard, and Bonhoeffer in chapters two, three, and four, a fifth chapter considers contempo-rary debates about embodiment as a case study for this claim. Finally, as conclusion, a sixth chapter weighs the implications for theological language after discipleship in its relation to 20th-century Catholic and Protestant debates about the relation of divine and human thought in light of the Incarnation.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University