Bloomsbury Academic

Bloomsbury Academic

English

While philosophical theology may be indifferent to personal belief, radical philosophical theology explicates such belief and personal reception of revelation as a fact. Balázs Mezei analyzes philosophically revelation, which theology as a discipline presupposes. If it is at all meaningful to speak of revelation, then revelation must be real, unavoidable, inimitable, and inevitably self-referential. In employing a variety of philosophical methods, this book opens the eyes to what Christian practice is doing: analytical method clarifies the usage and intentions of standard terms; historical method brings century old debates to life, such as Platonism and German Idealism; phenomenology conveys the reality of concepts like ‘radical’ or ‘kenosis’ (self-emptying of the divine). It was Enlightenment with its dismissal of the sources and modes of divine revelation, i.e., the basics of Christian religion, which yielded a philosophy of the concept of revelation as such. Mezei’s study unveils the irony that the demise of revelation in Enlightenment critique was itself a kenosis.