The Command of Grace

"The Command of Grace" sets forth a bold new critical initiative in theological apologetics which advocates a fundamental reassessment of theological self-understanding and method today, especially in its attentiveness to the present reality of God in revelation.It is predicated on what, through a sustained and penetrating critique of our philosophical and theological history, the book shows to be a still profoundly pervasive analytical 'spirit of idealism', under whose influences theology has in a wide array of ways come to exercise itself predominantly within a kind of cognitivist mono-vision. Theology has thereby not only become self-guaranteeing within itself ('tauto-theological'), thus forfeiting its rationally rigorous edge, but has also inadvertently violated its indispensable incarnational (embodied) ground. Against this, the book seeks, through a rigorously critical attentiveness to rational integrity, to revive for fundamental theological questioning two basic modes of human awareness, which under the aforementioned influences have become largely lost to theology over the past two centuries, even though they continue to thrive in the life of faith in the church itself.These are: causal attentiveness encountered through the faculties of bodily sensibility; and appetitive or motive attentiveness encountered in the faculty of desire. If God in his very 'Godness' meets us in revelation at the very centre of created life, and reveals himself only here as the hope of the life to come, then theology must again seek to be attentive to God in the full contingency of embodied-rational life in all of its constitutive faculties: sensible, cognitive and appetitive.