LFU:online

This lecture will enable students to develop a spiritually and philosophically grounded and historically informed understanding of the Christian concepts of Creation, Sin, Grace and Resurrection, and help them to understand how these concepts are intrinsically related.

The first three parts of this lecture will investigate three ‘im-possibilities’: impossibility that anything else should exist outside of the replete being of God (creation), the impossibility of the desire to be what you are not and to become attached to things that you don’t want (evil), and the impossibility to use a chance that we do not ‘have’ (grace). In the light of these three impossibilities, the last sessions will recover the Eastern orthodox concepts of salvation as ‘deification’ (visio dei) and show how this concept shaped the anything but ‘medieval’ Western imagery of heaven, hell und purgatory in the wake of Dante’s Divina Commedia. In related excursions, it will be shown how the decline of Christian philosophy in the late Middle Ages caused the emergence of pseudo-problems that provoked the confessionalisation of Christianity in the second half of the last millennium.

Lecture.

Oral exam.

General information on exams, dates and sign-on at the department:
https://www.uibk.ac.at/systheol/lehre/pruefungen.html.en.

Katechismus der Katholischen Kirche. Zweiter Abschnitt: Erstes Kapitel: Absatz 4 und Absatz 7; Drittes Kapitel: Artikel 10-12.
Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum 2017).
John Milbank, "Darkness and Silence. Evil and the Western Legacy". In: John D. Caputo (Ed.), The religious (Malden, Mass: Blackwell 2002), 277-300
Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Die Freiheit der Gnade / Das Paradox des Menschen (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag 2006)
Archimandrite George, Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life (Mount Athos: Mount Athos Press 42006)
Johannes Hoff, "Diesseits des panoptischen ‚Blicks von Nirgendwo': Das ‚Schauen Gottes' bei Nikolaus von Kues." In: Communio 44/2 (2015), 134-147
Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2018)
Johannes Hoff, "Himmel, Hölle, Fegefeuer. Dantes Commedia und die vergessene Wahrheit apokalyptischer Traumwelten". In: Simon Njami Mara Ambrožic (Ed.), Die Göttliche Komödie - Himmel, Hölle, Fegefeuer aus Sicht afrikanischer Gegenwartskünstler (Bielefeld: Kerber 2014), 68-81

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