LFU:online

This lecture will enable students to develop a spiritually, biblically and philosophically grounded and historically informed understanding of the Christian concepts of Creation, Sin, Grace and Resurrection, and help them to understand, in the light of the theological teaching on eschatology and pneumatology, how these concepts are intrinsically related. At the end of the lecture, students will start to understand what it means to believe in eternal life in the age of digital transformation.

This lecture will explore three "impossibilities": the impossibility of anything else existing outside of God's fullness of being (creation); the impossibility of attaching one's heart to things one does not love (evil); and the impossibility of seizing an opportunity one does not have (grace, pneumatology). In light of these three impossibilities, the patristic, orthodox, and medieval doctrine of the "divinization of man" (visio dei) are recaptured, and it is shown how this doctrine shaped the anything but "medieval" Western imagery of heaven, hell, and purgatory in the wake of Dante's 'Divine Comedy'. A particular emphasis will be placed on the question of what eternal life means in the digital age. Will we one day upload our brains to a self-replicating supercomputer, as the transhumanist priests of Silicon Valley believe?

Lecture.

Oral examination.

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

Henri de Lubac, More paradoxes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 2002). 

Johannes Hoff, "Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Dante's Comedy and the Forgotten Truth  of Apocalyptic Dreamworlds". In: Mara Ambroie; Susanne Gaensheimer; Zdenka Badovinac; Roberti Casati (Ed.), The Divine Comedy Revisited by Contemporary African Artists (Berlin: Kerber Verlag 2014), 66-81.

Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn. Re-thinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2013), part III.

None.