Theology and Modernity

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This graduate seminar focuses on the following question: How does Christian theology respond to challenges posed by the modern “turn to the subject”? The paradigm-shifting idea that transcendental conditions of human consciousness shape knowledge, language, science, morality, and religion has preoccupied many philosophers and theologians from the end of the eighteenth century into the twentieth, and beyond. Protestant and Catholic thinkers have devised various strategies of resistance and accommodation. These efforts have dramatically transformed fundamental theological concepts of faith, revelation, and tradition and affected the understanding of core Christian doctrines about the Trinity, Christ, the human person, and more. The debate among these thinkers revolves around a central tension between affirming the human contribution to theological knowledge, on the one hand, and preventing theology from becoming a mere human construction, on the other. This debate remains relevant to contemporary interpretations of Christian faith in diverse cultural contexts, as well as to broader conversations in the interdisciplinary study of religious pluralism.