My God, my God why have you abandoned me
The experience of God's withdrawal in late antique exegesis, Christology and ascetic literature
By (author) Evangelos Bartzis
The motif of God’s turning away his face still matters in theology as a direct aftermath of the horrors that the world experienced during WWII and also in the wake of the promotion of an excessive reading of theology, called kenotic. It even appears in unexpected places with no discernible association to the historical development of the Christian doctrine (Caputo, iek and C.S.Lewis). This book provides a historical supplement to current approaches and explores the way that late antique theology laid out the theoretical substratum on which modern approaches could anchor themselves. It presents the nuanced ways in which the motif of divine abandonment developed in late antiquity, displays the various threads of thought that theology pursued in different contexts (exegesis, Christology and ascetic desert literature) and raises three points: The extent to which parallel lines were drawn in late antique theology between the experiences of the bride in the Song of Songs, Jesus on the cross and the early ascetics. The normativeness of divine abandonment in early Christian thought and its association to sinfulness. The possibility that late antique theology had introduced a Jesus-like ‘kind’ of abandonment.
The motif of God’s turning away his face still matters in theology as a direct aftermath of the horrors that the world experienced during WWII and also in the wake of the promotion of an excessive reading of theology, called kenotic. It even appears in unexpected places with no discernible association to the historical development of the Christian doctrine (Caputo, iek and C.S.Lewis). This book provides a historical supplement to current approaches and explores the way that late antique theology laid out the theoretical substratum on which modern approaches could anchor themselves. It presents the nuanced ways in which the motif of divine abandonment developed in late antiquity, displays the various threads of thought that theology pursued in different contexts (exegesis, Christology and ascetic desert literature) and raises three points: The extent to which parallel lines were drawn in late antique theology between the experiences of the bride in the Song of Songs, Jesus on the cross and the early ascetics. The normativeness of divine abandonment in early Christian thought and its association to sinfulness. The possibility that late antique theology had introduced a Jesus-like ‘kind’ of abandonment.
- By (author) Evangelos Bartzis
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Analogical Identities
The Creation of the Christian Self: Volume 2: Self-catholicization, Meta-narcissism, and Christian Theology
Volume 57
Seeking the Face of God
The Reception of Augustine in the Mystical Thought of Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St Thierry
Volume 11
The ‘Universal Prayer’ in the Ancient Latin Liturgies. Patristic Evidence and Liturgical Texts
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Inventio meditativa
The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Meditation in Hugh of Saint-Victor, Guigo II, and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio
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Friendship as Ecclesial Binding
A Reading of St. Augustine's Theology of Friendship from his In Iohannis Euangelium Tractatus
Volume 48
The Christian Topography of Early Islamic Jerusalem
The Evidence of Willibald of Eichstatt (700-787 CE)
Volume 2
Through the Bone and Marrow
Re-examining Theological Encounters with Dance in Medieval Europe
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Removing Masculine Layers to Reveal a Holy Womanhood
The Female Transvestite Monks of Late Antique Eastern Christianity
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‘The Letter Killeth’
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Saints and Sinners in Early Christian Ireland
Moral Theology in the Lives of Saints Brigit and Columba
Volume 3
The Spirit, the World and the Trinity
Origen's and Augustine's Understanding of the Gospel of John
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‘The loss of a minute is just so much loss of life’
Edward Robinson and Eli Smith in the Holy Land
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