A Griffin, David Ray 1939- creator text bibliography pau Philadelphia Westminister Press [1973] 1973 monographic eng

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273 pages, 21 cm. This is the first full-scale Christology based upon process though. Its thesis: Whitehead's process philosophy provides a basis for explicating the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is God's decisive self-revelation, in a manner that is consistent with both modern thought and Christian faith. This book brings together three dimensions of recent theology: the new quest for the historical Jesus, the neo-orthodox emphasis on god's self-revealing activity in history, and the theology based primarily on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. The introduction discusses the basis for making the notion that Jesus in himself was the supreme self-expression of God's character and purpose (the divine Logos) central to contemporary Christology. It also mentions five problems encountered in defending the intelligibility of this claim. Part I presents an examination of the theologies of Paul Tillich, Richard Niebuhr, Rudolf Bultmann, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, to illustrate that the claims of Jesus have indeed caused problems for modern theologians. Part II and III offer constructive position that solves these problems based on process concepts, especially Whitehead's idea that each moment of experience is provided by God with an "ideal aim"'. This allows one to maintain both his formal commitment to rationality and his substantive conviction as to the truth of the essentials of Christian faith, at the center of which is the notion of the self-revealing activity of a personal God. Thus, with the help of process philosophy, the modern Christian can reaffirm those beliefs about Jesus needed to support Christian existence without to truth, ignoring any historical evidence about Jesus's fallibility, or affirming a divine interruption of normal causal patterns of reality. Key references -- Preface --Introduction: revelation and Christology -- Revelation in modern theology: problems and possibilities -- Being-itself and symbolic language -- The relativistic meaning of revelation -- Paradoxical identity of Divine and world action -- God's objective presence in Jesus -- Pointing a way forward -- revelation and reason -- Vision of reality and philosophical conceptualization -- A process conceptualization of reality --Jesus Christ as God's decisive revelation -- Christology and the historical Jesus -- God's supreme act of self-expression -- Revelation and christian existence by David R. Griffin. Includes bibliographical references. Jesus Christ Process theology BT 205 .G67 232 0664209785 73010252 //r89 730702 20231221151804.0 38041 spa