PHILOSOPHIC WARRANTS FOR SCRIPTURAL REASONING

Addressing readers who are already acquainted with the practices of Scriptural Reasoning (SR), this essay offers a logical strategy for warranting and testing such practices as well as all postmodern criticisms of modern inquiry. The strategy is to distinguish the logic of suffering, which is reducible to the binary terms of propositional logic, from the logic of repair, which is not. The essay argues that, if reduced to such binary terms, efforts at repair become inadvertent acts of oppression, or acts that produce suffering. The essay concludes that postmodern and postliberal theorists become inadvertent oppressors when their attempts to repair modern inquiry are presented through propositional logics. The practice of SR should be irreducible to such logics.     

CUSANUS ON DIONYSIUS: THE TURN TO SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY1

Nicholas of Cusa owed a substantial debt to Dionysius the Areopagite. The debt is present in On Learned Ignorance (1440) and intensifies in the later works. This essay explores the nature of the debt, focusing on the way in which Cusanus re‐writes the vision he receives from the Areopagite. One discovers in his reading a certain anticipation of the Hegelian dialectic (with which it is ultimately not identical) and a deep continuity with patristic and medieval authorities in areas such as christology and pneumatology. All in all, Cusanus reads the work of Dionysius as the ideal form of speculative theology.