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Analytic Theology
oleh: Michael Rea
Format: | Article |
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Diterbitkan: | St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology 2022-08-01 |
Deskripsi
In Christian theology, the term ‘analytic theology’ refers both narrowly to a particular kind of scholarly activity and more broadly to an overall style or approach to doing theology. It may also refer to what some characterize as an intellectual culture – ‘a rough grouping within a particular intellectual discipline, such as philosophy or theology, that identifies itself as having a distinctive approach to its subject matter’ (Crisp, Arcadi, and Wessling 2019: 10). As an activity, analytic theology involves bringing the rhetorical style, theoretical methods, and literature of analytic philosophy to bear on theological topics. As a style or approach to doing theology, analytic theology is a self-consciously interdisciplinary enterprise that treats both the methodological virtues prioritized by analytic philosophers, as well as the theoretical developments available in the literature of analytic philosophy, as valuable tools and resources for theological theory-building. As an activity, analytic theology has its origins in the work of analytically oriented philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Robert Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Eleonore Stump, and others who, in the latter half of the twentieth century, played a major role in the revival of philosophy of religion and the growth of philosophical theology within academic philosophy. But the concept of analytic theology and the overall approach to which it refers is of more recent origin, a product, in the first instance, of conversations and work by Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea that resulted in (among other things) the edited volume, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (2009), the decade-long series of Logos Workshops in Philosophical Theology at the University of Notre Dame, and the founding of the Journal of Analytic Theology. The intellectual culture of analytic theology has grown up in connection with these activities, as well as a wide variety of others undertaken by scholars in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Finland, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere.