Mark McInroy

The fourth edition of The Christian Theological Tradition provides students with essential theological knowledge of key persons and events of the Bible and the Christian faith, and of Christianity’s multifaceted encounter with Western culture.

Historically arranged, the textbook addresses major theological themes such as revelation, God, Jesus Christ, Creation, salvation, and the church. The textbook deals with the entire Christian tradition from an orientation that is both Catholic and ecumenical, with the fourth edition including expanded coverage of modern Protestant Christianity. The Christian Theological Tradition has been thoroughly revised and updated with nine new or rewritten chapters, including:

• A new section on the reception of the Second Vatican Council, including the pontificate of Pope Francis
• A new treatment of contemporary developments in liberation and environmental theology
• A new examination of the relationship between science and Christianity
• An entirely rewritten treatment of Islam that focuses on the ways in which the Christian tradition has historically understood and responded to Islam
• A new discussion of the “New Atheism,” with theological responses to this influential movement.
• New textboxes on aspects of religious life, such as liturgy, prayer, art, moral teaching, and social institutions, appropriate to given chapters.

With the assistance of images and maps, key words, and recommended reading, this textbook outlines the methods for Christian theology and demonstrates the relevance of the Christian theological tradition for our contemporary world.

This is an ideal resource for students of theology, biblical studies, or religious studies, and anyone wanting an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the Christian theological tradition.

In this study, Mark McInroy argues that the ‘spiritual senses’ play a crucial yet previously unappreciated role in the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The doctrine of the spiritual senses typically claims that human beings can be made capable of perceiving non-corporeal, ‘spiritual’ realities. After a lengthy period of disuse, Balthasar recovers the doctrine in the mid-twentieth century and articulates it afresh in his theological aesthetics. At the heart of this project stands the task of perceiving the absolute beauty of the divine form through which God is revealed to human beings. Although extensive scholarly attention has focused on Balthasar’s understanding of revelation, beauty, and form, what remains curiously under-studied is his model of the perceptual faculties through which one beholds the form that God reveals. McInroy claims that Balthasar draws upon the tradition of the spiritual senses in order to develop the means through which one perceives the ‘splendour’ of divine revelation.

McInroy further argues that, in playing this role, the spiritual senses function as an indispensable component of Balthasar’s unique, aesthetic resolution to the high-profile debates in modern Catholic theology between Neo-Scholastic theologians and their opponents. As a third option between Neo-Scholastic ‘extrinsicism’, which arguably insists on the authority of revelation to the point of disaffecting the human being, and ‘immanentism’, which reduces God’s revelation to human categories in the name of relevance, McInroy proposes that Balthasar’s model of spiritual perception allows one to be both delighted and astounded by the glory of God’s revelation.

Modern scholarly efforts at elucidating the meaning of “deification” have tended to advance subject-centered versions of the doctrine that focus on that which the individual receives from God (e.g., divine attributes such as immortality and incorruptibility), resulting in models that ultimately fixate on the self and its own transformation. This paper, by contrast, retrieves a largely unknown patristic strand of the doctrine in order claim that being “like God” involves not only the reception of divine attributes by the Christian, but also the distribution of God’s gifts to the neighbor by the deified person. According to early church figures, theosis does not stop at the transformation of the individual Christian. Instead, as Athanasius makes clear in his Orations against the Arians, to be deified is “to give assistance freely, impartially, and universally, even as God Himself does.” The transformation effected by deification, then, includes coming to resemble God in God’s hospitality toward the neighbor. The patristic-constructive account of theosis advanced here thus supplements current depictions of the doctrine by developing its long-neglected other-centered dimension.

This article develops an original account of the rise of the modern misperception of deification as an exclusively Eastern Christian doctrine antithetical to Western theology. The study argues that the origins of the misconstruction lie in the distorting influence of German Idealism on the seminal treatment of the doctrine advanced by Ferdinand Christian Baur. With Idealist categories shaping his retrieval, Baur inaccurately portrays ancient Christian figures as advocating an automatic, mechanical deification of humanity as a whole that leaves the individual no role to play in his or her salvation. Such a view of deification as a mechanical, “physical” process is the precise basis on which Baur’s student Albrecht Ritschl and those in his school influentially claim it has no place in Western theology. The antecedent condition for deification coming to be characterized as Eastern, then, is it being understood as “physical,” and it is Baur who is ultimately responsible for Ritschl so viewing the doctrine. Baur’s Idealist-inspired retrieval thus raises a mistaken understanding of deification to prominence in the modern period, resulting in misunderstandings of the doctrine that persist down to the present day.

This study argues that Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) advances a distinctive defense of beauty as a transcendental property of being that both draws from and breaks with key influences on his thought such as Bonaventure. Scholarly assessments of Balthasar frequently portray him as unconcerned with the question of whether beauty should in fact be regarded as a transcendental; however, this chapter demonstrates that Balthasar meticulously enters into medieval debates concerning the so-called ratio pulchri (i.e., the conceptual distinction that beauty adds to being). Resisting those figures who insist that beauty is convertible with only the good, and not with being as such, Balthasar creatively appropriates, systematizes, and extends Bonaventure’s remarks about beauty in order to make the following claim: beauty adds to being in the sense that it makes being manifest to the senses. This formulation does not merely claim that, through beauty, a being appears. Balthasar instead maintains that, through beauty, the depths of being itself are shown to the human observer. Beauty manifests being as a whole.
    Balthasar’s subtly original position serves his efforts at defending a more metaphysically robust view of beauty than is typically countenanced in the modern period. Additionally, Balthasar notes that, if beauty manifests being as such to the senses, then sense perception must play a crucial role in apprehending being. In response to this consequence of his view of beauty, Balthasar intriguingly develops the notion of a “transcendental sense perception,” as he calls it, which is capable of penetrating surface appearances in order to grasp the depths of being. Balthasar’s distinctive account of beauty thus ultimately elevates sense perception to a position of uncommon importance for contemporary philosophy and theology.

Recent scholarship on Martin Luther has sharply criticized the Finnish interpretation of Luther, which claims to have unearthed a notion of theosis, or deification, akin to that found within Eastern Orthodoxy. This article advances a twofold thesis concerning this controversial reading of Luther. On the one hand, it is argued that recent critics appropriately chasten some of the Finns' claims, especially the view that Luther's pre-1520 use of deification language is constitutive of his mature position on the topic. On the other hand, this article argues that these negative appraisals of the Finns go too far in maintaining that deification is unimportant for the mature Luther, and that Luther's use of deification language renders his model of justification incoherent. When one sees that Luther does in fact discuss deification in his late writings, and when one recognizes that Luther substantially reworks the idea of deification, one finds resources with which to reconcile from a systematic perspective forensic justification with Luther's distinctive version of deification.

John Henry Newman spearheaded one of the first modern retrievals of the Christian doctrine of the Christian doctrine of deification. This article argues that, precisely because of the early date of Newman’s rehabilitation, his treatment is not tinted by the polemics surrounding theosis that developed in the late nineteenth century between Eastern and Western Christianity. To Newman, deification is not an Eastern doctrine, it is not cause for division between East and West, and it does not supplant justification. Instead, it is arises from a broad patristic consensus, it is a tool for union among the churches, and it provides resources for understanding justification properly.

This chapter argues that the spiritual senses play an integral role in the theologies of the two leading Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Although Rahner appears to neglect the spiritual senses after his treatments of the doctrine in the early 1930s, this chapter claims that the spiritual senses exert a covert, long-term influence on his theology, particularly his model of the “pre-apprehension of being” (Vorgriff auf esse). Whereas Rahner’s use of the doctrine is difficult to detect, Balthasar’s is openly declared—if under-studied. He prominently deploys the spiritual senses throughout his theological aesthetics in order to develop the perceptual apparatus necessary for “seeing the form” of God’s revelation, specifically its immaterial, "super-sensory" aspect.

In noting the importance of the spiritual senses for Balthasar and Rahner, the chapter provides a lens through which to appreciate their similarities during a time at which their differences are often accentuated. When each figure is viewed through his use of the doctrine, we see that Rahner is much less dictated by philosophical influences than is often thought to be the case (bringing him closer to Balthasar), and we also observe that Balthasar is more concerned with theological anthropology than is typically assumed (bringing him closer to Rahner).

This article argues for a reassessment of contemporary academic opinion concerning Origen’s “doctrine of the spiritual senses." By calling attention to portions of Origen’s early works, McInroy shows that Origen’s articulation of the spiritual senses emerges much earlier than has been recently supposed. At a more fundamental level, however, the article exposes a methodological rigidity in twentieth-century examinations of the spiritual senses that is in need of revision.