Theology of Compassion

The wide-scale rejection of metaphysics today has become the test of the postmodern. In this volume, Oliver Davies argues for a renewal of metaphysics, as the language of createdness, based not in a return to outmoded concepts of essence, but in a dynamic new understanding of ontology as narrataive and performance. His repairing of the western metaphysical tradition is grounded both in the divine self-naming in Exodus which, for the rabbis, identified God's presence in the world with God's compassionate acts, and in the compassionate resistance of Etty Hillesum and Edith Stein to the violence of the Holocaust. Building upon a new metaphysics of compassion which is attentive to the deepest histories of the contemporary world, Davies offers a renewed systematic theology of divine speech and relation, focused in Jesus Christ who, as the triadic "Word" of God, speaks creatively at the heart of human culture and action, and, as the redeeming "Compassion" of God, regenerates the world. Oliver Davies is Reader in Theology at the University of Wales, Lampeter. His previous publications have been mainly in the area of medieval mysticism, especially Meister Eckhart, and Celtic Christianity.