Professor Oliver Davies - Author

Theology of Transformation Faith, Freedom, and the Christian Act

Significant advances in science bring new understandings of the human as a unity of mind, body and world and calls into question the deep-seated dualistic presuppositions of modern theology. Oliver Davies argues that the changing framework allows a return to the defining question of the Easter Church: 'Where is Jesus Christ?'. This is a question which can bring about a fundamental re-orientation of theology, since it gives space for the theological reception of the disruptive presence of the living Christ as the present material as well as formal object of theology in the world. At the centre of this study therefore is a new theology of the doctrine of the exaltation of Christ, based upon St Paul's encounter with the exalted or commissioning Christ on the road to Damascus. This places calling and commissioning at the centre of systematic theology. It provides the ground for a new understanding of theology as transcending the Academy-Church division as well as the divide between systematic and practical theology. It points also to a new critical theological method of engagement and collaboration. This book begins to explore new forms of world-centred theological rationality in the contexts not only of scripture, doctrine, anthropology, ecclesiology and faith, but also of Christian politics and philosophy. It is a work of contemporary and global Christological promise in Fundamental Theology, and is addressed to all those who are concerned, from whichever denomination, with the continuing vitality of Christianity in a changing world.

One-Month Money Why money ruins our economy - and how reinventing it could end unemployment and inflation forever

Money makes the world go round - until it doesn't. Bankers blunder, governments turn a blind eye and investors just get it plain wrong. But what if there's something else lurking behind all our great recessions and depressions, something operating in the shadows that makes our bubbles bigger and our crashes more catastrophic? Something so familiar and ubiquitous that we hardly ever think of its effects - even when it's under our very nose. What if it's money? Our modern system of money is a marvel, enabling complex trade and economic growth on a scale never known before. But money also carries a fatal flaw: it can be hoarded forever, and whenever we hoard we depress spending and distort interest rates. The result is a dreaded sequence of boom-and-bust that we know as the business cycle, an endless swing from unemployment to inflation and back again. But it doesn't have to be this way. One-Month Money begins as an eye-opening demonstration of how modern money is often our own worst economic enemy, and ends by proposing a controversial and innovative solution: a simple reinvention of money that would end recessions, inflation and unemployment forever.By rewiring the banking system and giving money a monthly expiry date, we can create a system of money with all its current benefits and none of its drawbacks, a system where money greases the wheels of global production without ever destabilising it. We can still save - just not under the mattress. Bad businesses can still go bust - just without bringing the wider economy down with them. Once money cannot be hoarded and interest rates are always perfect, there will be no more business cycles. The system of one-month money automatically checks our worst hoarding impulses, allowing us to save productively, keep prices stable and enjoy permanent full employment. With many countries struggling for growth and the stimulus toolbox growing emptier by the year, a creative rethink of our monetary system is critically urgent. One-Month Money is not only a timely and enjoyable addition to a vital conversation, but a book that will forever change the way you think about what's in your wallet.

Meister Eckhart Mystical Theologian

Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century German mystic and theologian, is one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures in the history of the Church, and few have played so diverse and fertile a role in the cultural imagination. He has been seen as both heretic and 'the man from whom God nothing hid'; Christian mystic and Buddhist sage; Catholic and Protestant; feminist and ecologist; he is both medieval schoolman and inspirer of contemporary philosophers such as Heidegger, Bloch and Derrida. Oliver Davies's masterly evaluation of Eckhart is based on an unrivalled knowledge of the original texts, their historical and theological context, and their place in the Christian mystical tradition. The portrait of St Dominic on the cover (of the book) illustrates one of Davies's main themes: Eckhart's position in the mainstream Dominican tradition of grounding theology in spiritual experience. Both a stimulating scholarly study and an ideal introduction for the non-specialist, Meister Eckhart: Mystical Theologian explores the enduring fascination of Meister Eckhart, 'a mystic for our age'.

Silence and the Word Negative Theology and Incarnation

Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with contemporary secular philosophy. Leading Christian thinkers explore in their own way the extent to which the concept of the apophatic illumines some of the deepest doctrinal structures of Christian faith, and of Christian self-understanding both in terms of its historical and contemporary situatedness, showing how a dimension of negativity has characterised not only traditional mysticism but most forms of Christian thought over the years.

Transformation Theology A New Paradigm of Christian Living

This book is the fruit of a close collaboration between three leading scholars with a background in systematics, philosophical theology and ethics. It sets out a new account of how incarnation is mediated in the world of space and time, leading to a new orientation of theology within the world. The doctrinal ('from above') and philosophical ('from below') sections lead to a new exposition of Christian life in confrontation with deep-seated problems of ethics and justice.The three pieces closely interweave with each other in the elaboration of a new kind of practical, doctrinal theology of full philosophical integrity. There are extended passages of reflection upon the historical processes which shaped the theological present in terms of the evolution of science and cosmology, and the consequent development of an array of idealist or anti-empirical conceptualities and methods.This book offers a powerful and sustained critique of modern theologies across the traditions which evade, assimilate or fail to take account of the real world of sensible embodiment, in which, according to creedal affirmations, incarnation continues. In place of idealist readings of faith in different guises, it argues for the centrality of sensibility and the unresolved problematics of everyday empirical existence as the primary place of divine disclosure in which theology is learned and practiced with integrity.

Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine The Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason

We have, as a theological community, generally lost a language in which to speak of the created-ness of the world. As a consequence, our discourses of reason cannot bridge the way we know God and the way we know the world. Therefore, argues Oliver Davies, a primary task of contemporary theology is the regeneration of a Christian account of the world as sacramental, leading to the formation of a Christian conception of reason and a new Christocentric understanding of the real. Both the Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotics of Christ as the embodied, sacrificial and creative speech of God serve the project of a repairal of Christian cosmology. The world itself is viewed as a creative text authored by God, of which we as interpreters are an integral part. This is a wide-ranging and convincing book that makes an important contribution to modern theology.

Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine The Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason

We have, as a theological community, generally lost a language in which to speak of the created-ness of the world. As a consequence, our discourses of reason cannot bridge the way we know God and the way we know the world. Therefore, argues Oliver Davies, a primary task of contemporary theology is the regeneration of a Christian account of the world as sacramental, leading to the formation of a Christian conception of reason and a new Christocentric understanding of the real. Both the Johannine tradition of creation through the Word and a Eucharistic semiotics of Christ as the embodied, sacrificial and creative speech of God serve the project of a repairal of Christian cosmology. The world itself is viewed as a creative text authored by God, of which we as interpreters are an integral part. This is a wide-ranging and convincing book that makes an important contribution to modern theology.

Silence and the Word Negative Theology and Incarnation

Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with contemporary secular philosophy. Leading Christian thinkers explore in their own way the extent to which the concept of the apophatic illumines some of the deepest doctrinal structures of Christian faith, and of Christian self-understanding both in terms of its historical and contemporary situatedness, showing how a dimension of negativity has characterised not only traditional mysticism but most forms of Christian thought over the years.

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.

Celtic Spirituality Classics of Western Spirituality

Celtic Christianity in Early Medieval Wales The Origins of the Welsh Spiritual Tradition

A study of sources from early medieval Wales, which offers new and exciting insights into the phenomenon of Celtic Christianity. This work examines the concept of Celtic Christianity and traces common Celtic features in early Welsh religious literature, including poetry, prose and hagiography. It adds significantly to our understanding of Celtic Christianity, and of those early Welsh texts, while making many of the latter available in English for the first time.