Oliver Crisp

6/2/2009

"Analytic Theology and the Incarnation"

Much contemporary theology draws upon the resources of Continental philosophy in order to underpin its doctrinal claims. Yet very few theologians look to the Anglo-American tradition of Analytic philosophy to perform the same task. If anything, there is little communication between theologians and ‘analytics’, despite the resurgence of philosophy of religion amongst Anglo-American philosophers since the 1960s, and an increasingly sophisticated and historically informed literature on philosophical theology. My own work is an attempt to address this problem by using analytic tools and methods for a properly theological end – in other words, an analytic theology. I have tried to spell out what analytic theology might look like in a volume of essays recently co-edited with Michael Rea, entitled Analytic Theology: New Essays inthe Philosophy of Theology (Oxford University Press, 2009). But in addition to methodological considerations, I have also been busy doing analytic theology. My CTI work is a sequel to my first book on the Incarnation, which deals with eight dogmatic issues in Christology. The book interacts with a range of theologians past and present, and uses the methods of analytic philosophy to get clear the arguments and objections to the views presented, in the pursuit of a constructive theological statement of things like the election of Christ, Christ’s pre-existence, the virgin birth, Christology and the status of the embryo and Christ’s impeccability. I hope that modeling what analytic theology looks like may help other theologians and graduate students give serious consideration to the virtues of an analytic approach to theology.