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Response to Knepper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

JOHN HICK
JOHN HICK
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT e-mail: j.h.hick@bham.ac.uk
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Abstract

Having cited Dionysius as one of the many Christian thinkers who affirm the ineffability, or transcategoriality, of God in God's ultimate inner being, I respond to Timothy D. Knepper's claim that this is a mistake. Whilst accepting much that he says about Dionysius, I still prefer the standard interpretation of the Dionysian texts as teaching the total transcategoriality of the Transcendent as ‘surpassing all discourse and all knowledge’.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 223 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1. Hick, John ‘Ineffability’, Religious Studies, 36 (2000), 35–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Bernard McGinn The Foundations of Mysticism (London: SCM Press, 1992), 163.

3. Knepper, Timothy D. ‘Three misuses of Dionysius for comparative theology’, Religious Studies, 45 (2009), 205–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All in-text references are to this article.

4. Robert Baum ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’, in Mircea Eliade (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Religion, 10 vols (Woodbridge CT: Macmillan, 1987), IV, 357.

5. Hick ‘Ineffability’, 38.

6. Ibid., 39.

7. Denys Turner The Darkness of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 37.

8. Dionysius The Mystical Theology, ch. 2 in The Complete Works of Pseudo-Dionysius, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York NY: Paulist Press, 1987), 36.

9. Dionysius The Divine Names, ch. 1 in Complete Works of Pseudo-Dionysius, 53.

10. John Hick An Interpretation of Religion (London: Macmillan and New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1993).