Faithful Thinking and World Orientation: Augustine, Aquinas, Dooyeweerd, Olthuis

This course examines four temporally and culturally distinct examples of Christian thinking about God, self and world. It takes up one ancient, one medieval, one modern and one "postmodern" thinker and compares how they frame their thinking with respect to their scholarly world and the pre- and post-Christian elements characteristic of it. It compares their respective attempts to speak of the problematics signaled by the terms God, self and world: a. knowledge as religious, b. self as simultaneously divine image and part of a world of creatures, c. the social world as the field within which God, self and world intersect.