Tillich and the Abyss

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Natal and Nihilistic Theological Foundations

   • Sigridur Gudmarsdottir

   Pages 1-32

3. Kataphatic Identity and Religious Symbolism

   • Sigridur Gudmarsdottir

   Pages 33-70

4. Affective Bodies and Agape Desire

   • Sigridur Gudmarsdottir

   Pages 71-106

5. Khoric Speculations and Maps of Difference

   • Sigridur Gudmarsdottir

   Pages 107-140

6. Apophatic Silence and Displacements

   • Sigridur Gudmarsdottir

   Pages 141-171

7. Back Matter

   Pages 173-193

   PDF

This book examines Paul Tillich´s theological concept of the abyss by locating it within the context of current postmodern antifoundalist discussions and debates surrounding feminism, gender, and language. Sigridur Gudmarsdottir develops these tropes into a constructive theology, arguing that Tillich’s idea of the abyss can serve as a necessary means of deconstructing the binaries between the theoretical and the practical in producing nihilistic relativism and the safe foundations of knowledge (divine as well as human).



How does one search for a map and method through an abyss? In his writings, Tillich expressed the ambiguity and groundlessness of being, the depth structure of the human condition, and the reality of God as an abyss. The more we gaze into this abyss, the more we encounter the faults in our various foundations. This book outlines how Tillich’s concept of the abyss creates greater opportunities for complexity and liminality and opensup a space where life and death, destruction and construction, fecundity and horror, womb and tomb, can coincide. 

• Tillich
• Theology
• Philosophy of Religion
• constructive theology
• Feminist theory
• Gender
• Mysticism
• Poststructural theology
• Practical theology
• Apophatic theology

“Gudmarsdottir's recovering of the metaphor of the abyss is a welcome expansion of our understanding of Tillich and of our theological imagination.” (Wendy Farley, San Francisco Theological Seminary, USA)

• University of Iceland, Háskóli Íslands, Iceland

  Sigridur Gudmarsdottir

Sigridur Gudmarsdottir holds a PhD in constructive theology. She teaches philosophy of religion at the University of Iceland and works as a rural dean in the Lutheran Church of Norway. She lives near the Polar circle and her research weaves together pastoral praxis and academic theory on the edge of the abyss.  

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