A Living Sacrifice focuses on the inherent relationship between eschatology and the liturgy in light of Ratzinger’s insistence upon the primacy of logos over ethos. When logos is subordinated to ethos, the human person becomes subjected to a materialist ontology that leads to an ethos that is concerned above all by utility and progress, which affects one’s approach to understanding the liturgy and eschatology. How a person celebrates the liturgy becomes subject to the individual whim of one person or a group of people. Eschatology is reduced to addressing the temporal needs of a society guided by a narrow conception of hope or political theology. If the human person wants to understand his authentic sacramental logos, then he must first turn to Christ the incarnate Logos, who reveals to him that he is created for a loving relationship with God and others. The primacy of logos is the central hermeneutical key to understanding the unique vision of Ratzinger’s Christocentric liturgical theology and eschatology. This is coupled with a study of Ratzinger’s spiritual Christology with a focus on how it influences his theology of liturgy and eschatology through the notions of participation and communion in Christ’s sacrificial love. Finally, A Living Sacrifice examines Ratzinger’s theology of hope, charity, and beauty, as well as his understanding of active participation in relationship to the eschatological and cosmic characteristics of the sacred liturgy.

Originally published in English in 1988, Joseph Ratzinger's Eschatology remains internationally recognized as a leading text on the "last things"—heaven and hell, purgatory and judgment, death and the immortality of the soul. This highly anticipated second edition includes a new preface by Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI and a supplement to the bibliography by theologian Peter A. Casarella. Eschatology presents a balanced perspective of the doctrine at the center of Christian belief—the Church's faith in eternal life. Recognizing the task of contemporary eschatology as "to marry perspectives, so that person and community, present and future, are seen in their unity," Joseph Ratzinger brings together recent emphasis on the theology of hope for the future with the more traditional elements of the doctrine. His book has proven to be as timeless as it is timely.

This important and illuminating book focuses on Ratzinger's status as one of the preeminent Catholic theologians of the 20th century. Aidan Nichols provides a full-scale investigation of his theology as it develops from the 1950s onward. The book presents a chronological account of the development of Ratzinger's writing which reflects a wide range of historical and theoretical interests such as: Augustine's ecclesiology, early Franciscanism and the idea of salvation history, Christian brotherhood, the unfolding of the Second Vatican Council, the Apostles' Creed, explorations of the concept of the Church, preaching, liturgy and Church music, eschatology, the foundations of dogmatic and moral theology, and the problem of pluralism. This third edition, as well as providing a two-chapter-long biography of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, and amplifying the account already given of his later pre-papal writings, describes the new thinking that belongs to the years of Benedict's pontificate. That comprises his trilogy of books on Jesus of Nazareth, his quartet of encyclicals, and the set of major speeches he gave at global venues, chiefly on the contribution of faith to culture and civil society. An expanded Conclusion, weighing the lasting significance of his work, leads into a presentation of the themes of his posthumous essay collection - the 'curtain-call' he entitled 'What is Christianity?'

Modern theological engagements on deification have undergone two major paradigm shifts. First, the study of deification shifted from the periphery of theological discourse to its center. For Adolf von Harnack, deification was a pagan import that fatally corrupted and distorted the Gospel message of salvation. In response, the positive retrieval of the concept of deification belongs to the early years of the twentieth century. By the 1910s in Russian religious thought and by the 1930s in much Roman Catholic theology, deification had become a magnet concept attracting attention from many different viewpoints. The second important shift relates to how deification is characterized. Recent studies question the exclusively 'Eastern' character of deification and draw attention to the engagements of this theme in Latin patristic and later Western Christian sources. Reassessing the evidence for these two major shifts, The Oxford Handbook of Deification comprehensively explores the points of convergence and difference on the constitutive elements of deification in different traditions, and offers a foundation for ecumenical and interreligious dialogues. The Handbook's first part analyzes the cultural and scriptural roots of deification; the second part explores the most significant historical contributions to the understanding of deification in the early, medieval, and modern periods; the third part develops systematic connections. Readers will discover a surprizing breadth, depth, and diversity of theologies of deification in Christian traditions. Throughout the Handbook, leading scholars in the field of Deification Studies propose vital new insights from a variety of perspectives for this central mystery at the heart of the Christian faith.

Starting in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Catholic theology witnessed a profound retrieval of patristic reflection on the interrelationship of the Virgin Mary and the Church. This dynamic reached a doctrinal high point with the declarations of Vatican II and Pope Paul VI concerning Mary as “type of the Church” and “Mother of the Church,” and it also provided the impetus for further theological exploration of the deeper unity of the Mother of Christ and his mystical body. In A Bride Adorned, John L. Nepil examines how this interrelationship has been formulated in modern theology in terms of perichoresis, a notion of unconfused reciprocity or interpenetration drawn from Christology and Trinitarian theology first applied to Mary and the Church by the nineteenth-century German theologian Matthias Scheeben. In the first part of the study, Nepil treats the foundations of this formulation, outlining its historical background and creative articulation by Scheeben. The second part tracks developments of Scheeben’s insight in the thought of twentieth-century theological luminaries Charles Journet, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Louis Bouyer, and Leo Scheffczyk, each of whom distinctively articulate the shared conviction that neither Mary nor the Church can be understood apart from each other. The third part draws out the far-reaching doctrinal and pastoral implications of this deepened account of the Mary–Church relation, establishing its vital importance for ongoing theological and ecclesial renewal. Through his careful engagement with these figures, Nepil shows how Mary and the Church are to be understood as two realizations of a single mystery. This vantage on Mary and the Church sheds new light on the vision of the Council Fathers at Vatican II, and it charts a course for the Church’s flourishing via a return to her Marian heart.

St. Thomas Aquinas is best known for his Summa Theologiae and is regarded as the great exemplar of systematic theology. Yet St. Thomas himself might be surprised at this legacy. He may well have saw himself principally as a commentator and teacher of Sacred Scripture. When it comes to engaging St. Thomas’ scriptural work, readers are at a significant disadvantage. They are arguably more foreign and more dense than his Summa yet have been scarcely studied. This book by one of the foremost experts on St. Thomas’ use of Scripture is a significant and much needed contribution. In The Order and Division of Divine Truth: St. Thomas Aquinas as Scholastic Master of the Sacred Page, John Boyle opens up the riches of St. Thomas as a master of the Sacred page. Readers will find explorations not just of the style of Aquinas’ commentaries, which differs from that of the modern biblical commentary, but also the overarching theological and methodological perspective that shapes his approach to Scripture. Boyle gives insight into how Aquinas would have understood the task of biblical commentary as a university lecturer, how Scripture is ordered to divine revelation, how medieval masters divided up the text, and how Aquinas’ biblical commentaries relate to his theological summaries. This book will be important for anyone seeking to better understand St. Thomas’ theology and the often-overlooked role that Scripture plays in his work.

Christian theology in recent decades has seen an explosion in the number of books published seeking a renewal of Trinitarian ontology. There has also been a proliferation of studies dedicated to the theology of Wisdom. Few if any of these books on the Trinity or on Wisdom have drawn for inspiration on the comprehensive vision of French Oratorian priest Louis Bouyer (1913–2004), one of the greatest theologians of the modern age. Bouyer produced a comprehensive work of theology that integrated these two seminal concerns based on a vast “re-sourcing” of the Christian tradition. Dr. Keith Lemna explores Bouyer’s achievement in depth, showing that at the heart of his venture was a deep, contemplative penetration into God’s mediation to the world—his creation, sustenance, and redemption of creation in the Wisdom of the Eternal Son. Bouyer is a decisive resource for theologians wanting to develop the Christian understanding of the Trinity and creation based on tradition but in dialogue with modern cosmological thought. The Trinitarian Wisdom of God: Louis Bouyer’s Theology of the God-World Relationship gets to the heart of Louis Bouyer’s theology of the God-World relationship more deeply than any other has done before. In doing so, Lemna recovers a great theologian at his best.