The title of 'poet' signifies the linguistic character of divine creativity. God is 'author' and 'poet' as the Lord and haven of the trustworthy word. God's work understood as poiesis is the world promised in faithfulness through which God adresses us. Therefore God's poiesis is a poetry of promise. It cannot be understood in the sense of a unifying theological principle. Theology has to consider the rupture of rimes - occasioned by our contradiction against God's poetry of promise - as interwoven modes of time. Their explication demands to understand the different linguistic forms like praise and hymnody, confession, complaint and petition as responses to the primary statements of Faith which are in their basic form of promise not constative but constitutive and to develop a corresponding wider concept of truth. The fact that faith has its truth in participation in God's promise and faithfulness requires a communicative form of judgement which is to be distinguished from a logical form of judgement. Through this communicative form of judgement we refer to the reality that is created by God's word which is maintained by God's against chaos over against sin and has received the promise of consummation trough the last judgement. Such an approach can be accommodated by a threefold concept of scholarship which does not isolate the rational realm of philosophy and science over against history and poetry, but locates it in its respective contexts in such a way that the constitutive significance of poetry for determining the place of theology between metaphysics and mythology, can become clear. Three concrete examples from the doctrines of creation, the Trinity and eschatology are intended to demonstrate how taking the poetic character of forms of languages of life into account shapes decisions concerning issues of doctrinal content.

Enthalten in:
Theologische Literaturzeitung; 1999/Nr.1 Monatsschrift für das gesamte Gebiet der Theologie und Religionswissenschaft (1999)

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Serie / Reihe: Theologische Literaturzeitung

Personen: Bayer, Oswald

Schlagwörter: Theologie Poesie