Professor Paul Hinlicky, who teaches the upper-level dogmatics sequence for ILT, is as busy as the proverbial beaver in his scholarship. Currently, he is co-authoring a book with a Deleuzian philosopher (Deleuze is a contemporary materialist metaphysician who holds that “Spinoza is the Christ of the philosophers”) on a new “cartography” of the faith – reason or theology – and its relation to philosophy. From the perspective of theology in the tradition of Luther, Hinlicky’s endeavor here is to make fruitful lines of the thought in Luther and Bonhoeffer that deny any transcendental perspective to human reason. The manuscript goes to the publisher in August. Hinlicky, who has taught courses on The Holocaust and Theologians under Hitler for years at Roanoke College, just signed a contract with Cascade Press for a new book titled: Before Auschwitz: What Christian Theology Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism. The manuscript is due to the publisher at the end of December. Fortunately, Hinlicky begins a two semester, fourteen month sabbatical in May. He is still awaiting final word on a Fulbright Lectureship that would return him to his former institution, the Protestant Theological Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava, in January 2013 to lecture on his work in progress, a one-volume systematic theology. It bears the title, Beloved Community: Critical Dogmatics for the Third Christian Millennium and reflects the teaching experience he has enjoyed at the Institute of Lutheran Theology. He is waiting final word on a contract with Eerdmans. Just recently, Hinlicky entered into negotiations with Baker Academic/Brazos Press on two writing projects. One will be an edited volume of contributions from this summer’s International Luther Congress in Helsinki, where Hinlicky, in cooperation with Dr. Mickey Mattox of Marquette University, will conduct a seminar on Luther’s Genesis lectures with the title, “A Post-Modern Luther? New Readings in the Critique of Epistemology and the Revision of Metaphysics.” He has also submitted to Brazos a prospectus for a work entitled “Divine Simplicity,” a study of the medieval and early modern doctrine of God that complements his 2010 Fortress Press study of the Patristic doctrine of the Trinity, Divine Complexity.
In the recent past, Hinlicky has published a number of chapter-length contributions. The article “Status Confessionis” was published in The Encyclopedia of Christianity Vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans & Leiden: Brill, 2008) 198-201. The provocatively titled “Luther’s Atheism” appeared in The Devil’s Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition ed. J. Hockenberry (St Paul, MN: Fortress, 2011). “A Leibnizian Transformation? Reclaiming the Theodicy of Faith” appeared in Transformations in Luther’s Reformation Theology: Historical and Contemporary Reflections, Vol. 32, Arbeiten zur Kirchen- und Theologiegeschichte.ed. C. Helmer and B. K. Holm (Leibzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2011). “Authority in the Church: A Plea for Critical Dogmatics” was published in New Directions for Lutheranism ed. C. Braaten (Delhi, NY: ALPB Books, 2010). “Staying Lutheran in the Changing Church(es),” Afterword in Mickey L. Mattox and Gregg Roeber, Changing Churches: A Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran Discussion (Eerdmans, 2012) was just released.
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