Tradition and the Normativity of History

This collection of essays by some of the world's leading theological
voices aims at unfolding and reflecting upon the complex relationship
between theology and history, with a special focus on the development of
tradition. The articles gathered here make it clear that the role of
historical consciousness within theology and the contribution of
historical studies to the theological disciplines, are of paramount
importance, and fundamentally alter the shape of the theological
enterprise. Rather than destroying theology, tradition and theological
truth claims, historical consciousness contributes to the deconstruction
of all facile appeals to history in order to support theological claims,
and works to prevent us from proposing simplistic readings of tradition
in terms of continuity or discontinuity. Moreover, it offers new
opportunities to theology to engage in the process of
recontextualization in the contemporary context, taking into account its
sensibility to historicity, contingency and particularity. It allows us,
for example, to think resurrection anew, and to constructively criticize
our forgetfulness of dangerous memories. It is not by overcoming these
features of the contemporary age that theology will succeed in its
striving after theological truth, but by discerning how such truth is
revealed precisely within, and thanks to, particular and contingent
histories, and not in spite of historicity, contingency and
particularity. When this is done, the dialogue between theology and
history/historical studies contributes to a contemporary reconsideration
of the radical dialogical character of revelation, that is, of the way
in which God reveals Godself in history. It is the hope of this
collective volume that it will further deepen the understanding of
revelation that was developed in Vatican II's constitution on divine
revelation, Dei verbum.