Introduction

Summary

This is a book that is concerned to identify resources to help theology think and talk about history. In particular, it sets out to examine the value and the potential of a ‘theodramatic’ conception of history. That is to say a way of thinking theologically about historical process and the historical character of human agents and environments that emphasizes their dramatic features. This book assumes that a theodramatic theology's identification of what such dramatic features are, and of what makes them dramatic, will need to be informed by attention to literary dramatic traditions – otherwise a theodramatics can claim to be ‘dramatic’ only in an abstract sense. It therefore undertakes an interdisciplinary approach to what it does. It makes its theological principles open and indebted to literary forms, and it seeks to articulate the value of a theology thus informed for the treatment of historical life; of a world intrinsically and thoroughly historical.

My argument will be that certain insights become available in a theodramatic approach to history which are less likely to come to light when theology operates in more conventional modes (particularly in modes characteristic of the late scholastic and modern periods). Likewise, I will argue that certain complexities in the subject matter of theology are less likely to be betrayed when a theological discussion of historicality is specifically theodramatic. A theodramatics will be less likely artificially to curtail what Dan Hardy calls the ‘dynamic, distributed and dense’ character of historical life and historical experience.