Common Places

A lecture with Q&A by Davenant Hall Teaching Fellow, Ryan Hurd. The sheer and utter delight of the theologian is knowing and speaking of God. As we consider the development of theology as a science or formalized discipline, we find that two things are especially important: the making of categories in theology, and of habits in the theologian. Analogous to Aristotle’s "Ten Categories", or even the Transcendentals, the development of categories was the production of adequate or reduced summaries which sweep in everything within both the natural and supernatural orders in a condensed fashion. After centuries of sweat and no small genius, the “divine names” and “trinitarian notions,” in the natural and supernatural order respectively, resulted. For example, we find the divine names “simplicity, infinity", and others of that sort; “wisdom, goodness, and others of that sort”; “incorporeality, impassibility", and others of that sort; “reasoning, laughing", and others of that sort: these adequately reduce everythin