Patristics is not only a study of the past but a practice which, speaking for theologically authoritative sources, has its own sort of authority and carries its own theological weight. Foucault offers to patristics a set of tools which may be used not only for examining the past but also for reflecting critically on the practice of patristics itself.
The papers themselves illustrate this in the way that they relate to contemporary theological issues. Athanasius is not the last theologian to repackage theological innovation as nothing more than the rearticulation of tradition. Yet Newheiser's unpicking of the narrative of a univocal tradition itself reflects a contemporary interest in diversity and multiplicity, which claims to speak on behalf of those excluded and marginalised by Christian orthodoxy. This move too is an exercise of a particular sort of productive power.
Ever since Nietzsche declared the 'death of God', Christian theology has struggled to reclaim ground lost to secular philosophy. Elgendy's discussion of the relationship between Nyssen's practices of the self to Foucault's political project of freedom fits nicely with the contemporary interest in 'the theological turn' in continental philosophy, which both picks up on explicit theological themes in contemporary philosophers and argues for the indebtedness of contemporary philosophy to ancient theological concepts. This theological reclamation of contemporary philosophers can serve a range of theological interests.
Singh's paper plays most directly into the question of methodological self-reflection: just as for Eusebius, the representation of the Father by the Son plays into wider questions of social and political representation, so contemporary patristics scholars represent the Fathers to the rest of the academic and ecclesiastical world, and they would do well to consider the ways in which such representations are inevitably social and political in their implications.
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