Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

The New Trinitarian Ontologies Panel of the European Academy of Religion 2021 Conference

Publication

Abstract

The study of the structure of being or ontology in metaphysics was once regarded as a seminal preparation for the study of God as the creative cause of all being in theology. Yet ontology has, largely due to the influence of late-medieval theology since come to be separated from Trinitarian theology, before God came to be conceived in early-modern philosophy as the supreme being of all beings in general metaphysics, natural theology, and modern ontology.

Modern ontology has since dirempted the ontological from the theological, suspended theology, and simulated ontology. The Analytic and Continental philosophical traditions have tended to treat the Trinity as, at best, superfluous, and, at worst, redundant to modern ontology.

Yet with the postmodern collapse of all such formal ontologies, we may once more work to renew Trinitarian theology and philosophy in Trinitarian ontology. The New Trinitarian Ontology (NTO) panel at the European Academy of Religion 2021 conference was held in Münster, Germany, on Tuesday, August 31, 2021, and included 12 conference papers on Trinitarian ontology by both senior and junior authors from leading European universities (University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Heildelberg, Freiburg University, Charles University, Jagiellonian University...).