ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a slight detour from those that have preceded it. It focuses on Werner G. Jeanrond's contribution as it sounds a new note in the eventual return to theology in the study of literature and religion. Theology and its reassurances, then, must await the painful, necessary dignity of the human, known in the unending, unresolved hermeneutical challenges of literature, challenges. Desiderius Erasmus writes of the theology and religious vision that look to articulate the 'future life of heaven toward which the pious aspire with so much endeavour'. And in the space of fiction may be sensed, even experienced, an absent presence – the otherness of God in literature, the future hope in the darkness of the present, the beginnings again, perhaps, of theology. Theology, in other words, must be neither hasty nor arrogant in its claims, but await the otherness of God in the textures and imaginings of the textual, literary world.
