Accommodation to What? Univocity of Being, Pure Nature, and the Anthropology of St Irenaeus

Abstract:  This article, the author's inaugural lecture for the J.I. Packer chair at Regent College, Vancouver, takes as its starting-point Karl Barth's penetrating question, ‘Accommodation to what?’ Suggesting that recent evangelical theologies have been too ready to accommodate to the immanentism inherent in postmodern culture, the article traces the roots of that immanentism to Scotus's teaching concerning the univocity of being, and suggests that in St Irenaeus's christologically shaped account of the nature and destiny of human life there is a theologically satisfying preservation of a proper account of transcendence.