Originally developed by Stanley Hopper and David Leroy Miller in the 1960s and furthered significantly by Amos Wilder with his 1976 text, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination.
It is led by individuals such as L. Callid Keefe-Perry, Rubem Alves, Catherine Keller, John Caputo, Peter Rollins, Scott Holland, Melanie May, Matt Guynn, Roland Faber, and others.
[5] This school of theo-poetics is influenced by the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar as informed by a range of thinkers as divergent as Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas, Maximus the Confessor, Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand, David Bentely Hart[6] and Pavel Florensky.
It belies the logical assertion of the principle of bivalence and stands in contrast to some rigid Biblical hermeneutics that suggest that each passage of scripture has only one, usually teleological, interpretation.
Classical Theopoetics In the second school of theopoetics, the aim is drawn “from von Balthasar’s affirmation of poetic expression: when God speaks to us in the Incarnation, all qualities of human language—even being itself—are employed as created ‘grammar’ by which God expresses himself to us…With God at the center of expression, poetry becomes capable of an authentic role in theological language.”[8] This form of theo-poetics “requires the interplay of three massive fields of knowledge: metaphysics, language, and Christology”[9] and is to be “sharply distinguished from the agnostic overtures of the ‘theo-poetics’ movement, whose lineage is not be found in the thought of Balthasar.”[8] The mythopoetics of the Oxford Inklings (C.S.