John Betz

Biography

John Betz studied systematic theology in Tübingen, Germany, and completed his PhD in philosophical theology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on the modern German philosophical and theological tradition. His
first article was on F.W.J. von Schelling, and his first book, After Enlightenment (2009), was on Kant’s friend and hometown rival, the prophetic man of letters, Johann Georg Hamann. Since then, his work has focused on recovering the work of the Jesuit Erich Przywara, who was a mentor to Edith Stein and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and arguably the leading German Catholic intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century. To this end he published with David B. Hart the first English edition of Przywara’s magnum opus, Analogia Entis--Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm (2014). This laid the groundwork for a number of articles on Przywara and further efforts to rehabilitate metaphysics in theology, culminating in Christ, the Logos of Creation: An Essay in Analogical Metaphysics (2023). He is also the co-editor (with Rik van Nieuwenhove) of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Apophatic Theology, and is currently working, with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, on a critical edition of Schelling's Original Lectures on the Philosophy of Revelation .