Christian Circles Research Articles

‘No Longer Strangers and Foreigners, but Fellow Citizens’: The Voice and Dream of Jacobus Eliza Capitein, African Theologist in the Netherlands (1717–47)

In the early modern period, black European lives were and remained highly visible and exceptional. This article focuses on the experiences and reception of Jacobus Capitein and two other African men who came to Europe as children in the eighteenth century. Jacobus Capitein was enslaved when he entered the Netherlands. He came from the Gold Coast, now part of Ghana, entered higher circles and received a privileged education. Capitein wrote a thesis in theology at Leiden University. As an immigrant amongst the Dutch, his texts were attempts to translate his experiences and memories for a Dutch audience. As a theologist, he addressed the international community of scholars, writing in Latin. Capitein's eighteenth-century study in theology can be seen as a consequence of his conversion to Christianity and acceptance in Christian circles. Gratitude and apology are important elements in his personal narratives but a contrast between his positive individual African–European friendships on the one hand, and the harsh limitations he met in his working life are evident. These simultaneous and contrasting experiences marked the ambivalent reception he received, and help explain why his stay in Europe, and that of many other Africans, remained temporary.

Le Buddha à l’École d’Alexandrie, à propos de Stromates I.15.71.6

The Buddha at the Alexendrine school, about Stromates I.15.71.6. Stromates I.15.71.6 is often used to assert that Buddhism was known at Alexandria and more widely in the Mediterranean as soon as the end of IInd century AC, and thus corroborate the idea of a possible influence of Buddhism in the Gnostic and Christian circles, as well as among Platonic ones. The content of this brief passage on the Buddha is above all the outcome of a rhetorical composition governed by its author’s editorial aim. This reference cannot be the proof of a Buddhist reality ; on the contrary it attests Buddhism was unknown of the Alexandrine intellectual spheres and was far from being something of a threat for the Church of Alexandria, even though it was soaring in the Indian North East.

Disability and the Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecost and the Renewal of the Church

AbstractThe interface between the disability rights movement and renewal Christianity has been one of missed opportunities in part because of the centrality of healing in renewal Christian circles. This essay delineates the challenges that occur at this intersection and charts the way toward a renewal theology of disability in dialogue with J. Rodman Williams, one of the leading theologians of the charismatic and neo-Pentecostal movements. Central to such an endeavor is the articulation of an inclusive ecclesiology derived from the Pauline metaphor of the body of Christ animated by the Spirit's diverse giftings amidst and through the church's many members.

Debating Toynbee’s theory of challenge and response: christian civilisation or western imperialism?

In his 1952 Reith Lectures on the British Broadcasting Corporation, “The World and the West”, the eminent London historian Professor Arnold Toynbee sought to explain inter alia why western European hegemony over much of the world was widely resented. His interpretation incorporated the “challenge and response” theory of successive civilisations which underlay his multi-volume A Study of History. Toynbee’s lectures drew sharp criticism from many quarters, not least because he gave the impression that the era of Western hegemony was waning and that much of the momentum of world history was moving to the East. This in itself was a controversial perception in the Cold War. In some Christian circles, his overarching interpretation was rejected as historiographically flawed. In the ensuing debate, the prominent English Roman Catholic historian and publisher Douglas Jerrold argued in his The Lie about the West: A Response to Professor Toynbee’s Challenge that he had unjustly underestimated the endurance of Christian civilisation and failed to recognise its inherent value as the source of many fundamental values which should not be surrendered to supposedly inexorable historical processes.

Postsecular spirituality, engaged hermeneutics, and Charles Taylor’s notion of hypergoods

This essay sets out to argue that postsecular spirituality is about the quest for hypergoods within today’s mass populist- and consumerist-oriented world. It shows that people who consider themselves to be spiritual not only have many values in their lives, but rank some values higher than others, with some being ranked as being of supreme importance, the so-called hypergoods. Such ethics has an interpersonal character, and in Christian circles this reopens the issue of biblical hermeneutics, especially the phenomenon of conflicting interpretations. Against the background of the various options of being religious in the secular age, the essay focuses on Charles Taylor’s view of the discovery of spirituality in a posttheistic world and his emphasis on the love of God and the ethics of justice as hypergoods.

Why the fuss over Brown’s <i>The Da Vinci code</i>? The dynamism of 'icons' and the in/stability of meaning

Dan Brown’s book, “The Da Vinci code” (2003) and the sub-sequent motion picture by the same title (2006), have created a considerable stir within, but not limited to, Christian circles. The cause of the controversy is that, despite Brown’s overt pre-sentation of this work as fiction, it draws on figures, events and themes regarded in religious circles as sacred – most par-ticularly in Christian circles. Holy figures, events and themes are sensitive matters to believers: the meanings attached to them are regarded as essentially fixed, with connotations of perma-nence and eternity. Literature of many kinds, however, reinter-pret set meanings, loosening their perceived inflexibility, thus opening up a dynamism quite foreign to popular notions of definite meaning.

The Jouissance of Belief: Devotional Reading and the (Re)Turn to Religion

In part, the contemporary critical interest in religion derives from epistemological and not ontological concerns, meaning that ideas about God aren't what contemporary scholars find compelling so much as the knowledge of what religious experience when they read or write as religious adherents. A materialist focus on religious practices as both a type of knowledge and a way of knowing is thus becoming more common, and practicing members of Christian communities can have greater insight and familiarity with their community's ways of knowing than those who approach matters of religion from without. Etymology itself suggests that religious scholars are in fundamental ways interdisciplinary inasmuch as disciplines--adherence to a given set of distinguishing practices--exist in both the spiritual and secular worlds as profound markers and components of group identity. The great diversity of methodological practices in contemporary literary criticism means that explications of Christian ways of knowing and reading are both less unusual and more potentially transformative than ever, at least when they are, as Sharon Kim proposes in her article in this issue, inculturated in both secular and religious ways of knowing. I argue in this article that the traditional Christian practice of devotional reading cultivates a worldly and self-critical faculty which accords with the humanistic reading practice that Edward Said terms worldliness. In accord with our group's interrogation of the academy's to religion, I write to clarify the basis of my confidence that the study of literature in the humanities has been and remains an act of religious significance, though not in many cases a specifically Christian one. To critically appraise any human production is to take seriously both our creative ability and our provisional nature, to acknowledge both production and limitation, agency and errancy, history and communion. I take as a given that the impulse toward theory in modern academic study was metaphysical in nature. Fundamental questions about the relationship of humans to each other, to the universe, and to the acts of cognition and existence itself remain plangent even when traditional approaches to them have been discarded. (1) What was seen by many within Christian circles as a sophisticated assault on their fundamental beliefs was, in fact, a muscular appropriation of their methodology. Literary criticism, as it is practiced in most universities today, is frequently more adept in the religious function of self-analysis and cultural critique than much of what is produced in the name of specifically Christian scholarship. As is apparent in the slippage of terms from literary study to cultural critique, I am as concerned with the question of why we study literature as I am with the issue of how. I believe that it is impossible to seriously consider what Christians can contribute to the recent turn toward religion in literary studies without acknowledging that much of what has been attacked as anti-Christian or anti-metaphysical modes of literary criticism has, in elements of its praxis, been prophetically acute in its engagement with and critique of our world and in revealing the spiritually fundamental truth of humanity's embeddedness in both created and received textuality. In methodological terms, the movement from people of the Book to discursively produced and apprehended cultural identities is a stunning appropriation of the disciplinary logic inherent in text-based world religions. To sum up, the discursive reality that Foucault, Althusser, and others argued that all texts conspire to create has long been a valued outcome of devotional meditation upon holy writ. By focusing on Edward Said's critical methodology, I am taking what is arguably one of the easiest paths towards illustrating my claims regarding the consonance between Christian devotional reading and humanist applications of post-structuralist and postmodern theories of textuality. …

The Menstruant as “Other” in Medieval Judaism and Christianity

Both Jews and Christians in the High Middle Ages wrote descriptions of the physical dangers posed by menstruants and menstrual blood. Such fears were augmented by their readings of the translated warnings of Greek medical writers. During this period, in both Jewish and Christian circles, those literal fears became abstracted in different ways that reflected distinct theologies. Jewish mystics saw menstruants, at the onset of their flow, as possessed by the sitra aḥra, the demonic “other side,” while Christian exegetes metaphorized menstruation almost entirely, reading biblical texts as allegorical references to sinfulness. Each group applied these negative symbols to the other, but in profoundly different ways. Thirteenth-century kabbalists, who retained Judaism’s ritual purity laws, developed a rhetoric that demonized Christians by emphasizing their permanent menstrual impurity, and they used that rhetoric to attack assimilation and ward off contact between members of the two faiths. Christians, by contrast, first emphasized the metaphorical moral impurity of Jews and later came to believe that Jewish men “menstruated,” a belief that would have dire historical consequences for the Jewish communities of northern Europe.

The Origins of Christian Hell

The paper re-examines the evidence concerning the early Christian conceptions of punishment of sinners in the afterlife. It commences with the New Testament and the ideas attributed to Jesus and moves on to the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter , composed about a generation later, which enjoyed great popularity among several early Christian circles and was seriously considered for inclusion in the New Testament canon. It is claimed that as it now reads, Apoc. Pet. advances ideas about hell that sharply contrast those presented in the New Testament. To solve this riddle, it is proposed that the Apoc. Pet. , as it has been preserved, was reorganized at a much later stage to meet the needs of the developing Church. Its original meaning was consequently twisted almost beyond recognition. In its earliest layers, the apocryphal document appears to have been mostly concerned, just like the New Testament, with salvation rather than everlasting chastisement.

Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism (review)

Jewish Tradition and Challenge of Darwinism, edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 260 pp. $24.00. This book is a collection of papers written by scholars in a variety of disciplines. It provides a survey of Jewish voices on a broad range of subjects related to Darwinism. One of book's main goals is to delineate scientific and theological dimensions of topic in context of engaging modern Jewish thought in dialogue between and religion. The book is eminently readable and accessible. While book initially claims that there is no Jewish problem with of evolution, further reading shows that not as much harmony exists under surface in terms of compatibility between Darwin's theory and Judaism as this claim would imply. Indeed, in final chapter, Darwinism is called the greatest challenge to divine (p. 230). Likewise, one of book's editors says that evolution is probably most prominent and controversial aspect of science (p. 32). Another theme is that of conflict and harmony. The theories of mutual aid and altruism are raised in contrast to competitive, war-based ideology, struggle for life, survival of fittest component of Darwinian theory, which was heavily influenced by Spencer's evolutionism and Malthus' population pessimism. Mutual aid, as it was originally envisaged, actually contradicts current evolutionary psychology, which has detached itself from metaphysics and ethics, to degree that it imagines animals and sometimes plants as similarly social beings equal to human beings. Should we not respect notion of a continuing creation, at work in both natural history and human history? Is reality of divine action something that can be considered in light of divine knowledge, if not in terms of secular human knowledge? Should we not leave space for highly improbable, or for what evidence has not yet verified, or for theories which do not currently stand as legitimate or valid? In this way anti-evolution, creation science, and Intelligent Design (ID) are said not to resonate with modern Orthodox Jews, but this need not mean that this applies to all such theories and paradigms. One suggestion is given in book, for example, of a reversal of typical views of evolution, suggesting that perhaps apes descended from humans, namely from sinful ones (p. 84). The larger context of book thus regards compatibility between and Judaism. Judaism holds a singularly important voice in controversy over evolution, which is nowadays current in some Christian circles, particularly in United States. Another aspect of book that makes this publication very timely has to do with contemporary Jewish identity, place of race concept and practice of eugenics in Zionism. …

The Enduring Value of the Old Testament—An Interesting Quest

AbstractThe period when the Society for Old Testament Study held its first meeting in 1917 marked a major turning point for the study of the Hebrew Bible. This rested on two factors: first, the preceding half-century had witnessed the slow, and often painful, acceptance in Christian and Jewish circles of a modern 'critical' explanation of the historical origin of its writings. Secondly, the context in which serious study of this literature was undertaken had increasingly moved out from a religious forum into that of a wider secular field of cultural and academic interests. The new methodology aimed to show that the Bible presented a worldview agreeable to modern scientific knowledge. In this setting, older, well-worn hermeneutical strategies were abandoned and replaced with new ones consonant with this aim. Prominent among these was a claim to present a historically verifiable demonstration that the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament possessed an enduring value based on its presentation of ideas of social justice, religious monotheism and universal morality. The claims to this uniqueness, however, rapidly lost credibility when fuller knowledge of the social world of antiquity became better known through archaeological and anthropological research. Such claims could be shown to depend largely on the Bible's own polemic. Nevertheless the idea of enduring value bears welcome comparison with comparable concerns to define what entitles any literary work to be regarded as a classic, and to deserve universal approval. Useful criteria can be set out but fail to command any wholly definitive acceptance. Rather, the best that can be achieved is to note those features and qualities which give to certain writings an intrinsic power to generate a continuity of interest and appeal. The history of the interpretation of the Old Testament shows that it performs well in such a context.

Evangelicals and Human Rights: The Continuing Ambivalence of Evangelical Christians' Support for Human Rights

The language and ideas of “international human rights” have become seemingly ubiquitous in modern times. Indeed, within the United States, even many prominent evangelical Christian churches and leaders have sparingly started to use the language of human rights despite earlier misgivings. While there has been important academic discussion concerning the foundational role of Christian theology for the modern human rights regime, and literature discussing the acceptance of human rights within Catholic, mainline Protestant, and even Orthodox Christian circles, gaps remain in the literature concerning the relationship between general human rights norms, language, and culture and evangelical Christian theology.This Article suggests that evangelical Christians have a greater connection to human rights than is often acknowledged (and greater than they often acknowledge themselves). But, it ultimately appears doubtful whether modern evangelical theology is amenable to a robust and deep understanding of human rights. Nonetheless, the recent rise in the number of evangelical non-governmental organizations and the attendant rise in awareness of human rights within evangelical discourse potentially serve as signposts that the uncomfortable dance of evangelicals and the human rights movement may become slightly less awkward over the coming years.

Fulfilment in Matthew

Matthew extensively explored the motif that Jesus was the fulfilment of the Old Testament hopes. In this article investigation is done on the way Matthew employs this motif. The expression of fulfilment of Scripture had an important function in early Christian circles. The Christian faith had to be legitimatized by reference to the Jewish Scriptures. What happened to Jesus and the rise of the Christian church were to be identified as the fulfilment of the promises of the Old Testament. For today’s reader it seems as if Matthew sometimes draws awkward links between Old Testament citations and their fulfilment in Jesus. However, when his hermeneutical method is being mirrored against contemporary interpretative methods, it becomes clear that Matthew used the fulfilment motif in a then acceptable way to strategically and persuasively place Jesus’ ministry within the unfolding plan of God.

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (review)

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. By Don C. Skemer. [Magic in History] (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 327. $75.00 clothbound, $25.00 paperback.) The topic of never fails to arouse interest, even in what Weber described as our disenchanted modern world. Yet I would contend that hardly any two of us can be found today to agree on exactly what the word means. Convinced that empirical historical research will do much to dispel the confusion, the Pennsylvania State University Press recently began its monograph series, Magic in History. Don Skemer's study on medieval represents the latest return on what is already proving to be remarkably profitable investment of scholarly and publishing resources. As Skemer makes clear at the start, the object of his investigation consists of apotropaic texts, handwritten or mechanically printed on . . . writing supports of varying dimensions and around the neck or placed elsewhere on the body for protection against harmful enemies and spirits or to bring health and good fortune (p. 1). He emphasizes that such textual amulets are to be distinguished from talismans - reserved for astrological seals and figures procured and worn for similar purposes - and charms - referring simply to speech acts though again performed with much the same ends in mind (pp. 8-9). The Latin terms signifying his intended objects were, among the church fathers, ligatura and phylacterium, but for most of the Middle Ages charta, cedula, scripttera, scriptura, or breve. Most common among Middle English equivalents were brief and writ. Though the author announces his intention to focus on and their use from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, in fact his book covers the subject well for the whole of the European Middle Ages. What stands out in Skemer's approach is the commendable determination not to fall prey to preconceptions about the dividing line between magic and religion, warning us that rationalism and Orientalism have encouraged most modern scholars to regard medieval as residues of the primitive in ritual practices of the lower orders of society, he insists that an unbiased look reveals them instead as prevalent in the most orthodox Christian circles and just as - perhaps more - common among the elite as in the ranks of illiterate peasants. Late-antique intellectuals like Augustine might have fulminated against as either fraudulent or dependent on demonic intervention, and Caesarius of Aries condemned their use as at best sacrilege. But for most of the centuries between the sixth and the sixteenth, they were accepted by the majority of clergy and laity alike as - in Skemer's words - a renewable source of Christian empowerment (p. 1). No doubt the primary use to which Skemer's volume wEl be put is as guidebook to actual that have survived from the Middle Ages and index of amuletic practices witnessed in the extant sources. …

Fasting, Piety, and Political Anxiety among French Reformed Protestants

Fasting has an ancient and revered place in the many religious traditions that human communities have fostered throughout history and across the globe. In India, to take a modern example, Hindu women commonly carry out ritual fasts or vrats. Fasting, particularly in its collective forms, is also frequent and widespread among western groups that scholars have sometimes described as Abrahamic religions. Muslims annually observe Ramadan, a month of fasting, prayer, and celebration. Jews customarily fast, taking no food or drink from sunup to sundown, several days each year and, most notably, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. For medieval Christians, preparation for the holy feasts of Christmas and Easter meant substantial periods of religious preparation, the well-known Advent and Lenten periods complete with fasting and abstinence from certain foods. In contemporary Christian circles, fasting may be less widely practiced, yet it retains an important place among Roman Catholics and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, to cite but two better-known cases. In short, the utilization of food for purposes of religious devotion and piety, whether through fasting or feasting, has been a long-standing custom within and without western religious culture.

Christianity and Gender Relationships in Japan: Case Studies of Marriage and Divorce in Early Meiji Protestant Circles

It is accepted that Victorian attitudes to love, chastity, marriage, and the family, all rooted in Christianity, played an important part in changing norms of behavior related to gender relationships in Meiji Japan. But writers on Christianity in Meiji Japan have paid little attention to women and the influence of Christian ideals on the actual behavior of Meiji Christians. This paper examines gender interaction in early Meiji Protestant circles and the evidence available for the marriage relationships of five Protestant leaders: Ibuka Kajinosuke, Uemura Masahisa, Ebina Danjo, Kozaki Hiromichi, whose marriages seem to have been successful, and Uchimura Kanzo, whose first marriage was not. Particular attention is paid to four issues: the extent to which the individuals studied had participated in gender interaction in Christian circles before becoming deeply involved, how partners were chosen, how the partnerships developed and, finally, the tensions that arose and what was done about them. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT] KEYWORDS: Meiji Japan - Protestant - converts - marriage - gender relationships - Uchimura Kanzo (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) IN LATE Tokugawa Japan, marriage customs, the role and position of women in the family, and attitudes to female chastity differed according to status and occupation. It was acceptable for elite males to have concubines, and for peasants to sell their daughters into prostitution. Beauty and desirability were the attributes of high-class geisha rather than of ordinary, marriageable, women. Women who belonged to the merchant and farming elite had opportunities for education and were able to take part in cultural pursuits, such as membership in literary circles, on the same terms as men. Female members of the samurai class, however, led more restricted lives. They were educated, but it was an education specifically for women. Their lives centered on the home and subservience to their fathers, their husbands, and their mothers-in-law. While the concept of male-female equality was present, for example in the writings of Ando Shoeki ... and the preaching of Kino ..., the founder of Nyoraikyo ..., Confucian teachings about the inferior status of women were able to reach a wide audience through the use of texts such as Onna daigaku . ... in reading primers for women of all classes (Hirota 1994, 325-27; Kanda 1994; Walthall 1991 and 1998). As is well known, early Japanese visitors to America and other Western countries were surprised by the prominence of women in public life and shocked by the deference paid to them by men (Kume 2002, 253-54). It is therefore not surprising that there was much discussion about the position of women in society in the early Meiji period. The status of women, the relationship between husbands and wives, prostitution and concubinage were among the topics raised by the early enlightenment intellectuals in their journal, Meiroku zasshi ... (Braisted 1976). Saeki Junko (1998) has analyzed the influence of the Victorian concept of love on Meiji literature. In the Tokugawa period, love (iro .) was not linked to chastity and the search for the right marriage partner; it existed outside marriage and focused on the sexual act as a way of transcending everyday experience. Sexual activity belonged to the sacred, not the profane. But in the Meiji period, iro came to seem uncivilized and was replaced by ai ., the Victorian concept of romantic but chaste love which made sexual activity a conjugal duty rather than the goal. Although the pleasure quarters remained the easiest place for novelists to explore gender relationships into the 1890s, the relationships sought by the heroes and heroines of writers such as Tsubouchi Shoyo ... and even Ozaki Koyo ... were spiritual rather than physical (Saeki 1998, 7-64; Kohiyama 2005, 1-7). It is accepted that Christianity played an important part in these changes (Saeki 1998, 13-16; Kohiyama 2005, 7-11). …

THE IMAGE AND GLORY OF GOD IN JACOB OF SERUG'S HOMILY, «ON THAT CHARIOT THAT EZEKIEL THE PROPHET SAW»

Jacob of Serug († 521) is, after Ephrem of Nisibis, the most beloved of theologian poets among the Syriac-speaking Christians of the East. Until recently, though, he was not well known in Western Christian circles and, when discussed at all, was usually associated with Severus of Antioch and Philoxenus of Mabbug as part of a triad of the most important, early sixth-century «Monophysites» theologians. This article seeks rather to examine one of Jacob's works, the long verse homily on Ezekiel's chariot vision, against the background of those traditions common in particular to Eastern Christianity and looking to their origins in the Judaism of the Second Temple. The homily conjoins three biblical texts: Genesis 1:26; Ezekiel 1:26, 28; and Phillipians 2:6. Its point is simple and fully in accord with, especially, pre-Nicene Christianity: the one who appeared to Moses and the prophets is the same one who was born of Mary Theotokos. While making this point, however, Jacob draws on — and occasionally opposes and criticizes — originally Second Temple Jewish traditions around the figure of Adam, mystical ascent to the divine throne, and the object of that ascent, the vision of the glorious form of God. He is thus a witness to the currency of these traditions in Christian circles, perhaps especially among the monks. His answer is the Eucharist. In the divine liturgy, he argues, everything that the prophet saw is present, and the one whom the ancients longed to go up to heaven to see, the one who rides on the throne of the cherubim, is present to the Christian in the bread and wine of communio

The Postexilic Exile in Third Isaiah: Isaiah 61:1-3 in Light of Second Temple Hermeneutics

Isaiah 61 is a text that has received an enormous amount of attention in the history of interpretation and in modern scholarly discourse. In Christian circles, this is no doubt due in large part to its use in Luke 4 to refer to the ministry of Jesus. Although the passage seems rather straightforward at first glance, further inspection shows it to be a complex text that articulates its message through a col lage of allusions to prior texts and traditions. In addition, developing an under standing of its present canonical function in the book of Isaiah is an arduous task and is open to a variety of interpretations.1 In this article, I will examine Isaiah 61 in its postexilic context, a context that is not just historical but also theological and hermeneutical. I will argue that Isaiah 61 provides one of the earliest attestation of the idea of a theological exile that extends beyond the temporal and geographical bounds of the Babylonian captiv ity. Furthermore, the subsequent appropriation of the text by later authors of the Trito-Isaianic corpus and its redaction into the canonical form of Third Isaiah and the book of Isaiah as a whole reveal a development of this concept of the ongoing exile that would flourish in later Second Temple writings. Thus, Isaiah 61 plays an important and pivotal role in the development of theological motifs and hermeneu tical methods during the postexilic period.

The Possibility of a Gender-Transcendent God: Taking Macmurray Forward

This paper borrows from philosopher John Macmurray's insightsin order to advance work in feminist theology relating to perceptions of God. Mac-murray argues that we cannot have an adequate concept of a personalGod, if our concept of the human person is inadequate.He asserts that we are persons by virtue of our agency and our personal relationships; hence, the growth and development of persons requires communities of equals. Beliefin God, then, is an attitude expressed through behaviour that creates and sustains such communities. As feminist theologians indicate, a‘male’ God is a stumbling block to equality; yet, thealogy remains on the periphery of mainstream academic and Christian circles. Hence, this paper sets the groundwork for a truly gender-transcendent concept of God, examining some contemporary language liturgies and employing Macmurray's portrayal of a supreme agent, in an attempt to resolve the main problems encountered by inclusive God-language.

Leadership: a Lateral Perspective

SummaryThis article draws on three contemporary writers on leadership, Keith Grint, John Paul Lederach and Julia Middleton, to explore ‘inverse learning’, ‘accidental sagacity’ and ‘leading beyond authority’ and what such insights can bring to the practice of leadership within and beyond Christian circles. The book of the Acts of the Apostles is used illustratively to emphasise these aspects of leadership, and also to stress the importance of ‘followship’.