Theological Resources Research Articles

Vulnerability in the arena of strength

There is an ambiguity inherent in vulnerability as a part of human life. Beyond mere limitation, recent interdisciplinary research shows that the condition of vulnerability also contains essential life-sustaining resources. This ambiguity is particularly interesting in the context of embodied competition, such as sports. The present study of Christian sermons held on the occasion of international sporting events explores to what degree and in what way the homilies mobilize religious resources to shed light on this ambivalence of vulnerability. The study shows that the sermons in general tend to confirm rather than challenge a conventional conceptualization of vulnerability as limitation. However, it also shows a critical potential, explicitly present in some of the sermons, of mobilizing theological and religious resources for providing a more multi-faceted and even affirmative interpretation of vulnerability in the context of competitive sports.

Charred Root of Meaning: Continuity, Transgression, and the Other in Christian Tradition by Philipp W Rosemann (review)

into some of the major developments in politics and the economy. He expresses a real understanding of the challenges facing politicians who try and do the right thing by the country. He tells the story of the famous budget debacle of January 1982, when John Bruton’s decision not to exempt children’s clothing and footwear from the imposition of VAT led to the collapse of the government. He reveals that Bruton’s intention was actually to restrict the measure to clothing and footwear for adults, but he was dissuaded as ‘the Department of Finance recommended in trenchant terms, under my signature, that an exclusion of children would probably be unworkable and wide open to abuse’. The episode made him listen more closely to politicians’ concerns. AsgovernoroftheCentralBank,heoversawIreland’stransitiontotheeuro and, almost a decade before the financial crash, publicly expressed concerns about the overheating of the economy, particularly the Dublin housing market. The crash gave him cause for deep reflection on the responsibilities of civil servants and politicians to act at all times in the public interest. The book is a truly honest assessment by the author of his life and work and is utterly devoid of any notion of self-importance. His modesty, however, cannot disguise the important contribution he made to public service in this country. Stephen Collins is a political columnist with the Irish Times. PhilippWRosemann, Charred Root of Meaning: Continuity, Transgression, and the Other in Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018), 237 pages. In a theological context, tradition refers to the apostolic heritage and the development of the Christian Church through history. For all of its virtues, Christian tradition carries risks for both the Christian and non-Christian. Professor Philip W Rosemann, a German-born philosopher and Chair of Philosophy at NUI Maynooth explores the development and the implications of Christian tradition in his latest book. He offers us a unique perspective into the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the development and understanding of tradition. I appreciated how Rosemann’s study highlights both the positive and negative power of the Christian Tradition, to recognise Studies • volume 110 • number 438 264 Summer 2021: Book Reviews and to disrespect the other. To place his contribution in context, Rosemann details his study of tradition, beginning from Moses and God’s radical and unprecedented entry into human affairs, and spanning across time to the present day. Before launching into how Rosemann understands Christian tradition specifically,itisworthrecallingthattraditionisageneralhumanphenomenon, with significance for cultures and societies. Conventionally, tradition is read as the transmission of beliefs, statements, and customs from one generation to the next. Catholic theology, for instance, understands revelation as having two necessary well-springs: Scripture and tradition. Rosemann not only resources theologians and Scripture for his task but also utilizes philosophers to argue for a renewed appreciation of tradition’s dynamic character. For Rosemann, tradition is never a settled matter. Irruption is specific to his understanding of tradition – Divine irruption or transgression from outside into human affairs. In his first three chapters, Rosemann considers that God’s transformation of tradition is a vertical movement of the Divine into humans’ affairs. In both expressing and developing this point, the author initially signals two great moments of irruption in salvation history: Exodus and the Incarnation. Both these historically changing moments are explored for their respective significance in the development of a Christian tradition. In delineating the dynamic operative in the Christian tradition, Rosemann first utilises Michael Foucault’s philosophical understanding of transgression. In doing so, Rosemann uses philosophical terms to narrate and give meaning to the Christian faith’s significance and its self-confessed priority and privilege amongst the other faith traditions. Transgression describes the encounter with the Divine and marks it as unique and distinctive amongst world religions. Transgression by the Divine is not simply a theoretical position in the existentialdevelopmentoftradition.Rosemann’sbookclarifiestransgressions as crafting relational spaces of encounter. Here, one encounters the redemptive out-pouring of divine presence itself. Illustrating Foucault’s specific understanding and application of transgression as a resource for theology, Rosemann signposts an interdisciplinary approach to studying Christian tradition. This reach toward an interdisciplinary approach to human meaning is a value for theology and...

Gratitude Needs a Giver: Why Political Science Needs Intelligent Design

This article presents Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy. Classical liberalism is under renewed attack from many directions. Many of its most notable defenders claim that the liberal order has no need of distinctively Christian theological resources. This essay scrutinizes that claim and argues for the necessity of a Christian doctrine of providence. KEYWORDS: God, gratitude, Jonah Goldberg, J. Gresham Machen, political science, Western civilization, providence, historicism, John Calvin

Did God Answer That Prayer?

Abstract In his recent book Petitionary Prayer, Scott Davison presents an epistemological challenge to petitionary prayer. He asks: If S prays for God to bring about event E, and E in fact occurs, how could one be justified in believing that E was an answer to S’s prayer? Apart from direct revelation in which God explicitly provides reasons for believing that E was an answer to prayer, Davison argues, S could not know that S’s prayer had been answered by God. Thus, the person praying should remain agnostic about answered prayers. I argue that in failing to attend to two theological resources available in the Christian tradition—the concept of spiritual senses and teachings about the relational nature of prayer—Davison’s conclusion is premature. Drawing upon recent literature on the epistemology of perception and the theology of prayer, I argue that one can be confident that God has answered one’s prayers.

Can America be Saved? A Pastoral Response to Racism and Covid-19 and an Appeal for Dreams, Visions, and Imagination

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the possibility of salvation for the United States of America in light of COVID-19 and systemic racism through the practice of dreams, vision and imagination. I begin with an exploration of visions, dreams, and imagination as a gateway to holistic ways of knowing, being, and doing. Then, through a biblical analysis of apocalyptic texts from the books of Daniel and Revelation, I ground concepts of dreams, visions and imagination as ways through which salvation is realized. Finally, drawing on Wesleyan theology, womanist theological analyses, Jungian thought and practical theological resources, I discuss theological and practical means of salvation which underscore the need for continuous social and theological engagement and creative expression.

Divine Action and the Human Mind

Divine Action and the Human Mind

Sociology of a disciplinary bifurcation: Bruno Latour and his move from philosophy/theology to sociology in the early 1970s

This article analyzes Bruno Latour’s transition from theology to sociology between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s. The study cross-analyzes the philosophical field of the 1970s with the progress of interaction rituals specific to disciplinary integration. By examining his Master’s degree in philosophy and a lecture carried out during his thesis, plus the report of his stay in Ivory Coast, it is possible to identify several stages of a disciplinary bifurcation. First anchored to the metaphysical sector of the philosophical field, Latour – like his masters André Malet, Jean Brun and Claude Bruaire – tried to dissolve the boundary between philosophy and theology. Nourished with Rudolf Bultmann’s hermeneutics – which generates a particularly powerful emotional energy –, the young philosopher drew from the new theological resources provided by Vatican II Council the instruments for a conversion to sociology. Before that, following in the Council’s focus on prayer as the very core of the practice of believers, he had tried to turn prayer into an adequate mode of litany for analyzing texts. He then drew on the post-colonial opening of Vatican II to engage in the field of sociology, the Council having exhausted classical metaphysical questions. His discovery of the effects of colonial domination also played a fundamental role in mobilizing once again some emotional energy. Latour’s disciplinary reclassification just before beginning his laboratory ethnography in California is based on a reassessment of the epistemological possibilities born from the theological innovations of Vatican II.

Theological Wiggle Room as a Resource in Ordinary Theology: Significance for Ecclesiology, Leadership, and Personal Development

Abstract Ordinary theology is often described as unrefined and imprecise in comparison to academic theology. A recent ethnographic study of vital youth ministries discovered a similar pattern, which the study coined “theological wiggle room.” This article discusses how a lack of precision may serve as a possible resource for theology in the ordinary, and thereby why theological wiggle room may be of significance. The article argues that a certain theological wiggle room engages centripetal and centrifugal dynamics. In other words, the lack of precision should not be interpreted as a shortage or deficiency alone, but as a significant quality of theology in the ordinary – in particular with regard to ecclesiology, leadership and personal development.

Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America by Ashley Reed

Reviewed by: Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America by Ashley Reed Ashley C. Barnes REED, ASHLEY. Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 262 pp. $19.95 paperback; open access e-book. Over the past two decades, literary criticism has situated itself as a post-secular discipline by negotiating between disenchantment and re-enchantment. Some critics have urged us to question the value of secular skepticism and to rediscover the pleasures of enchantment: to cease digging down and standing back (Rita Felski), to read reparatively (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), to embrace vibrant matter (Jane Bennett). Meanwhile, disenchantment has pursued a complementary path, deconstructing secularism as modernity's most pernicious form of mystification. Think of Bruno Latour's claim that moderns worship facts as their own preferred fetishes, or Talal Asad's argument that secularist claims of liberal pluralism simply offer a cover for Western imperialism. Ashley Reed works both sides of the case. Her book is in part a skeptical exposure of secularism as a program that domesticated women and religion to free the public sphere for male-dominated market capitalism. Her book could also be seen as pursuing the enchantment of the material world, arguing as it does for women's power to invest matter, including their own bodies, with spiritual meaning. But Reed walks a productive line between debunking the allure of disenchantment and promoting the value of re-enchantment. She seeks out the "excluded middle" occupied by persons for whom "the impossibility of total self-determination is in many ways simply a fact, an everyday occurrence" (23). The women writers who occupy this middle ground marshal the resources of theology and of the novel to imagine alternate ways of exercising their will. Reed's balance of generosity and skepticism makes a potent case for the value of this novelistic theologizing. Her book's fundamental goal is to define agency as a viable, non-secular contrast to autonomy. In the process of correcting our secular prejudices about agency, Reed's book also aims to revise literary critical reading methods. Women's religious agency offers Reed a fulcrum for the critique of the secular self, because secularism built its autonomous ideal against a caricature of believing women: at the mercy of their emotions and bodies, irrational and incapable of free choice. Secularism wants us to believe in the autonomous self as "enlightened and free from supernatural coercion" (22). Agency, by contrast, can circulate and empower multiple persons in a community. Agency does not require, as autonomy often does, escape from tradition. Agency can "[adapt] to the power structures within which one lives" (19). The women who write the narratives that Reed examines, and the characters portrayed in those narratives, are neither passive believers nor lone wolves. They are busy making meaning for themselves and others. [End Page 321] There is, for example, the agency exercised in the speech acts that we see in Catherine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods. Such speech changes minds and political affiliations, and it is grounded in faith, specifically a recasting of Christ as a salvific preacher rather than a sacrificial atonement. Likewise, in writing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs accesses agency through, not despite, religious faith. If we read Linda Brent's story as a spiritual autobiography akin to Nat Turner's and Jarena Lee's, Reed argues, then we see Brent claiming authority to speak by virtue of her battle against sin, calling on God as her judge and on readers as silent witnesses to her testimony. Brent claims interpretive authority when she counters Dr. Flint's reading of the Bible with her own. Both the authors and the women in these texts are themselves "heaven's interpreters," in the phrase of Reed's title. Representation and interpretation are the ways they exercise agency. Perhaps because that exercise lies so close to critics' own professional activity, and because we have long defined our professional activity as secular, we are liable to interpret in favor of the secular ideal of autonomy. But, Reed argues, it is time that we reform that liability. In...

United with Christ in the spirit: The pneumatological dimension of the doctrine of justification

AbstractAn important aspect of the consensus reached in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification was the understanding of justification as union with Christ. From the Lutheran side, this understanding was dependent on the contributions of the Finnish school of Luther research. The Finns’ understanding of justification has been criticized for its insufficient pneumatological basis, and this criticism might also be applied to the Joint Declaration. This article points to resources in Luther's theology as well as perspectives from Pentecostal theology that might contribute to developing the pneumatological dimension of the doctrine of justification.

White Jesus and Antisemitism: Toward an Antiracist and Decolonial Christology

AbstractThis article argues that traditional Christology is intimately bound up with a triumphalist agenda that denies Jesus’ Jewishness and is structurally antisemitic. Taking an antiracist stance, the article argues that systemic rethinking of Christianity’s theological resources is needed, which must be anti‐antisemitic and antiracist. This involves reconfiguring how we take on board Jesus’ Jewishness in a post‐Holocaust context and recognizing Jesus as a Jewish prophet. From this, it is tentatively suggested that rethinking the role of the Messiah involves understanding a Levinasian Messiah who does not come, but rather calls upon us to act in a Messianic role before the Other as an ethical imperative.

Micah: An International Theological Commentary

Micah: An International Theological Commentary

The Christology of Veli‐Matti Kärkkäinen re‐visited from the perspective of Scandinavian Creation Theology

AbstractThis article is a response to Veli‐Matti Kärkkäinen's Christology from the perspective of Scandinavian creation theology. Starting from the identification of a common post‐liberal horizon, together with similar challenges from anti‐liberal theology, the author enters into a critical examination of Kärkkäinen's systematic theology elaborating on the possible contributions from Gustaf Wingren. First, the significance of creation as horizon of understanding for Christology is discussed. Second, the relationship between anthropology and Christology is investigated, with a special focus on theological resources to transcend the dichotomies and the zero‐sum game that places God and humans in opposition as competitors.

Building Our Power to Care for the World: Integrating Pastoral Theology, Mental Health, and Community Organizing

ABSTRACT This article presents a roadmap for pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, mental health professionals, and the community-at-large to integrate community organizing with the resources of pastoral theology, spiritual care, and mental health to creatively and constructively transform the world. It argues that such an integration presents life-giving opportunities for justice and healing-oriented social revolution. To accomplish these ends, pastoral theologians, spiritual caregivers, and mental health professionals must take seriously community organizing’s goal of organizing people and organizing money to care for the world.

Biblical theology for oral-preference communities

Teaching in a non-individualist oral-preference culture in Indonesia, I have encountered the mismatch of theology developed for Western cultures and the needs of my students and their congregations that characterizes much postcolonial theological education. The use of proverbs and poetry as resources for theology addresses the need for theology to inspire and guide, but not the critical function of guarding responsible interpretation. Western theology has done the latter via abstraction of the biblical material into consistent propositional systems, an approach that also functions to inspire and guide for many of the highly literate people who developed Western theology. This connects with the deep Western philosophical tradition of finding order through abstraction, whereas oral and even literate Asian cultures create order through ritual. The Bible is not Western, however, and we show how the biblical story or theo-drama guides, guards, and inspires in a way that opens space for local theology. We then show how the identity of believers within this story is best developed for people in non-individualist cultures through ecclesial metaphors that in turn connect with divine metaphors. Three such “divine-ecclesial institutions” are sketched, namely family, kingdom, and cult. They shed light on missiological issues such as the priority of personal growth versus ritual observance. They provide a way of organizing the biblical material that offers a better starting point for the dialogue of contextualization than systematic Western theology.

Patriotism & Moral Theology

This essay examines the question of the moral justification of patriotism, given a Kantian view of morality as requiring an equal respect for every human being. The essay considers the background in Kant's moral theology for his cosmopolitanism. It then considers an extreme version of cosmopolitanism that denies a proper place for love of one's country, and it engages with a contemporary atheist cosmopolitan, Seyla Benhabib, suggesting that there are resources in Kant's moral theology to ground the hope that she expresses but does not succeed in grounding. Finally, it considers patriotism as a perfection of cosmopolitanism, in the same way that love of an individual can be a perfection of love of humanity. The essay suggests that defensible versions of cosmopolitanism put constraints on what kind of love of one's own country is morally permissible. But these constraints require the background in a Kantian moral theology.

Not all transcendence is created equal: Distinguishing ontological, phenomenological, and subjective beliefs about transcendence

ABSTRACTPsychologists have generated numerous measures designed to capture the “spiritual,” “religious,” and “transcendent” structures of human cognition, emotion, and behavior. Researchers often identify transcendence as the unifying element that brings together these constructs, but the concept itself lacks precision. Namely, they confound the distinctions between the different kinds of content that populate what is actually a diverse and dynamic set of belief systems regarding transcendence, reducing transcendence to its functional outputs. This paper outlines a more robust theoretical framework by drawing upon the resources of theology and philosophy. The aim is to describe a model that clarifies both the content and function of a variety of transcendent belief systems, which includes at least three clearly distinct but interrelated domains: ontological transcendence, which conceives of reality in terms of supernatural categories of being; phenomenological transcendence, which focuses on traversing the divide between the self and others or the self and the world; and subjective transcendence, which has in view the ever-shifting boundary that constitutes the mundane self, the crossing of which is always yet to come.

Judaism and the Contingency of Religious Law in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

AbstractFor Kant’s moral universalism, contingent religious law is legitimate only when it serves as a means of fulfilling the moral law. Though Kant uses traditional theological resources to account for the possibility of “statutory ecclesiastical law” in historical religions, he denies this possibility to Jewish law. Something like Kant’s logic appears in the work of some of his intellectual successors who continue to define Christianity in terms of its moral superiority to Judaism while attempting to excise remaining “Jewish” elements from it. A more adequate account of the Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and the origins of Christianity exposes deficiencies in Kant’s universalizing logic which seems to deny any intrinsic value to historical religions. A possible alternative may lie in a modified account of the relationship between the moral law and religious law, perhaps nourished by Jewish thought, including the rabbinic tradition of the Noachide commandments.

Barth's christological ecclesiology as theological resource for evangelical free church ecclesiology

AbstractThis essay argues that Barth's christological ecclesiology is worthy of consideration as a resource to fund a more robust and distinctly theological evangelical free church ecclesiology. Specifically, Barth's articulation of the church as witness, combined with his emphases on the gathering, upbuilding and sending of the church, all resonate with a distinctly free church vantage point. Additionally, I argue that Barth's theological interpretation of Matthew 18:20 (a verse of great significance for the free church tradition) further reveals his compatibility with free church ecclesiology. I conclude that while the traditional problems associated with evangelical reception of Barth need to be addressed and his doctrine of the church as grounded in Christ (and thus election) critically assessed, Barth does end up offering a resource that can inform the development of a theologically robust evangelical free church ecclesiology.

Paths to Wholeness: Comparative Theology and the Ecumenical Project

This essay explores four main points in outlining the changing relation between ecumenism and interfaith engagement. First, it describes an ironic shift: Where once world mission was the common motive for Christian ecumenical engagement, now differences among Christians over response to religious diversity are themselves of church-dividing status. Second, it argues there is a new urgency for ecumenism as the necessary resource for adequate engagement with the religions—a new way for religious diversity to motivate ecumenism. Third, the essay traces the development of comparative theology as the appropriate theological resource for this new engagement. Fourth, it describes the convergence toward a trinitarian theology as a common element that marks both the recent ecumenical movement and the newer response to religious diversity.