Theological Grammar Research Articles

Grammatical thomism and how (not) to speak about God

ABSTRACT I argue that grammatical thomism helps to clarify certain problems in philosophical theology by focusing attention on the parameters of coherent God-talk. By drawing on figures like David Burrell, Brian Davies, Kathryn Tanner, and Denys Turner, I show that the first rule of theological grammar is to avoid talking about God as if God were some sort of thing existing alongside the world. In fact, Aquinas concedes that we cannot really know what God is at all. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s later emphasis on meaning as use helps us to see why we can still talk intelligibly about God by focusing on the use of the word more than its referent. I connect this with the work of Stephen Mulhall and Cora Diamond on the nature of riddles, and suggest that this genre is one way of illuminating the peculiar grammar of certain Christian doctrines: in particular, the doctrine of the incarnation and of creation out of nothing. Finally, I look outside Christian contexts to the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedānta, and argue that the language and imageries of non-dualism can provoke us into reconsidering the essence of Christian grammar and alert us to some of the therapeutic possibilities of grammatical thomism.

Figural Reading of the Old Testament and Christian Formation

Paul's reading of Israel's scriptures in Galatians 4:19-31 is a christologically ruled reading motivated by the theological grammar of the Law and the Prophets. The exegesis of Old Testament scripture is a mode of catechesis and Christian formation for Paul, rather than a preparatory step on the way to formation, along with allegory understood as theological insight (theoria) into the historical deeds (gesta) narrated in Genesis 21 and Isaiah 54. Paul's christological reading of the Law and the Prophets reflects his conviction that the Old Testament does more than point to Christ in an eschatological sense, but also discloses Christ on its own semantic level. The early church did not depart from this conviction once Israel's scriptures were brought into relation with the New Testament, but continued to read the Old Testament as a witness to Christ in its own right, as is evident from the Nicene Creed and Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. The voice of the Old Testament and its built-in riches arise from its original relationship to Christ and give birth to New Testament surplus and the expansion of God's marriage covenant with Israel to the Gentiles. In this salvation-historical expansion from Israel's election to the adoption of the Gentiles, the Old Testament continues to speak its christological notes alongside the New Testament, rather than behind it, and its role in catechesis remains essential to Christian formation in the church.

The doctrine of participation in Augustine'stotus Christusecclesiology

AbstractAugustine's understanding of the church as part of thetotus Christus– the ‘whole Christ’ – has become an important resource in contemporary theology, offering a robust vision of the church's union with God. Yet a key critique maintains that it threatens to elide the distinction between the perfected Christ and the created church. This article addresses this issue by asking how thetotus Christusdoctrine relates to the doctrine of participation. For Augustine, participation is a metaphysical category that expresses the creature's dependent, non-divine status, its essential being out of nothing. Thetotus Christusdoctrine is most explicitly an exegetical, not metaphysical doctrine. Nevertheless, by putting these two facets of Augustine's thought together, we can see the way in which they mutually reinforce the view that the astonishing claims of unity in thetotus Christusare structured by a larger theological grammar that distinguishes God and creature.

After the Theological Turn: Towards a Credible Theological Grammar

AbstractThe theological turn provokes much debate on the nature of phenomenology but almost none on the definition of theology. I argue, however, that the theological turn not only enlarges the field of phenomenological exploration but also provides theology with a conceptual apparatus that can contribute to formulating rigorous theological positions. In the first step, I question the debate dominated by philosophers of religion which created a normative – restrictive – category of the theological turn. Instead, I argue that the full potential of the theological turn in phenomenology will only be revealed when we accept it as a descriptive category – a tendency that has always in fact been present in phenomenology. In the second step, I move towards theology to argue that the phenomenological engagements with the original theological thoughts are less de-theologized than they are transformed and in their new version offered back to theology, for which they can have crucial relevance. Hence, what is truly interesting after the theological turn is not so much the boundary between theology and phenomenology but their mutual and undeniable encounters.

Paul the apostle and distance educator: Ancient pedagogy for the pandemic era

AbstractPerceptions about remote theological education inevitably cluster around questions of embodiment, community, and unity. The letters of the apostle Paul have quite a bit to say about these themes. This essay examines Paul's treatment of distance in the formation and education of Christians, focused around the image of the “body of Christ” in 1 Corinthians and the “presence” of Paul's absence through his letter‐writing. Reflecting on distance education with reference to Paul's Corinthian correspondence proves useful in developing a biblical and theological grammar for understanding remote formation, including an alternative to traditional theological anthropology. The 2020–2022 global pandemic has underscored the importance and urgency of developing such a reassessment of theological formation. Following the lessons learned from Paul as distance educator, the essay concludes with a series of questions for institutions to ask themselves as they seek a way forward in the pandemic era.

Learning to See God in the School of Creation: Theoria and the Teleological Character of Creation in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron

AbstractThis article offers a constructive reading of Basil’s doctrine of creation in the Hexaemeron in order to articulate the relation between Christ the divine Logos and the logos of particular creatures. Tracing two lines of thought in Basil’s homilies on the six days of creation – (1) an ambivalence about the possibility of a material substrate in creation and (2) a teleological understanding of creation – I argue that the true ontology of the creature is something realized only eschatologically as a result of the divine Logos working out in creatures what they are to become. Basil’s ability to order creaturely speculation within a spiritual pedagogy of theoria allows him to articulate the nature of creation as something that is both unknowable (for now) and yet something to be realized (in the eschaton). Though these themes remain underdeveloped in Basil’s thought, when read constructively, the Hexaemeron provides an insightful theological grammar to express the divine Logos as immanent to the logos of creaturely beings and, at the same time, to name creaturely being as an eschatological gift, the end‐product of the divine Logos bringing to realization the creative purposes and powers of each and every being.

Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views

Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views

Theological Hermeneutics, Exegesis, and J. R. Daniel Kirk’s A Man Attested by God

ABSTRACT J. R. Daniel Kirk’s book A Man Attested by God attempts to undermine recent arguments for “early high Christology” in general and “divine” Christology in the synoptics more particularly. This essay judges Kirk’s study to obscure the narrative Christologies of the Synoptics more than it illumines them, exhibiting the pitfalls of exegesis inattentive to three interrelated disciplines: recent hermeneutical developments, literary and historical details in the texts under discussion, and the church’s precise theological grammar.

The Elder Testament: Canon Theology Trinity

The Elder Testament: Canon Theology Trinity

Cracking the Eurocentric Code: A Battle on the Banks of the ‘New Blood Rivers’

Belief in divine privilege or God’s creation of a volk is fundamental a motif in the propulsion of the superiority of one race against another in the world, ipso facto , the continuous management of systems of knowledge, authority, economics, and a ‘world civilization’ now quintessentially fundamentalist and racially fascist are effects of this deeply hidden and coded belief. Apartheid simply, is a zenith of this supersessionist (replacement of Israel from the Bible with European white) world enunciated since the justification of the commodification and dispensability of black lives. To elucidate this thesis, this article first offers a presentation of Cone’s theological grammar. Second, we punctuate the value of self-criticality as an indispensable criterion by demonstrating that Cone was engaged critically in Black Theology of Liberation’s (BTL) internal discourses not only to clarify the relationship between Sunday and Saturday religiosities, but to distinguish and distance BTL from idolatrous imaginations of knowledge and history. Black faith oozes from the volcanic, rapturous explosion that dismantles the divide between Sunday and Saturday religions. Third, we make the point about the ghettoization of Cone’s theology at its gestation and by this we seek to demonstrate this continuous relegation of the school to residential alienation and nihilism in the battle of ideas. For this reason, the article argues, cracking the “Western code,” to break the coalition of black experience with the white power structure, is the space where BTL might have to dwell in the battle of ‘New Blood Rivers.’

“You Possess The Land That Belongs To All Salvadorans”: Archbishop Óscar Romero and Ordinary Violence

AbstractThe essay focuses on the notion of ordinary violence in the homiletical and literary corpus of Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador. Focusing especially on the reality of landlessness, I attend to Romero’s characterization of the inability of people to access land and livelihood as itself a form of violence, which he understands to be an attack upon the dignity of those deprived of what they need to survive and to flourish. The essay then turns to the assumptions about the world that make the perception of ordinary violence possible, arguing that such violence assumes and elaborates upon the theological grammar of creation as a common gift. I proceed to sketch the moral and theological landscape opened up by this belief about creation, suggesting some of the possibilities it generates for moral description and agency. For instance, Romero’s understanding of ordinary violence considerably complicates commonplace conceptions of thievery—a complexity especially evident in his claim that some Salvadoran oligarchs are like thieves because they take the land that belongs to all.

Grammar of theology: logical argumentation from Origen to the Cappadocian Fathers

The article outlines the philosophical and linguistic background of the Post- Nicene theological debates concerning the relationship between the Father and the Son. A sharp focus dwells of the provenance of the term hypostasis, the phi­losophical and grammatical understanding of the terms hypokeimenon and ousia and the Stoic definition of the signifier and thing signified. The article shows new aspects of the anti-Eunomian polemics of the Cappadocian fathers, which come into sight due to comparison of theological concepts with Hellenic linguistic and grammatical theories. In such a way, the comparison demonstrates methodologi­cal and technical strand of the theological argumentation of the Cappadocian fa­thers and their affinity for the exegetic methodology of Origen.

The Collection of Grammatical Sophismata in ms London, bl, Burney 330. An Exploratory Study

Manuscript London, British Library, Burney 330 contains an anonymous collection of grammatical sophisms, dating in all probability from early 13th-century France or England, and all based on problematic biblical, liturgical or religious propositions. After a presentation of the manuscript and collection, this article examines two analysis tools that are applied in the majority of the sophisms, viz. a distinction between three layers of grammatico-semantic perfection or completeness, and the grammatical and semantic supposition doctrines. It appears that these sophisms pay prominent attention to improper or figurative supposition, but are not intended for highly advanced readers. These preliminary results suggest that the Burney Sophismata Collection constituted an exercise tool to support textbook-based instruction in theological grammar, which was developed by such masters as Peter the Chanter and William de Montibus in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

Prayerful Dispossession and the Grammar of Thinking Theologically: Sarah Coakley and Gillian Rose

AbstractGillian Rose's re-thinking of Hegel in the wake of twentieth century ‘right’ and ‘left’ wing Hegelianisms has offered occasion for a recovery of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as more than simply the narration of the way consciousness absorbs its objects, as textbook accounts often suggest. Rose's suggestion is that Hegel offers a program of radical criticism that destabilises the modern ego in speculative thought itself. Sarah Coakley's recent first volume, of a proposed four, of her systematic theology triangulating Trinity, prayer and dispossessive spiritual practices provides a fruitful dialogue partner for Rose's project in that Coakley offers a mode of thinking about prayer deeply attentive to the shape of spiritual discipline and it's relation to theological grammar. This paper contests that it is precisely in the non-objectivity of divine being, as thought by Rose and Coakley, that we find resources for conceptualising thinking itself as a dispossessive spiritual act. The theological and the spiritual (theory and praxis) cannot, therefore, be partitioned out without violence being done to the act of thinking itself.

Corpus Mysticum and Religious Experience: Henry, Lacoste and Marion

AbstractWhile usually denoting the church and/or the sacrament of the Eucharist, the ‘mystical body of Christ’ has become a theological grammar for Catholic phenomenologists Michel Henry, Jean‐Yves Lacoste and Jean‐Luc Marion to think through the possibility of religious experience. This article traces out some of the richly detailed accounts of religious experience proffered by Henry, Lacoste and Marion, paying heed to how they narrate the non‐worldly, invisible disclosure of that religious experiencing. The final section outlines a deeper integration of the three by highlighting the need for an encounter with Christ to be both non‐worldly and worldly, between presence and absence, and thus an experience that is concrete, lived, but also mediated by the visible church.

Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar by Paul Griffiths

Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar by Paul Griffiths

The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy by A. Edward Siecienski

BOOK REVIEWS 503 tends to produce bad art. “If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting” (Collingwood, Principles of Art, 325). I take it that Griffiths would agree, even as he would give the point a more theological expression. A supreme virtue of Intellectual Appetite is that its author has borrowed liberally from the entire tradition. The book bristles with insights. Its formulations bear serious consideration. Griffiths has freely given us a valuable contribution to theological grammar, one that we should acknowledge with gratitude and from which we can learn much. This is true, even if (on his own premises) it would not be correct to say that we stand in his debt. ROBERT MINER Baylor University Waco, Texas The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. By A. EDWARD SIECIENSKI. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 368. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-19-537204-5. Edward Siecienski has written a valuable history of the doctrinal controversy of the filioque, the Western addition to the Creed of Constantinople I (381) meaning that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Siecienski says that his book “is, first and foremost, a theological work” (vii). He gives not merely a review of the evidence from one of the longest and most complicated disputes in Christian history, but an explicit theological interpretation that will illuminate and challenge a spectrum of interested readers. After the introduction, ten chapters trace the history from the New Testament witness concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit to the study of the filioque in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This last chapter ends with an examination of the important 2003 Agreed Statement of the North American Orthodox-CatholicTheologicalConsultation.In succinct treatments of individual authors and events, Siecienski elucidates a great number of competing theologies concerning the Holy Spirit’s procession. His perspective through this historical narrative features Maximus the Confessor’s Letter to Marinus, which offers what Siecienski calls “a theologically sound hermeneutic capable of bringing together the East and West on the issue of the procession” (215). Because so much of the book hinges on the argument from Maximus in his letter, it is worthwhile to consider at some length Siecienski’s study of that seventh-century monk whose BOOK REVIEWS 504 life bridged East and West and whose teaching developed orthodox theology through the Monothelite controversy. Relying upon the pioneering scholarship of Polycarp Sherwood, Siecienski dates the Letter to Marinus to 645 or 646 as an authentic work by Maximus. This means that Maximus records the earliest Greek animadversion against the Western use of the filioque, and no further objection is known from the East until the controversies during the time of Photius of Constantinople (d. 895). Maximus wrote this letter to the priest Marinus so as to defend the living Bishop of Rome, Pope Theodore, an ardent opponent of the Monothelites, from Constantinople’s attack on two doctrinal points, one concerning the Incarnation and the other concerning the theology of the Holy Spirit’s procession. Siecienski believes that the Letter to Marinus clearly explicates not only the thought of Maximus and of Rome in the seventh century, but also, as he boldly claims, “the patristic mind on the procession of the Holy Spirit” (11; cf. 80). Siecienski writes: “Maximus began the Letter by addressing the accusations made against Pope Theodore’s confession that ‘The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son’ (ejkporeuvesqai kajk tou~ UiJou~ Pneu~ma toV a{gion), starting with the charge that the teaching was novel: ‘In the first place they [the Romans] produced the unanimous evidence of the Roman Fathers, and also of Cyril of Alexandria, from the study he made of the gospel of St. John” (80). Maximus thus wants to show that Pope Theodore’s teaching has a certain widespread acceptance in the West, and is not without support in the East. Maximus...

Talking politics, talking forgiveness

AbstractThe aim of this article is to provide a provisional review and evaluation of recent Christian endorsements of the notion of political forgiveness. Attention is given to the doctrine of forgiveness in the New Testament and to its distinctive theological grammar. The chief theological features of Christian accounts of political forgiveness are outlined, before a number of weaknesses in the literature are identified and discussed. The implication of our discussion is that Christian love is expressed in two different ways, that of forgiveness upon repentance within the church and that of justice tempered by mercy in the socio-political realm.

Can You Serve? The Theology of Service from Langland to Luther

In setting the apologia of Piers Plowman in passus 5 of the C-text alongside Martin Luther's 1525 text De servo arbitrio and his earlier lectures on the Psalms, this essay moves across the Reformation divide to argue for continuities between these writers' treatments of the theological grammar of “serve and deserve.” The article argues that when Langland has his narrator questioned by Reason and asked, “Can you serve?” Langland understands the question, like Luther, in the broadest theological and ethical sense. The article attends in detail to conventional readings that see the apologia as referring to Langland's putative clerical status, to his status as a laboring body under the terms of the 1388 labor statutes, or to his own vocation as a poet and maker of vernacular theology. Establishing significant parallels between Langland and Luther allows the picture of the “Lutheran moment” painted by recent literary historians to be questioned and challenged.

The Ground and Grammar of Theology

The Ground and Grammar of Theology