Theological Notion Research Articles

Paradise Lost in Derrida and Agamben: onto-theology of animal life

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the philosophical resonance of the theological notion of Paradise in the works of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida through the question of the Paradisiacal belonging of animal life. What is the significance of Paradise for these authors? This essay undertakes the search for the meaning of Paradise by way of these thinkers’ assessment of animal or creaturely life. I argue that their differing attitudes towards the life of the animal or creature expose a fundamental discord concerning exactly this issue: the significance of theology, and the myth of Paradise and the Fall. To be precise, it is argued that Derrida means to preclude the narrative of the Fall. Agamben, on the other hand, takes the animal as creature, and thus as a proper theological subject – which in this context means an Edenic exile – and accordingly as a proper subject of redemption. So, where Derrida intervenes in an encounter between human and animal prior to Paradise, Agamben joins the story after man was driven from it. In turn, this essay covers the issue of Derrida and Agamben’s messianic terminologies, the ontology of the animal as being-after, and ultimately, the conceptual understanding of Paradise.

How to redeem a corrupted world: The aporia of negative theology in the thought of Theodor Adorno

In Minima Moralia, Adorno talks about a ‘messianic light’ which shines from beyond the corrupted world, offering the possibility of redemption from suffering. Theological statements like these have created significant controversy within the literature on Adorno, with interpreters like Hent de Vries and Peter Gordon arguing that the ‘messianic light’ depicts a transcendent negativity in line with negative theology. This is in opposition to the materialist interpretation, with interpreters like Jay Bernstein who oppose this reading, arguing that Adorno’s use of messianic language is only a metaphorical means to express a negative approach to finite, material experience. In this article, I argue that an ambiguity concerning the source of redemption in Adorno’s work prevents either interpretation from being conclusive. Adorno vacillates between locating hope in sensuous experience or in spiritual negativity. In response, I offer a reading of Adorno’s notion of the object’s preponderance that fulfils both the materialist concern with concrete mediation as well as the theological notion that the messianic light cannot arise from the existing world. The experience of the retreat of the object’s preponderance explains our consciousness of a negative notion of redemption that transcends our current cultural circumstance.

Pastor Nevers Mumba’s Quest to Actualize the Declaration of Zambia as a Christian Nation through “Zambia Shall Be Saved” Campaign, 1993–2021

Abstract This article is grounded in the findings from qualitative and interpretivist research based on secondary and primary data. Two analytic frameworks have been used to make sense of the data. The first is Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar’s hypothesis that politics in sub-Saharan African societies cannot be fully understood without reference to religious ideas therein; and the second is the notion of African Political Theology which, according to Emmanuel Katongole, means going beyond addressing realities of violence, civil unrest, poverty, tribalism, and corruption, but deploying the story of salvation in Jesus as a concrete social, material, political, and economic reality in the African social imaginary for the construction of modern Africa. The article argues that through “Zambia Shall be Saved” orations from 1993 to date, Pastor Nevers Mumba has been calling for actualizing the declaration of Zambia as a Christian Nation (henceforth referred to as “Declaration”) made by President Frederick Chiluba in 1991. Katongole’s understanding of African Political Theology provides an invaluable lens for conceptualizing Mumba’s “Zambia Shall be Saved” discourse. The Declaration remains a topical issue among Zambian and international analysts and the significance of this particular article lies in the fact that it relates Mumba’s cry of “Zambia Shall be Saved” to the new conversation on “Actualizing the Declaration” coined by the government of the republic of Zambia in 2016. Overall, the article seeks to contribute to an ongoing discourse on Zambia’s Christian nationhood.

Irritating the secular: on Peter Berger and Charles Taylor’s theological projects

ABSTRACT The literature that discusses the secularization paradigm is extensive. However, we still know little about revisionist accounts of secularization theory utilized as a proxy for theological projects. Through close reading, I zoom in on two prominent scholars of religious studies and beyond, Peter L. Berger and Charles Taylor, who represent stellar examples of the religiously grounded critique of the secularization paradigm. Berger and Taylor attempted to reconcile contemporary social theory and theology by injecting constitutive theological notions into their alternative constructions of the secular and religious to re-claim the relevance of Christianity in the present. My central proposition is that the gist of their empirical and normative rebuttal of secularization hinges not on sociological or genealogical explanations but on theologically anchored claims. The conceptual comparison of Berger and Taylor’s revisionist works, well-established in the canon of religious studies, reveals parallel strategies and three mutually intertwined theological assertions set to fracture the secularization paradigm: two-tiered ontology, the notion of personhood, and reconceptualization of religion.

God Is Time; The Devil Rules over Space

Abstract This article explores José Val del Omar’s religious thought in relation to his Fire in Castile, a 1960 experimental film that sets Spanish Renaissance sculptures in motion by use of pulsating lights, projected patterns, and other striking audiovisual effects. Val del Omar sought to provoke a new and technological mystical encounter: Fire in Castile displaces the viewers’ physical space to create a transcendental and sacred opening, in turn activating the affective role of the sculptures. This essay seeks to contextualize the film in relation to a core theological notion in Val del Omar’s thought, the interlacing of God and time: “God is Time,” he wrote, “the devil rules over space.” For Val del Omar, this is a tragic situation in which God is waiting for us in the entrails of life, which in turn demands a visceral disruption of our spatiotemporal and existential assumptions.

Artificial Intelligence and an Anthropological Ethics of Work: Implications on the Social Teaching of the Church

It is the contention of this paper that ethics of work ought to be anthropological, and artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, which is the focus of work today, should be anthropological, that is, human-centered. This paper discusses the philosophical and theological implications of the development of AI research on the intrinsic nature of work and the nature of the human person. AI research and the implications of its development and advancement, being a relatively new phenomenon, have not been comprehensively interrogated in the social and ethical teachings of the Catholic Church. This paper, therefore, proposes a path for this interrogation by expounding a discourse which is believed to be epistemically helpful in the developing discourse of AI in the ethical and social teachings of the Church. The advancement in the research on AI is not only redefining the meaning of work, but, even more so, it is questioning the metaphysical notion of the human person and the theological notion of work as an intrinsic part in the selfhood and dignity of the human person.

Political Intertheology

ABSTRACT The following paper introduces the concept of political intertheology as a post-secular counterpart to Carl Schmitt's notion of political theology. It elaborates this concept by examining two interpretations of the New Testament narrative regarding the choice between Jesus and Barabbas. Both interpretations revolve around the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The first, anti-antisemitic reading, emphasizes the identity between Jesus and Barabbas. The second, anti-anti-Christian interpretation, intensifies the political-theological antagonism. This article proposes a third, guilt-political interpretation. This perspective enables us to acknowledge both the inevitability of the distinction between Christians and what they perceived as Jews, and the fact that a politico-intertheological intensification (the accusation against the Jews of demanding the crucifixion of Jesus) was not inevitable. Understanding how it unfolded facilitates overcoming this fateful accusation at its core, without succumbing to a new accusation (against early Christians) and thereby replacing anti-Judaism with potential anti-Christian sentiment.

Reparations and the Ministry of Planetary Peace

AbstractThis article explores the historical roots and unfolding legacies of reparations denial as a continuation of the spiritual and socioeconomic planetary war perpetuated through the transatlantic slave trade. An examination of the social production of an anti‐reparations norm against Afro‐Americans in the United States seeks to uncover underlying fears of national destabilization and their relations to underexamined opportunities for functional solidarities across ethnicities, potentially offering a unique contribution to the pursuit of lasting global peace. The article proposes a twofold re‐examination. First, it insists on the rejection and reconception of religious concepts upholding and extending the socioeconomic relations of slavery and white supremacy through evasive political theological notions of human nature and historical time. Second, it advocates the formation of local, national, and international alliances dedicated to articulating, supporting, defending, and achieving reparations for distinct historical events as a means of repairing unique legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism for the common good, using an international ecumenical alliance for repair and reparations (AIRRE) developed by the Presbyterian Church's (USA) Center for the Repair of Historical Harms as an active example.

‘Pastoral and ecclesial madness’ Facing the failure of ‘democratism’ within the current civil turmoil in South Africa

‘Pastoral and ecclesial madness’ Facing the failure of ‘democratism’ within the current civil turmoil in South Africa

A Contemporary Aristotelian–Thomistic Perspective on the Evolutionary View of Reality and Theistic Evolution

This article presents a coherent and comprehensive proposal of a renewed contemporary Aristotelian–Thomistic approach to the evolutionary view of reality and the position of theistic evolution. Beginning with a proposal of a hylomorphically–grounded essentialist definition of species—framed within a broader revival of biological essentialism—a constructive model of the Aristotelian–Thomistic metaphysics of evolution is being offered, together with a reflection on the alleged violation of the principle of proportionate causation in evolutionary transitions and the role of teleology and chance in evolution. The theological part of the article addresses a number of questions concerning the Thomistic school of theology in its encounter with the evolutionary worldview, including the question of whether God creates through evolution, the query concerning the concurrence of divine and created causes in evolutionary transitions, and the question regarding evolutionary and theological notions of anthropogenesis. A list of ten postulates grounding a contemporary Thomistic version of theistic evolution is offered as a conclusion to the research presented in the text.

The Theo-Politics of Ritual: Defining and Contesting the Sacred Order of the Church

Abstract Both sociology of religion and statistical bodies within the Catholic Church approach the question of church membership in similar ways: they take participation in religious ritual as a benchmark of affiliation to a religious community. What seems to be a straightforward criterion for measuring membership actually speaks to a complex interplay in the constitution of political and cosmological order: the constitution of social order through practices such as religious rituals is, irreducibly, also a definition of the ‘extraordinary’. Thus, starting from the assumption that the formation of community is a political–theological practice of boundary-drawing that cannot but refer to a beyond, this article offers a theological critique of ritual participation as a criterion of ecclesial affiliation. Taking the performance ‘Verantwort: ich’ (Synodaler Weg, 2023) as a case, it shows that it rests on a theological concept of transcendence that is used as a hegemonic instrument to confirm the established order of belonging in the church. Arguing that the definition of ecclesial boundaries is an irreducibly powerful, even violent theo-political practice, it asks which theological notion of transcendence can best reckon with, and consequently offer tools for managing, rather than concealing, the normative violence that is at the heart of the question of who belongs to the church.

Are we there yet? Probing the notion of contextualising practical theology and pastoral care in a post COVID-19 glocal African context

The article is a concise rendition of the author’s inaugural lecture and tracks his academic journey with the contextualisation of practical theology and pastoral care in an African context. It latches onto the inter-contextual dialogue between Western and African notions of practical theology and pastoral care, and positions it in a post coronavirus disease (COVID-19) glocal African context. It is argued that the post COVID-19 era signalled significant changes that will influence the path of future endeavours in the subject field, especially when it strives to be relevant in both the local and global contexts. A preliminary agenda for future deliberations is presented which focusses on the consequences of intensified pre-COVID-19 socio-economic realities, the implications of the disruption of traditional religious culture, and post COVID-19 challenges to higher education. The article concludes that the hallmark of contextualised practical theology and pastoral care in the African context is to be sought in being mindful of the challenges of the immediate local context as well as that of the global context.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: By engaging a post COVID-19 glocal African context from a practical theological and pastoral stance, the research engages social, economic and educational sciences to come to its findings. The resultant view that post COVID-19 practical theology and pastoral care should be mindful of both local and global contexts has implications for both academic practical theology and theological higher education.

The The Designed Limitation of Human Epistemology and the Necessity of Faith

This article argues that the attacks of atheists or philosophers against the Islamic conception of God (i.e., Allah) are constructed on the misunderstood notion of Islamic theology. Because God is already at a station where the standards of reason alone are frivolous if His existence is understood vis-à-vis the claimed teleological essence of His message (Islam). The fundamental approach here is to highlight the doctrinally necessary transcendence of God vis-à-vis human epistemological tools in Islam in the light of its objective (i.e., a test of faith). This article demonstrates the normatively affirmed limitations of reason in logically necessitating the being of Allah under the faith-test dynamic of Islam, which is a necessary component of the purpose of human existence according to the Qur’ān. The article aims to establish the necessity of faith vis-à-vis a designed limitation of the capabilities of the logical arguments for God’s existence through three major claims: faith in the unseen, Allah’s signs in creation, and the trial of faith, all three being rooted in the Qur’ān. The article also explains the nature of imān in the system of Islamic epistemology, referring to the works of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyyah and highlighting the incoherent, unreasonable scepticism of atheists in attacking Islamic theism through the principles of reason.

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

Anatomical Analysis of Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb and Corresponding Theological Commentary

Approaching Hans Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521/22) this paper combines the expertise of anatomical analysis and the perspective of theology and philosophy in order to address some of the well-rooted assumptions about Holbein in the historical reception of his Dead Christ. The authors propose a balanced conclusion about the hypothesis of a drowned man from the Rhine being a model for the painting, pointing out that the body of the man from Holbein’s painting, according to anatomical details, could not have previously been in water. Furthermore, the absence of an Adam’s apple on Christ’s body is interpreted in the light of New Testament texts, rather than as a result of Holbein’s lack of anatomical precision. Similarly, the fact that Holbein painted a corpse deprived of all signs of divinity is seen in connection with the theological notion of kenosis. Ultimately, the authors conclude that the results of the anatomical analysis reflect the key elements of the hermeneutics of Gospel reports of Christ’s passion and death.

Pedagogy of scale: Unmastering time, teaching and living through crises

What does it mean to teach, live, and imagine one’s futures amidst a global pandemic? How to respond to the reality of unequal and overlapping crises, COVID-19 being one of them? Can alternative understandings of time help us create a more just post-pandemic university? Drawing on environmental humanities, disaster and critical time studies, in conversation with qualitative data, this article theorizes a ‘pedagogy of scale’: a practical and conceptual centering on multiple temporalities and diverse interpretative frames. The analysis argues for the need to attend to overlapping, non-linear, and changeable scales of time, reference, and meaning that students draw on in order to make sense of crises: every crisis, even as unprecedented as COVID-19, is embedded in environmental processes, long-term vulnerabilities and injustices. These overlooked and overlapping scales interweave personal, planetary, and theological notions of time—from ecological deep time to the divine time—meaning, and self. In its focus on asynchronicity, overlap and multiplicity, the analysis extends current theorizations of temporality and crisis in higher education, challenges paradigms of mastery, advocates for epistemic plurality, and embraces decolonial notions of human subjectivity, providing a much-needed critical model for the post-pandemic university.

Another reconsideration of the Madaba map

It has recently been claimed that the Madaba map illustrates notions of law and ownership, and that it was displayed in a hall with secular functions. The present article rejects this claim, asserting that while we have insufficient evidence for determining the building's context, the map speaks in religious language. I argue that the Madaba map conveyed the very same message communicated by both early Christian typological imagery and Palestinian pilgrimage art, suggesting that apart from conceptualizing the topography of Palestine in religious terms and as a sacred space, the map gave expression to the theological notion of Fulfilment.

On conceptions of time in human rights studies: The afterlife, Islam, and reparative justice in post-uprising Tunisia

This article argues that conceptions of time are undertheorized in human rights studies and that such conceptions have a significant impact on how people participate in systems of justice. Within the context of the transitional justice process launched in Tunisia in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring—a context deeply shaped by an Islamist/secular divide—I examine how competing notions of time led to opposing modes of participation in reparative justice. Specifically, I analyze the Islamic principle thawāb (reward in the afterlife for suffering experienced on earth) as a theological notion of time and show how it structured Islamist victims’ participation in reparations measures. Observing that critiques of reparative justice have developed through a strictly secular notion of time, this article foregrounds Islamic concepts that are still underrepresented in such studies, particularly Islamic notions of time and the afterlife. I argue that thawāb contests the universalism of the secular, linear notion of past-present-future dominant in human rights and transitional justice studies.

The Theology of the People, Pope Francis, and Populism: A Critical Latin American Perspective

This paper investigates the Argentinian “theology of the people” (“teología del pueblo”) and how it might run the risk of turning Catholic social thought into an ideology. The first part focuses on the political and theological notion of people and its link to the poor. The author recalls the Argentinian roots of this theology, summarizes its main tenets, and presents Pope Francis’s understanding of the theology of the people. The second part contrasts the theology of the people with the roots of populism in Latin America. The author explores the historical construction of the notion of people in the modern nation-building process, turns to caciquism as the dominant cultural framework of political power, and reviews Nadia Urbinati’s definition of populist regimes. The conclusion proposes to build upon Francis’s principles of common good dynamics to avoid the capture and recycling of the theology of the people’s language by populist regimes.

Creation, Natural nd Ontological Beginning.: Some Lessons from Georges Lemaître and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We clarify the philosophical notions implicitly present in Georges Lemaître’s cosmology. We first show that he carefully distinguished the theo-logical notion of creation and the physical concept of physical (natural) be-ginning of the universe. We study his first cosmological work which did not involve any question of beginning and end of the universe. Afterwards, we explain how such a question arose in his work concerning the “Primeval Atom Hypothesis”. Reflecting on the ontological and epistemological status of the “Primeval Atom” we are lead to the concept of ontological beginning, which cannot be confused neither with creation nor with natural beginning (now the Big Bang, the initial singularity if any). We then consider the crea-tion representation in the thought of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We ana-lyze the comparison made by Teilhard, in 1948, between his “Omega Point” and the “Primeval Atom”. This suggests us the need for a philosophical in-vestigation of the “Archê” of the universe which appears to be absent, but for different reasons, in Lemaître and Teilhard’s thought and works.