bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Christ as Eternal Companion: A Study in the Christology of Shusaku Endo
Authors: Wills Elizabeth
Published: January 2009

In his book A Life of Jesus Shusaku Endo talks of Jesus' compassion for those who were suffering in terms of his ‘suffering with them, carrying their burdens with them, becoming an eternal companion for them’. In several of his novels this understanding of Christ as one who suffers alongside humanity is given extraordinary dramatic power. The image of eternal companion is not explicitly discussed but it seems to underlie many of the themes which Endo employs, providing a remarkably versatile vehicle for his creative exploration of how God's power in Christ can transfigure human lives, bringing the possibility of hope and re-creation.
The Intermediate State in the New Testament
Authors: Osei-Bonsu J.
Published: January 2009

The notion of apost-mortemdisembodied existence of the soul followed by resurrection on the last day has been part of traditional Christian theology for centuries. Though some modern theologians are unhappy with this doctrine and have tried to re-interpret it or reject it altogether, it cannot be denied that traditional Christian theology has always taught this. This view was held by many of the Church Fathers and by the Reformers. Today it is still the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and some Protestant Churches.
John William Colenso: Pioneer in the Quest for an Authentic African Christianity
Authors: Mosothoane Ephraim
Published: January 2009

There are, for purposes of this paper, two remarkable facts about Christianity on the African Continent. The first is its antiquity. There seems to be every likelihood that it was as early as its very inception that Christianity, as part of its rapid sweep across the first century Graeco-Roman world, reached Africa as well. The New Testament contains a number of hints that suggest that places such as Ethiopia, Egypt (particularly Alexandria) and Cyrene could vie with each other for first position. In any case, by the second and third centuries, the African Church could boast of such great leaders and thinkers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian and Cyprian; and a century later of the highly influential Augustine of Hippo. The significance and influence of these men extended well beyond Africa. After that, with the exception of Egypt and Ethiopia, there is a lacuna in our knowledge of Christianity in Africa. The next significant centuries are the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in respect of North, West and Central Africa, and the nineteenth century in respect of virtually the entire Continent. In short, Christianity is not a newcomer to the African Continent. Ups and downs of various kinds it has experienced here as it has done elsewhere; so also, in respect of a number of areas, major gaps affecting its continuous and unbroken existence down the centuries. Nevertheless, a newcomer to the Continent it is not.
Truth as Mission: The Christian Claim to Universal Truth in a Pluralist Public World
Authors: McFadyen Alistair
Published: January 2009

Alasdair Maclntyre has argued that, despite its ‘rhetoric of consensus’, modern society is irreducibly pluralist since it lacks the basic condition necessary for securing agreement on the truth of competing convictions — namely, some background consensus as to the nature and procedures of rationality. Even if the possibilities of affirming truth in the public sphere may not be quite as grim as Maclntyre makes out (and it seems to me to universalize an apt description of American public society), we are nonetheless still left with disconcerting questions as to the nature of public truth. Has public discourse been relativised into competing truth-claims? Is it possible to speak now of a common public world, of society, at all? Or of rationality? Indeed, if truth cannot be made the subject of public agreement, can we really speak any more of truth at all? How, in this situation, can Christianity claim to have an absolute and universal Truth? And how might it gain a public hearing for its truth?
Predestination: A Scottish Perspective
Authors: Fergusson David A. S.
Published: January 2009

In contemporary Scottish culture the subject of predestination is guaranteed to evoke a variety of reactions ranging from horror and disgust on the one hand to laughter and ridicule on the other. It is viewed by some as a nightmare scenario devised by Christian theologians in their worst moments, while for odiers it is a ludicrous aberration of the medieval and Reformation mind. It is perceived frequently as the trademark of a theological mindset which is marked by harshness, legalism and a fatalistic attitude towards life. A clear example of this is Edwin Muir's biography of Knox which writes vitriolically of the oppression and tyranny of the predestinarian religion that was imported from Calvin's Geneva.
An English Systematic Theology?
Authors: Gunton Colin
Published: January 2009

Early in his career Edward Bouverie Pusey paid visits to Germany, as a result of which he wrote a book, revealing the influence of both Hegel and Schleiermacher, on the development of German theology. Then came some form of personal crisis, as a result of which he repudiated the book, seeking out second hand copies in order to destroy them, and in his will requiring that it never be republished. The event was tragic not merely for Pusey's personal life, but because it can be taken as symbolic of the fate of English theology since then. As one commentator remarks, it was an attempt to answer modernism by ignoring it. ‘If modernism could not be defeated by intellect, it must be defeated by piety.’ As Stephen Sykes has pointed out, for nationalistic reasons – for it is the nationalist tendency of some tractarianism which is here the point – a breach between the different European traditions was opened and has meant that English systematic theology, never very strong, has suffered injuries from which it has not yet recovered.
Covenant or Leviathan? Political Theology for Modern Times
Authors: Moltmann Jürgen
Published: January 2009

Federalism or centralism – this is a decisive question in the political structuring of Europe today. The socialist centralism of the command economy and the ideological surveillance of the people has collapsed. The federal republic with decentralized forms of communication and a diversity of regional, local and personal initiatives proved stronger.
God the Measure: Towards an Understanding of Jonathan Edwards' Theocentric Metaphysics
Authors: McClymond Michael J.
Published: January 2009

Since Perry Millerpos;'s biography of Jonathan Edwards began a new cycle of study some forty years ago, research into Edwards' life and thought has advanced considerably. No longer is the intellectual giant of colonial America surrounded by the obscurity to which early generations had consigned him. Yale is republishing his works. New secondary studies on Edwards appear regularly. Academics from a range of disciplines - history, American studies, theology, philosophy, and literary criticism - have all made Edwards a focus for serious scholarly attention. As an index to the quickening tempo of research, the total number of dissertations on Edwards increased in geometrical proportion during the last half century,doublingduring each of the successive decades since 1940.
Canonical Hermeneutics: Childs and Barth
Authors: Scalise Charles J.
Published: January 2009

‘The Bible is not concerned with transmitting general truths about God, but is the Word of God calling forth a response.’ This declaration, which sounds as if it might be found in the first volume of theChurch Dogmaticsin one of the other early writings of Karl Barth, is actually a quotation from an early article by Brevard Childs entitled, ‘Jonah: A Study in Old Testament Hermeneutics’.
Alan Edmond Lewis
Authors: Stotts Jack L.
Published: January 2009

The last number of this Journal was already in print when news came of the death on 19th February of Dr Alan Lewis, who served for many years as one of our editors. The following tribute by President Stotts of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary speaks for all who knew and valued Alan Lewis as a colleague and friend.
Can Liberation Theology Survive 1989?
Authors: Forrester Duncan B.
Published: January 2009

There was a widespread assumption in the 1980s that liberation theology had come of age. The early passionate manifestos of those such as Hugo Assmann had been replaced by a deluge of substantial theological works which entered the theological debate bearing the wounds of oppression and injustice in Latin America, and also the clear marks of the European academy. Liberation theology remained highly controversial, but it had to be taken seriously. It suggested a new way of doing theology which was at one and the same time a recovery of older understandings of the nature of theology and rooted in Latin American reality. It plundered and turned on their original possessors the weapons of post-Enlightenment and post-Vatican II theologising, and it was viewed with deep suspicion by most of the authorities in church and state. The movement found resonances and allies in many countries of the Third World, and spread from systematics into biblical studies, ethics and pastoral theology.
Women and the Teaching Office According to Calvin
Authors: White Robert
Published: January 2009

Few aspects of Paul's teaching have proved more controversial in recent times than his injunction that women should neither speak (lalein) nor teach (didaskein) in church assemblies (1 Cor. 14.34–35; 1 Tim. 2.11–12). To those seeking to promote the ministry of women in the church, the apostle's words appear as a personal expression of opinion founded on patriarchal prejudice, on rabbinic conservatism or on purely local considerations of strategy, motives which are of little more than documentary interest in the current debate. To proponents of the principle of male leadership, on the other hand, Paul's instruction forms part of a normative, enduring evangelical tradition which is often assumed to bear not only on the order of the church but on the order of creation itself. In these circumstances it is instructive to examine Calvin's treatment of the subject as found not only in his major dogmatic work,The Institute of the Christian Religion, but at various places in his sermons and commentaries. Our purpose here is not to make Calvin the arbiter of what, in his own day, was a highly marginal question – outside of court and literary circles, equality of the sexes was not a serious Renaissance concern – but rather to understand how he interpreted Paul's teaching in the context of a creation which God was already renewing and of a church where all were already made one in Christ.
Historical scepticism and the criteria of Jesus research or My Attempt to Leap Across Lessing's Yawning Gulf
Authors: Theißen Gerd
Published: January 2009

The subtitle of my lecture suggests a theological sport called ‘Long Jump across Lessing's Gulf’ —jumping across the yawning gulf of historical criticism. However, it is a strange sport; no one has ever won. No one has ever succeeded in jumping across the gulf. Despite several run-ups I, too, have always failed. I've always ended up in the ditch. There, I discovered something important; the ditch is filled with water and it's fun to swim in it. Today, I would like to invite you to do just this; to jump into the ditch, into Lessing's gulf, to plunge into the cold water with me. It may not be as long jumpers but as swimmers that we arrive at the other side — even though we will then need a helping hand to reach dry land.
Duns Scotus on Sinful Thought
Authors: Broadie Alexander
Published: January 2009

Scotland's philosophers of the medieval period, priests almost to a man, were deeply interested in the concept of sin. The concept resonates with philosophical overtones, and our early philosophers found something philosophical to say about it. The greatest of those philosophers, John Duns Scotus, wrote extensively on sin in the course of his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Lombard quotes Jerome's dictum that there is sin in thought, word and deed, and in his Commentary on the Sentences Duns Scotus probes this dictum, since it is not only central to moral theology but also problematic to philosophy. I shall attend to an aspect of Scotus's investigation, that concerning the relation between will and sinful thinking. I shall argue against one of his theses and shall seek to replace it with one which is in a variety of ways more defensible.
Toward a Contemporary Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: Karl Barth and the Present Discussion
Authors: Molnar Paul D.
Published: January 2009

What is the purpose of a doctrine of the immanent Trinity? Broadly speaking it aims to recognize, uphold and respect God's freedom. Without theoretical and practical awareness of this freedom all theological statements about the significance of created existence become ambiguous and constitute merely human attempts to give meaning to creation using theological categories.
Schleiermacher's Metaphysical Critique of Miracles
Authors: Dembski William A.
Published: January 2009

In The Christian Faith Schleierrmcher offers three critiques of miracles—a pragmatic, an epistemological, and a metaphysical critique. Of these three critiques, by far the most important is Schleiermacher's metaphysical critique. In his own day, it was this critique that decisively distinguished Schleiermacher's account of miracles from the traditional orthodox account. In contemporary theological debates over contingency and divine action, it is this critique that underlies much of the continued skepticism towards miracles. Now as then, Schleiermacher's metaphysical critique of miracles continues to be a live issue
Arthur Cochrane and the Church-Confessing
Authors: Healey Robert M.
Published: January 2009

Arthur C. Cochrane has spent a lifetime recalling the Christian church to its vocation: confessing faith in Jesus Christ as the one Lord and Savior proclaimed in Holy Scripture; confessing sin; and submitting in freedom to the ethic which springs from sole reliance on Christ. The vocation has given focus to many concerns. He has worked to invigorate Christian understanding of the role of confessions of faith, to revive careful study of Reformation theologians, and to develop appreciation of the contribution of Karl Barth. He has engaged in ecumenical dialogue, fostered ecumenical relationships, and worked to arouse Christians to ethical response concerning the poor, worship, the state and war. He has been acutely sensitive to the constant need to determine a Christian response to challenging contemporary events, whether horrors or opportunities.
An Old Friend Incognito
Authors: Goulder Michael
Published: January 2009

The problem of the Beloved Disciple (BD) has come to seem virtually insoluble. It cannot be John bar-Zebedee: there would be no reason to suppress the name of so high an authority; striking events which he attended (Jairus' daughter, the Transfiguration) are passed over in silence; and anyhow the whole Gospel is antipathetic to the Jerusalem leadership (see below). It cannot be an anonymous jerusalem disciple: none such is mentioned in the Jerusalem events of 2–12; these latter seem to consist of elements also found in the synoptic tradition, given a Johannine slant; and why shouldhisname be suppressed, if he were Jesus' favourite, and the Gospel community's hero? It cannot be a totally fictitious ‘symbolic’ figure: no proposed symbolism is clear or adequate; and it was rumoured in the Church that he would not die. No one believes that he was Lazarus or John Mark: so what are we left with? It is time to approach the question from a different angle.
God's Self-Communication in Christ: A Comparison of Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Rahner
Authors: Molnar Paul D.
Published: January 2009

Karl Rahner and Thomas F. Torrance have made enormous contributions to 20th century theology. Torrance is quick to point out that Rahner's approach to Trinitarian theology which begins with God's saving revelation (the economic Trinity) and pivots ‘upon God's concrete and effective self-communication in the Incarnation’ does indeed have the effect that Rahner intended. First, it reunites the treatisesOn the One GodandOn the Triune God. This opens the door to rapprochement between systematic and biblical theology and binds the NT view of Jesus closer to the Church's worship and proclamation of the Triune God. Second, it opens the door to rapprochement between East and West by shifting from a more abstractive scholastic framework to one bound up with piety, worship and experience within the Church. Third, it opens the door to rapprochement between Roman Catholic theology and Evangelical theology ‘especially as represented by the teaching of Karl Barth in his emphasis upon the self-revelation and self-giving of God as the root of the doctrine of the Trinity …’
Focus of Unity: Ultimate and Penultimate Goals of the Christian Movement
Authors: Boyd Robin
Published: January 2009

Ecumenical myopia?

As a participant in the interchurch scene for many years I have become increasingly conscious of a phenomenon which I can best describe as ‘ecumenical myopia’. Myopia means short sightedness, and what I am thinking about is the tendency for ecumenical vision to fall short of its true objective: the lines of sight converge to a focus too soon, and from then on — as my schoolboy physics tells me — they cross each other and diverge in different directions into an obscure and unfocussed blur.
Christian Anthropology at the Beginning and End of Life
Authors: Banner Michael
Published: January 2009

If theological ethics speaks about man, it does not have in view man as he understands himself but man as he knows that he is understood, as he finds himself addressed by the Word of God that has come to him.
The Politics of the Nonviolent God: Reflections on René Girard and Karl Barth
Authors: Hunsinger George
Published: January 2009

Doctrines of the atonement in Christian theology, as Marlin E. Miller has pointed out, ‘usually limit their concern to reconciliation with God and, at most, consider reconciliation with others a secondary consequence of reconciliation with God’. Too often, in other words, the vertical aspect of reconciliation is allowed to overshadow its horizontal aspect. The vertical aspect of the atonement as it pertains directly to God is often treated in isolation as if its ethical implications were of no great importance. The reverse defect, however, would also appear to be widespread. Christian ethics as we know it today often seems to proceed as if the atoning work of Christ were of little or no relevance to its deliberations on human affairs. The social or horizontal aspect of reconciliation thereby eclipses its vertical aspect. Yet if the cross of Christ is indeed the very center of the center of the Christian gospel, as the church has historically believed, then how can it fail to determine the substance of Christian ethics as well as that of Christian theology? Moreover, how can the centrality of the cross fail to orient them both in any attempt to specify their inner unity, order and differentiation?
De-Scribing Church: Ecclesiology in Semiotic Dialogue
Authors: Jinkins Michael
Published: January 2009

Vaclav Havel in a speech in 1989 speaks of the ‘weird fate’ which ‘can befall certain words’.

At one moment in history, courageous, liberal-minded people can be thrown into prison because a particular word means something to them, and at another moment, the same kind of people can be thrown into prison because that same word has ceased to mean anything to them, because it has changed from the symbol of a better world into the mumbo jumbo of a doltish dictator.
Should We Say that Personhood Is Relational?
Authors: Harris Harriet A.
Published: January 2009

A current emphasis in theological anthropology is that we become persons through our relations to others. Ethically valuable and pastorally illuminating insights that as persons we develop in relation to others have been used wrongly to underpin the claim that personhood is relational — a claim which is logically confused and ethically precarious. Alistair I. McFadyen, whose book The Call to Personhood has been influential in this respect, describes personhood as the ‘sedimentation’ of interpersonal relations. Elaine L. Graham places the stress on cultural interaction as a prerequisite for the development of beings into persons. In her study of gender and personhood, Making the Difference, Graham argues that her ‘relational’ account of gender is ‘suggestive of a model of human nature as profoundly relational, requiring the agency of culture to bring our personhood fully into being’. The potential ethical danger behind a view of personhood as relational is apparent from statements made by Vincent Brümmer in his volume The Model of Love, to the effect that ‘both our identity and our value as persons is constituted by our relations of fellowship with others’.
Medieval Exegesis and the Origin of Hermeneutics
Authors: Ocker Christopher
Published: January 2009

Dilthey, in his famous essay, ‘Die Enstehung der Hermeneutik’, first published in 1900, taught us that Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the mid sixteenth-century Lutheran theologian, was the author of the first significant treatise on hermeneutics. Conceding a classic Protestant opinion once articulated by Flacius, he consigned medieval interpretation to what must have seemed a justified oblivion: he simply ignored the period between Origen and John Calvin. Calvin, Flacius, and especially Friedrich Schleiermacher were the main contributors to the rediscovery of the interpretive force of history and language, which Dilthey surely felt was best appreciated by his own philosophy of culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer later tried to show that Dilthey himself was weak on language and misinformed about history, falling prey to the movement that Gadamer opprobriously called ‘historicism’. Gadamer's own view of the development of hermeneutics—with its subjection of historical knowledge to ‘our own present horizon of understanding’, its accent on language, and its debt to Martin Heidegger—shifted the chronology of hermeneutics even closer to the present According to Gadamer, the ‘hermeneutic problem’ was specifically created by the alienation of exegesis and understanding from ‘application’, the importance of which was discovered only by Romantic philosophy and best redressed with the help of a language-obsessed philosophy of being. But as was the case for Dilthey, the crucial moment in the development of hermeneutics remained the discovery of the role of language in ‘meaning’, in the broadest sense, so that texts could only be understood in the grand context of a philosophy of life or, in Gadamerian terms, in the context of a philosophy that functioned as present interpretation.
Lancelot Andrewes at Holyrood: The 1617 Whitsun Sermon in Perspective
Authors: Stevenson Kenneth
Published: January 2009

Early in March 1617, King James followed what he himself described as a ‘salmon-like instinct’ and made his first (and last) return visit to his native Scotland since his departure fourteen years previously on the death of Queen Elizabeth. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of his coronation, at the age of fifteen months, as James VI of the northern kingdom. Among the events in Edinburgh to celebrate the visit was the Whitsun eucharist in the Chapel Royal at Holyrood Palace. The sermon was delivered by the King's favourite preacher, Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Ely.
The Covenant of Grace Fulfilled in Christ as the Foundation of the Indissoluble Solidarity of the Church with Israel: Barth's Position on the Jews During the Hitler Era
Authors: Busch Eberhard
Published: January 2009

How might Karl Barth's engagement with the question of the relationship of the church to Judaism during the Nazi era help us today as we seek to revise that relationship? It is obvious that we cannot simply repeat his statements today. But the reference to Barth would be unproductive if it consisted solely in the assertion that the opponent of anti-Semitism at that time was in fact in league with his adversaries. Protestants all too willingly take on an air of self-importance, imagining the distant past to be the proverbial night in which all cats are gray. It would also be insufficient to find in this theologian some good initial ideas, to the extent that they agree with one's own views, in order then, when one differs from his thinking, to identify all the logical flaws that one believes to have been successfully overcome. In neither case would we learn anything, but only confirm our own position. If our encounter with a teacher of the church is to be fruitful, we must enter into a conversation in which we are not only the questioners, but also those who are questioned. True, such a teacher, whom we may critically question, is only an authority subject to the Word of God. But a proper teacher of the church is an authority under the Word of God, and his or her question to us, therefore, is whether we, as we move ahead, are following the Word of God as attested in the Bible or only our own authority.
Election and Ecclesiology in the Post-Constantinian Church
Authors: Gunton Colin
Published: January 2009

It is often enough averred that Calvin developed his doctrine of predestination in order to reassure believers of their status before God; it is even more often asserted that the overall effect of his teaching was eventually to subvert that assurance, or at any rate to turn it into a form of self-absorption that has an effect contrary to that for which the gospel frees us. Self-absorption is indeed among the besetting sins of Western Christianity, from Augustine onward. In each era, it takes characteristic form. In our day, it is among the prime dangers of the post-Constantinian Church, which, deprived, apparently, of once secure social and political status and role; diminished, apparendy, in numbers and influence, flounders variously in inaction, activism and political correctness in a sometimes desperate concern not to lose the attention of the—reprobate? In this paper, I propose to bring together the related themes of election and ecclesiology, with particular reference to the beleaguered situation of the Christian Church in a world which, as Robert Jenson has observed, is unique in being the first once apparently believing culture to have abandoned the Christian gospel. That throws into the limelight the problem of the, if not everywhere minority status, at least unique situation for the Church of rejection by the main streams of intellectual and cultural life.
The Use of Animal Imagery in the Psalms and Wisdom Literature of Ancient Israel
Authors: Dell Katharine J.
Published: January 2009

TheOld Testament is rich in animal imagery. There has been a considerable amount of work done on the imagery connected with animal sacrifice and on the theological significance of this, but little work done on the wider use of animal imagery in the Old Testament. To attempt to document and review this for the whole Old Testament is beyond the scope of this article, but what I wish to do is to focus on a particularly neglected area—the use of animal imagery in the psalms and wisdom literature of ancient Israel. I have divided the material mentioning animals in the books of Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes into seven categories, which I believe are helpful for defining the material but necessarily involve some overlap. The first three categories are concerned with animals as seen from a human viewpoint. They involve humans looking at the world and attempting to illuminate and prescribe human behaviour on the basis of what is observed of animal behaviour. The last three categories involve God and his relationship with the created world, with humanity and with animals. Again this is expressed from a human standpoint, but very often the limitations of the human quest for understanding is stressed. The middle and bridging category is the simple observation of animal behaviour which seems to me to go some way towards counterbalancing the others which are inevitably humanocentric and theocentric respectively.
The Origins of Human Evil
Authors: Burns R. M.
Published: January 2009

Enlightenment optimism concerning man's ‘natural goodness’ is out of fashion. The many instances of monstrous evil on a mass scale (Nazi extermination camps; Gulags; Cambodia; Kosovo, etc.), the widespread reporting of the activities of sadistic torturers and killers, the great increase in violent crime and drug addiction in the most affluent and welleducated societies, expose to ridicule Condorcet's prediction that 'the time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason … the human race, emancipated from its shackles [will] advance with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness. Yet there have been few recent philosophical or theological attempts to consider afresh the nature of human evil, and most of them still tend, if mutedly, to cling to the notion of mankind's essential moral goodness. Thus the hesitant conclusion of Ricoeur's reconsideration of human moral responsibility is that ‘however radical evil may be, it cannot be as primordial as goodness’, and that we should think of an ‘existential superimposition of radical evil on primordial good’.2 In 1963, Hannah Arendt declared that ‘evil is never “radical”, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension … Only the good has depth and can be radical.‘ Instead she wrote of the ‘banality of evil’, generalising from the case of Eichmann.
Learning Where to Place One's Hope: The Eschatological Significance of Election in Barth
Authors: McDowell John C.
Published: January 2009

Withoutcreating certain illusions, to which hope could also be added as a moving beyond despair, the early Nietzsche felt one would be resigned to a paralysing, despairing life-denying, nausea. After all, some form of hope is necessary to human existence in order to open otherwise closed avenues towards the future, one that can resist the contemporary loss of certain imaginings of our futures.
Ethnography is Dogmatics: Making Description Central to Systematic Theology
Authors: Adams Nicholas , Elliott Charles
Published: January 2009

Thepurpose of this article is to suggest that dogmatic theology is best practised through description of the world. Its method is to marry two unlikely characters: Karl Bardi, Swiss Reformed theologian, and Michel Foucault, French atheist philosopher and historian. The thesis we propose can be presented directly. Barth is well known for insisting, in his ethics lectures in Münster and Bonn (1928/29 and 1930/31 respectively) and volume II of hisChurch Dogmatics, that ethics is dogmatics. Foucault famously rejected ethics which makes universal normative claims in favour of producing descriptions of historical phenomena and letting the reader make moral judgments accordingly. His method, we suggest, understands ethics as ethnography. We have taken these two ways of thinking together and excluded the middle term: ethics. This has yielded the abbreviated form: ethnography is dogmatics.
‘Do You Understand What You Are Reading?’ Calvin's Guidance for the Reading of Scripture
Authors: Zachman Randall C.
Published: January 2009

One hot day a eunuch of great authority under Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, was riding home in his chariot. He had just been to the temple in Jerusalem, yet he was not content to have his faith nourished by the priestly exposition of Scripture alone, but was also studiously reading Scripture for himself, specifically the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. He found enough clarity in the prophet to strengthen his faith; but then he came across a passage that seemed to block his access to the meaning of the prophet, for it spoke of one who in a contradictory way was humiliated beyond all others, and yet exalted above the earth. As he was puzzling over the meaning of this passage, a man appeared and asked him, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ The eunuch could have dismissed this question with proud disdain. Instead, he responded with modesty and humility, ‘How can I, unless someone guide me?’ Philip answered the eunuch's most pressing question, ‘Of whom does the prophet speak?’ by pointing him to Jesus Christ. The eunuch responded to Philip's help in interpreting Scripture with such faith that he asked to be baptized then and there, and then returned home with much joy, for he now knew the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.
Zwingli and the Origin of the Reformed Covenant 1524–7
Authors: Gillies Scott A.
Published: January 2009

The concept of the covenant is crucial to understanding the development of Reformed theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The origin of this aspect of theology during the initial decades of the Reformation, however, has received little attention. Kenneth Hagen's groundbreaking article on the advent of covenant theology and its distinctiveness from testamental theology was a pioneering outline, yet was not built upon by the succeeding generation of scholars. Attempts to explain the Reformed covenant as an outgrowth of late Medieval theology, in particular the Nominalistpactumconcept, remain tentative and inconclusive. Efforts in the field of Anglo-American Puritanism have likewise yielded little in the way of detailed analysis.
The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa's Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology
Authors: Hart D. Bentley
Published: January 2009

Nowhere in the literary remains of antiquity is there another document quite comparable to Gregory of Nyssa's fourth homily on the book of Ecclesiastes: certainly no other ancient text still known to us—Christian, Jewish, or Pagan—contains so fierce, unequivocal, and indignant a condemnation of the institution of slavery. Not that it constitutes a particularly lengthy treatise: it is only a part of the sermon itself, a brief exegedeal excursus on Ecclesiastes 2:7 (‘I got me male and female slaves, and had my home-born slaves as well’), but it is a passage of remarkable rhetorical intensity. In it Gregory treats slavery not as a luxury that should be indulged in only temperately (as might an Epicurean), nor as a necessary domestic economy too often abused by arrogant or brutal slave-owners (as might a Stoic like Seneca or a Christian like John Chrysostom), but as intrinsically sinful, opposed to God's actions in creation, salvation, and the church, and essentially incompatible with the Gospel. Of course, in an age when an economy sustained otherwise than by chattel slavery was all but unimaginable, the question of abolition was simply never raised, and so the apparent uniqueness of Gregory's sermon is, in one sense, entirely unsurprising. Gregory lived at a time, after all, when the response of Christian theologians to slavery ranged from—at best—resigned acceptance to—at worst—vigorous advocacy. But, then, this makes all the more perplexing the question of how one is to account for Gregory's eccentricity. Various influences on his thinking could of course be cited— most notably, perhaps, that of his revered teacher and sister Macrina, who had prevailed upon Gregory's mother to live a common life with her servants—but this could at best help to explain only Gregory's general distaste for the institution; it would still not account for the sheer uncompromising vehemence of his denunciations.
‘Person’ and ‘Being’ in John Zizioulas' Trinitarian Theology: Conversations with Thomas Torrance and Thomas Aquinas
Authors: Colle Ralph Del
Published: January 2009

The 318 Fathers at the First Council of Nicaea (325) began their profession of faith in the second article of the creed as follows:

Confessing that: We believe in one God … And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father as only begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father, [ek tes ousias tou patros].
Can the Truth Be Learned? Kierkegaard's Theological Epistemology
Authors: Rose Tim
Published: January 2009

Søren Kierkegaard delivered a scathing critique of certain German philosophies that arose in the wake of theAufklärung. In this respect he is most well known for focusing most of his attacks against Hegelian idealism, although it is important to remember that he also found the time to attack aspects of the theological Rationalism and Romanticism that he had encountered during his university studies. Unfortunately for us he chose a rather eccentric way in which to do this. Inspired by the literary techniques of German Romantic ironists such as Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, Kierkegaard chose largely to mask his thoughts beneath levels of irony and pseudonyms. Each one of these pseudonyms personified specific traits of his chosen opponents.
Personhood and the problem of the Other
Authors: McFarland Ian
Published: January 2009

The question of what it means to be a person is hardly new in theology, but it has arguably been posed with renewed urgency over the past generation. On the one hand, traditional answers have been challenged by those whose personhood had long been viewed inside and outside the church as somehow inferior or deficient (especially men of colour, and women of all backgrounds). On the other, reflection on the situation of people suffering from severe mental retardation, psychosis and dementia (not to mention the debates over abortion and euthanasia) has cast doubt on ancient and modern attempts to understand personhood in terms of self-consciousness or some other mental capacity.
Modernity, History and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible
Authors: Green Joel B.
Published: January 2009

One of the more noticeable features of the landscape of theological studies, broadly conceived, is the trouble-some relationship between biblical studies and systematic or constructive theology. Following the programmatic comments of Colin Gunton, by ‘systematic theology’, I refer to that theology which is concerned (1) to elucidate in coherent fashion the internal relations of one aspect of belief to other potentially related beliefs; (2) to demonstrate an understanding of the relation between the content of theology and ‘the sources specific to the faith’; and (3) to evince an awareness of the relation between the content of theology and general claims for truth in human culture, not least those of philosophy and science. It is with this enterprise, the doing of systematic theology, that biblical studies has come in the last two centuries to have increasingly poor relations.
Et Incarnatus Est
Authors: Parker David C.
Published: January 2009

While the Christian tradition in some of its language takes very seriously the idea that God's revelation in Jesus Christ took place on a historical stage, it too often treats the inevitable historical problems as negative, overlooking their positive value.
Defending Derrida: A Response to Milbank and Pickstock
Authors: Collins Guy
Published: January 2009

The reception of Jacques Derrida in the academic community has frequently been a source of controversy. Whilst America has often been hospitable to his thought, the situation in British and even French universities has occasionally been openly hostile. Derrida arouses an intensity of emotion illustrated by the two hundred and four academics at Cambridge University who attempted to block the award of an honorary degree in 1992. Like the reaction within other disciplines, the theological response was, and remains, fissured. Leading the critics, Brian Hebblethwaite lent vocal support to Derrida's detractors. Nevertheless, Hebblethwaite's published criticisms of Derrida at the time lack either theological or philosophical arguments. Instead, his assessment reveals a knowledge of Derrida gleaned almost exclusively from secondary sources, with the exception of a lone reference to Derrida's debate with John Searle inLimited Inc.
Image, Likeness, and the Ethics of Memory
Authors: Sider J. Alexander
Published: January 2009

Modern people make horrible contemplators of icons. This is not only because we have excised icons from the venues in which they were originally deployed, hanging them on the walls of this-or-that National-Gallery-of- Art. It has also to do with the way we see things. We trust sight in a way pre-modern people never could. Consider the contact lens: Small convex pieces of silicon we place over our pupils to refract light more precisely onto our retinas. We put them in and we forget about them—until our eyes begin to burn. But even then we rarely think of contacts as mediators that decisively affect our capacity to trust in sight. Or consider the television. With a tap of a button it comes on, bringing us images from … where? New York, Hollywood, London—one, two, three thousand miles away. This is mediation, and we trust it so much that we have forgotten to experience it as such. The relevant question is, Why?
Dual Processions of the Holy Spirit: Development of a Theological Tradition
Authors: Nodes Daniel J.
Published: January 2009

The theology of the Holy Spirit waited through the early Christian centuries until the main doctrines regarding the Trinity and the person of Christ had been forged. Even then pneumatology was introduced ‘by the back door’, in Theodore Campbell's phrase, that of how the Son was placed in the Father, Son and Spirit confession. While prayers to the Spirit were not lacking in the earliest liturgies, still, at Nicea the doctrine ‘had been disposed of in lapidary brevity’, as Jaroslav Pelikan has described the credal line, ‘and we believe in the Holy Spirit’. ‘Nor does there seem to have been a single treatise dealing specifically with the person of the Spirit composed before the second half of the fourth century’. After Nicea, however, controversy concerning the Spirit erupted ‘with a vengeance’, producing the same kind of energy that had accompanied the Christological debates. Pneumatomachi, Tropici, and Macedonians, though losers in the fight for orthodox doctrine on the Spirit's nature, had mounted formidable campaigns, as Arians had done over the relationship of Christ to the Father. But disagreement over the Spirit had an even greater impact than Arian opposition in that the filioque remains a principal difference between the Catholic and Orthodox, and now Catholic and Anglican, creeds.
Human Rights, Fact or Fiction?: ‘Human Rights and “the Risk of Freedom”’
Authors: Meyer John R.
Published: January 2009

Before the General Assembly of the United Nations Pope John Paul II declared that the quest for freedom points to the existence of ‘natural rights’ that reflect the objective and inviolable demands of a universal moral law. While this assertion was well received by those in attendance, an important question remains: how are we to reconcile this universal vision of human rights with the current plethora of disputable legislated rights? Ernest Fortin claims the problem is rooted in the fact that modern ‘rights talk’ emphasizes individual subjective rights over the objective reality of human nature, and Alasdair Maclntyre even questions the moral value of human rights because they are all too easily manipulated by those who view them as self-evident truths. When you add to these observations the appearance of such controversial individual entitlements as ‘reproductive rights’, ‘sex rights’, ‘the right to same-sex marriage’ and the ‘right to die’, it is not surprising to hear people calling for a silencing of ‘rights talk’.
The Disarming Virtue of Stanley Hauerwas
Authors: Wells Samuel
Published: January 2009

Stanley Hauerwas likes to be regarded as a theologian. He writes about ethics, and ethics is commonly thought to be about decisions. But he believes that the fundamental decision is God's decision to be in relationship with his creation and his people. He believes that out of the Christian narrative come particular habits and practices that shape the lives of Christians in a distinctive way. He believes that Christians proclaim the sovereignty of God and the imitation of Christ by the practice of peaceable engagement with the world. These convictions earn his ethics the epithets of theological, narrative, and nonviolent.
The Religious Power of Scripture
Authors: Jenson Robert W.
Published: January 2009

A distinction was proposed in old Protestantism, by Johannes Musaeus among others, but not then generally adopted: that the authority of Scripture is a ‘double capacity: one to judge other writings and teachings…, another to bring about the assent of faith…’. Recognition of this distinction and separate discussion of these capacities is, in my judgement, necessary to resolve many modern perplexities about Scripture. The present essay is concerned for the second sort of scriptural authority, precisely in its difference from the first. We will begin with the simple fact that the church reads Scripture, in expectation of faith.
The Time Is Fulfilled: Jesus and the Jubilee
Authors: Barker Margaret
Published: January 2009

As the Millennium approaches, there is considerable interest in the Old Testament idea of Jubilee, but the New Testament application is unexplored. The Jubilee is a key element in understanding both the ministry of Jesus and Palestine in the first century CE.
Why Time Cannot and Should Not Heal the Wounds of History But Time Has Been and Can Be Redeemed
Authors: Hauerwas Stanley
Published: January 2009

In his wonderful book, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, Michael Ignatieff observes that the process of healing the wounds of the past is the most mysterious process of all. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, South Africa are names that remind us that the past continues to torment us because it is not the past. ‘These places are not living in a serial order of time but in a simultaneous one, in which the past and the present are continuous, an agglutinated mass of fantasies, distortions, myths, and lies.’
‘To Be Or Not To Be’: The Possible Futures of New Testament Scholarship Markus Bockmueh
Authors: Bockmuehl Markus
Published: January 2009

One Tuesday afternoon in June of 1936, the newly installed Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge set out to deliver his inaugural lecture (Dodd 1936). As he stepped up to the podium, his subject stretched out before him in a wide open vista, clear and uncluttered, inviting him to enter into the inheritance of a century or more of successful scientific investigation. The man was C.H. Dodd; his title, ‘The Present Task in New Testament Studies’.
Schleiermacher as an Anselmian Theologian: Aesthetics, Dogmatics, Apologetics and Proof
Authors: Rogers Eugene F.
Published: January 2009

About ten years ago, just before his death, Hans Frei added a new section, ‘Convergence’, to essay bearing the main title ‘Barth and Schleiermacher’, which has appeared in print more recently. In the proposal that gave its name toTypes of Christian Thought, Frei stated the convergence in another way. Barth and Schleiermacher represented theologies of adjoining rather than opposing types in Frei's array.
Hellfire and Damnation: Four Ancient and Modern Views
Authors: Hunsinger George
Published: January 2009

Hell is a doctrine that has always had its uses. The range of those uses can be conveniently traced by examining a passage fromCold Comfort Farm, the comic novel by Stella Gibbons, first published in 1932. The novel is set in rural England during the third decade of the twentieth century, a time when automobiles were not entirely unknown but not yet widely in use. The scene to be examined involves Flora Poste and Amos Starkadder. Flora is a young, sophisticated woman who has gone to visit her relatives in the country, and Amos is her gray-haired, grizzled cousin, a Scotsman who lives on the farm with other kinfolk and who serves as a lay preacher in town at the Church of the Quivering Brethren. Flora accompanies Amos to a preaching service one evening. They arrive by horse and buggy, enter the hall, and take their seats. Flora sits in the back near the exit, Amos by the platform up front.