to such a context be? What makes Christian Theology different from other disciplines reflecting on the same reality? What is the strategic value of Theology - its rhetorical, reality-depicting, problem-solving potential - in a pluralistic, multi-religious society? Put differently: What would the educational, formative, and therefore scientific importance of Christian Theology in such contexts be? These, in my view, would be crucially important qualitative questions to ask with respect to Theology's position at a (secular) university.Much of the integrity of the responses to these questions lies, I believe, in the dynamic yet mysterious ways in which Christian Theology refers to the ultimate reality called "God". The Christ event was to reconfigure and amplify previous experiences and interpretations of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. It would challenge the early (and later) Jesus followers radically to revision their everyday lives from within a faith relationship with the living God. If Jesus (as interpreted by the NT writings) then opened up new ways of thinking and speaking about God, humanity, society and creation - how did it happen, and how was it supposed to happen?The ability to explore, know and describe reality, is an awesome responsibility entrusted to human beings. Yet, perhaps even more remarkable, is the ability of human imagination to redescribe reality, to rename experiences, to retell their stories from new angles. This refers to the human capacity to speak metaphorically - to see new possibilities and to make new connections between known images and (past and present) experiences.Metaphorical language typically permeates the biblical writings. Literary devices such as genre (narrative, parable, poetry, apocalyptic symbols), liturgy, art, tradition (as extended metaphor) and even people all function rhetorically as instruments for redescribing reality from new perspectives.1 My interest in metaphor here lies particularly in its imaginative and transformative nature, in its ability to refer to an alternative reality, and thus to make sense of this reality. According to Ricoeur (1975:63-145; 1976:89-95), the transformative (authoritative, life-giving) power of a text lies in its ability to suggest, to open up, to make possible (glimpses of) a "proposed world" which readers might adopt or inhabit, an alternative point of view with which they can identify. In this way a text may disclose new possibilities - new ways of looking at things, of relating to people, of thinking and behaving. In this way a text has a persuasive thrust towards renewal and transformation, inviting people to re-imagine their life stories and to inhabit its world as the real world for them.For Christian Theology to give an account of the nature of the biblical writings and their reception in new times and places - as life-giving and sense-making activities - the authority of these texts has to be (re)focused and (re)structured within the dynamic site of continuous interaction between God's Spirit, their multiple textual dimensions, as well as the interests, dreams and fears of contemporary faith communities (Mouton 2006:60-64). Such an approach would embrace the many dimensions of the full hermeneutical circle, and would be truthful to the dynamic nature and purpose of these texts. Surprisingly, the spiral