{"title":"The Experience of God: A Phenomenology of Revelation by RobynHorner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), ix + 226 pp.","authors":"Brian W. Becker","doi":"10.1111/moth.12933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12933","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"90 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140075587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eschatological and apocalyptic patterns of thought are today prominent in environmental discourse, across multiple disciplines and media. Yet some theologians criticise these thought patterns for their role in perpetuating and even causing the environmental degradation we now witness. This article argues that the construal of salvation and the Kingdom as a future state is rooted in a misinterpretation of the Gospel, and that this error led secularised Western modernity into its endemic preoccupation with progress, acceleration, and futural, secular utopias. Reading Maximus the Confessor, an alternative view of eschatology emerges, according to which eschaton and theosis constitute one and the same event in the life of the soul, and the advent of the Kingdom is considered inseparable from the soul's transformed perception of reality as she undergoes deification. If the Kingdom resides as a potentiality within the now of all times, accessible through the metanoetic transformation of consciousness, such realisation may lead to a more ecological way of living on the Earth: one less preoccupied with the future and individual survival, and more attuned to the cyclical nature of the cosmos and time, which became displaced by Christianity's and modernity's focus on historical and linear time.
{"title":"Living on This Earth as in Heaven: Time and the Ecological Conversion of Eschatology","authors":"Gunnar Gjermundsen","doi":"10.1111/moth.12930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12930","url":null,"abstract":"Eschatological and apocalyptic patterns of thought are today prominent in environmental discourse, across multiple disciplines and media. Yet some theologians criticise these thought patterns for their role in perpetuating and even causing the environmental degradation we now witness. This article argues that the construal of salvation and the Kingdom as a future state is rooted in a misinterpretation of the Gospel, and that this error led secularised Western modernity into its endemic preoccupation with progress, acceleration, and futural, secular utopias. Reading Maximus the Confessor, an alternative view of eschatology emerges, according to which <i>eschaton</i> and <i>theosis</i> constitute one and the same event in the life of the soul, and the advent of the Kingdom is considered inseparable from the soul's transformed perception of reality as she undergoes deification. If the Kingdom resides as a potentiality within the now of all times, accessible through the metanoetic transformation of consciousness, such realisation may lead to a more ecological way of living on the Earth: one less preoccupied with the future and individual survival, and more attuned to the cyclical nature of the cosmos and time, which became displaced by Christianity's and modernity's focus on historical and linear time.","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"110 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139763879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper presents an argument for the recovery of the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. I argue that the doctrine accords with creedal and doctrinal tradition (§2), as well as the scriptural witness about the goodness and destiny of human flesh (§3). I then outline what it means to say – minimally – that the flesh (or ‘numerically the same body’) will be raised (§4). In §5, I argue that the doctrine speaks to the unique predicament of human beings, namely, that our very being (our flesh) is the site and source of our greatest fear – the fear of death. By focusing its proffered hopes on the same flesh in which our deepest fears are located, the promise of resurrection is shown to be a ‘peculiar treasure’. Finally, I suggest in §5a-5c three practices by which the church can inculcate this hope in the face of death.
{"title":"The Resurrection of the Flesh: the ‘Peculiar Treasure’ of the Church","authors":"Jon W. Thompson","doi":"10.1111/moth.12929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12929","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents an argument for the recovery of the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. I argue that the doctrine accords with creedal and doctrinal tradition (§2), as well as the scriptural witness about the goodness and destiny of human flesh (§3). I then outline what it means to say – minimally – that the flesh (or ‘numerically the same body’) will be raised (§4). In §5, I argue that the doctrine speaks to the unique predicament of human beings, namely, that our very being (our flesh) is the site and source of our greatest fear – the fear of death. By focusing its proffered hopes on the same flesh in which our deepest fears are located, the promise of resurrection is shown to be a ‘peculiar treasure’. Finally, I suggest in §5a-5c three practices by which the church can inculcate this hope in the face of death.","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139763881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
According to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr, the divine Persons eternally pray to each other. According to Thomas Aquinas, they do not. Thomas allows for ways in which the divine Persons worship, glorify, contemplate, and give thanks to each other. Yet he defines prayer as petition, and he teaches that the divine Persons cannot petition each other—which means that They cannot pray to each other. For Thomas, however, Christ's prayer reveals His eternal sonship, and certain terms in which Thomas casts divine sonship recall those in which he casts prayer. Thomas, therefore, can open up certain avenues towards the conclusion that the petitionary prayer, which is limited to creatures, resembles and is rooted in the Son's eternal sonship.
根据汉斯-乌尔斯-冯-巴尔塔萨(Hans Urs von Balthasar)和阿德里安娜-冯-斯皮尔(Adrienne von Speyr)的观点,神人永恒地相互祈祷。而根据托马斯-阿奎那的观点,他们不会。托马斯允许神人以各种方式互相崇拜、荣耀、思索和感谢。然而,他把祷告定义为请愿,他教导说,神格之间不能相互请愿--这意味着他们不能相互祷告。然而,对多马来说,基督的祷告揭示了祂永恒的儿子的身份,多马对神子身份的某些描述让人想起他对祷告的描述。因此,多马可以开辟某些途径来得出结论,即仅限于受造物的祈求式祷告类似于圣子永恒的儿子身份,并植根于此。
{"title":"Aquinas on Prayer in the Eternal Trinity","authors":"Michael Joseph Higgins","doi":"10.1111/moth.12931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12931","url":null,"abstract":"According to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr, the divine Persons eternally pray to each other. According to Thomas Aquinas, they do not. Thomas allows for ways in which the divine Persons worship, glorify, contemplate, and give thanks to each other. Yet he defines prayer as petition, and he teaches that the divine Persons cannot petition each other—which means that They cannot pray to each other. For Thomas, however, Christ's prayer reveals His eternal sonship, and certain terms in which Thomas casts divine sonship recall those in which he casts prayer. Thomas, therefore, can open up certain avenues towards the conclusion that the petitionary prayer, which is limited to creatures, resembles and is rooted in the Son's eternal sonship.","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"133 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139764143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article imagines how the discipline of comparative theology might sound in a decolonial key. Focusing on implications for Hindu-Christian comparative theology, this article puts the sacramental theological approach of Indian Christian artist and theologian Jyoti Sahi into conversation with Michi Saagiig (Mississauga) Nishnaabeg theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's notion of land as pedagogy. In contrast to the narrow epistemology that dominates the academy, this study highlights features of a land-based alternative in which place, positionality, and relation are central to knowing; in which a subject is not first a thinker but a person in relation to a particular locale; and in which ecological and theological thinking encompass not only the sustainability of natural “resources,” but also the histories and exercises of power within a place.
{"title":"Hindu-Christian Comparative Theology in a Decolonial Key","authors":"Michelle Voss","doi":"10.1111/moth.12918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12918","url":null,"abstract":"This article imagines how the discipline of comparative theology might sound in a decolonial key. Focusing on implications for Hindu-Christian comparative theology, this article puts the sacramental theological approach of Indian Christian artist and theologian Jyoti Sahi into conversation with Michi Saagiig (Mississauga) Nishnaabeg theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's notion of land as pedagogy. In contrast to the narrow epistemology that dominates the academy, this study highlights features of a land-based alternative in which place, positionality, and relation are central to knowing; in which a subject is not first a thinker but a person in relation to a particular locale; and in which ecological and theological thinking encompass not only the sustainability of natural “resources,” but also the histories and exercises of power within a place.","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139373836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay is an excavation of Islamic theological confluences in Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics. It likewise demonstrates how comparative theology facilitates the de-essentialization of religious traditions. This essay uses the Swiss theologian as a case study in exposing how someone apparently closed off from interreligious learning is still inadvertently shaped by non-Christian traditions. Being adjacent to the work of Anne Carpenter, who seeks to save his theological project from Eurocentrism, this essay seeks to save it from theological exclusivism and Orientalism. It will argue that in the case of Christian theology, confluences of the Islamic in the past offer possibilities for future exercises in comparative theology. It looks back to look ahead by suggesting theo-poetics as a new direction for Christian comparative theology with Islam.
{"title":"Confluences of the Islamic in Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics: Toward a Comparative Theo-Poetics with Islam","authors":"Axel M. Oaks Takacs","doi":"10.1111/moth.12917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12917","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is an excavation of Islamic theological confluences in Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics. It likewise demonstrates how comparative theology facilitates the de-essentialization of religious traditions. This essay uses the Swiss theologian as a case study in exposing how someone apparently closed off from interreligious learning is still inadvertently shaped by non-Christian traditions. Being adjacent to the work of Anne Carpenter, who seeks to save his theological project from Eurocentrism, this essay seeks to save it from theological exclusivism and Orientalism. It will argue that in the case of Christian theology, confluences of the Islamic in the past offer possibilities for future exercises in comparative theology. It looks back to look ahead by suggesting theo-poetics as a new direction for Christian comparative theology with Islam.","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139066115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article offers an interpretation of the New Thinking of Rosenstock‐Huessy and Rosenzweig. It first explains the New Thinking in juxtaposition with a philosophical tradition that views reality as a problem of knowledge and conceptualizes the I's relation to reality as accomplished primarily through thought. The New Thinking is defined by its effort to understand the human being's relation to reality as constitutively shaped by speech, and speech not as means of knowing or representing things but as means of establishing relations among speakers. The article then reconstructs an argument central to the New Thinking that begins with the analysis of the structure of speech in order to discover the relations between the human being, the world, and God that are the conditions without which speech would not accomplish what it always already accomplishes, namely, to establish relations among speakers. The idea that emerges from this analysis is that prior to, and presupposed by, our capacity to know reality objectively, our very encounter with reality in speech and time is inescapably a response to God's address. For the New Thinking, God is not an object of knowledge or experience, but the perpetual address that is the condition of speech.
{"title":"God as the Condition of Speech: An Interpretation of Eugen Rosenstock‐Huessy's and Franz Rosenzweig's New Thinking","authors":"Ron Katwan","doi":"10.1111/moth.12916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12916","url":null,"abstract":"The article offers an interpretation of the New Thinking of Rosenstock‐Huessy and Rosenzweig. It first explains the New Thinking in juxtaposition with a philosophical tradition that views reality as a problem of knowledge and conceptualizes the I's relation to reality as accomplished primarily through thought. The New Thinking is defined by its effort to understand the human being's relation to reality as constitutively shaped by speech, and speech not as means of knowing or representing things but as means of establishing relations among speakers. The article then reconstructs an argument central to the New Thinking that begins with the analysis of the structure of speech in order to discover the relations between the human being, the world, and God that are the conditions without which speech would not accomplish what it always already accomplishes, namely, to establish relations among speakers. The idea that emerges from this analysis is that prior to, and presupposed by, our capacity to know reality objectively, our very encounter with reality in speech and time is inescapably a response to God's address. For the New Thinking, God is not an object of knowledge or experience, but the perpetual address that is the condition of speech.","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":" 26","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138994848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Russian religious culture has been a constant and prominent element of Rowan Williams’ work. This article demonstrates the affinity of Williams’ metaphysics with the work of two Russian philosopher-theologians, whose influence on Williams is explicit: Sergii Bulgakov and Aleksei Losev. This affinity is drawn out by a close attention to the significance of the concept of substance in Williams’ metaphysics. The concept of substance brings together language, metaphysics, and the doctrine of God in Williams’ work, in ways that converge strongly with the thought of Bulgakov and Losev. Via a scrutiny of language, these thinkers eschew an understanding of substance and transcendence that privileges isolated interiority, with substance instead taking a Trinitarian shape. To think metaphysically thus becomes a spiritual practice, as the metaphysician renounces an understanding of substance in the image of the isolated ego, conforming instead to the triune pattern of created being.
{"title":"Speaking (about) Substance: The Metaphysics of Rowan Williams and some Russian Philosophers","authors":"Joshua Pulin Elvy Heath","doi":"10.1111/moth.12914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12914","url":null,"abstract":"Russian religious culture has been a constant and prominent element of Rowan Williams’ work. This article demonstrates the affinity of Williams’ metaphysics with the work of two Russian philosopher-theologians, whose influence on Williams is explicit: Sergii Bulgakov and Aleksei Losev. This affinity is drawn out by a close attention to the significance of the concept of substance in Williams’ metaphysics. The concept of substance brings together language, metaphysics, and the doctrine of God in Williams’ work, in ways that converge strongly with the thought of Bulgakov and Losev. Via a scrutiny of language, these thinkers eschew an understanding of substance and transcendence that privileges isolated interiority, with substance instead taking a Trinitarian shape. To think metaphysically thus becomes a spiritual practice, as the metaphysician renounces an understanding of substance in the image of the isolated ego, conforming instead to the triune pattern of created being.","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138686231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Toward a Higher Synthesis: Reflections on Paul Tyson's A Christian Theology of Science","authors":"J. Betz","doi":"10.1111/moth.12912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12912","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"8 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138621060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Metaphysics concerns the whole of reality, including the human spiritual response to reality. Pre-reflectively we do not divide these two, but reality includes the moment of reflection. For this reason, metaphysics and poetry are identical, and yet also distinguished. As distinguished, metaphysics must treat all as found, including the poetic, and link individual monads to the single infinite entirety. Conversely, poetry must treat all as made through its own continuation of the making process; it must seek to express the infinite in its own monadic instances. Yet both activities look towards a re-unification and second innocence. In this regard, poetry assumes participatively the entire burden of creation, judgement and redemption, while knowing that it is fallible, and may demonically fail. Equivalently, metaphysics must hermeneutically track all of the particular in its varied positivity, all the monadic makings and arrivals of unique events. The poetic is only secure in the poetic event of the Incarnation, and metaphysics only complete in conceiving of the divine thought as itself Trinitarian poetic emergence, and all finite reality as participation in that emergence, only sealed by the arrival of the God-Man.
{"title":"Metaphysics and Poetics","authors":"C.J.C. Pickstock","doi":"10.1111/moth.12915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12915","url":null,"abstract":"Metaphysics concerns the whole of reality, including the human spiritual response to reality. Pre-reflectively we do not divide these two, but reality includes the moment of reflection. For this reason, metaphysics and poetry are identical, and yet also distinguished. As distinguished, metaphysics must treat all as found, including the poetic, and link individual monads to the single infinite entirety. Conversely, poetry must treat all as made through its own continuation of the making process; it must seek to express the infinite in its own monadic instances. Yet both activities look towards a re-unification and second innocence. In this regard, poetry assumes participatively the entire burden of creation, judgement and redemption, while knowing that it is fallible, and may demonically fail. Equivalently, metaphysics must hermeneutically track all of the particular in its varied positivity, all the monadic makings and arrivals of unique events. The poetic is only secure in the poetic event of the Incarnation, and metaphysics only complete in conceiving of the divine thought as itself Trinitarian poetic emergence, and all finite reality as participation in that emergence, only sealed by the arrival of the God-Man.","PeriodicalId":18945,"journal":{"name":"Modern Theology","volume":"35 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138496782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}