International Journal of Systematic Theology最新文献

In this essay, I trace the main contours of Herman Bavinck's account of divine providence, outlining its unique features. I then highlight ways that Bavinck's parliamentary speeches which touch on the subject of colonial policy in the Dutch East Indies expose a hidden risk in his formulation of this doctrine. In conversation with recent reflections on this doctrine, I then argue that this problem is not insurmountable. By way of conclusion, I suggest ways that it might be overcome so that the more promising features of Bavinck's doctrine of providence might be retrieved.

This essay aims to reply to the three essays devoted to Systematic Theology, volume 2. Common to all three essays is the conviction that my Trinitarian theology exhibits a kind of unicity that gives rise to inconsistencies of method and worries in matters of doctrine. My reply lays out several forms of unity and details how I hope to present proper uniformity in form and matter of dogmatics. A precis of my underlying Doctrine of Scripture and my forthcoming Christology is appended as well, as these prove central to the essayists' queries about the volume.

Social Trinitarians have long argued that a strong reading of consubstantiality rules out the possibility of anything interpersonal – including interpersonal self-giving – in God. I argue that, for Aquinas, the claim that all three persons are identical to the same nature is no threat to interpersonal self-giving. Nor is it merely compatible with interpersonal self-giving. Instead, it is necessary for the fullest possible self-giving: if the Father and the Son did not share a single nature, then the Father could not give everything he has to the Son.

This review of the second volume of Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology reflects upon its several extraordinary features before exploring in some detail the theological account of Scripture integrated into its argument. The possibility of unfolding a metaphysically robust account of God's immanent triune life on the basis of the biblical witness turns upon a highly distinctive view of the Bible and its relation to God's own being.

The second volume of Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology is a daring attempt to do something new in trinitarian dogma: find a fulsome, technically sophisticated doctrine of the Trinity in key Old Testament texts using an interpretive approach, and employing assumptions, that might be recognizable to certain Jewish theological readings of the same texts. This paper situates this project in Sonderegger's longstanding belief in a need for Christianity to overcome its pervasive anti-Judaism, and shows how, to achieve this aim, Sonderegger constructs a highly unique and provocative understanding of the Bible as the creaturely site wherein God's immanent, holy life is manifest. The author commends Sonderegger's ontology of scripture as stimulating and compelling, while also raising some questions for further consideration.

This article presents a brief, constructive, theological account of memory in response to contemporary questions regarding memory loss via Augustine's account of memory, which elucidates the remembering subject's openness and relatedness to God and the communion of saints. First, I examine Augustine's Confessions, showing how memory is embodied, affective, and cogitative, and that memory's end is in relation to God and the communion of saints. Afterwards, I consider the resonances between Augustine's account of memory and two threads of research in dementia studies—namely, the notion of the ‘embodied self’ and the concept of memory ‘extension’—in order to propose how such a reading of Augustine on memory might contribute towards theological accounts and responses to memory impairment or loss.

This paper considers Katherine Sonderegger's view of Scripture. In volume 2 of her Systematic Theology Sonderegger suggests a ‘dogmatic reading’ that overcomes the impasse of both a too historicist and a too theologically narrow view of the biblical text. As evidenced in her innovative reading of Isaiah 53, Sonderegger's engagement with Scripture is both thoroughly traditional and a novel approach to theologically engaging the biblical text.