‘We Pray by His Mouth’: Karl Barth,Erving Goffman,and a Theology of Invocation

Rereading the opening question of the Westminster Catechism, “What is the chief end of man?”, I contend in this essay that the act of invocation — giving God thanks, praise, and petitions — is the act in and through which human being itself is founded, constituted and achieved. I take important cues from Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics and The Christian Life, and from sociologist Erving Goffman's work on the shifting “footings” involved in everyday interactions. I argue for an account of the human being as a being‐with‐God, human acting as acting‐with‐God, and human salvation as a restoration to the genuine human partner's work — indeed, the true leitourgia— of thanks, praise and petition to God.     

God's Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar

Abstract: A recent disagreement between Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar highlights some of the issues involved in discussing the relationship between God's triunity and determination to be God‐with‐us. Can we say that God's determination to be with us is the basis of God's triunity? Must we identify the Son's being as eternally toward‐incarnation? How does God's freedom relate to God's eternal decision to be God‐with‐humanity? In this article I argue (contra McCormack) that God's triunity logically precedes God's determination to be with us, but (contra Molnar) that this logical precedence entails neither that the pre‐incarnate Son is utterly unknown to us nor that God retains some freedom to be God‐without‐humanity.     

Experience and the Absolute other

In Experience and the Absolute (2004) and other works, Jean‐Yves Lacoste develops a phenomenology of a way of life he calls “liturgy,” in which one refuses one's being‐in‐the‐world in favor of a more basic form of existence he calls “being‐before‐God.” In this essay I argue that if there is indeed such a thing as being‐before‐God, Lacoste has not sufficiently considered the possibility that it is characterized in part by a disturbance of one's being‐in‐the‐world similar to, or perhaps even identical with, the disruptive encounter with the human other that constitutes the self as responsible according to Levinas's unique notion of ethics. Lacoste's dismissal of Levinas, evidently based on a misunderstanding of what Levinas means by the word “ethics,” leads him to overlook the potential relevance of Levinas's ideas to his phenomenological project at a number of significant points in his work.     

The possibility of having knowledge of al‐wujūd al‐mahd ’sheer being’ according to ibn carabi's Kitab al‐jalal wa‐al‐jamal

Mysticism in general makes a distinction between ‘God‐for‐us’ and ‘God‐in‐him‐self. This paper attests that the Muslim mystic‐philosopher, Ibn ‘Arabi's concepts of ‘Sheer Possibility’ and ‘Sheer Being'; ‘Beauty’ and ‘Absolute Majesty’ parallel God‐for‐us and God‐in‐himself. The paper also attempts to examine the extent of possible human knowledge of God beyond the level ‘God‐for‐us'/'Beauty'/'sheer possibility’ and the relation of such developmental knowledge to the Qur'an, according to Ibn ^cArabi. The paper ends with a statement on the need to examine the hermeneutical mechanism supporting this sort of linking of human knowledge with the Qur'an and a need to discuss the possible motives behind traditionalization of developmental knowledge inputs.     

The Erotic Eucharist

Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est continues the magisterium's twentieth‐century shift from an act‐oriented, procreative approach to sexual ethics to what I will term a heterosexually personalistic one. Situating a heterosexual anthropology within a heterosexual cosmology, Benedict argues that just as God loves humanity with heterosexual eros, so must human beings love each other heterosexually. Although Benedict depends upon the explanatory power of heterosexuality, he perhaps unwittingly ends up depicting God's love not as iconically heterosexual, but as queer. In casting God's love as queer, I do not, even analogously, impute to God a type of homosexuality as Benedict does a heterosexuality. Instead, by drawing attention to the discursive specificity and historical instability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality, I use “queer” to recognize God's love as beyond categorization and as strange; it cannot be corralled into or contained by the historically specific notions of heterosexual and homosexual. But this essay does not merely deconstruct Benedict's heterosexually personalistic cosmology. It uncovers in Benedict's Eucharistic transfiguration of marital love a new and promising way of situating discussions about the ethics of sex.     

KIERKEGAARD AND EVANS ON THE PROBLEM OF ABRAHAM

A significant challenge faces any ethic that endorses the view that divine commands are sufficient to impose moral obligations; in this paper, I focus on Kierkegaard's ethic, in particular. The challenge to be addressed is the “modernized” problem of Abraham, popularized especially by Fear and Trembling: the dilemma that an agent faces when a being claiming to be God issues a command to the agent that, by the agent's own lights, seems not to be the kind of command that a loving God would issue. Against a solution to this problem proposed by C. Stephen Evans in Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, I argue that Kierkegaard regards this scenario as never actually resulting in a fully responsible agent's performance of some horrendous action on account of her non‐culpable misinterpretation of God's will and/or failure to discern correctly whether a perceived moral imperative truly is divine in origin.     

Aquinas and the Natural Law

Recent decades have seen a shift away from the traditional view that Aquinas's theory of the natural law is meant to supply us with normative guidance grounded in a substantive theory of human nature. In the present essay, I argue that this is a mistake. Expanding on the suggestions of Jean Porter and Ralph McInerny, I defend a derivationist reading of ST I‐II, Q. 94, A. 2 according to which Aquinas takes our knowledge of the genuine goods of human life and their proper ordering to one another to be self‐evident only to the wise who are able to discern the truth about our God‐given human nature. I then show that this reading provides a better account of Aquinas's view than two recent alternatives: John Finnis's brand of inclinationism and Daniel Mark Nelson's virtue‐based interpretation.     

DANCING WITH THE SACRED: EXCERPTS

Abstract. In excerpts from my Dancing with the Sacred (2002), I use ideas from modern science, our world's religions, and my own experience to highlight three themes of the book. First, working within the framework of a scientific worldview, I develop a concept of the sacred (or God) as the creative activity of nature, human history, and individual life. Second, I offer a relational understanding of human nature that I call our social‐ecological selves and suggest some general considerations about what it means to live meaningfully and morally in an evolutionary world. Third, I explore how we might be at home in a universe that is constantly changing and in which suffering and death are interwoven with life and new creation.     

Divine Hiddenness: Would More Miracles Solve the Problem?

This article addresses the question of whether God's existence would be obvious to everyone if God performed more miracles. I conclude that it would not be so. I look at cases where people have been confronted with what they believe to be miracles and have either not come to believe in God, or have come to intellectual belief in God but declined to follow him. God's existence could be made undeniable not by spectacular signs, but only by God impressing his existence upon us in a direct, non‐propositional way.     

On disagreement about perception

In this article I have tried to rebut certain types of arguments which purport to show not merely that God does not exist but that the notion of necessary existence is itself either self‐contradictory or senseless. In showing that it is not self‐contradictory I have allowed myself the luxury of a negative and a positive approach. Negatively, I have had to show that when the accusation of self‐contradiction is made, it is often accompanied, not by an argument but by a sheer assertion. On the rare occasions when an argument is forthcoming, the arguments, I have tried to show, have been invalid, not even, inconclusive. And to the extent that Kant may be said to have argued not simply the impossibility of a genuine proof of the existence of God, but indeed the impossibility of the concept of necessary existence, I have argued out the weakness of Kant's arguments, the most notable of which I have discussed in some detail. Finally, to establish the genuineness of the concept of necessary existence, positively, I have paradoxically made use of a notion from Russell's logic.     

Imagination,Pop Culture and Ministry with Youth and Young Adults1

Abstract : In this article I raise the question of whether and how Christians can become captive to a kind of constricted imagination, and how this does not serve the church well in its work with youth and young adults. I draw on examples from pop music (Kanye West, U2) to portray the theological logic of ‘check‐list Christianity.’ As an alternative, I follow C. S. Lewis in reorienting the perspective from deciding if some cultural object (song, movie, TV show) is good or bad, to asking what sort of people we become by attending to this or that cultural object; specifically, does it enlarge our being‐before‐God or not? This requires that we also view pop culture as the domain of God's work in Christ, and that we confess that God is already working reconciliation in the midst of the world.     

Minds and Bodies: Human and Divine

Does God have a mind? Western theism has traditionally construed God as an intentional agent who acts on creation and in relation to humankind. God loves, punishes, and redeems. God's intentionality has traditionally been construed in analogy to human intentionality, which in turn has often presumed a supernatural dualism. Developments in cognitive science, however, render supernatural dualism suspect for explaining the human mind. How, then, can we speak of the mind of God? Borrowing from Daniel Dennett's intentional stance, I suggest that analogical reasoning regarding the mind of God be abandoned in favor of an ontologically agnostic approach that treats God as an intentional system. In this approach, God's purposive action is an explanatory feature of the believer's universe, a real pattern that informs our values and beliefs about the world and our place in it.     

When Prayers Go Unanswered

Many Americans believe God answers prayers, but scholars know little about how individuals handle situations in which they perceive that prayers have gone unanswered. Using data from an in‐depth interview project with current and former victims of intimate partner violence, I argue that perceived unanswered prayers cause challenges to belief systems that elicit attribution processes—or cognitive processes through which individuals try to explain the causes of actors’ behavior—whose outcomes are explanations for why God did not answer their prayers. I find that the outcomes of these attribution processes are God‐serving justifications, or attributions of God's perceived unanticipated or problematic behavior that define this behavior as appropriate to the situation. God‐serving justifications for unanswered prayers fall into three types: (1) appeal to higher loyalties, (2) affirmation of benefits, and (3) denial of the pray‐er. I conclude with a discussion of the implications and limitations of the analysis.     

THE HOLY & WHOLLY OTHER: KIERKEGAARD ON THE ALTERITY OF GOD

In response to prevailing perceptions, I contend that Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) conceives of the wholly otherness of God via his dialectical category of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine, initially through the self's consciousness of sin and ultimately through the self's acceptance of the gift of forgiveness. Therefore, I claim that while the common designation of Kierkegaard's God as ‘Wholly Other’ may initially evoke the alterity of sin; it is not ultimately sufficient to describe the divine alterity which Kierkegaard regards as more faithfully manifest in the ‘impossible possibility’ of forgiveness. Through this reading, I finally suggest that the ‘Wholly Other’ is not ultimately representative of God in Kierkegaard's writings and might be more faithfully supplemented by the appellation of the Holy Other.     

The object beyond objects and the sacred

In both Freud's and Winnicott's thoughts regarding our psychological origin, there is the assumption of a given relationship which precedes all human relations. I refer to Freud's primal father and Winnicott's primary ideal object. I have chosen to call the object of this primordial relation “the object beyond objects” and to reflect on this as the psychological basis for an individual's faith in God. By examining what both these authors have to say concerning the sacred and the individual's way of relating to it, I feel that I am also able to describe maturation processes in the believer's relationship with God.     

Person and Being: Conversation with T.F. Torrance about the Monarchy of God

In whom is the unified rule of God centred? Does ultimate determination and authority reside with God the Father or is supreme power shared equally by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? T.F. Torrance's conception of a triune Monarchy, with its differentiated senses of God's Fatherhood, is here expounded and contrasted with Karl Barth's account of command and obedience as integral to God's eternal Being. A brief exegetical study in the Fourth Gospel is also undertaken to seek clarification. The main strengths of Torrance's view are reckoned the unqualified divinity of the Son and Spirit, and their full participation together with the Father in all God's ways and works. A weakness is identified, however, in an under‐determination of the Father's fatherliness. Resolution is then pursued in terms of Person and Being. Although Torrance makes wide‐ranging use of these terms, he does not appear to employ them sufficiently regarding the Monarchy. It is subsequently argued that with respect to Person God the Father is Monarch, while with respect to Being the Three share the Monarchy of God equally and eternally.     

THE VARIETIES AND REVISIONS OF ATHEISM

Abstract. The philosopher Antony Flew has argued for decades that theistic arguments cannot meet criteria of truth. In this essay I respond to Flew's recent announcement that research into the emergence of DNA provides grounds for rational belief in an intelligent orderer, a “God.” Flew's theistic turn is important for philosophers of religion and the wider science‐and‐religion dialogue. It becomes apparent, however, that Flew's “conversion” is not as decisive as one might imagine. While he admits growth in scientific and philosophical understanding, he rejects the idea of growth in religious understanding. Further, he endorses a version of “theoretical theism” while denying the practical importance of belief. Such denial of practical conviction is part of a modernist mindset that separates freedom from the embeddedness of human beings in the natural world. I conclude by noting that the entanglement of human action and wider physical processes, an entanglement seen emblematically in the environmental crisis, requires not only considering the importance of intelligence and order in the emergence of life but also the significance of human agency in claims about the divine and the natural world.     

THE THOUGHT SPACE OF GOD: THE HAUNTING BELOW THE I‐THOU RELATION

This essay attempts a phenomenological analysis of Descartes' statement, ‘my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself,’ and Buber's claim that God ‘is also the mystery of the self‐evident, nearer to me than my I.’ I radicalize the implications of Descartes' and Buber's claims by drawing on the thought of Husserl and Levinas, and couching the analysis in terms of Merleau‐Ponty's experiential notions of haunting and reversibility. This forces us to interrogate the subjective space in which we think God qua recognize the other, and shows us a kind of necessity that underlies the I‐Thou relation. My conclusion leaves us in a place of powerless subjective inwardness and awe.     

What Does it Mean to call God Good?

Contemporary expositions of God's goodness commonly err either (1) by subjecting God to moral laws, which is to question His sovereignty, or (2) by failing to establish that God will always act in accordance with moral principles, which removes the theist's ability to appeal to God's goodness in response to problems of evil. Current attempts at intermediate positions which avoid these two problems fall short. In this paper, I aim to construct a better intermediate position and account of God's goodness. I do this by claiming that God's ability to create is best explained in terms of God's self-love. Since God, as the greatest possible being, must be able to create, He must love Himself. I argue that this in turn entails that God loves all things, since by loving Himself, God loves the pre-existent ideas of everything that will come to exist, and by extension the things themselves. This, I argue, allows us to have confidence that God will act in accordance with moral principles, but without subjecting Him to moral laws.