Holy Matrimony

SUMMARY

Sacredness in marriage is described psychologically as an intense, complex, committed bond, mutually respectful and vulnerable, whose unique depth for both persons evokes the special word “holy.” Examples are cited, including the qualities lacking and at stake in problematic marriages.     

The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Created Order

The article is a sketch for a dogmatics of the Creator Spirit and contends that the Spirit's relation to the creation in general cannot be treated either without attention being paid to its trinitarian matrix or in the absence of some consideration of the human creation in particular. A christologically formed attempt is made to expand the Cappadocian theology of the Spirit as the creation's perfecting cause. This leads into some fragmentary remarks about the Spirit in relation to church, political order and culture more generally.     

Holy Movement and Holy Place: Christian Pilgrimage and the Hajj

Abstract : This article uses a comparative theological model to explore the concept of pilgrimage—holy movement and holy place. It examines Christian pilgrimage exemplified by John Paul II's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 2000 and Islamic pilgrimage exemplified by the Hajj. It then re‐visions Christian pilgrimage by suggesting how three features of the Hajj (danger and hardship, ritual nature, and gathering) can be used to deepen the Christian experience and understanding of pilgrimage.     

O,Holy Simplicity! registering a religion in Slovenia

A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics by Hans Küng. London: SCM Press, 1997, xvii + 315 pp. Paperback, £14.95.

Methodism in Russia and the Baltic States: History and Renewal edited by S. T. Kimbrough, Jr. Nashville: Abingdon, 1995, 253 pp. Paperback.     

The Holy Spirit in Mission

God initiated mission and intends to achieve it by work of the Holy Spirit. Thus, mission—which God commands his church to accomplish—belongs to God, not to human agency. Prior to ascending to heaven, Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples, and asked them to wait in Jerusalem. This Holy Spirit is given to enable them to be witnesses of Jesus from Jerusalem to the end of the world. This implies that the church has to partner with the Holy Spirit to fulfil this mission. Missionaries need to consciously work together with Spirit and be directed and guided by the Spirit.     

Face to Face

In “Face to Face,” I explore my work as a Jewish analyst with a Lebanese woman, Ara, who is strongly identified with the Palestinian cause. As the work unfolded I find myself thrust into a psychic and social space I had not wanted to inhabit, into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the turmoil of Jewish identity. Ara and I were in the midst of ghosts of historical traumas, intersecting and interweaving history and identity between us. It was her history and my history and the history of nations, of broken bonds and damaged victims suddenly all present in the room. I will hold together, in tension, the micro and the macro, the intrapsychic and social, the drama of the encounter between Ara and me and between Palestinians and Jews. I ask what it takes to find one's way into an understanding of the other, a recognition of the other and the legitimacy of their suffering when one's own history is suffused with the trauma of centuries of victimhood. “Face to Face” is an exploration of how to inhabit the Other, how to negotiate difference, moving beyond the dynamics of victim and victimizer, beyond that of oppressor and oppressed to what Emmanuel Levinas refers to as a welcoming of the stranger, a transcendent experience.     

Divine Simplicity and the Holy Trinity

The doctrine of divine simplicity is largely ignored in modern continental theology and has been criticized by some analytic theists. However, it plays a central role in patristic and medieval trinitarian thought, and is a doctrinal affirmation of the Catholic Church. This article seeks to illustrate the significance of the teaching first by examining the contrasting modern trinitarian theologies of Karl Barth and Richard Swinburne, noting how each suffers from a deficit of reference to the doctrine of divine simplicity. The article then presents four aspects of Aquinas’ teaching on divine simplicity. From this a consideration of trinitarian persons ensues that illustrates why the distinction of persons in God can best be understood by making use of Aquinas’ theology of ‘subsistent relations’, while the unified nature of God can best be understood in terms of ‘personal modes of subsistence’. Based on this analysis, the contrasting insights of both Barth and Swinburne can be fully retained, without the contrasting inherent problems that the theology of each presents.