THE MYSTERIES OF OUR EXISTENCE: ESTRANGEMENT AND THEATRICALITY

“Theater” has become a fashionable metaphor that theologians and ethicists deploy to correct what they see as a Gnostic or antinomian impulse to prioritize “inner state” over “outer action.” But their turn to theater as an easy way to valorize “outer action” conflates person and role, generating a confused anthropology that 1) obscures what theater could make obvious about occupational roles; 2) misses the distinctively non‐theatrical character of performing Christ and church; and 3) renders actions more easily legible than they in fact are. These losses are traced in the work of several theater theologians, and their resultant distortions in self, power, and freedom are elaborated with the help of Stephen Mulhall's critique of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. Gregory of Nyssa's use of theater, by contrast, avoids such distortions by invoking theater together with the “mysteries of our existence”—death and creatio ex nihilo. Theater, for Gregory, becomes a way to describe the estrangement Christians must live into in a world beholden to wealth and power. The anthropology embedded in his metaphor of theater elaborates how Christians might approach their occupational roles, the world, and skepticism.     

MALEBRANCHE AND LEIBNIZ ON THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

In this article I explore Leibniz's claim in the Theodicy that on the essential points Malebranche's theodicy “reduces to” his own view. This judgment may seem to be warranted given that both thinkers emphasize that evils are justified by the fact that they follow from the simple and uniform laws that govern that world which is worthy of divine creation. However, I argue that Leibniz's theodicy differs in several crucial respects from Malebranche's. I begin with a qualified endorsement of Charles Larmore's recent claim that remarks in Malebranche's correspondence with Leibniz indicate that their theodicies rely on incompatible conceptions of the moral rationality of divine action. I also attempt to go beyond Larmore's discussion in highlighting further differences concerning the sort of freedom involved in the divine act of creation. My conclusion is that these differing conceptions of divine morality and divine freedom reveal that in contrast to the case of Leibniz, Malebranche's theodicy not only does not require that God create anything at all, but also is compatible with the result that the world he decides to create is not uniquely the best possible.     

Negative freedom or integrated domination? Adorno versus Honneth

According to Axel Honneth, Adorno's very idea of social critique is self‐defeating. It tries to account for what is wrong, deformed, or pathological without providing any positive yardstick. Honneth's idea of critique is a diagnosis of chronic dysfunctions in the relations of recognition upon which the society in question is grounded. Under such conditions of misrecognition, institutions that embody what he calls social freedom regress to negative freedom. However, such a deficit‐based notion of critique does not square with Honneth's own diagnosis of our present: namely, the transformation from welfare capitalism to neoliberalism. In fact, Honneth's diagnosis is very much in line with Adorno's idea of late capitalism as a society of “total integration.” Adorno's matching conception of critique, it is argued, avoids the problems Honneth runs into. At the basis of Adorno's critical idiom are two key points: an explanation of how social relations can be functional while contradictory and an account of social domination that is diffused throughout society while being differentially experienced by different classes. Adorno's answer to Honneth's concern, regarding the lack of a positive yardstick, is that it is domination that gives meaning to our idea of freedom, rather than the other way around.     

FOLLOWING AT A DISTANCE (AGAIN): GENDER,EQUALITY, AND FREEDOM IN KARL BARTH'S THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

This article explores the possibility of moving beyond the apparent incapacity of Karl Barth's theological anthropology to accommodate gender equality. Barth's theological anthropology is read by critics and appreciative readers alike as confining the basic form of humanity to a binary opposition (I and Thou) from which he then derives a gender‐specific, hierarchical account of man and woman, and finally, of husband and wife as a paradigmatic ethical relationship. I first forward a close reading of Barth's account of I and Thou in order to explicate the nature of the normative form that is basic to his account of human being‐in‐relation. I apply this reading as a lens through which to re‐read and re‐orient his account of Man and Woman/Husband and Wife. I argue that the inequalities that appear intrinsic to Barth's formal ordering of Man and Woman/Husband and Wife owing to the absence of a standard concept of “equal regard” might be re‐oriented, and limitations of his account surpassed, by grasping with greater precision and enunciating the orientational implications of Barth's christologically‐anchored conception of freedom as the “root and crown” of human being‐in‐relation generally, and gendered relationship in particular.     

Present in Love: Rethinking Barth on the Divine Perfections

While Karl Barth's identification of love and freedom (in that order) as the fundamental divine perfections was intended to eliminate any gap between God as revealed and God's eternal being, Barth's equation of divine freedom with decision fatally compromises this aim by reintroducing the spectre of a ‘hidden God’ behind the God revealed in Jesus. Moreover, it exacerbates a worryingly anthropomorphic model of divine action, already pronounced in older orthodox theologies, that is ill‐suited to upholding the causal integrity of the created order. Substituting presence for freedom as the foundational perfection paired with (and used to interpret) divine love maintains the benefits of Barth's relative prioritization of love while avoiding the problems that accompany the interpretation of divine freedom as decision. Specifically, it provides a model of divine action in which permission rather than decision emerges as the fundamental mode of willing whereby by God brings the world into being and sustains it in existence.     

Can imagined intergroup contact change (internal) dialogues on differences between ingroup and outgroup?

Several positive functions have been ascribed to integrative internal dialogues (IDs), which are based on mutual openness to a partner's viewpoint and a readiness to consider his/her arguments in order to potentially modify one's own stance. As the technique of imagined intergroup contact (IIC) favorably influences attitudes towards outgroup members, it was hypothesized that IIC would have a beneficial impact on IDs with an outgroup member when the dialogue is focused on differences between ingroup and outgroup. In the experiment, 151 people (80 women) participated. It revealed that after IIC, both the dialogue author's confrontational attitude and the interlocutor's integrative attitude decreased. Thus, IIC made participants less inclined to gain an advantage over their imagined outgroup interlocutors and more inclined to give them freedom in IDs. However, the effect was significant only when the author's involvement in ID was high or medium.     

Fanon via Lacan,or: Decolonization by Psychoanalytic Means … ?

ABSTRACT

Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the Fanon-Lacan relation we are able to re-articulate many of Fanon's most crucial political insights. The paper adopts three routes of enquiry. Firstly, it investigates Fanon's earliest citations of Lacan, noting how Fanon utilizes Lacan's ideas of historically-situated forms of madness, (mis)recognition, paranoia and psychic causality. Secondly, it highlights a series of conceptual affinities that exist between the work of the two theorists including idea of sociogeny, the importance of symbolic (or social) structure, the notion of fantasy and of a social (or transindividual) unconscious. Thirdly, it provides an instructive example of how Fanon's theorizations of colonial oppression might be supplemented by means of Lacanian social theory especially in respect of how the colonized are positioned as "non-subjects" relative to the master-signifier of whiteness.     

Early Sartre on Freedom and Ethics

This paper offers a revisionary interpretation of Sartre's early views on human freedom. Sartre articulates a subtle account of a fundamental sense of human freedom as autonomy, in terms of human consciousness being both reasons‐responsive and in a distinctive sense self‐determining. The aspects of Sartre's theory of human freedom that underpin his early ethics are shown to be based on his phenomenological analysis of consciousness as, in its fundamental mode of self‐presence, not an object in the world (Section 1). Sartre has a multi‐level theory of the reasons‐sensitivity of consciousness. At one level, consciousness's being alive to reasons is a matter of the affective perception of values and disvalues as features of phenomenal objects (Section 2). This part of his theory, a development of Scheler's, is, however, situated within a broader phenomenological analysis resulting in the claim that the ultimate reasons acknowledged by consciousness neither are nor justifiably could be values adequately presentable as intentional objects. Consciousness's ultimate reasons are, in this sense, not given by the world but by itself (Section 3). Section 4 reconstructs and assesses Sartre's argument that consciousness cannot rationally have an ultimate end other than self‐transparent (‘authentic’) freedom itself.     

Rewriting the flesh of the world for the new human: Merleau-Ponty,Fanon, and Wynter on the ethics of futurity

This article reads Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the “flesh of the world” alongside the ontology that seems to undergird Frantz Fanon's sociodiagnostics as well as his theory of sociogeny. It argues that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the ambiguity and intercorporeality of the flesh of the world renders the ethical and political imperatives of Fanon's decolonial project all the more pressing, since the “new human” is prefigured—if not totally determined—in the national consciousness obtained by “les damnés” through the decolonization process. It then examines how Sylvia Wynter's Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness through (re)conceptualizing “being human as praxis,” also seems to rely on this ontology of the flesh of the world. Bringing these arguments together, the article suggests that the conceptual content of the new human can be found in the liberation struggles of les damnés across what Wynter calls the “poverty archipelagos” wrought by colonial humanism. Hence, the “new skin” for which Fanon calls is fashioned through forming international solidarity with les damnés, with the conceptual content of the new humanism emerging sociogenically—and autopoetically—from those struggles themselves.     

The “Grand Medium”: An Edwardsean Modification of Thomas Aquinas on the Beatific Vision

Jonathan Edwards's understanding of the beatific vision, which draws on Neoplatonist metaphysics, marks a modification of views that became dominant in the Western Church through the rise of Aristotelian anthropology as articulated in the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Edwards's account treats the resurrection of the body as significant, even indispensable for the deifying vision of God. It is also an account that regards Christ—the “grand medium” of the visio dei—as the consummate theophanic appearance of God. And it is, finally, an account that takes seriously the infinite progress of the vision of God, beginning in this life, continuing in the intermediate state, and on into the eternity of the resurrection.     

Friendship and Being: Election and Trinitarian Freedom in Moltmann and Barth

This article constructs two responses to Moltmann's critique of Barth's doctrine of divine freedom in Trinity and the Kingdom, a first on the basis of Barth's programmatic treatment of divine freedom in II/1 of the Church Dogmatics and a second on the basis of Bruce McCormack's reading of Barth's doctrine of election. It shows why the Barth of II/1 must dismiss Moltmann's concern for the priority of God's loving relationship to the world while Barth as interpreted by McCormack can accommodate it. Finally it observes the significance of this twofold defense for mapping Barth onto the terrain of modern theology.     

From Passive Psyche to Dynamic Dasein

This article is a study in contrasts between Freudian psychoanalytic metapsychology, shaped by the physical–mechanistic scientific model of the Helmholtz School of Medicine, and Boss's Daseinanalytic psychotherapy, formed by the human science model derived from the Heidegger's analysis of Dasein. It begins with Binswanger's initial attempt to replace the Freudian metapsychology with Heidegger's analytic of the human being as an active agent in the world. Following this path, the article shows the radical new direction Boss gives to psychotherapy by shifting the focus of therapy from the analysis of an abstract and disembodied psyche driven by forces toward an analysis of the person as a free and responsible agent engaged in the world. Although Boss maintains a high regard for Freud's great achievement, I suggest that he failed to appreciate fully the true magnitude of his new contribution and, due to his hermeneutic of generosity toward psychoanalysis, underestimated the reciprocal influence between Freud's metapsychology and his therapeutic advice and techniques. It is my basic contention that a radical shift of a psychotherapy's philosophical anthropology transforms the entire theory, as a whole, in all its dimensions.     

CREATED CO-CREATOR IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHURCH AND ETHICS

Abstract Philip Hefner's work on created co‐creator is presented for consideration as a contemporary theological anthropology. Its reception within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America falls into three main lines, which are reviewed here because they are suggestive of its potential impact on Christian thinking. This review raises two major questions and leads to a critique. The first question is whether created co‐creator should be replaced by another term for the sake of more clearly encapsulating the ideas represented in Hefner's work. The second question concerns the moral “payoff” of created co‐creator. Such questions lead to the critique that Hefner's corpus gives insufficient attention to responsibility as integral to freedom and that it lacks a theory of obligation. I then sketch the amenability and benefit of linking created co‐creator with “responsibility ethics,” exemplified by the work of Hans Jonas.     

ANTHROPOLOGY,POLANYI, AND AFROPENTECOSTAL RITUAL: A SCIENTIFIC AND THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF PARTICIPATION

The 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis sponsored both an International Congress of Arts and Sciences aimed at unity of knowledge and an anthropology exhibit of diverse peoples. Jointly these represented a quest for unifying knowledge in a diverse world that was fractured by isolated specializations and segregated peoples. In historical perspective, the Congress's quest for knowledge is overshadowed by Ota Benga who was part of the anthropology exhibit. The 1904 World's Fair can be viewed as a Euro‐American ritual, a global pilgrimage, which sought to celebrate the advances and resolve the challenges of modernity and human diversity. Three years later Afropentecostalism dealt with these same issues with different methods and rituals. This ritual system became the most culturally diverse and fastest growing religious movement of the twentieth century. I suggest that the anthropological method of Frank Hamilton Cushing, the postcritical epistemology of Michael Polanyi, and the Afropente‐costal ritual movement initiated by William J. Seymour are all attempts to develop a postmodern epistemology that is simultaneously constructive, focused on discerning reality, and broad enough to allow for human consciousness and diverse human communities. I explore this confluence of scientific and participatory epistemology through six theses.     

Joseph Ratzinger's Debates with Gisbert Greshake: An Argument for the Resurrection of Matter

Debates in eschatology have been unresolved regarding the place of earthly matter in the resurrection. I analyze the positions of Joseph Ratzinger and Gisbert Greshake and argue in favor of Ratzinger's position. He defends a transphysical bodily resurrection that involves the matter of this world over against Greshake's resurrection in death eschatology and anthropology that entails the resurrection of a phenomenological but not a physical body. What is at stake in this debate is nothing less than the meaning of creation in God's salvific economy.     

Politics and the Contingent: A Plea For A More Embedded Account of Freedom as Independence

This contribution defends Ripstein's attempt to reconstruct Kant's political philosophy as entirely and consistently grounded on the idea of people's innate right to freedom as independence, in particular with respect to charges of circularity raised by other contributors to this symposium. However, it also argues that, if the concept of freedom as independence is to provide a foundation for a full‐blown account of political justice, a richer interpretation of it should be provided. In other words, we must be willing to make controversial and empirically informed claims about what counts as a threat to our freedom as independence under specific circumstances. We must have a more embedded account of freedom as independence, one that engages with the contingencies of politics and of the human condition.     

Theology's Need for a New Interpretation of Nature: Correlate of the Doctrine of Grace

Abstract : Important aspects of contemporary life—from increasing dependence on technology to climate change, from changing views of human nature to global interactions among varied cultures and religions—demand that theologians consider the best understandings of the world that the sciences can offer. To help support a fully relational trinitarian concept of God, namely, one that offers a richer interpretation of God's relationship with the world, theology needs truth about the world, humans, and our place in relation to the rest of nature. Lutheran theological foci have a built‐in thirst that only dialogue with science can quench. Too narrow an approach to anthropology and justification by faith focuses on God's activity on behalf of humans as if apart from nature. We need a more comprehensive vision of God's activity in creation, redemption and sanctification by grace. To explicate this, we turn to Luther's emphasis on God's incarnation in human flesh and blood—thus also in the cells, molecules, and subatomic activity of the world; the communication of attributes; and the indwelling Christ. For a deeper understanding of God as triune and of redemption, we need a renewed emphasis on the connection between creation, incarnation and redemption, and between nature and grace. An increased knowledge of science contributes to a healthier approach to the church's mission by giving a theological basis for ethical action in relation to the (natural) world.     

Gödelian time-travel and anthropic cosmology

This paper looks at Kurt Gödel's causally‐pathological cosmological models (derived from general relativity), in the light of anthropic explanations. If a Gödelian world is a possible world, could anthropic reasoning shed any light on whether or not our world is Gödelian? This paper argues that while there are some good anthropic reasons why our world ought to be Gödelian, too many observations suggest that our world can’t possibly be Gödelian in fact. If Gödel's world is a possible one, anthropic teleology alone cannot explain why it isn’t the world we inhabit. Furthermore, if our world were Gödelian, anthropic arguments against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences would imply a bleak human future. En route, some general objections to relativistic causal pathologies are addressed and some anthropic arguments to the effect that Gödelian worlds couldn’t sustain life are also addressed and dismissed.     

Redeeming Creation: Creatio ex nihilo and the Imago Dei in Augustine

Contemporary theology has sometimes been critical of the perceived abstract, speculative intellectualism in Augustine's anthropology, especially in his understanding of the imago Dei. Within the larger context of Augustine's claims on the soul, however, and, in particular, in the way he conceives the soul created from nothing according to the image of God, one finds an intimate binding of soteriological and moral concerns to his claims on the created origin of the soul. In this we see that Augustine's intellectualism does not remove the soul from time, history and the relations with God and the world forged therein, but underscores the soul's sensitivity to, and dependence on, its relations to God and the world.