Military Service in the Church Orders

The debate concerning the approach of the early Christians to the military can be advanced by paying attention to a genre of literature that scholars have largely ignored: the church orders. These documents—the Apostolic Tradition, Canons of Hippolytus, Testament of Our Lord, and Apostolic Constitutions—are illuminating in that they deal with ethics within comprehensive treatments of worship, catechesis and pastoral life. They also are useful in that they, as variations upon a common original, are means of monitoring change across the third and fourth centuries. This article uses the church orders to assess four elements of a “new consensus” (David Hunter) on Christians in the military. By and large it confirms these, but at times it alters emphases and adds nuances. It argues that: (1) the church orders viewed killing as the big problem for Christians in the legions, not idolatry; (2) the church orders confirm that the pre‐Christendom church was divided on Christian participation in the legions; (3) the church orders provide evidence for both discontinuity and continuity on the issue across the centuries, although the deepest continuity, based on John the Baptist's “rule” of Luke 3.14, is between the pre‐Constantinian laity and later theologians; (4) the church orders confirm a regional variation in attitude and practice. The church orders' authority in practice is never clear.     

What If the Church Really is the Body of Christ?

Abstract : What does it mean to claim that the church is the body of Christ? Following the lead of the New Testament, Bonhoeffer, Jenson, and Hauerwas, this article articulates how the church becomes the body of Christ through the narrative of Scripture and the practices of worship. As Jesus Christ has a distinctive character, so also the body of Christ has a distinctive character. This character is described through the four classical marks of the church—one, holy, catholic, apostolic. These notae ecclesiae are to be interpreted not only in relation to the inner constitution of the church but ethically in relation to the church's calling to be “shalom church” for the life of the world in peacemaking, doing justice, caring for creation, and defending human dignity. Particular communal practices that embody this character are proposed for the life of the church.     

Once More Unto the Breach: Type B Physicalism,Phenomenal Concepts,and the Epistemic Gap

Type B, or a posteriori, physicalism is the view that phenomenal-physical identity statements can be necessarily true, even though they cannot be known a priori—and that the key to understanding their status is to understand the special features of our phenomenal concepts, those concepts of our experiential states acquired through introspection. This view was once regarded as a promising response to anti-physicalist arguments that maintain that an epistemic gap between phenomenal and physical concepts entails that phenomenal and physical properties are distinct. More recently, however, many physicalists have lost confidence in the view, and have proposed less promising defences of physicalism—or have become outright sceptical about its prospects. I argue here that these physicalists have underestimated the resources of Type B physicalism and are thereby retreating too quickly—or fighting battles that have already been won.     

The Apostasy of the Church and the Cross of Christ: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Mystery of the Church as Casta Meretrix

The ongoing moral and theological catastrophe of persistent and pervasive clergy sexual abuse across the Catholic Church makes theological reflection on sin in the church essential. This essay has two parts. The first, longer part is a hermeneutical argument. I offer a contextualized interpretation of Hans Urs von Balthasar's 1960 essay “Casta Meretrix,” in which he traced the image of the church as a “chaste harlot” through the Christian tradition. I demonstrate that several recent interpretations of this essay have not penetrated to its radical heart. A close reading of the text reveals that here Balthasar affirmed that the church sins precisely as the church, and not merely as individual members. The motivation for this affirmation was not the empirical failures of individuals, but was properly dogmatic—a necessary implication of christology. In the second and concluding part of the essay, I contend that even though Balthasar's use of the feminized image of the casta meretrix does have significant problems and should not be uncritically adopted today, the underlying theological claim regarding the church as sinner is theologically significant. He affirmed a necessary ecclesiological truth, one that can help the church recover its visibility and better understand its essence in repentance, which is all the more essential in light of the continuing revelations of clergy sexual abuse.     

The Global Reach of Human Rights

We live in a world in which the idea of human rights is persistently invoked. However, despite the tremendous appeal of the idea of human rights, it is also seen by many as lacking in foundation. I have argued, particularly in my book The Idea of Justice, that human rights are best seen as articulations of commitments in social ethics, comparable to — but very different from — accepting utilitarian reasoning. Like other ethical tenets, human rights can, of course, be disputed, but the claim is that they will survive open and informed scrutiny. This view contrasts with seeing human rights in primarily legal terms, either as consequences of humane legislation, or as precursors of legal rights, or as pointing towards what should ideally be legal rights. Human rights may well be reflected in legislation, may inspire legislation, and may even serve, in many circumstances, as ideals that demand legislative attention. However, these are ‘further facts’— not the defining characteristics of human rights.     

What Nature Makes of Her: Kant's Gendered Metaphysics

Women's exclusion from political enfranchisement in Kant's political writings has frequently been noted in the literature, and yet has not been closely scrutinized. More often than not, commentators suggest that this reflects little more than Kant's sharing in the prejudices of his era. This paper argues that, for Kant, women's civil incapacities stem from defects relating to their capacities as moral agents, and more specifically, to his teleological account of the conditions within which we, as imperfect beings, develop our moral capacities. Women are not incidentally or tangentially excluded from the boundaries of political and moral agency, but rather must adopt an explicitly nonmoral character if we are to understand humanity as moving toward its naturally given, moral ends. I argue (1) that Kant's teleological view of human development requires women to develop an explicitly nonmoral character; (2) that this teleology is inextricable from his view of the moral agency that human—and not merely rational—beings are capable of; and (3) that taken together, these suggest that women's subordinate status is internally connected to Kant's view of moral personhood.     

Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

Abstract

This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and from broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief—in contexts where it becomes an identity marker—is bound up with relational practices of belief, so that distinctions between ‘belief in’ and ‘belief that’ are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals.     

Church: A creature from which “word”? Reflecting on the meaning of the remembrance of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in Latin America

To answer the question, “From which word is the church supposed to be created,” I briefly delineate what I understand to be the reality and circumstances in which Latin American churches are situated. Then, I present a basic outline of main factors constituting the reality of these churches as churches. Particular attention is given to the Evangelical church at La Plata. Subsequently, I present essential perspectives from the theological tradition of the Reformation—particularly its Lutheran expression—that are most important and need to be regained, while taking into account complex “external” and “internal” realities that churches are facing in the current day and age.     

Of doubting Thomas: The suppressed Christian tradition: An interview with Elaine Pagels

The 1945 discovery of ancient documents at Nag Hammadi in Egypt would have great significance for New Testament scholars. But it would take decades, and one woman, to unleash their meaning to the public. In the 1960s, Elaine Pagels was part of a team at Harvard University, studying the Nag Hammadi scrolls; in 1979 her slim bookThe Gnostic Gospels put the formerly suppressed writings of early Christians into the hands of ordinary people. The letters, gospels and poems from Nag Hammadi emerged from a community that had been condemned by the church fathers. They show a different set of beliefs about Jesus than were taught by the church. This radically different view of the crucifixion relates one of the central tenets of Gnosticism, that the material world is false, and that Jesus was not a human but a purely spiritual being, who only adapted himself to human perception. The church was not only concerned about Gnostic beliefs but also about heretical Christian practices, prompting this attack by an early church father, Tertullian in about the late 2nd century. Here follows an interview with Elaine Pagels, based on her new work,Beyond Belief, the Gospel of Thomas.     

From body to body: A post‐gender politics for the cosmic homo1

This article engages in establishing some common ground, some human and humane politics for the global Luther, in contradistinction to the focus in much recent scholarship on difference/s as an almost hegemonic way of understanding human life. The aim is to move beyond feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories to a post‐gender politics by employing Judith Butler's concepts of performativity and “abject” bodies. Homo, the human being, will be the hermeneutical key for examining Luther's understanding of God's creation and incarnation as well as of baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the church. The aim is that of searching out Luther's differing performances of body, from the carnal body of the incarnate Christ and the human body to the spiritual body of church and community, and how these matter, materialize and intersect in the body of Christ as one body/homo.     

Ninian Smart

Mary Douglas has invited historians of religion to test her hypothesis about the social meaning of body symbols. Her view that body symbolism always points in the direction of social concerns and that efforts to separate body and spirit indicate sentiments of revolt and alienation has proved fruitful in several areas. Of course there is nothing particularly novel in the proposal that the body can be seen as a symbol of wider realities. The Stoics spoke of the universe as a body; Paul could describe individual Christian congregations as a body; and Priscillian referred to the human body in depreciating terms as a figura mundi. Victor Turner has shown that the body symbols of the Ndembu in Zambia are part of a wider pattern which uses ‘an aspect of human physiology as a model for social, cosmic and religious ideas and processes’, including, he adds, ‘the human body [as] … a microcosm of the universe,’⁵⁷ There is even a considerable literature on the subject.⁵⁸ Indeed, one cannot help but be struck by the fact that with the great abundance of work devoted to body symbols in general, so little has been done with early Christianity.

What distinguishes Douglas from other theoreticians of body symbolism is her Durkheimian orientation. By taking seriously the social dimension of body symbols and by positing the revolutionary character of symbols which separate body and spirit, she is able to uncover latent dimensions of doctrinal controversy and to restore flesh to the dry bones of theological debate. In her own preliminary studies, she has limited herself to one symbol, i.e. incarnation, and one controversy, i.e. the Arian. In extending her initiative to other symbols and controversies, I have proceeded on the assumption that body symbols of different sorts should reflect the same condensed message about society. I would argue that this effort has been largely successful. Expectations of imminent resurrection or views of the resurrection which deny the physical aspect are regularly associated in early Christianity with separatist-sectarian behaviour generally. The recession of hopes for an imminent resurrection accompanied the transition of Christianity from sect to church. Conversely, and this would warrant further study, subsequent sectarian movements within Christianity seem to be accompanied by a return of hopes for physical resurrection. Particular sorts of sectarianism, especially those which stress individualism and spiritualism, are prone to view the resurrection in other than physical terms. Even the mainstream of Christianity refused to abandon altogether the doctrine of a future resurrection. Orthodox believers could always point to the denial of resurrection as an unmistakable signpost of heresy. At one level we may treat this doctrinal survival as little more than a memory of Christianity's sectarian pedigree, as a vaguely disquieting memory. At another level, however, its very survival, against heavy odds, may also be seen as a permanent symbolic indicator of Christianity's ultimate refusal to identify itself completely with the secular order. Beyond this, the survival of belief in resurrection has meant the persistence of a latent symbol of protest, alienation and transformation. For in the final analysis, it is not the case that symbols merely reflect social reality. As symbols, they also possess the power to shape it.

In this observation lies perhaps an explanation for the fact that our effort has not been fully successful. We have not found it to be true in every case that statements of protest in one symbolic medium, say, asceticism, will inevitably be replicated in other media, say, incarnation and resurrection. This does occur often enough to be interesting and more than coincidental. The Testimony of Truth from Nag Hammadi is a paradigm case. Paul's Corinthians, Paul himself and Arius come close. The ascetics of Egypt are the most interesting ‘deviants’. The connection between their asceticism and the message of alienation and protest is clear. Their views of the resurrection have not been much studied, but in view of the symbolic function of their bodies and their view of ascetic practice as a means of restoring the natural state of Eden, it is not too much to suggest that their conception of resurrection would have emphasized the restored and purified nature of the resurrection body in contrast to the orthodox view of the absolute identity of that body with the present physical one. As for their views of the incarnation, there is some evidence of leanings in this direction. While those who held to docetic christologies generally favoured asceticism, the reverse was not always true. Part of the reason for the absence of docetic views of the incarnation among the ascetics—assuming, of course, that they should have been docetists—is that they say so little about doctrines of any kind. Part may also be due to the orthodoxy of those who wrote about the monks. Part may be due to the fact that the primary target of ascetic protest was not the physical universe, or matter as such, or even the world of social and political reality, but rather the church in and of the world—a differentiated and thus moderated protest. But part may also be due to a more or less conscious decision to draw a line between expressions of alienation, so to speak, a symbolic quid pro quo. The quid was the recognition by the church at large that ascetic piety could not be proscribed by the successor generations of the martyrs. The pro quo would then take the form of doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus the absence of docetic christologies among the ascetics would result not just from the imposition of episcopal authority but from the power of doctrine to shape reality.

Body symbols thus provide us with a new thread for tracing the transformation of Christianity from an obscure cluster of sects in Palestine to an institution of unparalleled spiritual and political power in the Roman empire. Of course, not everyone accepted this transformation as an act of divine providence. Some reacted by denying that God had taken on a human body in the person of Jesus; others tortured their bodies; and from time to time in succeeding centuries still others gathered in small communities to await the resurrection of the body and with it the birth of a new world.     

A Missionary Church: Introduction and Chapter One of Evangelii Gaudium

The article provides a summary and synthesis of the Introduction and Chapter One of Evangelii Gaudium (EG 1–18 and 19–49), where Pope Francis outlines his vision of the church and the program of his pontificate. He envisions the church as fundamentally a missionary church and sees the role of his pontificate as bringing about the transformation of the church into a missionary church. The article concludes by showing that Pope Francis’ vision of the church in EG echoes Vatican II's decree Ad Gentes and is shaped by his experience of the church in Latin America. Thus, it ends with two observations: first, that with EG, Ad Gentes’ statement that “the Church is missionary by her very nature” ceases to be merely a theological declaration and now becomes a concrete pastoral program of action; and second, that EG, where the concerns of the third world are allowed to shape the vision of the universal church, is an eloquent manifestation of the church becoming a World Church.     

Missio Dei Trinitatis and Missio Ecclesiae: A Public Theological Perspective

In this article I address the mission of the triune God (missio Dei trinitatis) and the mission of the church (missio ecclesiae) that participates in the mission of God the Trinity, particularly from the perspective of public theology. First, I investigate that the concept of the missio Dei trinitatis so expanded our understanding of mission that the church‐centred view of mission was replaced by the public mission taking place in the midst of the world. Second, from the public theological perspective I argue for the need of the diakonia mission in order to realize the reign of God in the world. Third, I insist that the mission of the church participating in the mission of the triune God ought to appropriate the post‐colonial hermeneutics of suspicion and develop a post‐post‐colonial public mission theology for the sake of a mature democratic civil society. Fourth, I suggest that the mission of the church participating in God's mission should develop a transcultural‐indigenous public hermeneutics of mission in such a way as to encourage different stories through transcultural‐indigenous interpretations of the biblical narrative.     

On the “Litany of Costlies” of the World Council of Churches: An Appeal for an Organizational Pilgrimage toward the Church as Moral Community

This essay concerns itself with what Lewis S. Mudge described as “the church as moral community.” 1 The trilogy of World Council of Churches’ documents entitled Costly Unity, Costly Commitment, and Costly Obedience are the primary source materials for rigorous and systematic reflection on the idea of the church as moral community. 2 Reading this “litany of costlies” 3 will deepen appreciation of the ecumenical significance of the idea of the church as moral community and inspire dedicated ecumenists to model it. Indeed, study of the ecclesiology and ethics process might have immediate, wider ecumenical implications. It could be a catalyst for creative organizational development in as many conciliar bodies that choose to practise the principles of building “the church as moral community.”     

Reconciliation and Mission

This article discusses the message and ministry of reconciliation with a view to both its biblical content and its contemporary missional application. Within a salvation historical framework of missio Dei, the article outlines the biblical narrative about human beings created in the image of God for personal relationships with God, self, other people, and nature; the fall in sin and the human predicament that necessitate reconciliation; the historical reconciliation provided by God through the incarnation, atoning death, and victorious resurrection of Christ (the first stage); the message of reconciliation in the mission of the church; the present reception of reconciliation through faith in that message (the second stage); and the results of reconciliation both in relation to God (“vertical reconciliation”) and among human beings in the church and in the world (“horizontal reconciliation”), with an emphasis on peace, unity, love, forgiveness, righteousness, and freedom. Christ’s victory over and subjugation of all evil spirit powers are described as “cosmic reconciliation.” Because reconciliation may be partial in this world where sin still exists and evil powers are active, the eschatological hope is for a final reconciliation where the relationships to God, to other human beings, and to a recreated world are renewed and consummated.     

An Assessment of Robert Jenson's Hermeneutics on Divine Im/Passibility and the Emotions of God

The term apatheia, ‘impassibility’, has had varied meanings in Christian history. While some theologians have dismissed this attribute due to its Greek origins – as Paul Gavrilyuk states, a classic case of committing the genetic fallacy – Robert Jenson has prudently noted that for some of the church Fathers impassibility did not mean God was affectionless as the Greeks proposed; rather, it meant eternal faithfulness. This essay examines whether Jenson's appropriation of the early church's understanding of apatheia is true to the Fathers' original intentions. I first identify Jenson's assumptions regarding his interpretation of Scripture that causes him to conclude that God is im/passible. I then assess the validity of Jenson's claim that his own view is the same as the early church Fathers.     

The Legacy,Leadership, and Hope of Pan‐African Women as a Missional Focus for Theological Education

This article analyzes the experience and self‐understanding of Pan‐African women of faith, who have often been viewed at the margins of church history and in the larger context of this history. This article challenges this marginal location. It argues that through the theological lens of the ecumenical Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace—and under the tenets of via positiva, via negativa, and via transformativa—the historical, present, and future pilgrimage of Pan‐African women of faith and their vision of hope needs to be further examined for a more inclusive embrace and accompaniment of the ecumenical community. Theological education should be a priority in preparing leaders for advancing the agenda of justice and peace. The article concludes by detailing the past, recent, and future work of the Pan‐African Women's Ecumenical Empowerment Network (PAWEEN) and its partners.