God's Transforming Spirit

God's transforming Spirit takes us where theology matters most: how we speak of the life of God in a way that speaks to the life of the world. The following reflections undertake this especially in the context of the pre‐eminent crisis in the world's life today, the pollution and unrepentant exploitation of the earth. In some senses, these reflections flow from an environmental liberation theology, trying to address issues of creation, mission and spirituality from the perspective of earth's hurt and her Creator's pain. They even aim to come from a new “below”, lifting up the complex, diverse non‐human life of the planet to be understood as partner and agent in God's mission. Informed by injustices of human exploitation of the earth, this study is, nevertheless, inspired by hope in the earth's Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. While rooted in a deeply trinitarian notion of God, it sees a new and exciting route into these issues via the particular life of the Trinity expressed in the ru'ach Spirit. There is a wide spectrum of terms for the Spirit. This document allies itself with an eco‐feminist perspective on the Spirit as ru'ach. This signals an identification with the eco‐feminist perspective as an essential corrective to the androcentric perspective that has been so exploitative. It also opens the way to invite fresh insights from Indigenous Peoples that also inform the characterization of the Spirit in this text. But the fundamental character of the Spirit in this text is transformational. This makes the Spirit dynamic within and beyond Creation and with and without humanity. This dynamic is often recognized in the text as a spiral. This describes the Spirit's movement and is also a metaphor for the spirit as life. “The ru'ach is a force for life, a sign of God's deep compassion embracing all life. Such love calls forth more love in answer and response. We meet her compassion with our care and commitment and find ourselves accountable to each other. The flow of love spirals forth and the gift of life is renewed and transformed”. And further: “This spiralling life force relates, gathers, empowers and sends us into relationship, into gathering, into empowerment as the means by which we witness that all are related, all Connected within Creation and between Creation and Creator”. God's transforming Spirit not only creates and empowers life in general, she also agitates and ferments life into partnership with God's mission. This is the further transformation she brings. She is not a deist Spirit, content to let individual lives exist in isolation but embroils herself in Creation's life, inviting fresh communities turned towards the vision of life she exudes. This study offers a spirituality and praxis for mission that seeks to live in harness with this.

相似文献   

God's Beauty‐in‐Act: An Artful Renewal of Human Imagining

This article seeks to contribute to the ongoing renaissance in theological discourse that strives to heed Karl Barth's call to stop perpetuating the gap in our knowledge of God by integrating beauty into our theological discourse. In this way, God's beauty, understood as the fittingness of the incarnate Son's actions in the Spirit to the Father's will that radiates the splendor of God's triune love to the world, is seen to renew human imagining, which is essential not only of human being but also for creative expression and ethical action.     

PESSIMISTIC UNIVERSALISM: RETHINKING THE WIDER HOPE WITH BONHOEFFER AND BARTH

This article considers Christian universalism. Responding to the charge that this universalism arises from an overly optimistic view of humanity that fails to take seriously evil and sin, or that it has an overly optimistic view of the omnipotence of God's love which impugns God's righteousness and undermines God's justice and holiness, the article advocates a pessimistic approach to Christian universalism, grounding the argument for universal salvation in the sin and unbelief of the Christian. The article draws on Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to support this case, and concludes by pointing to non‐absolute actualistic anthropology as a means for making sense of the Christian life alongside the co‐sinfulness of the Christian and the non‐Christian.     

How Does a Loving God Punish? On the Unification of God's Love and Punitive Wrath

There are two influential and opposing theological paradigms concerning the relationship between God's love and punitive wrath. According to the first paradigm, which is here labelled the ‘divergent account’, God may sometimes punish an individual in a manner that is opposed to his love. Alternatively, there is the ‘unitary account’, according to which God's punitive wrath is an expression of love that seeks the creature's good. In the present article, an argument for the unitary account is provided, and a fresh way of understanding God's punishment therein is considered. The article proceeds as follows. In the first section, a dominant motivation for the divergent account is distilled through an examination of the writings of Emil Brunner. This motivation is then rejected and the unitary account is defended in the next section, in light of the New Testament ethic of love. In the third section, the work of Gregory of Nyssa and the contemporary philosopher R.A. Duff is utilized to develop a communicative theory of God's punishment, which illuminates and fortifies the unitary account. In the final section, the unitary account, together with the communicative theory of divine punishment, is applied to the doctrine of hell.     

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.     

SELF-ABANDONMENT AND SELF-DENIAL Quietism, Calvinism, and the Prospect of Hell

Self‐abandonment and self‐denial are, respectively, Catholic and hyper‐Calvinist analogues of each other. Roughly, each requires the surrendering of a person to God's will and providence through faith, hope, and love. Should the self‐abandoning/self‐denying individual accept his or her own damnation if that be God's will? This article, which is virtually alone in discussing the Catholic and Reformed Protestant traditions together, answers “No.” The unqualified self‐abandonment present in quietism and the radical self‐denial of Samuel Hopkins are perverse and irrational responses to the prospect of hell because they run counter to the Christian's deepest need to spend eternity with God. However, a qualified self‐abandonment is intellectually defensible and offers a viable Christian piety.     

Linking Childhood Maltreatment to Substance Use in College Students: The Mediating Role of Self-Worth Contingencies

This study investigated the link between childhood maltreatment and substance use, focusing on examining contingencies of self-worth (CSWs) as mediators among college students (N?=?513). Structural equation modeling indicated that childhood sexual abuse among females was related to lower God's love CSW, which in turn was related to higher levels of cigarette, marijuana, and other illicit drug use, supporting the mediational role of God's love CSW. Correlational analyses demonstrated that, for both male and female students, external contingency of appearance was related to higher substance use, whereas internal contingencies of God's love and virtue were related to lower substance use. The findings highlight the protective role of internal CSWs in substance use among females with childhood sexual abuse.     

Love and Eschatology

Abstract : This article reflects on the connection between Christian hope for salvation and Christian praxis today. Following a discussion of Christian approaches to hope, salvation, and reconciliation, the eschatological potential of love is explored in conversation with significant theologies of love in Western Christianity. It is argued that love, properly understood, offers the most adequate and dynamic horizon for approaching God's coming reign and for being transformed in the process.     

Christ's Love as the Basis of the Church's Faith Witness to Muslims

According to the Christian view, the essence of the triune God is revealed in the relational event between God the Father, the Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. The Bible says of this God, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). By way of example, the article explores “God's love” to show that the Qur'an's conception of God is incompatible with key tenets of the New Testament. Thus, when keeping both conceptions of God in view, we cannot speak of one and the same God. Now what does this mean for the pursuit of conciliatory relations between Christians and Muslims? Which relational paradigms need to be kept in mind? After reflecting on the concepts of neighbourliness, companionship, and hospitality, the article goes on to trace the conceptual outlines of Christian mission as a mission of God's love (missio amoris Dei). Its hypothesis is that a characteristically Christian conception of God can supply useful motifs for appreciative and conciliatory actions by Christians toward Muslims. Finally, the author proposes a theology of interreligious relations (which he has elaborated upon elsewhere) as an alternative approach to conventional theologies of religion.     

John Calvin on the Christian's Social Responsibility: Cultural Activist or “Modest Social Reformer”?

Recently there have been heated discussions between Reformed theologians who embrace the two‐kingdoms doctrine and proponents of the Neo‐Calvinist tradition on whether Calvin held social transformationist views. This article examines the debate and argues that Calvin did not interpret the kingdom as a progressive social‐transforming reality that gradually establishes God's future eschatological reign on earth. Instead, he regarded Christ's present reign as a “backward”‐reaching reality that restores God's original created order. At the same time Calvin did not make a sharp categorical distinction between the spiritual and civil realms but depicted the civil and spiritual order as two regiments of God's one reign that mutually aid and assist each other.     

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.     

Sola Gratia as Divine Attribute: Resurrecting the God of the Gospel

Can we speak of sola gratia as a divine attribute so as to affirm that all that God does is grace? Traditionally, Western Christian theology has answered that question negatively, placing God's justice in opposition with God's grace and presenting a God whose love does not seem to be unconditional. This has been especially evident in the ways in which Scripture, the work of Christ, justification by faith, and the distinction between law and gospel commonly have been interpreted. By rethinking those traditional interpretations on the basis of an understanding of divine grace as unconditional love, we can indeed proclaim a God of sola gratia and a gospel capable of transforming human lives and responding effectively to the crisis of faith we face today.     

‘In God's Changelessness There Is Rest’: The Existential Doctrine of God's Immutability in Augustine and Kierkegaard

This article establishes a specific point of agreement between St Augustine and Søren Kierkegaard: for both thinkers the doctrine of God's immutability is an existential doctrine. Specifically, Augustine and Kierkegaard agree that God's immutability functions as a condition to preserve the existential integrity of the human creature across the vicissitudes of time and change. This article describes the existential role of God's immutability in Augustine and Kierkegaard, and it establishes this point of agreement between the two thinkers. Afterward, this article briefly considers some implications of this point of agreement for the interpretation of Augustine and Kierkegaard and some implications for the doctrine of God's immutability.     

DEMOCRATIC VIRTUE, COMPARATIVE ETHICS, AND CONTEMPORARY ISLAM

This essay illustrates the kind of moral analysis Jeffrey Stout advocates in Democracy and Tradition by way of examining a conversation among Muslims that took place between June and December 2002. Their debate centers on al‐Qaída's legitimacy as God's chosen defender of Islam, which is called into question due to the tension between al‐Qaída's military tactics and the concepts of honorable combat held within the Islamic tradition. This giving and taking of reasons in both defense and detraction of al‐Qaída's tactics demonstrates the living reality of Islamic tradition—the ongoing process of striving to discern God's will in light of communal agreements about the authority of certain texts and the validity of established rules for interpreting them.     

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD AND THE WORLD: CHRISTIANITY'S REASONS FOR CONSIDERING PANENTHEISM A VIABLE OPTION

What reasons and resources can Christian theology find for developing a panentheist position that is also able to engage with contemporary science? By taking its point of departure in basic human experiences, Christian theology can, even in a Trinitarian fashion, be developed as a way to understand God's presence in the world as a presence where the actual occurrences point towards God's own work. This point is especially related to the experience of love. Furthermore, God's presence can be understood as sacramental in the Augustinian sense. Moreover, the contributions of the Danish philosopher of religion Knud E. Løgstrup on God's presence and transcendence, as well as Niels Henrik Gregersen's elaborations on deep incarnation. Prove to offer important reasons for considering panentheism a viable option for the articulation of Christian theology.     

CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS: SKETCH TOWARD A RECONCILIATION

Abstract. Evolutionary ethics posits the evolution of dispositions to love self, kin, and friend. Christianity claims that God's ethical demand is to love one's neighbor. I argue that the distance between these two positions can be interpreted theologically as original sin, the disposition to disobey God's command and practice self-love and nepotism rather than neighbor-love. Original sin requires Incarnation and Atonement to unite God and humanity. The ancient doctrine of the Atonement as educative does not invoke the Fall. Its revival may help reconcile Christianity and evolutionary ethics.     

SOME RECENT WORKS BY CHRISTOS YANNARAS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION1

This article reviews four recent English translations of works by the Greek thinker, Christos Yannaras. It sets Yannaras' work in its historical context, and draws out some of his fundamental themes: the centrality of the notion of the person, which is fulfilled in the self‐transcendence of love, the place of the apophatic, and the use of imagery and poetry in theology. It also seeks to contextualize the sometimes quite strident anti‐Westernism of Yannaras' thought, and show how he draws on themes from patristic theology to provide a viable solution to the problems caused by Western individualism and consumerism.     

The Contemporary Relevance of Schillebeeckx's Political Theology: On Ecclesial Participation in the Saving Work of Christ

In this article I explore the relation between God's absolute governance of the world and ecclesial dominion over other communities in a shared political forum that seeks the greatest good of all. On this question I compare the positions of Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson, and Edward Schillebeeckx as representatives of three distinct political theologies. Whereas Gunton's reservation regarding the participation of the church's politics in divine governance shows excessive deference to human sinfulness, Jenson on the contrary tends to absorb God's Rule into ecclesial politics. Drawing upon Schillebeeckx's Christology, I argue that God's absolute Rule is compatible with ecclesial sovereignty; however, this does not allow for unilateral ecclesial dominion over others, inasmuch as God's Rule is disclosed as forgiveness.     

A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF EVOLUTION AND PARTICIPATION

Recent controversies surrounding the discernment of design in the natural world are an indication of a pervasive disquiet among believers. Can God as creator/sustainer of creation be reconcilable with the belief that God's work is indiscernible behind secondary evolutionary causes? Christian piety requires that the order experienced in the natural world be evidence of God's love and existence. Theistic evolutionary models rarely examine this matter, assuming that God is indiscernible in the processes and order of the world because only secondary causes can be examined. This leaves antievolutionary perspectives to interpret and address the problem of seeing God in the world. I examine these issues in order to gain more credibility for the religious longing to discern God in nature while at the same time affirming the indubitable truth of an evolutionary history. I argue that God's trinitarian nature, hiddenness, and incarnation give us reason to believe that God's presence in the natural world will be discernible, but only within the natural processes, and thereby only in an obscured fashion. I also argue that newer understandings of evolutionary mechanisms are more consistent with theological appropriation than are strictly Darwinian ones.