Relevant and Effective Theological Education in the Context of Twenty‐First Century South Asia

This essay considers Christian theological education in South Asia highlighting pertinent issues in pedagogical content, form, method, and praxis. Debunking the notion of students as “empty bottles” to be filled, and criticizing the top‐down model of education, the paper argues that theological education is an ongoing and interactive process in which students and teachers are participants who share and reflect upon each other's faith and socio‐cultural experiences. Participants reject, test, negotiate, and choose – while remaining open to the variety that is embodied in different human experiences. The paper stresses the relationship between the theological college and the church and calls for mutual responsibility, respect, and accountability. In an increasingly communal and fundamentalist atmosphere that poses a threat to multi‐culturalism, the role of the laity in shaping theological education is highlighted and public debate is encouraged. The paper calls for interactive and dialogic learning. A version of this paper was published in Ministerial Formation 100 (2003): 5–16.     

A Response to Paul Griffiths’ Annihilationist Proposal

In his recent influential theological work, Paul Griffiths, the esteemed Buddhism scholar and Anglican convert to Catholicism, proposes, among other things, that annihilationism is a viable option for Christians, including Catholics, despite apparent magisterial prohibition. He argues, in effect, that every creature must be naturally mortal because bodily, including the angels. Therefore, de facto immortal creatures are not immortal by nature, but by a positive act of God in addition to the creative act. Accordingly, it makes no sense to assert the existence of an eternal hell. Rather, since sin is fundamentally corrosive, those who opt to continue down the rabbit's hole of sin literally become nothing. Hell, then, is a no‐place and a no‐time. Hence, as long as the damned continue to exist, they have the opportunity for eventual redemption as for eventual self‐annihilation. Griffiths attempts to defend this thesis in dialogue with Augustine, in particular, to the neglect of Aquinas, except to argue that Aquinas’ own arguments for the natural immortality of the human soul are incoherent. I will argue instead that spiritual being exists, that it is naturally immortal, that Aquinas demonstrates both, and that even an Augustinian such as Joseph Ratzinger recognizes Aquinas’ theological insights and builds on them.     

Theology,Metaphysics, and Realism about Truth

This essay examines the theological grounds for rejecting metaphysics and the correspondence theory of truth, and argues that while there are good grounds for rejecting a certain kind of metaphysically oriented theology, metaphysics per se is neither objectionable nor avoidable in Christian theology. In the process, it also defends a realist conception of truth against some recent theological criticisms, and argues that a commitment to a modest version of metaphysical realism and realism about truth is not only philosophically tenable, but also theologically preferable to non‐realist views.     

The Youth Ministry Mission Trip as Global Tourism: Are we OK with this?

Abstract : This article explores the rise of the short‐term mission trip in youth ministry. It argues that this escalation has much to do with transformations of globalization. This reality requires that the mission trip confront the conundrum of dealing with dichotomies between its service and its tourist activities. By exploring the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman we see why we face such dichotomies. The article concludes by providing some theological thoughts connected to Karl Barth's theology of the word that might help us move past these tensions between global service and global tourism.     

Ethics, theism and metaphysics: An analysis of the theocentric ethics of James Gustafson

Modern ethics has been shaped by two dominant philosophical assumptions: (1) that there can be no theoretical knowledge of God, i.e., denial of metaphysics, and (2) that moral claims can be redeemed independently of theistic affirmations, i.e., morality does not require theism. These assumptions have influenced much of modern theological ethics. Yet, insofar as theological ethics accepts that morality does not require any explicit or implicit religious beliefs, it affirms that a secularistic morality is possible. But this affirmation is directly at odds with the essence of theism, namely, that God is the source and end of all things, including the moral life. By accepting the dominant consensus, therefore, theological ethics undermines its fundamental theistic claim. Focusing on James Gustafson's theocentric ethics, I seek to show the price that theological ethics pays for subscribing to the dominant consensus. I argue that: (1) Gustafson embraces an inconsistent self-understanding, which undermines his theocentric claim, (2) this is due to his dismissal of metaphysics, and (3) his theocentric ethic would be more compelling if formulated in terms of Whitehead's process metaphysics.     

Christian Supersessionism,Zionism, and the Contemporary Scene

Postliberal theology has been a topic of considerable theological debate over the past few decades. In his 2011 book Another Reformation, Peter Ochs deploys a postliberal theological model for the purpose of developing a sophisticated understanding of the future of interreligious relations. Ochs argues that postliberal theology is a reparative theology focusing on alleviating human suffering. He argues that the Christian idea of supersessionism may be the most challenging for Christians to confront as they explore avenues for making interreligious dialogue more effective. Ochs critiques the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder's understanding of Zionism as Jewish Constantianism for being an instance of an ostensibly postliberal theology losing its way. In this essay, I offer a critique of Ochs's reading of Yoder, claiming that Yoder's view actually mirrors an important intra‐Jewish debate about the relationship between political power and piety, and retrieves an ingenious contribution of both early Judaism and early Christianity that is effaced in today's growing Constantinian approach to Christian imperialism and Jewish nationalism.     

RELIGION,SCIENCE, AND GLOBALIZATION: BEYOND COMPARATIVE APPROACHES

Using case studies from the Indonesian context, this article argues that the current truth regimes we now live by are always and already “hybrid” and that we need new methods for understanding meaning‐making practices in an era of globalization and climate change than comparative approaches allow. Following the works of such thinkers as physicist Karen Barad, political philosopher William Connolly, and eco‐critic Timothy Morton, this article develops the idea that an event‐oriented or object‐oriented approach better captures our hybrid meaning‐making practices. Not only that, but it also provides a lens through which to understand traditions as polydox (rather than orthodox) and the rise of “modern” science as itself a planetary (rather than a Western) phenomenon.     

How Master of Divinity Education Changes Students: A Research‐Based Model

To increase understanding of how Master of Divinity education actually functions and to respond to accreditors' emphasis on the outcomes of learning, this paper presents a research‐based model that focuses on how M.Div. education transforms students. The students‐in‐seminary model is conceptually undergirded by life course theory. In the model, students attending seminary engage in a messy process in which they respond to competing demands of school, church, and family. The author compares the students‐in‐seminary model with the dominant message model for theological education articulated by Carroll et al. (1997 ) and argues that the students‐in‐seminary model more adequately describes the process of theological education. The author calls for further research to study how seminaries promote key messages to their students, the plasticity of students' sense of calling, the impact of church requirements on M.Div. students, and the complexity of life for multiple‐role students.     

Being,belonging, and borders: Scandinavian creation theology as political theology

Desire for life and protecting lives has come to the fore during the pandemic. Borders have been closed to stop the spread of Covid‐19. The virus does not respect borders, yet physical distance is crucial. Three things have become clear. One is the level of uncertainty about which measures are most efficient. The other is that the neo‐liberal philosophy with “just in time” deliveries on a global market has made everyone vulnerable and invited national protectionism rather than collaboration. A third insight is that the lack of borders between wild and tame animals and human beings is connected to the emergence of the virus itself, where rain forests are exploited for short sighted profit. In the midst of this, a cry for Being, for Life, and Human Flourishing, can be heard as an underlying drumbeat. In relation to this I ponder Being in relation to Belonging and to Borders. I first describe a political landscape where neo‐nationalist, and neo‐atheist, claims for belonging, have emerged all over the world, and hence emphasized strong borders between different people, but not for capital. Secondly, I draw on resources from Scandinavian Creation Theology, especially Grundtvig, Aulén, and Wingren to paint a planetary vision with porous borders, beyond patriarchy, populism, and protectionism. In the long run there is no opting out of the planetary vulnerability. I launch the term eschatological creation theology for a creation theology that allows creation to be inspired by the Kin‐dom to come with righteousness and life in abundance.     

On the Road to Emmaus: Together towards Life as Conversation Partner in Missiological Research

This article argues that the Emmaus narrative in Luke 24:13‐40 illustrates a messianic paradigmatic missiological approach to costly discipleship making. The central motif in this approach is critical emancipatory conversation, which is not merely the means to data gathering but an end in itself. Using Luke's story as a paradigmatic approach to missiological research, I demonstrate how Together towards Life as a research tool could creatively and innovatively engage with African theological education.     

FIRST PERSON PLURAL: SELF‐UNITY AND SELF‐MULTIPLICITY IN THEOLOGY'S DIALOGUE WITH PSYCHOLOGY

In contradistinction to the contemporary human sciences, recent theological accounts of the individual‐in‐relation continue to defend the concept of the singular continuous self. Consequently, theological anthropology and the human sciences seem to offer widely divergent accounts of the sense of self‐fragmentation that many believe pervades the modern world. There has been little constructive interdisciplinary conversation in this area. In this essay I address the damaging implications of this oversight and establish the necessary conditions for future dialogue. I have three primary objectives. First, I show how the notion of personal continuity acquires philosophical theological significance through its close association with the concept of personal particularity. Second, through a discussion of contemporary accounts of self‐multiplicity, I clarify the extent of theological anthropology's disagreement with the human sciences. Third, I draw upon narrative accounts of identity to suggest an alternative means of understanding the experiential continuity of personhood that maintains the tension between self‐plurality, unity, and particularity and thereby reconnects philosophical theological concerns with human‐scientific analyses of the human condition. Narrative approaches to personhood are ideally suited to this purpose, and, I suggest, offer an intriguing solution to understanding and resolving the problem of self‐fragmentation that has caused recent theological anthropology so much consternation.     

UPHOLDING THE HUMANUM: SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY'S FOUNDATIONAL CHARACTER1

Theologians in the liberal tradition have developed the distinctive method of critically correlating Christian revelation with critical interpretations of history, texts and social realities. Non‐foundationalists react to this stance by developing theological anthropologies for which interdisciplinary correlation is deemed unnecessary. In response, this paper argues for a retrieval of a philosophical anthropology that address the advances made in the fields of genetics and evolutionary biology, though aware of the secularizing failings of theological liberalism. In contrast to the anti‐religious materialism of scientists such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, human freedom needs to be argued on the basis of complexity science and the emergent systems it explains. Both correlationist and non‐foundationalist theological strategies are unable to respond to the threat to human freedom posed by scientific materialism. The science of emergent complex structures is the most plausible research programme for constructing a viable theological anthropology. To uphold the humanum is to uphold human freedom based on a scature. This leads me to suggest that theology is best characterized as foundationalist in the general sense of its universal scope.     

Academic Theology Centered on Practical Theology

This article argues that there are considerable advantages for society, university, theology and the church to conduct theological research and education of pastors at a secular state university like the University of Copenhagen. The disadvantage is foremost that learning from a practice‐theory‐practice model is not found in theological education at the secular university. In the case of Denmark, this is, however, more due to the theology and set up of the church than to the university, where it is commonplace to integrate practice in academic studies.     

The Eschatological Turn in German Philosophy

This article argues that modern European philosophy was significantly shaped by the transposition of eschatology from a theological into a philosophical register. By ‘eschatology’, I here mean thought about the ‘last things’ as they relate to present systems of life and action; and about those systems as determined, at least in part, by their end. I take as my starting point the claim that the scepticism regarding revelation that was such a central characteristic of the Enlightenment did not eradicate the importance of eschatology as a structuring frame of historical and moral thought, but merely changed it. Modern theologians and philosophers tended to shift the ground of eschatology from revelation to the inner logic of a system; eschatology was seen as legitimated by, and in turn legitimating, the shape of a given philosophical account of history. The questions and challenges arising from this shift were important drivers of early twentieth‐century European philosophy. This article works out this claim through indicative accounts of several large debates of early twentieth‐century philosophies of history and of politics as contestations about the meaning of eschatology: the crisis of historicism, the rise of existentialism, and the surge of political religions. It concludes with a discussion of Martin Heidegger’s eschatological thought of the 1930s, illuminated by the recent publication of his Black Notebooks.     

MODERN SOVEREIGNTY IN QUESTION: THEOLOGY,DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM

This essay argues that modern sovereignty is not simply a legal or political concept that is coterminous with the modern nation‐state. Rather, at the theoretical level modern sovereign power is inscribed into a wider theological dialectic between “the one” and “the many”. Modernity fuses juridical‐constitutional models of supreme state authority with a new, “biopolitical” account of power whereby natural life and the living body of the individual are the object of politics and are subject to state control (section 1). The origins of this dialectic go back to changes within Christian theology in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. In particular, these changes can be traced to Ockham's denial of the universal Good in things, Suárez's priority of the political community over the ecclesial body and Hobbes's “biopolitical” definition of power as state dominion over life (section 2). At the practical level, modern sovereignty has involved both the national state and the transnational market. The “revolutions in sovereignty” that gave rise to the modern state and the modern market were to some considerable extent shaped by theological concepts and changes in religious institutions and practices: first, the supremacy of the modern national state over the transnational papacy and national churches; second, the increasing priority of individuality over collectivity; third, a growing focus on contractual proprietary relations at the expense of covenantal ties and communal bonds (section 3). By subjecting both people and property to uniform standards of formal natural rights and abstract monetary value, financial capitalism and liberal secular democracy are part of the “biopolitical” logic that subordinates the sanctity of life and land to the secular sacrality of the state and the market. In Pope Benedict's theology, we can find the contours of a post‐secular political economy that challenges the monopoly of modern sovereignty (sections 4–5).     

Horror Angelorum: Terroristic Structures in the Eyes of Walter Benjamin, Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Rilke and Slavoj Žižek

In search for a European theological contribution to the debate on the new global context, this essay undertakes a theological‐aesthetic exploration of theological motifs in the current political imagination, in particular: the theme of the angel. After a problematisation of the theological reception of Benjamin's Messianic‐apocalyptic angel figure, I develop a critical position in the wake of von Balthasar. Von Balthasar's interpretations of Rilke and Bonaventure lead to two angelological paradigms, the monad and the crucified seraph, which occur in current political debates, as exemplified in recent essays of Zizek.     

TOWARDS A FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGICAL RE‐INTERPRETATION OF VATICAN II

This paper argues for a fundamental theological re‐interpretation of Vatican II ecclesiology that acknowledges not one but two principal ecclesiologies inspired by the Council documents. Ecclesiastical authorities and some theologians have acknowledged that communion ecclesiology is the principal ecclesiology of Vatican II. However, this conception does not sufficiently account for the full range of relations with the Other that is a distinctive development in the Church's self‐understanding inaugurated by Vatican II; such an understanding is better represented by an ecclesiology of friendship. I thus argue there are two ecclesiologies reflected in the Council documents: communion ecclesiology and another to be developed based on mutual relations and friendship with the Other. The latter is distinctively Ignatian in spirit; further, these two ecclesiologies are not fundamentally opposed to each other but are united in the missions of the Son and the Spirit.     

Beyond the Tools of the Trade: Heidegger and the Intelligibility of Everyday Things

In everyday life, we constantly encounter and deal with useful things without pausing to inquire about the sources of their intelligibility. In Div. I of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes just such an inquiry. According to a common reading of Heidegger's analysis, the intelligibility of our everyday encounters and dealings with useful things is ultimately constituted by practical self‐understandings (such as being a gardener, shoemaker, teacher, mother, musician, or philosopher). In this paper, I argue that while such practical self‐understandings may be sufficient to constitute the intelligibility of the tools and equipment specific to many practices, these “tools of the trade” are only a small portion of the things we encounter, use, and deal with on a daily basis. Practical self‐understandings cannot similarly account for the intelligibility of the more mundane things—like toothbrushes and sidewalks—used in everyday life. I consider whether an anonymous self‐understanding as “one,” “anyone,” or “no one in particular” —das Man—might play this intelligibility‐constituting role. In examining this possibility, another type of self‐understanding comes to light: cultural identities. I show that the cultural identities into which we are “thrown,” rather than practical identities or das Man, constitute the intelligibility of the abundance of mundane things that fill our everyday lives. Finally, I spell out how this finding bears on our understanding of Heidegger's notion of authenticity.     

Reason with Baggage

In this article I show that David Novak's natural law theory precedes his encounter with Judaism. That is to say, the theory is the product of a theological viewpoint consisting of three components—createdness, commandedness, and response—that is then found by Novak in a number of areas of Jewish thought and practice that admit of the same three parts. As a result of this interpretation, I posit that Paul Nahme, who argues for a pragmatic reading of Novak's theory, as well as Martin Kavka and Randi Rashkover, who offer a political understanding of it, do not account for the theological richness and metaphysical basis of Novak's natural law theology.     

Beyond Stewardship? Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Nature

This article questions whether the model of stewardship is helpful in considering Christian responsibility towards non‐human nature and proposes a different way of treating the issue of care of the environment. In an extended engagement with the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the article argues that human relations to non‐human nature are best understood by seeing humanity as historical, political and natural. In theological formulation, humanity must be understood asimago dei, imago civitatis andimago mundi. Therefore the place of humanity cannot properly be understood without reference to both God and nature. Humanity, nature and God thereby constitute a ‘common realm’. A new test of Christian responsibility towards non‐human nature is introduced: of primary interest is how historical, political and natural humanity acts in ways which either reveal or obscure the ‘common realm of God, nature and humanity’. At this point, theological self‐understanding moves beyond the model of stewardship.