The Unifying and Catholizing Love of Christ in a Time of Pandemic

This article discusses the meaning of Christ’s unifying and catholizing love in a time of COVID-19. The love of Christ is trinitarian love. It is the love of Christ on the cross. It is the love of the father, mother, parent who sent Jesus to the cross. It is the love of the Spirit who is also the comforter who actualizes, operationalizes, and makes tangible the love of the triune God. This love of the cross is a unifying love, a love that creates unity between God and God’s creatures, unity among God’s people and creatures, global and ecumenical unity, unity in diversity, unity in concreteness and visibility, unity not from a distance, but unity in proximity. This sacrificial love of Christ is a catholizing love, a love that brings into being the catholicity of God’s people and creatures; catholicity in all ages, all places, and in truth; catholicity as catholicity in particularity and not in vague universality; catholicity as partisanship for the sake of the universal. The time of the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified existing challenges and concerns. Of major concern are the increase of social alienation and social exclusion (local and global) and the decrease of social cohesion and social solidarity in a world of inequality. The well-intended use of the expression “social distancing” instead of “physical distancing” might lend momentum to social alienation and exclusion.     

Christ’s Love amid Pandemic

In 2022, the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches is to take place in Karlsruhe, Germany, at a time when nations are searching for the strength to rise out of the ashes of COVID-19. The assembly theme, “Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity,” reflects God’s vision for creation. The focus on Christ’s love and its inherent power to move the world to reconciliation and solidarity is necessary, as the assembly will gather amid perplexity, anxiety, and fundamental existential, structural, and societal questions. These questions are related to humanity’s place in creation: how we inhabit the earth and make sense of our own lives and the lives of other creatures and how we seek to develop collective human conscience to live justly and peacefully together in God’s world.     

“A Mosaic Community Together in the Journey of Faith”

This article demonstrates how missional churches have emphasized accompaniment as missiological foundation in the COVID-19 pandemic season. Employing ethnographical method, interviews, and virtual church visits as the primary approach, the paper explores how NextGen Church as the embodiment of Christ’s love has moved communities to solidarity and unity in the middle of global suffering. It concludes that God is on the mission of love and that the pandemic has provided an opportunity for the church to enhance its participation in missio Dei by epitomizing Christ’s love.     

Christ’s Love,Peace, Justice,and Freedom Seen against the Challenges of the Modern World

This is an edited version of an address given in Paralimni at the Open University of Cyprus in January 2019 during a meeting of the assembly planning committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC), hosted by the Archdiocese of Constantia and Ammochostos. It is a reflection on the theme set for the WCC’s 11th Assembly in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2021, “Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity.”     

Playing God during the Pandemic

According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in extraordinary situations, when the accepted norms of ethics do not provide clear-cut answers and even prevent responsible action, human beings must act freely in conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ. Being conformed to his incarnation means being involved fully and vicariously in the life and struggles of the world; being conformed to his crucifixion means identifying with the suffering of the victims and being in solidarity with the oppressed; and being conformed to his resurrection means living and acting in hope for the sake of future generations. In seeking to express the love of Christ in the midst of our present-day pandemic, we are called to act in response to the question “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” In this way, “Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity,” not just during a pandemic such as we have experienced, but also at this time in world history when enmity and discord have once again become rampant.     

The Pluralistic Vision of Persian Sufi Poetry

This article explains how the Sufi tradition was instrumental in molding the imagery, symbolism, metaphors, tropes, and indeed the worldview, that informs all but the earliest Persian poetry. This poetry expresses the precedence of mercy in a pluralistic vision by pointing to an expression of love, and it does this by the magic of beautiful language, enticing imagery and intoxicating rhythm. Therefore, in this tradition, love alone is able to bring together all contradictory and varied qualities and to reinstate them in God's unity, which is the first principle of Islamic faith. What is being celebrated is God's unitary reality. The article then recognizes that love is understood as the unifying divine power that is the unique prerogative of human beings, who alone were created in the full image of God.     

Love from Afar: Distance,Intimacy and the Theology of Love

Proceeding from Jean‐Luc Marion's The Erotic Phenomenon, this article discusses how the Christian concept of love can manifest intimacy. While most theological concepts of love spell out the requirement of distance, they do not pay sufficient attention to the intimate variants of love. The article argues that a full‐fledged theological account should make room for love's different economic and donative variants, as well as for love's advance from ‘distance’ to ‘visibility’ and, finally, ‘intimacy’. Concrete examples of intimate love include mystical union, transforming hospitality, fidelity and love that is as strong as death.     

A Philosophy of Weakness: Merleau-Ponty on Fugitive Love and the Wisdom in Letting Die

This essay provides a sketch of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of love in relation to human experience and to the conceptualization of φιλ?α and σοφ?α outlined in his later works. In response to what he calls a “cruel thought?…?that is more fear of error than it is a love of truth”, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on love and jealousy in Proust offer a concept of “fugitive love”. Opposed to the Cartesian desire for apodicticity that seeks to seize and arrest, fugitive love means withholding one’s touch and letting the beloved die. In its offer of dispossession rather than possession, love requires faith. This faith, the opposite of faith in an absolute λ?γο?, invites and accepts being’s occultation as the very means of its openness. Merleau-Ponty’s thought offers a mode of philosophizing that no longer aims to make being its captive but a philosophy of weakness that allows for its withdraw.     

Generous Orthodoxy: Theology,Church and the Gift of the Spirit

The article explores the concept of ‘Generous Orthodoxy’. It argues that the phrase focuses the task of theology on the worship of God, and its significance in spiritual formation. It also works to enable the church's witness by engaging with the realities of the world from the perspective of credal orthodoxy. The words ‘Generous’ and ‘Orthodoxy’ each illuminate the other, in that true orthodoxy is generous, and generosity is a vital part of true orthodoxy. Such an orthodoxy can only be maintained with a robust doctrine and experience of the Holy Spirit as the Church's principle of unity.     

Children’s spiritual development in forced displacement: a human rights perspective

This article provides a synthesis of current research and theories of spiritual development in forced displacement from a human rights perspective. Spirituality, understood as a cognitive‐cultural construct, has shown positive impact on children’s development through both collective and individual processes and across ecological domains of the physical world, the community and the individual child. Findings support a human rights framework of spiritual development that privileges the child’s and the community’s own understandings of human development, and this framework may further serve as an important resource for scaffolding refugee children’s development. The study of spiritual development will enable more effective human rights protection of child development in situations of war and forced displacement.     

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.     

Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran Doctrines of Eucharistic Presence: A Brief Note towards a Rapprochement

This article explores Schlatter's doctrine of the Trinity in the light of the contemporary debate, focusing on the relation of the economic and the ontological Trinity. It is shown that Schlatter relates God's triune being and God's trinitarian action through the notion of love – where God's love ad extra as well as ad intra is oriented toward the particular in such a way as to enable true otherness. It will be argued, moreover, that Schlatter's contribution to the contemporary trinitarian debate lies in propounding an applied trinitarian theology which is faithful to its object. When God in himself and in relation to creation is oriented toward and actively seeks the other, then theology cannot talk about God's being apart from the actuality of his actions in this world.     

Why Nature Doesn’t Turn Off Neurosis

This paper develops an integration of psychoanalytic and wisdom tradition concepts to answer the question as to why nature does not turn off neurosis, The proposed answer is that nature wants a person to exploit the neurosis for two gains, one being the increase in adaptive capacity resulting from releasing it and the second involving the difficulty in the release itself, the latter related to gains proffered by the world’s wisdom traditions. These see a movement from the psyche’s creation by passive, unconscious means of finite promise rooted in parental love to creation by active, consciously chosen means of unlimited promise involving a direct relationship with nature and the Cosmos.     

Intergenerational transmission of violence: Is violence a pathology of intersubjective contact?

In this article, I look at violence as a pathology of the intersubjective contact. In particular, I claim that one possible explanation of violence is lack of recognition on a societal, intersubjective level. I propose an explanation based on Honneth’s concept of struggle for recognition and Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity. The article takes the following course: I first give a short outline of the concept of intergenerational transmission of violence, as understood by psychology at the level of an individual, followed by a brief presentation a summary of sociological research on the concept. Then, I proceed with a discussion of Honneth’s three modes of recognition, viz. love, rights, and solidarity, as modes of intersubjective contact, leading to the development of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. I claim that the lack of these kinds of recognition leads to the decrease in confidence and trust and consequently to abusive behaviour, that it affects social integrity and brings about the destruction of social functions, and that it results in an individual and a society which have lost their “honour” and dignity. Finding his account of intersubjectivity lacking in its philosophical aspect, I complement Honneth’s account of intersubjectivity with that of Merleau-Ponty, based in his understanding of the intertwining of the subject and the world and the reversible contact between and among subjects within the world. Considering the negative effects of misrecognition as described by Honneth, in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intersubjective contacts among subjects, I conclude that a country where all three modes of recognition have been disturbed houses a society lacking self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem, and consequently shows all the signs of Honneth’s forms of disrespect, i.e. abuse and rape, denial of rights and exclusion, as well as denigration and insult, all of which are forms of intergenerationally transmitted violence.     

Perception,Expression, and the Continuity of Being: Some Intersections between Nishida and Gadamer

This article draws on Nishida’s ontology to shed light on some problems with Gadamer’s concept of dialogical truth. This form of truth relies on the claim that self and world ‘belong together’ as aspects of a single, unitary phenomenon, one which is made manifest in language. This view has difficulty, however, accounting for the expression in language of that which is distorted, mistaken, or untruthful. To get past these difficulties, I suggest that we turn to the more dynamic and developmental vision of the continuity of being found in Nishida’s work. One can cultivate or neglect this relational continuity, and so achieve or fail to achieve it in its fullest forms. I argue that we can cultivate our perceptual capacity along similar lines, bringing the self and world together into a kind of harmony so that the expression of such perceptions comes to be the expression of truth.     

Arendt and Augustine: More Than One Kind of Love

Although Hannah Arendt is not usually read as a philosopher of religion, her political philosophy is noticeably filled with references to religious figures and thinkers, including Jesus of Nazareth, Augustine and Duns Scotus. Also notable is the implicit centrality in her thought of amor mundi, or love of the world. The difficulty is that although she spoke to her students about it, she rarely wrote about amor mundi. In this article, I seek to provide a plausible explanation of the meaning of amor mundi in Arendt’s thought, drawing in particular upon the influence of Augustine on Arendt’s unique development of the ethical and political principle of love for the world. Specifically, through a close reading of Arendt’s doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, I identify the relationship between Augustine’s conception of cupiditas and Arendt’s conception of amor mundi.     

God So Loved the World

The account of the near sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, often referred to as the Aqedah, has been profoundly influential, both directly and indirectly, in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theological reflection. This article seeks to explore some Christian insights into the use of the motif of the sacrifice of Isaac, suggesting that its use is fundamental to understanding the theme of Christ’s love in the Gospel of John, in particular the link between love, sacrifice, and unity. With a brief exploration of two artworks by Marc Chagall, The Sacrifice of Isaac and the White Crucifixion, it will also raise questions as to what this might mean for the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.     

A dilemma for wolterstorff’s theistic grounding of human dignity and rights

In a number of recent works, Nicholas Wolterstorff defends the claim that human rights inhere in the dignity of every human. He further contends that the explanation of this dignity cannot be found in the intrinsic features of humans; rather, the only plausible explanation for human dignity is that it is bestowed upon humans by God’s love. In this paper, I argue that Wolterstorff’s theory concerning the ground of human dignity falls prey to something quite similar to the classic Euthyphro dilemma: either God must love every existing human in a dignity-bestowing manner or he need not, and either option is problematic. If the former, then whatever it is about humans that ensures God’s love can reasonably be thought to be the independent source of human dignity and/or rights, thereby leaving us without cause to appeal to God’s love for the explanation of this dignity. If the latter, the implication is that moral statements which appear to be necessarily true are only contingently so. Wolterstorff’s theory will thus require substantial modification, or else abandonment.     

Christ’s Love in the Midst of Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed vividly the pandemic of economic inequality, the pandemic of racism, and the pandemic of climate catastrophe. This article explores what it means to manifest Christ’s love, moving the world, in the midst of these pandemics. It begins by recalling firm faith claims on which to build a response, moving on to “reading” the context of these four pandemics, noting five signs of the times as guides for discerning how to respond. It concludes with four suggestions regarding gospel-grounded response: (1) seeking to address one of these pandemics without deep attention to the others is dangerous; (2) the four pandemics converge in a holy call to economic restructuring; (3) the movement toward a moral economy is not an impossible dream; and (4) religion, including the World Council of Churches, has a crucial role to play. They are suggestions, in other words, about the form of Christ’s love moving the world in the midst of these pandemics.     

From the Same Spirit: Receiving the Theological Gifts of Transgender Christians

Transgender Christians bear four transformative gifts to the body of Christ. They celebrate that humans are God's created co‐creators, and that God creates with and through them. Second, gender non‐conforming Christians have learned to steadfastly love (hesed) themselves as they love God and the world. Next, transgender Christians witness that humans are a coherent unity of body‐mind, not a mind in a body. Finally, transgender followers of Jesus welcome the Holy Spirit's gifts of plurality, newness, unity, and freedom.