Vocational integrity

Luther's doctrine of vocation is about faithfully living the baptismal life. This article argues that for the Christian a theology of work—vocation—is not to be constricted to the spiritual sphere only. The Christian is called from the temporal sphere, but not out of it. As such, the Christian embraces the spiritual and temporal spheres in response to God's grace and for the good of the neighbor.     

The Freedom of a Teenager: Vocation and Service Learning as the Future of Youth Ministry

Abstract : This article asserts the value of service learning as integral to youth ministry's future. However, service learning often lacks an appropriate philosophical foundation and an effectual process. Therefore, we offer Luther's doctrine of vocation as a framework for engaging youth in service experiences, which in return becomes a concrete way to experience the doctrine of vocation and, more importantly, the freedom of a Christian. Framed and interpreted through a vocational lens, service experiences aid youth in recognizing the urgency of a life of faith,     

CREATED FOR EVERLASTING LIFE: CAN THEISTIC EVOLUTION PROVIDE AN ADEQUATE CHRISTIAN ACCOUNT OF HUMAN NATURE?

Christians who affirm standard science and the biblical doctrine of creation often endorse theistic evolution as the best approach to human origins. But theistic evolution is ambiguous. Some versions are naturalistic (NTE)—God created humans entirely by evolution—and some are supernaturalistic (STE)—God supernaturally augmented evolution. This article claims that NTE is inadequate as an account of human origins because its theological naturalism and emergent physicalist ontology of the soul or person conflict with the Christian doctrine that God created humans for everlasting life. Both the traditional Christian account of the afterlife and its modern Christian alternatives involve God's supernatural action and a separation (dualism) of person and body at death. STE can combine with several philosophical accounts of the body‐soul relation to provide an adequate Christian account of original human nature.     

Beauty,Tragedy and New Creation: Theology and Contemplation in Cappadocian Cosmology

This article explores whether we can speak of an aggregate Christian cosmology or doctrine of creation constructed by the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa. While discouraging the possibility of identifying a perfectly contoured ‘system’ of Cappadocian cosmology, I argue that there are certain ‘first principles’ and doctrinal correlates shared by this triumvirate. More helpful is to approach their constructive theology of creation from the standpoint of its basic epistemological protocols of theologia, which lay down the ground rules for Christian language of Creator and creation, and theôria, the church's ‘sanctified intuition’ of the meaning of the world. Theôria, as ‘contemplation’ in the broadest sense, enables the Cappadocians to envision the world, through the lens of sacred history, as a theatre of tragedy and beauty, and as the matrix of the triune Creator's aspiration to bring about an ever‐renewed creation.     

“After you,sir!”: Substitution in Kant and Levinas

This paper compares the later Levinas’ notion of “substitution” with Kant’s account of substitution in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Kant’s account is modelled on the Christian doctrine of the vicarious substitution of Christ, and some recent commentators on Levinas have argued that Levinas’ account is also similar to this Christian doctrine. By bringing out what I see as major differences between the two accounts, I show that Levinas’ notion of substitution should not be understood in this way.     

Debt Resistance and Satisfaction? Notes from Catherine of Siena toward a Theology of Redemption against Neoliberal Capitalism

Adding to recent concerns about resonances between debt in Christian soteriologies and in capitalism, Hollis Phelps has argued that Anselm’s satisfaction theory provides subjective reinforcement for neoliberalism’s biopolitical use of debt, and thus calls for an abandonment of the idea that humans must be redeemed from debt to God. Without advocating mere retrieval of satisfaction theory, I submit that such a concept of debt can have the opposite effect by analyzing how it plays out in Catherine of Siena’s mystical theology and the way she articulates satisfaction in her writings. Catherine’s doctrine of creation casts humanity’s unremittable debt as an obligation to love God, self, and neighbor that is divinely designed to benefit all. This concept of debt determines what satisfaction signifies for Catherine, fostering an “indebted subjectivity” incompatible with that of neoliberalism. Her theology thereby suggests a productive way to leverage the language of a prominent Western atonement theory against the neoliberal concepts of debt that discipline Western society—namely, by rooting debt in a doctrine of creation that emphasizes relationships of mutuality and interdependence that benefit all.     

The Place of Growth in the Theology of Karl Barth

It is often wondered whether Karl Barth’s doctrine of sanctification preserves space for a sufficient account of growth in the Christian life. Such concerns arise, at least in part, from Barth’s radical claim that the sanctification of all humanity is totally and effectively established in Jesus Christ, a claim that appears to exclude more familiar notions of cumulative regeneration. This essay seeks to complement other responses to this critique by delving into Barth’s most explicit discussion of growth in Church Dogmatics: §67.2 ‘The Growth of the Community’. A close reading of this subsection will demonstrate that Barth can happily employ the language of growth albeit interpreted in light of his understanding of the Christian life as an ongoing encounter with Jesus Christ.     

The Option for Life

In today's Anthropocene, the reality of our growing global population, with its requirement of and strain upon the natural world, and our grave projected ecological outlook pose new challenges for Christian ethicists. How can both people and the earth flourish? Discussed within the context of theological and secular reflections on natural law, this article proposes one answer to such a question through a recasting of the human right to nature by way of a deep and wide understanding of vocation. Using Luther as a prototype who demonstrates the innate value of all life forms and offers an innovative working concept of vocation, it is here shown how an emphasis on vocation, when extended ecologically, can promote the option of life for all.     

TOUCHING THE MIND OF GOD: PATRISTIC CHRISTIAN THOUGHT ON THE NATURE OF MATTER

This paper seeks to examine the nature of matter from an Orthodox Christian patristic perspective, specifically that of St. Gregory of Nyssa, and compare this with David Bohm's concept of wholeness and the implicate order. By examining the ramifications of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, the basic nature of matter as being rooted in the mind of God reveals itself, and furthermore shows that certain conceptions of quantum physics can provide language with which to give voice to this ancient view.     

On Christian Discernment and the Problem of the Theological

This article lays the groundwork for a theology of discernment that seeks to address modern anxieties about the integrity of the theological by showing how Christian believers are sanctified for the identification of true speech about God. It does so by arguing that post‐Kantian understandings of the activity of the human subject in judgement need not be seen as inimical to an account of Christian discernment, that recognition of Paul's understanding of the place of discernment in the Christian life points to alternatives to Barth's attempt to resolve the difficulties of the theological through an exclusive appeal to divine activity, and that Augustine develops a helpful account of the place of a theology of discernment in addressing the problem of the theological by treating the connection between these topics as an element within theologies of sanctification and creaturely vocation.     

Christ Existing in Ordinary: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sanctification

One task of any doctrine of sanctification is to attend to a theological rationale for the significance of a habitual and developing Christian life within a broader salvific economy. This article introduces the problem of claiming ‘ordinary’ life as the arena and instrument of God and distils three elements of Bonhoeffer's early theology that might be employed to articulate a theology of sanctification as the counterpoint of justification: the realization of a new humanity in Christ that constitutes an ontology of justification; Christian devotion as the act of this new humanity in the Spirit; and the dynamic integrity accorded to historical existence.     

“Together towards a Banquet”: The Feast as Promise and Resistance in Together Towards Life and Contemporary Theological Discourse

This article explores the symbol of the feast, as proposed by the 2012 World Council of Churches’ affirmation Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL). The feast is introduced as an appropriate hermeneutic tool to account for the multi-layered and dynamic reality of human life in the presence of others and in the presence of God. Interpreting the feast, together with TTL, as a symbol of the liberation and reconciliation of the whole creation and of the celebration of life in response to the outreaching love of God, the article reflects on some contemporary theological voices arguing that God’s invitation to the feast of God’s kingdom is a central element of Christian existence. Such feasting is, among other things, characterized by the dynamics of facing, the presence of the other, the awareness of human corporeality, and the particularization of the other that can overcome the idolatrous power of death. Entering this conversation, the present article will argue that the symbol of the feast can helpfully be understood in its two-fold dynamics of promise and resistance. While giving assurance about the transformation of all reality in the coming reign of justice and peace, the symbol of the feast, with its emphasis on inclusiveness and equality, also empowers people to resist all life-denying forces. Walking with the rest of the creation “together towards a banquet,” Christians are thus enabled, it will be asserted, to discern and actively live their vocation.     

Can Lutheran Theology and Virtue Ethics Be Friends?

Lutheran theology is generally suspicious of virtue ethics. This suspicion arises from (1) the Lutheran commitment to justification by faith in God's unconditional promise; and (2) Luther's corollary understanding of sin as existential self‐absorption. Some Lutheran theologians have sought to incorporate virtue ethics by using it as an orientation for Christian life, while making sure to avoid any contamination of the doctrine of justification by virtue ethics. My project is to consider the possibility of a mutual illumination and interaction between the doctrine of justification and virtue ethics’ focus on formation by habituation. As an aid in exploring this possibility I use the distinction in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics between the “ultimate” and the “penultimate.”     

The Problem of Criteria and the Necessity of Natural Theology

Most streams of Christianity have emphasized the unknowability of God, but they have also asserted that Christ is the criterion through whom we may have limited access to the depths of God, and through whose life and death we can formulate the doctrine of God as Triune. This standpoint, however, leads to certain complications regarding ‘translating’ the Christian message to adherents of other religious traditions, and in particular the question, ‘Why do you accept Christ as the criterion?’, is one that Christian thinkers have attempted to answer in different ways. There are two influential responses to this query in recent Christian thought: an ‘evidentialist’ approach which gradually moves from a theistic metaphysics to a Christ‐centred soteriology, and an ‘unapologetic’ standpoint which takes God's self‐disclosure in Christ as the perspectival lens through which to view the world. The opposition between these two groups is primarily over the status of ‘natural theology’, that is, whether we may speak of a ‘natural’ reason, which human beings possess even outside the circle of the Christian revelation, and through which they may arrive at some minimalist understanding of the divine reality. I outline the status of ‘natural theology’ in these strands of contemporary Christian thought, from Barthian ‘Christomonism’ to post‐liberal theology to Reformed epistemology, and suggest certain problems within these standpoints which indicate the need for an appropriately qualified ‘natural theology’. Most of the criticisms leveled against ‘natural theology’, whether from secular philosophers or from Christian theologians themselves, can be put in two groups: first, the arguments for God's existence are logically flawed, and, second, even if they succeed they do not point to the Triune God that Christians worship. In contrast to such an old‐fashioned ‘natural theology’ which allegedly starts from premises self‐evidently true for all rational agents and leads through an inexorable logic to God, the qualified version is an attempt to spell out the doctrinal beliefs of Christianity such as the existence of a personal God who interacts with human beings in different ways, and outline the reasons offered in defence of such statements. In other words, without denying that Christian doctrines operate at one level as the grammatical rules which structure the Christian discourse, such a natural theology insists on the importance of the question of whether these utterances are true, in the sense that they refer to an objective reality which is independent of the Christian life‐world. Such a ‘natural theology’, as the discussion will emphasize, is not an optional extra but follows in fact from the internal logic of the Christian position on the universality of God's salvific reach.     

Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor

Maximian logoi or the “principles” of created being are often virtually identified with Platonic ideas or forms. This assumption obscures what is distinctive about Maximus's concept of the logoi. I first note two metaphysical peculiarities of his doctrine, and then propose that these only make sense if we follow Maximus's own directive to read the logoi through Christology proper – that is, as describing creation as the Word's cosmic Incarnation. This suggests, in creative tension with a good deal of twentieth‐century philosophical theology, that the God‐world relation is not fully exhausted by the analogia entis: Maximus divines a still deeper hypostatic (not natural) identity between Word and world that actually generates natural difference – for perhaps the first and only time in the history of Christian thought. Here I assay a first step toward retrieving that relation.     

Bulgakov's Account of Creation: Neglected Aspects,Critics and Contemporary Relevance

The article focuses on a central, yet neglected dimension of the ‘Sophia Debate’ in twentieth‐century Russian Orthodox theology: Bulgakov's panentheistic account of creation and its critique by Nikolai Lossky. Bulgakov understood the doctrine of creation to be negatively defined as creatio ex nihilo and positively defined as creatio ex Deo. Bulgakov's sophiology seeks to relate God and the world through the intermediate concept of Sophia, balancing an account of God's being in the world with an account of the world's eternal foundation in God. Lossky objected that Bulgakov's account underemphasizes novelty, contingency and the free character of creation. Lossky's objections notwithstanding, Bulgakov's version of panentheism – especially its trinitarian, antinomian and kenotic dimensions – finds significant points of contact with contemporary accounts of creation.     

“Like sheep for the slaughter”

The primary objective of this article is to investigate how a Lutheran theology supports the soldier’s vocation in war. First, the analysis is made in relation to the concept of larva Dei, second, in relation to “the pastorate” and “technology of power”. By the interaction, I show how Luther’s theology can be used as a critique towards Foucault and vice versa. Through this narrative method, structures of power and liberation are unveiled. The interaction illuminates their diverse views on secular and non-secular order, as well as an immanent and transcendental order. Luther points towards eternity, while Foucault points towards society and its powers. The main outcome is firstly: faith for Foucault is never an explanation of “reality”, but a result of social relations. For Luther, faith is to experience the world as reality; and secondly: larva Dei creates a possibility to overcome suffering by faith, whereas by Foucault’s immanent structure, suffering is understood as “empty” or “meaningless”. Foucault contributes with an important critique of misusing vocation in war. An area for further research is to continue developing critiques of vocation and power in relation to contemporary soldiers’, terrorists’ and anarchists’ masks, since some are used to protect life and others to protect identities.