The Twofold Assumption: A Response to Cole-Turner,Moritz, Peters and Peterson

Abstract

The article discusses points and perspectives offered by the four respondents to the R.J. Russell Fellow Lectures for 2013/14. Joshua M. Moritz and Ron Cole-Turner bring in new material from biblical and patristic traditions relevant for the proposal of deep incarnation. How does the concept of deep incarnation fare in relation to tradition and science? Ted Peters and Daniel J. Peterson raise questions about the compatibility between a compatibilist view of divine action and creaturely freedom on the one hand, and ideas of kenosis on the other. Which models of kenosis models are workable, and which forms of compatibilism?     

Noah J. Toly and Daniel I. Block,eds. Keeping God's Earth: The Global Environment in Biblical Perspective

Abstract

Ted Peters rightly rejects, on biblical and theological grounds, the understanding of kenosis presumably endorsed by Niels Gregersen (and with him Jürgen Moltmann, John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke) as divine withdrawal from creation (tsim tsum). That said, a second version of kenosis, one more consistent with Scripture and early patristic theology, meets Peters' criticism by presenting kenosis not as a creative withdrawal of divine power but as a self-negation on the part of God that results in the generation of created reality along with God's reappearance and presence in it, albeit in another form. This is the kenosis-plerosis model, one according to which God gives history its momentum and empowers finite beings as a consequence of God's own self-negation; this would make possible a way for Gregersen meaningfully to affirm God's action at higher levels of nature without violating nature's integrity, even though it does so in a heterodox way.     

Wicked incarnations: Jesus,intra-action,climate change

To take incarnation seriously, Creation Care Christians, such as Douglas and Jonathan Moo, focus on Jesus’ divinity in incarnation. If the divine Jesus was fully flesh, then creation must be good. And if we do not take care of it, we are sinning, they reason. Laurel C. Schneider's promiscuous view of incarnation insists on a porous flesh, one that is materially entangled with the world. This is beyond Sallie McFague's model of the world as God's body. Applying Schneider's promiscuous incarnation, Mary-Jane Rubenstein claims that the world is God's body, and, as such, God does not transcend matter as Ernest Simmons suggests. For Catherine Keller, unknowable divine interdependence must move us to civic action. In the middle of this conversation, I offer the term wicked incarnations to make explicit the intra-action of divinity and the world in its incarnations. To take incarnation seriously is to acknowledge incarnations as a dynamism of divine and material forces, neither of which pre-exist their relationship. I join Keller in hoping that this moves us to care about and for the material world, its changing climate, and our intra-active relationship with nonhuman, divine presence.     

Becoming No-Thing: Eckhart and Hegel on Identity and Difference

Abstract: My goal in this paper is to draw productively on Meister Eckhart's concept of the ‘no-thing’ in order to illuminate Hegel's ontotheological account of both human and divine kenosis. I advance the view that just as divine kenosis is understood as the outpouring of the divine which includes the death of Christ in its economic activity, human kenosis also requires an engagement with death, namely, a spiritual death to the finite. It is via this species of death which is a becoming ‘no-thing’ that the reconciliation between the human and the divine is disclosed as a unity that relies on the shared identity of the divine and the human while simultaneously respecting the integrity of both. Indeed, it is in and through their parallel activity of kenosis that finite and infinite being achieve their respective transcendence by necessarily engaging with the being of the other. Hence, Hegel's ontotheological work is not reducible to sheer immanentism as some scholars suggest, but instead upholds the genuine transcendence of the divine.     

Orthodoxy,Orthopraxis, and Orthopathy: Evaluating the Feminist Kenosis Debate

This study examines the feminist kenosis debate, tracing its development through Daphne Hampson, Sarah Coakley, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Carolyn Chau, Jennifer Newsome Martin and Anna Mercedes. Given the diversity of theologies put forth in this debate, it is necessary to have a method of evaluation. In order to do this, I will introduce the theology of Jon Sobrino to the feminist kenosis conversation. Sobrino's notions of orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and orthopathy are essential tools for assessing different interpretations of kenosis and advancing an adequate theology of “self‐emptying.” This analysis leads to a proposal for a comprehensive feminist theological view of kenosis.     

THE MAKER'S MEANING: DIVINE IDEAS AND SALVATION

The divine ideas tradition played a valuable but often unrecognized role in the history of Christian theology. This article investigates the possible loss to theology by examining how the divine ideas permitted a unified theology of creation and salvation, centred upon the contemplation of all things in Christ. Interpreting examples from Origen to Aquinas, the article demonstrates that leading theologians understood the full truth of all creatures to be known eternally by God in the procession of the Word, by whose incarnation, death, and resurrection the creatures are redeemed.     

KENOSIS AND EMERGENCE: A THEOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS

Emergence, a hot topic of discussion for the last several years, has implications not only for the study of science but also for theology. I survey Philip Clayton's book Mind & Emergence , drawing from it and applying some of its philosophical principles to a theological interpretation of emergence. This theological interpretation is supplemented by a brief examination of relevant biblical usages of the term kenosis. From this exploration of kenosis, I assert that the Spirit is kenotically poured into creation, which onsets the long and laborious process of prebiotic evolution, leading to biological evolution toward increasing complexity. The complexification of matter, then, has its ontological origin in and through the agency of the Spirit of God. As such, the concept of creatio continua , continuing creation, is defended. The Spirit enables emergence by endowing creation and creatures with the ability to unfold by apparent natural processes according to their own inherent potentialities and possibilities. This essay contributes to a systematic theology of creation by constructing a theological synthesis between kenosis and emergence.     

Risk and Religion: Toward a Theology of Risk Taking

Historically the concept of risk is rooted in Renaissance lifestyles, in which autonomous agents such as sailors, warriors, and tradesmen ventured upon dangerous enterprises. Thus, the concept of risk inseparably combines objective reality (nature) and social construction (culture): Risk = Danger + Venture. Mathematical probability theory was constructed in this social climate in order to provide a quantitative risk assessment in the face of indeterminate futures. Thus we have the famous formula: Risk = Probability (of events) × the Size (of future harms). Because the concept of harm is always observer relative, however, risk assessment cannot be purely quantitative. This leads to the question, What are the general conditions under which risks can be accepted? There is, after all, a difference between incurring a risk and bearing the costs of risks selected for by other agencies. Against this background, contours of a theology of risk emerge. If God creates a self‐organizing world of relatively autonomous agents, and if self‐organization is favored by cooperative networks of autopoietic processes, then the theological hypothesis of a risk‐taking God is at least initially plausible. Moreover, according to the Christian idea of incarnation, God is not only taking a risk but is also bearing the risks implied by the openness of creation. I thus argue for a twofold divine kenosis—in creation as well as in redemption. I discuss some objections to this view, including the serious counterargument that risk taking on behalf of others remains, even for God, a morally dubious task. What are the conditions under which the notion of a risk‐taking God can be affirmed without leaving us with the picture of God as an arbitrary, cosmic tyrant? And what are the practical implications for the ways in which human agents of faith, hope, and love can learn to cope with the risks of everyday life and of political decisions?     

Beyond Deep Incarnation: Rethinking Christology in Radical Lutheran Terms

This article takes the demise of Christendom and what Diana Butler Bass calls the end of religion as its point of departure for a “radical” rethinking of God in fully kenotic terms. It rejects any vestige of otherworldly transcendence as a temptation to escapism, inviting us instead to seek God's complete presence among us here in the world. Going beyond Niels Gregersen's understanding of the deep incarnation of the Logos and starting instead with a complete commitment to the infra‐Lutheranum, the author presents a radical Lutheran theology that embraces a total kenosis of God whose liberating and life‐giving reappearance we must find implicit among us in unexpected places, not least of which might include the embers of a dying church or the crumbling of our religious institutions.     

THE DIVINE SPIRIT AS CAUSAL AND PERSONAL

Theists in general and Christians in particular have good grounds for affirming divine action in relation to twenty‐first‐century science. Although humans cannot perceive with their five senses the causation—both divine and creaturely—at work in our world, they have reasons to believe God acts as an efficient, but never sufficient, cause in creation. The essential kenosis option I offer overcomes liabilities in other kenosis proposals, while accounting for a God who acts personally, consistently, persuasively, and yet in diversely efficacious ways. We can reasonably infer that the love, beauty, and truth expressed in creation derive from divine and creaturely causation.     

GOD,CHRIST, AND ANIMALS

One of the most significant contributions to the field in recent times, David Clough's work On Animals: Volume 1, Systematic Theology, should ensure that theologies of creation, redemption, and eschatological fulfillment give proper attention to animals. In a landmark study, he draws upon resources in Scripture and tradition to present a systematic theology that is alert to the place of animals in the divine economy. Amidst his relentless criticism of all forms of anthropocentrism, however, it is asked whether some unresolved tensions emerge in relation to the traditional doctrine of God, the use of the category of the “personal” in theology, and the incarnation of the Word of God as a human creature.     

Explorations in a Theological Metaphor: Boethius,Calvin, and Torrance on the Creator/Creation Distinction

This article explores a theological metaphor, comparing God and creation to an author and story. Framed as an Einsteinian thought experiment, and broadly in the genre of theological retrieval, it seeks to resource the use of this metaphor in contemporary theology by bringing it into dialogue with three areas of theological reflection throughout church history: Boethius' doctrine of divine foreknowledge, the so‐called extra Calvinisticum, and Thomas Torrance's account of Christ's ascension. It is suggested that the story metaphor brings into greater visibility what unites and determines each of these different doctrines, namely, a simultaneously robust and dynamic Creator/creation relation. In particular, it is suggested that the metaphor of story illumines the ontological priority of God over creation, as well as the importance of the incarnation and ascension as the determining events for their relationship.     

Cur deus caro: Jesus and the Cosmos Story

Abstract

There seems to be a vast gulf between the grand-scale story of the world of creation, cosmic in scope and pitiless in its operations, and the small-scale story of Jesus as embodying divine empathy. The concept of deep incarnation offers a bridge by arguing that God's own Logos or Wisdom, when assuming the particular life story of Jesus, also conjoins the material conditions of God's world of creation at large (“all flesh”), shares the fate of all biological life forms (“grass and lilies”), and experiences the pains of all sentient creatures (“sparrows and foxes”). Incarnation is thus the story of God's reach into the very tissue of material and biological existence. In the embodied Logos, the “flesh” of Jesus Christ is co-extensive with his divinity. Otherwise, the incarnation would be skin deep, confined to a historical figure of the past, or merely an external appendix to divine life.     

Incarnation Deep and Wide: A Response to Niels Gregersen

Abstract

This paper responds to Professor Niels Gregersen's theology of deep incarnation by doing three things. Section 1 summarizes and defines the idea of deep incarnation, with particular reference to what is intended by the key adjective “deep.” Section 2 engages Gregersen's proposal critically in relation to traditional options within the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. If Gregersen's language of “incarnation” is to be taken seriously as a proposal that is grounded in but goes beyond traditional ideas, its best chance for success lies in being as clear as possible about relationship with its traditional sources. Finally, Section 3 offers a few suggestions concerning the promise of deep incarnation for contemporary theology, especially for theology informed in part by serious engagement with the natural sciences.     

Trust,Endangerment, and Divine Vulnerability: An Interdisciplinary Conversation with Niklas Luhmann and K.E. Løgstrup

Faith is trusting God in the midst of endangerment. Yet, human experience of excessive suffering has challenged any spontaneous trust in God. In this article, I reconsider the idea of faith as trust in God, adding an emphasis on the divine vulnerability in the incarnation. I develop a more complex view of trust inspired by the Danish philosopher of religion K.E. Løgstrup and the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. I use this view of trust to reconsider the relationship between trust and faith in the God of incarnation.     

Augustine on Creation,Providence and Motion

Augustine's theology of creation has been criticized for its Platonic tendency to denigrate matter and for a supposedly extrinsic view of divine providence that is reminiscent of design and even deism. This article counters such criticism and argues that Augustine explicitly blends extrinsic and intrinsic notions of providential teleological order. For Augustine, God ‘administers externally the natures he has created internally’ by inscribing the rationes seminales within creatures and conferring motion through the mediation of measure, number and weight. By resisting a dualism of intrinsic and extrinsic teleological order, Augustine avoids many of the problems that characterize modern theologies of creation and provides a more coherent account of divine providence.     

The Sign Redeemed: A Study in Christian Fundamental Semiotics

A Christian engagement with the question of the nature of the sign has to begin in a theology of the creation. Signs exhibit features of both reference and address. The meaning of the incarnation is that in a world of God's making the referring signs which constitute the world also implicitly function as divine address. The words of institution of the Lord's Supper, taken as an integral part of the Passion narrative, are the fulfilment of this addressive function of the world and thus also mark the point at which the Church is constituted as the human community who are called to receive the divine address.     

ASTROBIOLOGY AND ASTROCHRISTOLOGY

Astrochristology, as a subfield within the more comprehensive astrotheology, speculates on the implications of what astrobiology and related space sciences learn about our future space neighbors. Confirmation of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations living on exoplanets will force Christian theologians to decide on two issues. The first issue deals with the question: should Christians expect many incarnations, one for each inhabited exoplanet; or will the single incarnation in terrestrial history suffice? The second issue deals with the question: why is there an incarnation in the first place? Does the divine presence in the historical Jesus mark a divine attempt to fix a broken creation or does it mark a divine self‐communication that would occur with or without creation's fall into sin and death? Sorting these issues out is one task for astrochristology. My own position is to affirm both a single incarnation on Earth valid for cosmic redemption from the brokenness of creation in its present state.