Representing God's Presence

The article tackles two myths: the modern myth that God has vanished from human life, and the religious myth that the apostles, patriarchs, mystics and martyrs were in a more privileged position vis-´-vis God than we are. Dalferth argues that God has never been more present than today, has never been less hidden than today, and develops the thessis that the importance of God being present is central to the Christian understanding of God. Christian faith is faith in a present reality, not a set of beliefs about past events. The implications of this for the task of Christian communication are clear: the prime interest of Christian communication is to help those to whom it is addressed to develop a sense of the presence of God.     

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.

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Establishing conventional communication systems: Is common knowledge necessary?

How do communities establish shared communication systems? The Common Knowledge view assumes that symbolic conventions develop through the accumulation of common knowledge regarding communication practices among the members of a community. In contrast with this view, it is proposed that coordinated communication emerges a by‐product of local interactions among dyads. A set of multi‐agent computer simulations show that a population of “egocentric” agents can establish and maintain symbolic conventions without common knowledge. In the simulations, convergence to a single conventional system was most likely and most efficient when agents updated their behavior on the basis of local rather than global, system‐level information. The massive feedback and parallelism present in the simulations gave rise to phenomena that are often assumed to result from complex strategic processing on the part of individual agents. The implications of these findings for the development of theories of language use are discussed.     

God's Attributes as God's Clarities: Wolf Krötke's Doctrine of the Divine Attributes

Abstract: For the Berlin systematic theologian Wolf Krötke, the doctrine of the divine attributes presents God as, first, one who is clear and luminous in himself, and, second, as one who communicates his clarity in the eventfulness of Jesus Christ. Krötke modifies the traditional approach to the doctrine by redescribing God's attributes in terms of clarities which, in turn, are indicative of the glory of God. In this article, I expound and analyse Krötke's understanding of the clarities of truth, love, power and eternity as proper to God in his relationally rich reality shining forth, with an eye to the character of the renewal of human life thereby effected. Critical comments are also raised in relation to Krötke's proposal, particularly with respect to his lack of a robust doctrine of the immanent Trinity and the necessity of maintaining such.