Narrative and Metaphysical Ambition: On Being “in Christ”

This article addresses some of the confusion regarding the role of metaphysical claims in narrative theology. Proponents and critics of narrative theology alike wonder at the ambiguous place of metaphysical speech about God as an objective reality. This essay enters the conversation through the side door of soteriology. Rather than focusing on the relationship between narrative and metaphysics or narrative and analogy or narrative and first‐order theological claims, I examine what sort of metaphysical statements are required to make the Christian claim that human beings are “in Christ” intelligible as a soteriological reality. I argue that the Christian grammar itself assumes a Christology with a certain kind of metaphysical ambition without which Christianity lapses into incoherence. To make this case, I show that David Kelsey's “narrative identity” Christology in Eccentric Existence lacks the metaphysical statements necessary to uphold his conviction that human beings are “in Christ.” A comparison with T. F. Torrance and the Book of Hebrews reveals that when narrative circumvents metaphysical statements about the incarnate Son, soteriological claims lack coherence and the biblical narrative itself is distorted by a false metaphysic. Thus, metaphysical claims internal to the narrative of Jesus are necessary to tell the story of God faithfully. In this way, narrative is the expression of a theological metaphysics.     

Henry David Thoreau's Anti‐Work Spirituality and a New Theological Ethic of Work

Although Henry David Thoreau stands outside the Christian canon, his outlook on the relations among spirituality, ecology, and economy highlights how Christian theologians can develop a theological work ethic in our era of economic and ecological precarity. He can furthermore help theologians counter the pro‐work bias in much Christian thought. In Walden, Thoreau shows that the best work is an ascetic practice that reveals and reaps the abundance of nature and connects the person to the immanent divine and thereby glimpsing eternity. Thoreau thus offers the outline of a transformed theology of work even as he challenges Protestant vocationalism in the early industrial era. He is therefore a fitting if challenging guide for formulating a theology of the self as agent and product of work, at a moment when the postindustrial ideal of work that is both meaningful and remunerative seems ever more unattainable while the negative impact of our work on nonhuman nature is ever more apparent.     

Blacks,Jews and the racial imagination in the writings of Sephardim in the long seventeenth century

This essay explores facets of the Sephardic racial imagination. Early Modern Catholic Iberian discourse generally scorned Jews and linked them, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, with denigrated Africans, or Blacks. Marginalized and often persecuted, conversos and Sephardim of the sixteenth through the eighteenth century resorted to hegemonic discourse about Blacks to construct their own identity. Central to Sephardic discourse about Blacks was its redemptive logic. In both Iberian Catholic and northwest-European Protestant colonial spheres, conversos and Sephardim sought through anti-Blackness to identity themselves (and hopefully for others to identify them) as members of the dominant White culture and ruling class, their religious otherness aside.Some of the material presented here comes from Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own, for which I gratefully acknowledge the help of Hazel Gold, Viviana Grieco and Julia R. Lieberman. In order to convey the meaning of the often overwrought Baroque style of the Spanish originals, my translations are of necessity sometimes rather loose. I would also like to thank Yosef Kaplan, Lisa Moses Leff, Julia R. Lieberman and Kenneth Stow for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.