Everything you wanted to know about redemptive stories* (*but were afraid to ask)

Life stories organize personal experiences within broad temporal frameworks. Stories that are redemptive in nature progress from negative beginnings to positive endings. Psychologists have become increasingly interested in the tendency for individuals to both understand their lives using story-based principles and evoke redemptive imagery while so doing. Here, I consider the past (foundations), present (extant literature), and future (directions and controversies) of psychology’s redemptive story. Previously, work on redemptive stories has been informed by several theoretical vantages and analytic approaches. Currently, a sizable literature has emerged examining redemptive stories in relation to a number of processes and outcomes. In future, it will be crucial to explore moderations in these relations as well as redemption’s causal nature.     

Redemptive Experience in Relational Family Therapy: A Christian Perspective

We all long for relationships with others, because only in connecting with others can we develop our intrapsychic structure and become functional adults. We are psychologically predisposed to have a constant connection with others and are driven toward relationships with others. Our deepest yearnings are therefore devoted to building solid dialogue as the means of becoming fully human. We, therefore, consciously or unconsciously, long for a relationship where we can experience happiness, satisfaction and, above all, redemption or salvation from our dreads, miseries and unhappiness. In this article we presuppose that a therapeutic relationship, demonstrated in a psychoanalytic setting, namely in relational family therapy, can contain redemptive dimensions in which the inextinguishable longing for salvation is always present.

Arthur Peacocke

Drawing on animal ethological studies, this article considers the possibility of a form of morality existing in animals and its relationship with human morality. Given this capacity, I argue that first we need to reflect more carefully on human sin and evil in evolutionary terms. Second, I question the adequacy of the traditional divide between “moral” and “natural” evil as well as consider the possibility of anthropogenic evil. Third, I suggest that a theological response to nonhuman morality should include discussion of the atonement, but traditional categories prove inadequate. Fourth, drawing on Sergii Bulgakov, I explore the idea of shadow sophia as representing a multivocal theodicy that is capable of holding together a tapestry of different theological responses to evil. Finally, I discuss the redemption of nature in the light of the foregoing discussion.     

The Presuppositions of Religious Pluralism and the Need for Natural Theology

In ‘The Presuppositions of Religious Pluralism and the Need for Natural Theology’ I argue that there are four important presuppositions behind John Hick’s form of religious pluralism that successfully support it against what I call fideistic exclusivism. These are i) the ought/can principle, ii) the universality of religious experience, iii) the universality of redemptive change, and iv) a view of how God (the Eternal) would do things. I then argue that if these are more fully developed they support a different kind of exclusivism, what I call rational exclusivism, and become defeaters for pluralism. In order to explain rational exclusivism and its dependence on these presuppositions I consider philosophers J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Alvin Plantinga, who offer arguments for their forms of exclusivism but I maintain that they continue to rely on fideism at important points. I then give an example of how knowledge of the Eternal can be achieved.

THE FUTURE OF TEILHARDIAN THEOLOGY

Abstract. The impossibility of predicting the future allows us only to indicate which theological developments seem to be needed. These developments concern our changing perception of the world, which requires a reversal in our understanding of God's Creation, from its most imperfect beginnings to its unforeseeable future. The passing of evolution from the biological to the human level has opened moral dimensions that must be explored. Rather than return to the beginnings of the church, theology needs to try to understand Christian faith within evolution, to reinterpret the past in the light of the new. In evolution, no final doctrine is possible. The necessity for doctrine creates a constant tension with the necessity of its revision. New truth must be paid for by suffering. The need is for a coherent theological vision of Creation, Redemption, and God's action in the world. Teilhard's metaphysics of union may be the key to it. In this view love becomes the central force of creation, which in Teilhard's view opens into an eternal future in God: in its final stage, evolution becomes Christogenesis.     

Salvation: Its Forms and Dynamics in the New Testament

Abstract : Salvation takes several forms in the New Testament, including earthly‐historical saving acts by the earthly Jesus and eschatological salvation by God's saving work in Christ. The dynamics of salvation can be considered from both anthropocentric and theocentric approaches. In the former salvation is by works, faith, or grace, but issues can be raised about each. In the latter salvation is spoken of as the act of God in Christ (a theopractic approach) or by the act of Christ on God's behalf (a Christopractic approach). Issues arise concerning canonical contexts, whether something happened at the cross effective for humanity and the cosmos, and the scope of redemption.     

THREE COMPARATIVE MAPS OF THE HUMAN

Abstract. This article is a response to the 1994 Star Island conference on the "Decade of the Brain" from a Jewish perspective. After a brief introduction about the logical function of models and maps, I compare and contrast three models of the human: Ezekiel's vision of the chariot in the Hebrew Scriptures, Franz Rosenzweig's geometry of the human face in Der Stern der Erlosung (the Star of Redemption), and a standard anatomical picture of the human brain. Whereas Rosenzweigs face is seen to be compatible with Ezekiel's chariot, both are seen to be radically distinct from the implicit conception of what a human being is in modern medical science. I conclude with a suggestion that the differences are to be understood in terms of their different intended functions and express my hope for some new kind of model that will incorporate the functional advantages of both.     

Counteracting performativity in schools: the case for laughter as a qualitative and redemptive indicator

The auditing culture and its concomitant, ‘performativity’, have been at the core of the on‐going public sector reforms of the last twenty‐five years or so. The advantages and limitations of performance indicators as a managerial technique of control have long been known. Considered from an organisational, social and political perspective, it is now possible to evaluate the predictions made in the 1980s and 1990s. These focused on the consequences for the cultures of educational institutions and the emotional resilience of individuals – especially the children – within them, if techniques of this kind are inappropriately managed and emphasise the impersonal and quantitative. The article offers a compromise solution that balances effectiveness with humanity and spirituality, in the form of a radical performance indicator, namely, laughter.     

Presentism,Redemption, and Moral Development

This paper explores what could justify some intuitive temporal asymmetries regarding redemption and the distribution of ills and goods throughout an agent's lifespan. After exposing the inadequacies of causal explanations – based on our differential ability to affect the future, but not the past – a metaphysical explanation is outlined in relation to three competing temporal‐ontological profiles of agents, and their varying accounts of a being's development. Only one of those conceptions of agents – supported by Presentism, the thesis that everything is present – offers an account justifying the intuitive temporal asymmetries. Finally, consequences are then drawn for the possibility of true redemption.