Author: Jason Goroncy

Empire or Democracy?: Mikhail Gorbachev poses some questions for US Presidential candidates

There has been unusual interest throughout the world in the U.S. presidential race.

Skeptics, of whom there are quite a few, say the campaign is just a marathon show that has little to do with real policymaking. Even if there’s a grain of truth in that, in an interdependent world the statements of the contenders for the White House are more than just rhetoric addressed to American voters.

Major policy problems today cannot be solved without America – and America cannot solve them alone.

Even the domestic problems of the United States are no longer purely internal. I am referring first of all to the economy. The problem of the huge U.S. budget deficit can be managed, for a time, by continuing to flood the world with “greenbacks,” whose rate is declining along with the value of U.S. securities. But such a system cannot work forever.

Of course, the average American is not concerned with the complexities of global finance. But as I talk to ordinary Americans, and I visit the United States once or twice a year, I sense their anxiety about the state of the economy. The irony, they have said to me, is that the middle class felt little benefit from economic growth when the official indicators were pointing upward, but once the downturn started, it hit them immediately, and it hit them hard.

No one can offer a simple fix for America’s economic problems, but it is hard not to see their connection to U.S. foreign policies. Over the past eight years the rapid rise in military spending has been the main factor in increasing the federal budget deficit. The United States spends more money on the military today than at the height of the Cold War.

Yet no candidate has made that clear. “Defense spending” is a subject that seems to be surrounded by a wall of silence. But that wall will have to fall one day.

We can expect a serious debate about foreign policy issues, including the role of the United States in the world; America’s claim to global leadership; fighting terrorism; nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and the problems caused by the invasion of Iraq.

Of course I am not pretending to write the script for the presidential candidates’ debates. But I would add to this list of issues two more: the size of America’s defense budget and the militarization of its foreign policy. I am afraid these two questions will not be asked by the moderators. But sooner or later they will have to be answered.

The present administration, particularly during George W. Bush’s first presidential term, was bent on trying to solve many foreign policy issues primarily by military means, through threats and pressure. The big question today is whether the presidential nominees will propose a different approach to the world’s most urgent problems.

I am extremely alarmed by the increasing tendency to militarize policymaking and thinking. The fact is that the military option has again and again led to a dead end.

One doesn’t have to go very far to find an alternative. Take the recent developments on nonproliferation issues, where the focus has been on two countries – North Korea and Iran.

After several years of saber-rattling, the United States finally got around to serious talks with the North Koreans, involving South Korea and other neighboring countries. And though it took time to achieve results, the dismantling of the North Korean nuclear program has now begun.

It’s true that nuclear issues in Iran encompass some unique features and may be more difficult to solve. But clearly threats and delusions of “regime change” are not the way to do it.

We have to look even deeper for a solution. “Horizontal” proliferation will only get worse unless we solve the “vertical” problem, i.e. the continued existence of huge arsenals of sophisticated nuclear weapons held by major powers, particularly the United States and Russia.

In recent months there seems to have been a conceptual breakthrough on this issue, with influential Americans calling for revitalizing efforts aimed at the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have now endorsed that goal.

I have always been in favor of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. On my watch, the Soviet Union and the United States concluded treaties on the elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons – Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) missiles – and on A 50 percent reduction of strategic weapons, which led to the destruction of thousands of nuclear warheads.

But when we proposed complete nuclear disarmament, our Western partners raised the issue of the Soviet Union’s advantage in conventional forces. So we agreed to negotiate major cuts in non-nuclear weapons, signing a treaty on this issue in Vienna.

Today, I see a similar and even bigger problem, but the roles have been reversed. Let us imagine that 10 or 15 years down the road the world has abolished nuclear weapons. What would remain? Huge stockpiles of conventional arms, including the newest types, some so devastating as to be comparable to weapons of mass destruction.

And the lion’s share of those stockpiles would be in the hands of one country, the United States, giving it an overwhelming advantage. Such a state of affairs would block the road to nuclear disarmament.

Today the United States produces about half of the world’s military hardware and has over 700 military bases, from Europe to the most remote corners of the world. Those are just the officially recognized bases, with more being planned. It is as if the Cold War is still raging, as if the United States is surrounded by enemies who can only be fought with tanks, missiles and bombers. Historically, only empires had such an expansive approach to assuring their security.

So the candidates, and the next president, will have to decide and state clearly whether America wants to be an empire or a democracy, whether it seeks global dominance or international cooperation. They will have to choose, because this is an either-or proposition: The two things don’t mix, like oil and water.

Source: Gorby.ru

International Journal of Public Theology is out

The recently-birthed International Journal of Public Theology has announced its second volume, which includes the following articles:

Richard Maegraith Band, Free Running: A Review

The great Canadian jazz pianist and vocalist Oscar Peterson once observed about jazz, ‘It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz’.

He is right, of course; and that is one of the reasons why I’ve really enjoyed listening to Richard Maegraith‘s debut album, Free Running. Richard is a Sydney-based jazz musician – a gifted tenor saxophonist – who has pulled together a small group of equally talented artists – Gary Daley (keyboards), Kristin Berardi (vocals), Jonathon Zwartz (bass) and Tim Firth (drums) – to produce not just a bunch of great songs but, more impressively, a whole story which is, powerfully, an echo of the Story and in which no voice is drowned in the crowd.

The opening track, ‘Whisper’, is a playful, unencumbered explosion of colour, and a fitting prelude to the second track, ‘Eden’s Story’, with which one is invited, even thrown, into a story that will carry the listener through the whole album, Kristin Berardi’s haunting vocals promising that this is only the beginning, and that there’s something more significant to come.

By the time we get mid-way through the album – with tracks ‘The Journey’, ‘Propitiation’, and ‘Duet For Tenor Sax and Double Bass’ – we’ve all warmed up and we are given to see not just the boldness of a talented saxophonist, but a sensitivity to, and respect for, each other among all the players. You don’t get the sense that anyone is trying to show off unduly, and there’s certainly no sense of competing egos at work here.

The final two tracks, ‘Expectantly Waiting For You’, and ‘Highland Cathedral’, betray the joy and release of those who have been taken into and through the Propitiation, those ‘felons not to hopelessness’ and ‘free to love’. There is playfulness … at last.

Returning again to Oscar Peterson. He once suggested that ‘Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they’re trying to say with jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you’. Free Running deserves to be listened to not just because it plays but because of what it says. You can check out more about the album here or on Richard’s Myspace page.

‘SCM Core Text: Christian Doctrine’: A Review

Mike Higton, SCM Core Text: Christian Doctrine. London: SCM Press, 2008. xi + 413pp. £22.99.

While the finest of Christian dogmatics employs the grammar of praxis, proposition and imagination, much of what passes for ‘orthodoxy’ privileges proposition and is (to varying degrees) suspicious of those attempts to faithfully make sense of life encountered and interpreted in a specific time and space biography, drawing upon God’s action corporately experienced, and upon the narratives and metaphors that inform Christian imagination. As invaluable as propositions are, they ought not be, according to Mike Higton, ‘extricated from the Christian lives and imaginations’ (p. 73) that provide the context for comprehending and evaluating all things in light of that one determining Word of God who has taken on flesh and who, in the Spirit, is dancing created humanity into participation in God’s life in the world. It is this grand narrative that stirs Higton’s theological project in Christian Doctrine (part of the SCM Core Text series), and provides the matrix through which he seeks to assist readers to make sense of life as individuals and communities in relation to each other, and in relation to God.

Knowing and loving God, Higton presses, is more akin to knowing, loving and sharing identity with a piece of music – it is to resonate with, and to participate in, even to become an aspect of, God’s eternally-playing melody – than it is to ‘grasp fully, define and explain’ (p. 57) the otherwise unknowable God. Such knowledge is interruptive, transformative and self-involving, drawing a responsive participant into – to be ‘caught up … grasped by’ (p. 57) – the same love and justice that is God’s life and which God has revealed to the world in Jesus of Nazareth and made real by the invading, transforming and overwhelming Spirit who draws human persons to Christ, ‘impels and enables participation’ in God’s kingdom, and who produces a response ‘consistent with the claim that God is love’ (p. 255). While ‘imagining how the immanent life of God functions is not our business’ (p. 99), Higton is confident that what God makes known in the economy is the ‘dance’ of God’s own immanent life – God’s one endless threefold way; that is why, according to the author, God can be trusted and known. ‘The economy is enough‘ (p. 102). As Higton repeatedly reminds, the triune God who is love ‘all the way down’ is ‘immanently Christlike’ (p. 71):

[To] learn to speak appropriately about God’s immanent life is to learn to see the human being Jesus – a graspable, knowable, historical, economic reality – as the coming to the world of the ineffable, eternal Son; it is to learn to see the Father who appears in one’s economic imaginations and words as the coming to the world of the eternal, ineffable Father; it is to learn to see the shakings and stirrings of the Spirit’s historical, economic work as the coming to the world of the ineffable Spirit. It is to learn to see the whole patterned drama of the economy, into which Christians believe all are called, as the opening up to the world of God’s own immanent life’. (pp. 101-2)

Christian Doctrine emerges out of a certificate course in theology that Higton teaches at Exeter, and is targeted at second- and third-year undergraduate students. Resisting all attempts to merely download the tradition, Higton seeks to encourage the critical making, breaking and remaking of sense that is all around us, and to do so with careful attentiveness to the transforming light of the Christian story – at the heart of which is God’s love and justice.

The book consists of two parts: The first, ‘Life in God’ (pp. 1-166), explores with startling clarity questions of epistemology, the indivisible relationship between knowing and loving (here he draws upon Exodus 3:13-17 and 1 John 4:7-21), God-talk, God’s trinitarian economy, and God’s human life. On the latter, Higton draws upon depictions of Jesus in painting and film, contrasting Piero della Francesca’s Baptism with Antonello da Messina’s Le Christ à la colonne, and two parts of Matthias Grünewald’s Eisenheim Altarpiece. The author presses that triune love made flesh – that is, one ‘utterly human, unreservedly and unadulteratedly human’ (p. 130) – is ‘God’s way of loving the world’ (p. 124), and belief in which occasions rearrangement and transformation of every area of one’s life and every aspect of one’s world. The book’s first part concludes with a chapter on pneumatology, on the enlivening Spirit who sustains, animates and enlivens all life, who draws out and nurtures skills, wisdom and justice, who erupts against idolatry, injustice, darkness, estrangement and oppression, and who patterns human persons for their deeper share in ‘unfragmented communion’ (p. 161) in God’s life through a ‘journey of learning and unlearning’ (p. 152) while working to complete and perfect creation. ‘It is the Spirit’s work to draw what might otherwise be a cacophonic disunity into symphony. The Spirit worked to transcribe God’s music for playing on the human instrument of Jesus of Nazareth; the Spirit now works to orchestrate that theme for an ensemble of billions’ (p. 161)).

Part Two, ‘Life in the World’ (pp. 167-404), seeks to unpack the implications of God’s threefold action for our assessment of creation, providence and freedom, eschatology, suffering, love, theodicy, harmartiology and soteriology, and the four traditional ecclesiological marks. The discussion on the Church’s sacramental activities (pp. 314-24) deserves careful reading. Higton presses that the two sacraments ‘don’t simply say something about what the Church is, but are part of the process by which the Church actually becomes what it should be’ (p. 316), and is ‘redescribed’ (p. 321). In the two final chapters, Higton identifies some popular lenses – ‘settlements’ – that are often employed to interpret the Bible’s message(s), before offering his own proposal, what he names ‘trinitarian settlement’ which, he suggests, understands the core narrative of Holy Scripture as concerned with a journey into the triune life itself; the Bible being read not as a ‘moral handbook’ (p. 379), but ‘around Jesus’, ‘in the Spirit’ (which means at least read ecumenically, in conversation with the tradition, in openness to previously excluded voices, and in hope), and ‘on the way to the Father’ (pp. 376-400). Throughout, Higton is concerned to relate central Christian doctrines to the experienced realities of human being, resolute to show how such doctrines affect how one conceives, interprets and lives with everything else, all the while pressing that the ‘world is called to the fulfilment of its creatureliness, not the abandonment of it’ (p. 182).

There are a number of underlying commitments that find expression in Christian Doctrine. I will name four: (i) a deep commitment to Trinitarian theology: ‘The word “God” simply refers to the reality that Christians come to know, and whose life they come to share, as they find themselves, in the Spirit, caught up in the Son’s love of the Father and the Father’s sending of the Son’ (p. 90). Higton is suspicious of those attempts to describe the triune life along social trinitarian lines (see pp. 96-101) because, he argues, such steer too close to positing ‘three realities that share the same defining characteristics’ (p. 97). He suggests that such attempts threaten (at least temporarily) to lose sight of the particularity of the persons and that if trinitarian theologians are serious about the nature of community, they must ground their theology not in a general account of personhood and relationality, but in reflection of the life specifically of the three Persons. ‘Talk about the Trinity’, he insists, ‘should not ever be something different from the Bible’s talk about the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ (p. 100). Moreover, Higton rightly rejects throughout all attempts to think about, talk about or imagine God by way of going behind the economy and beginning with a set of abstract propositions (see pp. 97-9); (ii) that the goal of human life is theosis – being drawn in time and space to share in the love and justice which is God’s life; (iii) an unashamed commitment to helping those within and without the Church to value and ‘do’ theology; and (iv) that theological realities ought to inform all aspects of life in the world.

Presumably, because of the classroom context out of which this material arose, it is at times unnecessarily repetitious. This makes the volume longer than it needs to be. Also, the chapters are qualitatively uneven; I found chapters 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 10 and 13 to be the strongest. Another reservation is that whereas Higton situates his theology in a covenantal context, there is very little discussion of the place of law in his exploration of central Christian doctrines. Moreover, while the ‘not-yet’ of holiness is properly explored, the author’s discussion on the Church’s mark of holiness inadequately explores the Church’s faithful confession of its ontological life as the ‘set-apart’ of God, and the divine election by virtue of which the Church is already holy. Also, occasionally (e.g. p. 177) Higton expresses a somewhat more panentheistic vision of reality that some readers may feel moves beyond that witnessed to in Scripture, even though he is careful throughout to distinguish – while not separating – divine transcendence from divine immanence, and to not conflate creation into divinity.

These shortcomings aside, Christian Doctrine is a lucid introduction to the subject, and it is encouraging to see a work targeted at mid-level undergraduate students. Pastorally sensitive, receptive of the tradition, accessibly written, and inviting of conversation, Higton attractively resists over-presuming on his claims and he models an unashamed agnosticism on matters where less sober minds might push for sight (see, for example, his treatment on the parousia on pages 218-21). Exegetically informed, Higton patterns a theological commitment which requires that one approach Scripture expectantly and vulnerably, prepared to be ‘unsettled, overthrown and remade’ (p. 400). The book’s structure, and that of each chapter, serves the reiteration of key teaching points, each of which are also helpfully illustrated with well-chosen examples from life, Scripture and/or the arts. The inclusion throughout of carefully-chosen exercises, discussion starters and suggestions for additional reading well compliments each section. A useful complement to recent introductions by Migliore, McGrath, Ford and Gunton, Christian Doctrine is a constructive introductory volume for the student, and a helpful model for the teacher – an all-too-rare combination.

[NB: A version of this review has been submitted to IJST]

Introducing: James Orr

James Orr (1844–1913), theologian, was born in Glasgow on 11 April 1844, the son of Robert Orr, an engineer, and his wife, Montgomery (née Hunter). He began school in Manchester and Leeds before, when he was about nine, both his parents died. Living with Glasgow relatives, he became an apprentice bookbinder. In 1865 he entered Glasgow University to prepare for the United Presbyterian ministry. He was moulded in philosophy by John Veitch, the last representative of the Scottish common-sense school, and in lesser degree by John and Edward Caird, early advocates of idealism. He graduated MA with first-class honours in mental philosophy in 1870, winning a Ferguson scholarship that enabled him to remain at Glasgow for two further years. In 1872 he graduated BD and shared in the lord rector’s prize for a penetrating critique of David Hume that he later published in revised form (1903). From 1868 to 1872 he also attended the United Presbyterian Divinity Hall in Edinburgh and during most of 1873 preached as a probationer at Trinity Church, Irvine, Ayrshire.

From 1874 to 1891 Orr was minister of East Bank United Presbyterian Church, Hawick, Roxburghshire. On 7 April 1874 he married Hannah Fraser, the daughter of James Gibb, a shoemaker from Glasgow; she was to survive him. He became chairman of Hawick school board, campaigned for the reduction of liquor licences, and was known as a Liberal, one of his four sons being named William Gladstone. He helped to draft the United Presbyterian declaratory statement that in 1879 repudiated any total endorsement of Calvinism. Six years later he obtained a Glasgow DD by examination. In 1891 he delivered his church’s Kerr lectures, published two years later as The Christian View of God and the World, which showed originality in teaching the coherence of an incarnation-centred world-view. The book remained influential a century later.

The lectures secured Orr’s appointment in 1891 to the United Presbyterian college in Edinburgh as professor of church history. In 1894 he published one of three replies to the anti-supernaturalist Gifford lectures given by Otto Pfleiderer of Berlin, and in 1895 and 1897 lectured in North America. The resulting books, especially The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith (1897) and The Progress of Dogma (1901) criticizing Adolf Harnack, the German theologian and church historian, cautioned against the subjectivist trend in German theology. Writing in The Progress of Dogma:

A God in process is of necessity an incomplete God – can never be a true, personal God. His being is merged in that of the universe; sin, even, is an element of His life. I hold it to be indubitable that God, in order truly to be God, must possess Himself in the eternal fulness and completeness of His own personal life; must possess Himself for Himself, and be raised entirely above the transiency, the incompleteness, and the contingency of the world-process. We are then enabled to think of the world and history, not as the necessary unfolding of a logical process, but as the revelation of a free and holy purpose; and inconsistency is no longer felt in the idea of an action of God along supernatural lines – above the plane of mere nature, as wisdom and love may dictate – for the benefit of His creature man.

In 1896, when the Free Church approached the United Presbyterian church with a proposal of co-operation, Orr urged merger instead and became joint convenor of the United Presbyterian union committee. At the eventual creation of the United Free Church in 1900 Orr was transferred to the chair of systematic theology and apologetics at its Glasgow college but, perhaps partly because of hostility to his pro-Boer stance during the South African War, he failed to secure its principalship two years later. He edited the United Presbyterian Magazine (1896–1900) and with his friend and Glasgow colleague James Denney co-edited the Union Magazine (1901–4) and the United Free Church Magazine (1904–6).

In 1902 Orr seconded Robert Rainy’s general assembly motion not to proceed against another colleague, George Adam Smith, for his advocacy of higher criticism. Yet, as Orr explained in The Problem of the Old Testament (1905), he dissented from the growing acceptance of that approach. In the same year God’s Image in Man, based on the 1903 Stone lectures at Princeton Seminary, argued that supernatural interruptions of the evolutionary process were essential to account for the emergence of humanity. From 1906 Orr’s prolific writings became more popular in tone, a tendency culminating in the republication of four of his articles in The Fundamentals (1910–15). His Revelation and Inspiration (1910), though explicitly repudiating biblical inerrancy, cogently defended a high estimate of scripture. His final years were spent chiefly as general editor of the conservative International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (5 vols., 1915). After illness caused by a weak heart, he died at his home, 4 Hampton Court Terrace, Glasgow, on 6 September 1913 and was buried in Cathcart cemetery, Glasgow, on 9 September.

Tall and broad-shouldered, Orr was tolerant of opponents and, though sometimes abrupt, markedly kind to students. He swam against the tide of contemporary British theological opinion, but his influence was more widely felt in North America.

Principal Source: David Bebbington’s article in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Bibliography

  • The Christian View of God and the World (1893)
  • The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith (1897)
  • Neglected Factors in the Study of the Early Progress of Christianity (1899)
  • Progress of Dogma (1902)
  • David Hume (1903)
  • Ritschlianism; Expository and Critical Essays (1903)
  • God’s Image in Man and its Defacement in Light of Modern Denials (1905)
  • Problems of the Old Testament Considered with Reference to Recent Criticism (1906)
  • The Bible under Trial: Apologetic Papers in View of Present Day Assaults on Holy Scripture (1907)
  • The Resurrection of Jesus (1908)
  • Side-Lights on Christian Doctrine (1909)
  • Sin as a Problem To-Day (1910)
  • The History and Literature of the Early Church (1913)
  • ‘The Holy Scriptures and Modern Negations’, ‘The Early Narratives of Genesis’, ‘Science and Christian Faith’, and ‘The Virgin Birth of Christ’, in The Fundamentals (1917)
  • The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (ed.) (1939)

References

  • Gary J. Dorien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology, Westminster John Knox Press, 1998.
  • George Eyre-Todd, ‘Rev. James Orr’, in Who’s Who in Glasgow 1909.
  • Jeff MacDonald, ‘Book Review of A Call for Continuity: The Theological Contribution of James Orr‘, Layman Online, May 26, 2005.
  • Gavin Basil McGrath, ‘James Orr’s Endorsement of Theistic Evolution’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 51/2 (June 1999): 114-121.
  • Philip Schaff, ‘Orr, James’, New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1953.
  • Glen G. Scorgie, A Call for Continuity: The Theological Contribution of James Orr, Regent College Publishing, 2004.

Introducing the Introducing Series

Regular readers of this blog have no doubt noticed my interest in Church history. While the seed for this interest was planted decades ago, it has sprouted more rapidly in recent years as I have focused my attention on one of Church history’s outstanding figures, PT Forsyth. One of the real joys of doing a PhD is being introduced to so many new names and so much unfamiliar literature. For me, this has principally been Victorian/Edwardian nonconformist theologians from Britain.

Having enjoyed these introductions so much, I thought it might be a good idea to (from time to time) share some biographical material on, and quotes from, various theologians that I come across that are of particular interest. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography will be a principal source. The series will include posts on:

(If there’s a biography that you’d particularly like to see included, let me know … and why).

Note: Additional dictionary content from The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography can be obtained free in the UK from public libraries thanks to a national deal with the MLA.

James K. Baxter: ‘He Waiata o Hemi’

He Waiata o Hemi

I came to Hiruharama
With a leather coat;
Now the coat is cloth
but the cuffs are still leather.

Kua timata te mahi –
The work has begun.
There are beans growing
And Karl planted them;
There are pumpkins growing
And Heto dug the ground;
There are eels in the pot
And Peter caught them – Yes,
Kua timata te mahi–
The work has begun.

Ka whakaiti taku mana,
Ka whakanui te aroha –
As I shrink down to death
The love will grow greater.
The old kumara has to rot
For the young ones to get life –
When the hangi is ready
They dig them out of the ground,
The young ones red and strong,
but the old one is pulpy –
They throw him over the fence
With mildew round his neck.

He parapara iti,
The little seed in the ground
The all-but-nothing thing –
The soul that sleeps naked
In the arms of Te Atua –
No good at all if the seed
Was wrapped in cellophane.

Because our God is dark
The blindness does not matter –
Because our God is silent
The deaf man gets no blame.

What can I do in the morning?
I can put on my coat;
I can make a cup of coffee;
And light a cigarette;
I can kneel down like a camel
On the grass beside the fence;
I can eat and walk and sleep;
I can pray for those I love –
Ko te aroha, i te Ariki –
When we love, it is the Lord –
And this dead man is permitted
To give with empty hands.

When we share our fags and blankets
Christ begins to shine –
Our flesh becomes the bread;
Our blood becomes the wine –
I am cowshit in the garden
So that the crops can grow –
Ko Ihu taku wai,
The Lord is my drink –
Ko Ihu taku kai,
The Lord is my food –
Ko Ihu taku moni,
The lord is my bank account –
Ko Ihu taku mana,
The Lord is my good name –
Ko Ihu taku aroha,
The Lord is my heart –
Ko Ihu taku mate,
The Lord is my death pain.

To be a dead goat
That the flies gather on –
The sun in his mercy
Can make the teeth shine.
Even our sins are His
Let the new pain begin.

The business of a poet

‘It is the business of a poet, I think, to be destitute as well as honest. He may have money; but he should recognise that it is dirt. He may have prestige; but let him hate it and wear it like an old filthy coat. Then he may be able to stay awake a little better. Love will not harm him, though. It will slice him open like a fish, and hang him by the heels, and let the sun into his private bag of dreams and idiot ambitions. He will think he is dying when he is just beginning to wake up’. – James K. Baxter, cited in Paul Millar, Spark to a Waiting Fuse: James K. Baxter’s Correspondence with Noel Ginn (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2001), 72.

James K. Baxter: ‘Rocket Show’

‘Rocket Show’

As warm north rain breaks over suburb houses,
Streaming on window glass, its drifting hazes
Covering harbour ranges with a dense hood:
I recall how eighteen months ago I stood
Ankle-deep in sand on an Otago beach
Watching the fireworks flare over strident surf and bach,
In brain grey ash, in heart the sea-change flowing
Of one love dying and another growing.

For love grows like the crocus bulb in winter
Hiding from snow and from itself the tender
Green frond in embryo; but dies as rockets die
(White sparks of pain against a steel-dark sky)
With firebird wings trailing an arc of grief
Across a night inhuman as the grave,
Falling at length a dull and smouldering shell
To frozen dunes and the wash of the quenching swell.

There was little room left where the crowd had trampled
Grass and lupin bare, under the pines that trembled
In gusts from the sea.  On a sandhillock I chose
A place to watch from.  Then the rockets rose,
O marvellous, like self-destroying flowers
On slender stems, with seed-pods full of flares,
Raining down amber, scarlet, pennies from heaven
On the skyward straining heads and still sea-haven.
Had they brought death, we would have stood the same,
I think, in ecstasy at the world-end flame.

It is the rain streaming reminds me of
Those ardent showers, cathartic love and grief.
As I walked home through the cold street by moon-light,
My steps ringing in the October night,
I thought of our strange lives, the grinding cycle
Of death and renewal come to full circle,
And of man’s heart, that blind Rosetta stone,
Mad as the polar moon, decipherable by none.

– James K. Baxter, Collected Poems (ed. John Edward Weir; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 81.

The Public Purpose of Marriage

In a recent article entitled ‘Focus on the Public Purpose of Marriage: Protecting Children’, Colleen Carroll Campbell, writes:

‘Battles over same-sex marriage typically turn on arguments about gay rights, judicial activism and views on homosexuality. Absent are answers to a more fundamental question: What is the public purpose of marriage?’

She concludes by asserting that marriage only survives in a culture for as long as a critical mass of the population views it as the socially acceptable context for childbearing and childrearing. When popular support for marriage drops too low and public policy denies the unique value of marriage between a man and a woman as a guarantor of social stability, fewer men and women marry. More children, she argues, are deprived of the presence of their mothers and fathers. Thus marriage ‘no longer serves its civic purpose, which always has been more about defending child welfare than validating adult desires’.

It is only when marriage passes beyond mere consent that it becomes concerned with its real nature as ethical, and so related to matters of family, of kinship, and so of the State. That is why Forsyth argued that we must always bar unions that do not conform to the conditions of the State’s welfare. [I would want to say more here than Forsyth does, especially about the proleptic and prophetic aspects of marriage, and of the life of the church as the foretaste of the kingdom, a life in which all relationship are re-defined]. While it is a lot more, marriage is no less than a social act. The social form, therefore, is not indifferent. Forsyth avers, ‘It is part of the substance. It is a piece of social morality, i.e. of social existence. It is bound up with the safety, honour, and welfare of society’.

Thus what mere civil marriages betray is any sense that the relationship concerns more than the two selves. Forsyth is worth recounting here: ‘If anything is ethical on that universal scale, it has already begun to be more than ethical. On that wide scale, and on such an intimate subject, it becomes also deep and sacred, it becomes religious. Even if you own no more than the religion of Humanity that is so. You cannot treat human society as one whole without your ethic becoming religious. Even the Positivists, since they worship Humanity, treat marriage in their religious ritual as a sacrament. And I do not wonder that the Roman Church treats it so. I do not agree with that Church in so doing, for reasons which would be misplaced here. All I do say is that the more one ponders the solemn implicates and slow effects of marriage, moral and spiritual, the more one feels that it has something sacramental in its nature. It may be less than a church sacrament, but it is a moral; it is certainly more than a contract … If not a sacrament, it is a means of grace; and, like every means of grace, it sweetens or hardens according as it is used’.

What Forsyth betrays here in an appreciation that a merely social view of marriage is quite inadequate, even if humanity be all we have in view. Sorry Colleen, but marriage calls for more than social sanction and exists for more (though not less) than ‘defending child welfare’. Marriage calls for divine sanctification (if life do so at all) and exists to bear witness to divine blessing, and to the divine life itself. Forsyth again: ‘If [marriage] means so much for the soul and for society, that is really because it belongs to the Kingdom of God, to the will of the God Who ordered society and its destiny. If it is organic to the structure of society, it is vital to the purpose of God. It is a union which reflects a union deep in the eternal nature of a triune God Himself’.

[There is much that Forsyth fails to say about marriage, and not all that he says will – or should – fly with us today. He was, as we are, a person of his age and who was responding to the pressing questions of his age, and must be read in light of such. This, however, is not to let him off the hook so much as it is to encourage reading beyond the boundaries of his corpus.]

James K. Baxter: ‘A Pair of Sandals’

A Pair of Sandals

A pair of sandals, old black pants
And leather coat – I must go, my friends,
Into the dark, the cold, the first beginning
Where the ribs of the ancestor are the rafters
Of a meeting house – windows broken
And the floor white with bird dung – in there
The ghosts gather who will instruct me
And when the river fog rises
Te ra rite tonu te Atua –
The sun who is like the Lord
Will warm my bones, and his arrows
Will pierce to the centre of the shapeless clay of the mind.
Hemi.

James K. Baxter

McCormack, Willis and Bush Challenge Efforts to Amend the Heidelberg Catechism

A few days before the 218th General Assembly of the PCUSA, a letter was issued by a group of seminary professors supporting the efforts of three overtures sent to General Assembly seeking to amend the Heidelberg Catechism.  By way of response, Bruce L. McCormack, E. David Willis, and Michael D. Bush have since issued the following letter:

Dear Commissioners and Advisory Delegates to the 218th General Assembly:

Some of our Presbyterian colleagues in the fields of theology and church history have petitioned the General Assembly to take steps toward changing the theological teaching of the P.C. (U.S.A.) by changing the Heidelberg Catechism as it stands in our Book of Confessions.

We are writing to you as well so that you may have a fuller scholarly account of the issues before you. We apologize that we must say so much: we have found that theological and historical scholarship cannot be well done in sound bites. Please bear with us!

Our colleagues wrote to you in support of overtures from the Presbyteries of Northern Kansas, Boston, and Newark.  Not all the claims in the rationales for these overtures are mistaken, but those that are not mistaken seem hardly worth the emotional and financial expense the Church will incur by changing them, since no one of our eleven confessions is definitive.

We would like to point out three historical and theological problems in the rationale for these overtures, expressed most fully in the version from Northern Kansas, which appear to be endorsed in our colleagues’ petition.

First, this overture, endorsed by our colleagues, claims that the writers of the Heidelberg Catechism did not contrast the concepts of an Old Covenant and a New Covenant. The rationale describes such a contrast as “not very well represented” in the Reformed tradition and “not supported” by the Catechism.

These claims are simply incorrect. There have been many forms of covenant theology in the Reformed tradition, and no one form has definitive authority. The Northern Kansas overture identifies one of these several forms, one that emphasizes a unitary covenant with different expressions through time. Such a view has had advocates in our tradition. Even Zacharius Ursinus, the primary author of the Heidelberg Catechism, sees the old and new covenants as “one in substance,” and even writes that “there is but one covenant,” in the sense that God promises forgiveness both before and after the coming of Christ.

However, it is precisely through the Heidelberg Catechism that much of Reformed theology receives from Ursinus (and, perhaps Caspar Olevianus) the distinctive form of covenant thinking that uses an old covenant God made with humankind at the creation of the world as a foil for a new covenant in Christ. Ursinus makes it abundantly clear in his Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism that he understood God’s covenant in just these terms: “The old testament, or covenant, is often used in Scripture…for the law… For in the old covenant, the law was enforced more strenuously, and there were many parts of it. The gospel was also more obscure. The new testament, or covenant, on the other hand, is for the most part taken for the gospel, because in the new a great part of the law is abrogated, and the gospel is here more clearly revealed.”

Thus, denying that the Heidelberg Catechism, to say nothing of the Reformed tradition as a whole, makes use of a two-fold covenant scheme is akin to denying the roundness of the earth. It is manifestly untrue in light of the evidence.

Second, the Northern Kansas overture points out that the terms “testament” and “covenant” are not synonyms. Indeed, in order to make sense of the whole range of covenantal thinking in the Reformed tradition, it is important to maintain this distinction. However, here again, in the case of the Heidelberg Catechism, Ursinus makes his intention clear in his Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism: “In the Scriptures, the terms Covenant and Testament are used in the same sense, for the purpose of explaining more fully and clearly the idea of this Covenant of God.”  Since the major author of the Heidelberg Catechism sees the terms as synonyms, even though some of his contemporaries would have disagreed, it is clear that the P.C.(USA)’s Heidelberg Catechism is faithful to the theological perspective of the original version of this Catechism.

Third, we come to the point that we all know is behind this apparent fishing expedition for problems in the P.C.(U.S.A.)’s Heidelberg Catechism: Did Ursinus have in mind 1 Corinthians 6:9, with its negative view of homosexuality, when he composed the answer to question 87?

Once again, Ursinus has recorded for us a definitive answer: he did associate this verse of Scripture with this question and answer. In his Commentary, Ursinus mentions this verse as having particular relevance for understanding what is at stake in question 87.  The translators of the P.C. (U.S.A.)’s Heidelberg Catechism, as good translators do, took into account the stated intention of the authors in order to show us what the passage meant in its historical and literary context. They did this faithfully.

Unless these overtures and scholars wish to claim that Ursinus did not know what he meant by the words he and his collaborators chose, we can only conclude that the overtures have made serious historical and theological mistakes.

If we as a church are going to look for theological guidance in the sixteenth century, then it is only responsible to respect that period in its distinctiveness, and not to flatten its witness into the kind of one-sided sloganeering with dubious historical and theological claims that we read in these overtures. It is unworthy of our academic and ecclesial calling to reduce these complex issues to sound bites and then deploy them, with a scholarly patina, in the service of church politics.

These overtures show signs of wanting to find a kind of inerrant Ur-text to treat as the “real” Heidelberg Catechism, playing this original off against the actual text of the P.C.(U.S.A.)’s Heidelberg Catechism. Such an approach fails to understand how the Confessions function in the P.C.(U.S.A.). It is not the Latin and German texts from the sixteenth century that guide our Church, but rather it is the English texts adopted by the deliberative assemblies of the Church and published in the Book of Confessions by which every officer of our Church has vowed to be guided. These English versions have been responsibly translated and carefully chosen as “faithful expositions of what Scripture teaches us to believe and do.”

Will the Presbyteries who have sent these overtures, together with their academic sponsors, next ask that we revert to the seventeenth century texts of the Westminster standards, without the chapters on divorce and the Holy Spirit, and restoring the claim that the Pope is the anti-Christ, as the original indisputably said? Will they question the translation of the Second Helvetic Confession?

We suspect not, because we suspect the goal of these overtures is not to restore early modern texts or their embodiments in our Constitution to some pristine state, but only to remove from the Constitution of the P.C. (U.S.A.) a single phrase they find disagreeable. These other issues, with the infelicitous scholarship that underwrites them, have apparently been sought and found to provide cover for this one goal.

In other words, these overtures appear to us to be a disturbing effort to change the church’s normative teaching about homosexuality under cover of historical-theological scholarship, instead of using the legitimate, above-the-table process our Constitution provides for considering such a change. Trying to slip a change by the church under cover of correcting mere errors of translation is inappropriate as deliberative process, short-circuiting the P.C.(U.S.A.)’s ongoing contemporary discussion of this issue, even as it undermines the trust the church places in its seminaries and teachers.

Bruce L. McCormack, Frederick and Margaret L. Weyerhaeuser Professor of Systematic Theology
Princeton Theological Seminary

E. David Willis, Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus
Princeton Theological Seminary

Michael D. Bush
Erskine Theological Seminary

‘Reflections on Grace’: A Review

Thomas A. Langford, Reflections on Grace (ed. Philip A. Rolnick, Jonathan R. Wilson; Eugene: Cascade Books, 2007. xi + 113 pages. ISBN: 978 1 55635 058 0. Review copy courtesy of Wipf and Stock.

‘God present is grace’. So begins this collection of brief, but rich, reflections on the most precious of realities – the inexhaustible grace of God. In under 100 pages, Langford shares with us his reflections – penned during the last years of his life and published posthumously – of what he has learnt over a lifetime of learning about grace as gift, as truth, and as the converse of disgrace. Ever interpreted christologically, and never divorced from its enfleshment in the realities of creation and in the nurturing and interpretation within the community of God’s people, Langford gently – graciously – invites us to catch glimpses of nothing less than the Triune God, and to believe that this God not only speaks in ‘the tongue of our time’ (p. 22), but that he holds nothing of himself back as he throws himself into the most despicable and hopeless of human situations in order to bring transformation. This is grace’s self-giving and cruciform ‘edge’; it is ‘as real as the conditions in which life must be lived’ (p. 29).

Grace, Langford argues, is not only God’s ‘way of being’, but – precisely because it is such – it establishes our way of being, and makes possible ‘the integrity of the faithful responder’ (p. 105). Rejection of this grace, therefore, issues in the malformation of life. This United Methodist minister reminds us that our attempts to live as though God were absent atrophies human possibility and being.

While not convincing at every point (he over-presses, at times, a strained disjunction between God’s love and his law, for example), this is a beautifully-written book and deserves to be read slowly. It would be a great book to work through in a small group.

Burma’s Unjustified Detention Of Aung San Suu Kyi

Today, Condoleezza Rice, secretary of the US State Department, issued the following statement concerning Aung San Suu Kyi:

Tomorrow, on June 19, Aung San Suu Kyi will spend yet another birthday in custody, denied her liberty and fundamental political and civil rights by Burma’s military rulers. This deplorable situation must end.

Sadly, the regime not only continues to keep this distinguished Nobel laureate under house arrest, but there are nearly 2,000 other political prisoners currently in custody. Burma’s rulers should release all political prisoners and begin to move in earnest to transform Burma into a democratic society.

Meanwhile, the regime has backtracked on even the modest steps it had taken – naming a liaison to meet regularly with Aung San Suu Kyi and allowing her to meet with her colleagues in Burma’s National League for Democracy. There have been no meetings with either since January, and Aung San Suu Kyi has even been denied regular access to medical care and legal counsel.

Rather than risking further unrest in Burma by its unjustified detention of political prisoners and its holding of a rigged referendum in May on a sham constitution, the regime should release all political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, and begin a genuine dialogue with her and other democratic and ethnic minority leaders on a transition to democracy.

UNHCR Condemns Systematic Rights Violations

The United Nations Human Rights Council today condemned “ongoing systematic violations of human rights” in Myanmar and called on the Government to stop making politically motivated arrests and to release all political prisoners immediately.

In a resolution adopted without a vote, the Council also called on the Government of Myanmar to fully implement commitments it made to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that it would grant relief workers “immediate, full and unhindered access” to people in need in the wake of last month’s catastrophic Cyclone Nargis.

It called on the Government to refrain from sending victims of the disaster back to areas where they would not have access to emergency relief, and to ensure that any returns are voluntary, safe and carried out with dignity.

The resolution, introduced before the Geneva-based Council by the European Union, also condemned the recruitment of child soldiers by both Government forces and non-State armed groups and urged “an absolute an immediate stop of this appalling activity.”

In addition, it called for an independent investigation into reports of human rights violations, including enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, acts of torture and forced labour, and called for those responsible for such crimes to be brought to justice.

The resolution also called on the Government “to engage in a real process of dialogue and national reconciliation with the full and genuine participation of representatives of all political parties and ethnic groups who have been excluded from the political process.”

Introducing the resolution on behalf of the EU, Slovenian representative Andrej Logar said previous resolutions had not been implemented by Myanmar and many political prisoners remained in detention.

The recent constitutional referendum was conducted in complete disregard of basic standards on such issues as freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, he said.

Myanmar’s representative U Wunna Maung Lwin described the resolution as politically motivated and lopsided and said powerful States were trying to influence matters through political interference.

The representative said Myanmar was working with the international community in the response effort to Cyclone Nargis, which struck the country on 2-3 May, and was also making efforts on the political front, such as with the recent holding of the constitutional referendum.

Meanwhile, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon briefed the General Assembly today on his recent trip to Myanmar, saying that overall the relief effort there is continuing to improve and to be scaled up.

More than 134,000 people are dead or missing as a result of Cyclone Nargis and the subsequent tidal wave, and as many as 2.4 million people were affected and now need humanitarian assistance.

In his address to Assembly members, Mr. Ban stressed that the humanitarian tragedy wrought by the cyclone should not be politicized, and he plans to remain focused on the issue, drawing on the efforts of his Special Adviser, Ibrahim Gambari.

The Secretary-General also covered other issues in his remarks to the Assembly, including his latest travels, the most recent developments in the global food crisis and the situation in Zimbabwe.

Who am I to judge?

‘There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging … [B]ehind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done … Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone. Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person’. – Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 2003.

Scottish Journal of Theology (61/3) is out

The latest Scottish Journal of Theology (Volume 61, Issue 03) is out and includes the following articles and reviews:

‘Resurrection as surplus and possibility: Moltmann and Ricoeur’, by Devin Singh.

Abstract
Though Moltmann and Ricoeur have a history of interaction, little attention has been paid to this relationship and its implications for their respective programmes. These thinkers have much in common, however, and the Ricoeurian categories of surplus and possibility elucidate critical aspects of a theology of hope, serving to strengthen its contemporary implications. Nuance is provided for the resurrection’s role in redemption, and an existential mode of hope is delineated. Focusing on Moltmann’s interactions with Ricoeur concerning the resurrection elevates these latent themes and demonstrates the fruitfulness of a continued conversation between these two thinkers. Furthermore, examining Moltmann’s thought in Ricoeurian perspective opens new directions for conceptualising resurrection hope and praxis in a postmodern context.

‘Maimonides, Aquinas and Ghazali: distinguishing God from world’, by David Burrell

Abstract
This exploration focuses on Moses ben Maimon’s attempt to give philosophical voice to the revelation of the Torah to offer a window into the comparative (though not actually collaborative) efforts of Jewish, Christian and Muslim medieval thinkers to adapt the metaphysical strategies available to them to the hitherto inconceivable task of articulating a creation utterly free, with nothing presupposed to it. Short of a divine revelation, nothing could have suggested such an affirmation, so crafting the adaptations demanded of familiar philosophical categories would require exploiting the illumination inherent in those distinct revelations. Far from being a merely historical exercise, these efforts are presented as object lessons for philosophical theologians today, as we move to show how Aquinas and Ghazali complement Maimonides’ way of negotiating recondite regions where reason and faith interact. In that sense, this exercise inspired by medieval thinkers may be dubbed , since the deliverances of faith can be seen to be interwoven with rational inquiry and indispensable to its execution. Moreover, their witness can also challenge current who may all too easily presume their categories to be adequate to the task of probing the reaches of religious faith. In this way, the call to transform philosophical strategies in ways not unlike that undertaken by our medieval thinkers can suggest a benign reading of the situation in which we admittedly live.

‘From Hilary of Poitiers to Peter of Blois: a Transfiguration journey of biblical interpretation’, by Kenneth Stevenson

Abstract
The Transfiguration narratives have received considerable attention from New Testament scholars, but so far very little has been written about them from the point of view of their reception-history. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which they have been interpreted in the Latin West from the time of Hilary of Poitiers in the fourth century to Peter of Blois in the early thirteenth. Among these writers, from the big names like Jerome to the lesser known figures like Peter of Celle, a varied tapestry emerges where light allegory plays an important part, whether in the symbolisms given to the choice of the three disciples, Peter, James and John, or to the dazzling clothes of Christ as baptismal glory before cross ), or as a festival in its own right, the Transfiguration emerges as an unusually rich source of biblical interpretation that poses real challenges to the use of the religious imagination today. And it provides a significant contribution to the development of a balanced view of reception-history in our own time.

‘The Barthian heritage of Hans W. Frei’, by John Allan Knight

Abstract
Hans Frei and the of narrative theology are often understood to be Barthian in orientation, but only rarely have the origins and contours of Frei’s engagement with Barth been treated in the secondary literature. Frei’s dissertation itself remains unpublished, with the exception of an oddly edited abridgement that appeared ten years after Frei’s untimely death. This lacuna is unfortunate, because Frei’s dissertation on Barth, and especially his treatment of Barth’s method, are of signal importance in that they set the agenda and orientation for much, if not all, of Frei’s later work. Consequently, in this article I analyse Frei’s dissertation on Barth, focusing primarily on his treatment of Barth’s protest against . On Frei’s reading, three moves constitute Barth’s break with relationalism: the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the subordination of method to positive affirmations about God, and the conformance of interpretative method both to Barth’s methodological commitments and to his affirmations about God. In his dissertation, Frei argues that Barth believed that, without these moves, theology would be vulnerable to Feuerbach’s critique. Frei’s construal of Barth’s break with relationalism sets the agenda for Frei’s own later work, in which he appropriates these Barthian moves by insisting on the primacy of biblical narratives in theological method. Similar to Barth, Frei takes twentieth-century hermeneutic theology to be vulnerable to deconstructionist critique. His insistence on the primacy of a literal reading of the biblical narratives is his attempt to rectify this vulnerability.

‘The struggle between the “image of God” and Satan in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve’, by Rivka Nir

Abstract
According to a tradition in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve (GLAE), Seth and his mother Eve were confronted by a wild beast that attacked Seth. This article asserts that Seth’s battle with the beast should be understood as a struggle between the and Satan, and viewed in a Christian context. The claim is based on three aspects of the story: how the beast is described, why it attacked Seth and only he could control it, and why the beast was confined to its dwelling place until the Day of Judgement. The struggle between Seth and the beast/Satan should be seen as a link in the chain of struggle between the image of God and Satan. It begins in Paradise between Adam, the image of God, and Satan, as recounted in the story of Satan’s fall from heaven, continues on earth between Seth, Adam’s descendant, and Satan, and will culminate with the final victory of Jesus, the ultimate image of God, over Satan at the end of times.

‘Torture and the Christian conscience: a response to Jeremy Waldron’, by Jean Porter

Abstract
In remarks offered in 2006 at a conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, inaugurating a National Religious Campaign against Torture, the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron observed that Christian leaders have contributed relatively little to the recent debate over the use of torture. This is regrettable, in his view, because secular morality does not have resources sufficient to address the question of torture, and a Christian perspective emphasising the absoluteness and divine character of the relevant moral norms would represent an important contribution to our reflections on this question. This article offers a response to Waldron’s timely and important challenge, setting forth a Christian theological argument that the practice of torture is categorically prohibited. The basis for this prohibition does not rest, however, on the absoluteness of moral norms as such rather, it rests on the distinctive character of torture as an egregious assault on the human person regarded as image of God.

Book Reviews include:

  • ‘Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth and the Pietists: The Young Karl Barth’s Critique of Pietism and Its Response‘, by Cherith Fee Nordling
  • ‘Donald G. Bloesch, The Last Things: Resurrection, Judgment, Glory‘, by Ray S. Anderson
  • ‘D. Stephen Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness‘, by Todd C. Ream and Kevin K. Wright
  • ‘James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette, eds, Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience‘, by Matthew Halteman
  • ‘I. Howard Marshall, Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology‘, by Steven J. Koskie
  • ‘Jeffrey Stout and Robert MacSwain, eds, Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Wittgenstein and Aquinas‘, by Harold E. Ernst
  • ‘Stanley E. Porter, ed, Reading the Gospels Today‘, by Edward W. Klink
  • ‘Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics‘, by Mark Douglas
  • ‘Bruce D. Chilton and Jacob Neusner, Classical Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: Comparing Theologies‘, by Brad Embry

Art, Religion, Identity: An interdisciplinary symposium

In conjunction with an art exhibition at Glasgow University Chapel celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Glasgow Jewish artist Hannah Frank, the Graduate School of Arts and Humanities and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow are planning a two-day symposium on Art, Religion and Identity for 23-24 September 2008

Keynote speakers are Professor Melissa Raphael-Levine (University of Gloucestershire), Professor Shulamit Reinharz (Brandeis University) and Dr. Laura Levitt (Temple University).

Organisers have issued a call for papers on any topic relating to the conference theme, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, although they are open to proposals dealing with other periods. They welcome papers from any discipline, including but not limited to theology, art history, museum and archive studies, cultural studies, history, psychology, sociology, anthropology and literature. Abstracts of 150-300 words, for papers not exceeding 20 minutes in length, or proposals for posters (A1 size) should be addressed to Julie Clague and Alana Vincent no later than 20 July.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Art as (auto)biography
  • Borrowing and appropriation of imagery
  • Contested (religious) identities
  • Hermeneutics, textuality, and ‘reading’ images
  • Intersections between mythology and religion in visual culture
  • Imagination and the fantastic
  • Material memory and culture making
  • Theological and/or religious aesthetics
  • Tensions, transgressions, heresies, and idolatries
  • Religious uses of art: devotion, illustration, midrash, protest
  • Artistic uses of religion: themes, symbolism, tradition, power
  • Visual markers of religious identity
  • Gender in relation to any of the above

Further information is available here.