Parallel stories, such as the Genesis tales of wife/sister ploys on the part of Abraghama and Isaac, raise the questions of difference and relationship.  Choosing which questions to ask of these texts is a methodological exercise which heightens the challenge of difference, for different questions will elicit different answers from the text.  Our awarenss of this challenge and our choice of questions will allow texts to challenge us in our own contexts.  These toales told with difference can symbolise the task to be undertaken “again and again and again”.

This article takes its point of departure from the comparison of Jesus and John the Baptist in Matt 11:18-19/Luke 7:33-34.  After considering the broader Synoptic context of the passages, the study focusses on the behaviour of Jesus to do with food and bodies.  Drawing on the theories of social anthropology with regard to the correlation between body and food symbolism and social setting, it is argued that Jesus' everyday behaviour with food and with bodies is directly related to his proclamation, in word and deed, of the coming reign of God.  Implications are drawn for contemporary celebrations of Eucharist.

When critically interpreted the contemporary evidence does not support the common opinion that first-century Jews were aggressive missionaries and that the Roman empire gave an enthusiastic reception to Jewish values and institutions.  As data accumulates the mysterious God-fearers become even more enigmatic.  Thus a revisionist view of Paul’s relationship to the Law cannot claim support from the hypothesis that he was once a Jewish missionary.

This article presents a critique of the narrative theology of revelation developed in Ronald Thiemann’s Revelation and Theology and George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Post-Liberal Age.  Both these writers are critical of any theological method that employs a correlation between scripture and human experience, because such a correlation assumes either a foundation of knowledge in experience or the possiblitiy of meaningful experience independent of concrete narrative.  It is argued here that only a dialectical conception of the relationship between experience, tex, and tradition can do justice to the character of biblical revelation.

In the Preface to his recent study, The Trespass of the Sign,  Kevin Hart writes of his “abiding interest in bringing deconstruction into conversation with Christian theology” (p.x).   At the heart of his account of how the strategy of deconstruction can illuminate theology is the distinction between the reality of God and the concept of God.  In this note I wish to draw attention to the importance of the distinction Hart has made for all future considerations of the relationship between negative and positive theology.

This article reviews Gary Dorrien’s Reconstructing the Common Good and Christopher Rowland’s Radical Christianity.  Dorrien aims to retrieve christian socialism as a central and vital tradition of christian social theology and practice.  Rowland endeavours to show that despite, or because of, its historically marginalised position vis a vis the institutional churches, radical apocalypticism is anything but heretical.  Christian hope represents a life-affirming disposition for a humanity confronting the possibility of its own collective death.  If hope is to be prophetic, however, its witnesses must stipulate in what they hope and for whom.  The constructive imagining of social order implies the need of a theological anthropology and social theory and ethics as well.

Is the theology of universal salvation reconcilable with the New Testament warnings about the possibility of damnation and with the long-standing teaching of the Church on hell?  Does it take into account the doctrine of the last judgement where the just God gives to each man and woman according to his or her deeds?  How can God be both just and merciful?  Did God punish Jesus for our sins?  If the greatness of God's transcendence consists in the infinite quality of God's mercy and God's saving justice, may we not hope that God's love made visible in the cross of Christ will wear down the heart of even the most hardened sinner.

Discussion

Jewish Mission to Gentiles