IN 1991, THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES sponsored a symposium which bore the title "Beyond the Disciplines: The New Humanities".  The publicity presented the symposium in these terms:

During the last two decades the Humanities have engaged in radical critiques of their own political and epistemological assumptions.  Positive outcomes of this self-scrutiny include a redrawing of the boundaries between traditional disciplines, and the establishment of new disciplines - the new Humanities - whose aim is to produce new kinds of knowledge about human cultures.

The symposium is one sign of a process which has been evident for some time in the humanities.  Conventional lines of demarcation have been and are still being unsettled.  This brings with it questions concerning the identity and task of the disciplines, which prompt in turn the questions of method which press in most disciplines.

If this is true of the humanities, it may also be true of the large and various field we call "theology".  The lines of demarcation between the disciplines which comprise the theological curriculum are less settled than they were.  And so the questions come: what is the task of biblical exegesis? of (church) history? of systematic theology? of practical theology? what does theology have to offer society writ large? why so much concern from interdisciplinary work in the theological curriculum? what of science and theology? The questions could continue indefinitely.

What they suggest is that at the end of the  twentieth century  - a moment  which Davis McCaughey ponders in the essay which heads this issue of Pacifica - we may be facing not only the prospect of "the new humanities" but also the prospect of "the new divinities".  A crucial part of this, to which McCaughey points in his essay, is the need for theology to find a new voice after Auschwitz.  In all the uncertainty, one thing is clear: neither Jew nor Christian can speak either of God or to God in the same way after the Holocaust.  Both are committed to the vast hermeneutical task of reading the Scriptures differently in order to discover new ways of understanding the relationship between synagogue and church.  This will surely be a long and painful journey, and we will all need help.

It is timely, then, that Terry Veling offers an article on the unclassifiable Jewish writer Edmond Jabes, who grows in stature as interest grows in Hebraic modes of writing and reading which move from a quite different hermeneutical base than do the Hellenic modes familiar to most of us.  Like the rabbinic tradition of reading from which he takes his cue, Jabes may seem at first unnervingly strange.  Veling leads us across the border into the strange land, which for all its strangeness is the land of the Bible which we claim to know well.  It may be writers such as Jabes who will help us read differently: "and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time".

Bernard Teo, Chris Prowse and Greg Dawes speak a more familiar idiom.  Yet each treats a question which until recently hardly figured on the theological horizon.  Teo and Prowse turn outward to tackle bioethics and the rights of indigenous peoples.  These are massive and perplexing questions in the whole of society, but they are questions to which the Bible offers no ready-made answers and on which the Christian tradition is hardly more helpful.  Dawes turns inward to consider the vexed question of the ordination of women in the search for a fresh angle in a debate where the angles seem at times less than fresh.  In each case, the idiom may be familiar but the territory is new. 

In the process of shaping "the new divinities", Pacifica is keen to speak its word, to pay its modest part in generating "new kinds of knowledge about human cultures" and especially about the strange ways of God within human cultures.  This will mean looking both inward and outward; it will mean crossing borders into strange lands; it will mean learning languages that are new.  The word of God is always a foreign tongue, always invoking a move beyond the disciplines.