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Volume 22, Issue 2, June 2009
Articles
What Athens has to do with Jerusalem: The Wisdom of Reason, the Publics of Theology
John McDowell, pp.125-147
This paper, specifically composed to provide a vision for theology in the University of Newcastle NSW, offers a series of reflections that suggest first, that at present the very idea of a “university” is itself under pressure and in danger of becoming meaningless; secondly, that theology, conceived broadly through a pedagogical model of paideia, can engage in critical conversation over the identity of the university; and, thirdly, that theology, as a university discipline, can be properly ordered in terms of an ongoing conversation.
Can there be a Forgiveness that makes a Difference Ecologically? An Eco-Materialist Account of Forgiveness as Freedom (aphesis) in the Gospel of Luke
Anne Elvey, pp.148-170
The article considers master/slave relations in the Gospel of Luke as a background for understanding forgiveness (as aphesis) ecologically. I draw on the work of ecophilosopher Val Plumwood, who identifies a master/slave dynamic operating in a logic of colonisation An important aspect of the master/slave dynamic is the ascription of agency to the master and no, or limited, agency to the slave. I re-situate agency within a more-than-human sociality that includes both human and other than human members of the Earth community. I interpret forgiveness in Luke as a gracious interruption (or gift) that occurs within the materiality of this community. Through a life-giving shift toward freedom, this gift of forgiveness enables in turn a life-giving agency, enacted in a more-than-human community.
Lack of Personal, Social and Cosmic Integration: Original Sin from an Eschatological Perspective
Henry L. Novello, pp.171-197
This essay critically examines traditional formulations of the doctrine of original sin in Western theology and the contemporary “situationist” and “personalist” reformulations of the doctrine in the search for an adequate understanding of original sin that acknowledges both the evolutionary view of the world and Jesus Christ risen as the new “emergent whole” in evolutionary history. The negative portrayal of original sin as a situational privation of sanctifying grace and the positive portrayal of original sin as rebellion against God are both held to be valid and complementary, but it is argued that only a thoroughly eschatological perspective can illuminate the state of the human condition which is destined for a supernatural end in the Risen One. The essay concludes with the proposition that original sin is best thought of in terms of the lack of personal, social and cosmic integration that humans invariably experience in this life, and that the person of the risen Christ saves us from this complex state of privation by elevating us to a “higher nature” that represents a “new creation”.
The Self Found Elsewhere: Phenomenological Faith meets Deconstructive Doubt
John Martis, pp.198-214
The phenomenological approach taken in our lifetime by Emmanuel Levinas – and, in broad continuity, by Jean-Luc-Marion – envisages an original disruption of the self by an “other”, thereby opening the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl to con¬sonance with religious faith. But this description of an “other-oriented” self, and implicitly a God nameable as wholly Other, does not obviously escape assimilation to the futile essentialism by which, in the light of deconstructive critique, any self-oriented-to-other remains oriented to “the same”, or to itself. On the other hand, the deconstructive insight itself seems unavailable for proposing a self which, under disruption by the other, retains those minimal attributes of identity and self-present subjectivity consonant with moral accountability for the human self, and in the case the divine, a self-identity as Other. Is a harmonisation of both approaches possible, mediating, despite everything, between their founding assumptions? Focussing on Levinas (for phenomenology) and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (for deconstruction), this article proposes that a particular meta-representational framing – en abyme representation – can accommodate equally the radically differing perspectives from which the two approaches offer the description of “the subject as another” (or, “self as other”). The approaches thus come to be seen as bridged, in a mode preservative of the essentialist and deconstructive resources in both, and thereby of the complex thread linking phenomenological faith and deconstructive doubt.
In the Name of Mercy: A Meditative Exploration
Terry A. Veling, pp.215-235
This essay is a meditative exploration of the relationship between justice and mercy. While it recognises the importance of social justice – as a mutual indebtedness – it argues that without social mercy, even justice itself cannot save us. Mercy is not the opposite or complement of justice, but its very condition.
St Paul and the Life of the Mind
Brendan Byrne, pp.236-240
The “Paul” presented by Luke in the second half of Acts does not entirely cohere with the image of Paul emerging from the letters he himself had written a generation earlier. However, Luke's depiction of Paul’s use of rhetoric and rational argument before the Areopagus has a genuine basis in what we find in the Letters, read comprehensively and with attention to context. Paul is not an enemy to the life of the mind. He only insists that, like all other aspects of human life, it must be illuminated and challenged by the light of the Gospel.
Book Reviews
Theological Hermeneutics
Alexander S. Jensen
Richard Treloar pp.241-243
Jesus Our Redeemer: A Christian Approach to Salvation
Gerald O'Collins
Christiaan Mostert pp.243-245
Vanity Faith: Searching for Spirituality among the Stars
Terrance W. Klein
Christopher Gleeson pp.246-247
Contributors
JOHN C. MCDOWELL, after nine years of lecturing at the University of Scotland, has recently taken up appointment to the Morpeth Chair of Theology at the University of Newcastle, NSW. He is the author of Hope in Barth’s Eschatology (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), and The Gospel According to StarWars: Faith, Hope and the Force (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), and the co-editor of Conversing With Barth (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2004). Main research areas have been the theologies of Karl Barth and Donald MacKinnon, theology of hope, and theology’s engagement with popular culture, and with tragic drama. Currently he is working on a book addressing the prospects of approaching Barth's theology as conversation.
ANNE ELVEY is an adjunct research fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, and an honorary research associate with the Melbourne College of Divinity. She is author of An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke: A Gestational Paradigm (Mellen, 2005). Her current research focuses on ecological hermeneutics and the materiality of the text. Her poetry has appeared in a number of journals in Australia, most recently Eureka Street, Mascara Literary Review and Going Down Swinging.
HENRY NOVELLO, taught Systematic Theology at The University of Notre Dame (Fremantle) for five years and is currently Honorary Visiting Scholar, School of Theology, The Flinders University of South Australia. He has published in Gregorianum, Colloquium, as well as Pacifica, and is currently seeking to publish a manuscript on a theology of death. His research interests at present are centred mainly on issues of eschatology, but christological issues, Christian anthropology, the theology-science dialogue, and Christian-Jewish relations are also of considerable interest.
JOHN MARTIS teaches philosophy at Jesuit Theological College, Parkville, where he is currently Principal. His philosophical interest has focussed on the possibility of a poststructuralist account of subjectivity. That question, addressed in his Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), he has subsequently intertwined with the question of faith, in articles that include “Awaiting Faith: Jacques Derrida and the Impossible Encounter with Death”, Pacifica 18 (2005) 1-17. The contribution in this issue has been adapted from a lecture given in December 2008 at Marquette University, under the auspices of the Wade Chair.
TERRY VELING teaches at St. Paul’s Theological College, Australian Catholic University, Brisbane. He taught for many years in the United States, most recently at St Thomas University, Miami. His most recent book is Practical Theology: On Earth as It Is in Heaven (Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 2005).
BRENDAN BYRNE, Editor-in-Chief of Pacifica since 2000, teaches New Testament at Jesuit Theological College, Parkville. He is the author of nine books, the most recent being A Costly Freedom: A Theological Reading of Mark’s Gospel (Strathfield, NSW: St Paul’s Publications, 2008), and is currently working upon a popular reading of the Fourth Gospel.
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