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Volume 23, Issue 3, October 2010
THIS ISSUE OF PACIFICA CONSISTS OF ARTICLES drawn from papers delivered by leading speakers at the Melbourne College of Divinity Centenary Conference held in Melbourne in the early days of July 2010. From different aspects all the articles bear upon the theme of the conference, “The Future of Religion in Australian Society”. Pacifica is grateful to the range of distinguished scholars, national and international, who made their papers available for inclusion in this issue of the journal.
Editorial
Brendan Byrne SJ,
THIS ISSUE OF PACIFICA CONSISTS OF ARTICLES drawn from papers delivered by leading speakers at the Melbourne College of Divinity Centenary Conference held in Melbourne in the early days of July 2010. From different aspects all the articles bear upon the theme of the conference, “The Future of Religion in Australian Society”. Pacifica is grateful to the range of distinguished scholars, national and international, who made their papers available for inclusion in this issue of the journal.
This issue, October 2010, is also the last for which I shall be acting as Editor-in-Chief. I took over the editorship from Dr Daniel Madigan SJ in late 1999 and have been responsible, with a great deal of assistance from generous colleagues, for eleven volumes since that time. While an editor’s task has its wearisome as well as its positive aspects, it has been a privilege to serve the cause of intelligent theology in Australia, Aetoroa-New Zealand, and beyond over these years. In particular, it has been gratifying to assist younger scholars emerging from doctoral studies to achieve initial publication of their research interests alongside the work of established academics.
I have received unfailing support from a succession of Chairs of the Pacifica Theological Studies Association (Dr Ian Williams, Professor Ian Breward, Professor Frank Rees, Professor Christiaan Mostert) and from Review Editors, Dr Maryanne Confoy RSC and Dr Janette Gray RSM, and Acting-Editor for one issue, Rev Bruce Barber. On the more managerial and production side, I should like to signal the contribution of Ms Margaret Wood, Dr John Honner, Mr Chris Straford, Dr Anne Elvey and Dr Mark Crees. Along with a host of members of the editorial board and readers too numerous to mention, this group of colleagues has been an academic community truly reflective of the ecumenical cooperation that has been a hallmark of Pacifica since its inception.
The Executive of the Pacifica Theological Studies Association has appointed Dr Sean Winter, Professor of New Testament at the Uniting Church Theological College, Parkville, as Editor of the journal from 1 January 2011. With this appointment I am confident that Pacifica is in excellent hands and will preserve the quality of content and production required for it to retain the A-level grade that it currently enjoys in the ERA ranking of academic journals.
Articles
The Word in the World
Sandra M. Schneiders, pp. 247-266
This article addresses the topic “the Word in the World” by seeking to clarify both concepts in the light of biblical usage and the present situation of believers. While “the world” features quite prominently in the New Testament, the understanding of the motif throughout Christian history has reflected more the Church’s experience with its socio-cultural and religious context rather than the New Testament usage. The largely defensive attitude to the world that was the stance of the Roman church in reaction to the Reformation and Enlightenment was radically challenged at the Second Vatican Council, offering the chance to re-orientate the Church towards an understanding of “world” in a less objectified sense as an imaginative construction of reality. From the New Testament, notably the Gospel of John, at least four understandings of “world” emerge, of which only one is negative. The Synoptic tradition, in particular the parable of the Weeds among the Wheat, addresses the issue of evil by indicating the world as one reality in which good and evil are pervasively intertwined such that believers can never isolate themselves over against or out of the world but must contest, with the power of the Gospel, the destructive dynamics at work in God’s good world. The Word, which believers are commissioned to proclaim to the world, is not first and foremost a message but Jesus, the Word Incarnate, who is both with us and one us, while also the locus and instrument of God’s salvific work within the world. The particularity of the Incarnation, especially as the Wisdom of God incarnate, rather than a scandal or limitation in a pluralistic world, can open us up to the infinite mystery of God mediated by all religious traditions. The Incarnation also designates our humanity as the locus of God’s Presence in the world, enabling believers, as Christ’s body, to be the Word of God resounding in the world.
The Ancient Limits of Modern Religion: Perpetua, Augustine and the Construction of the Secular
Andrew McGowan, pp. 267-280
The martyr Perpetua’s declaration, “I am a Christian”, is a point of departure for the invention of religion in the familiar sense of beliefs and practices chosen, rather than as the ritual and piety characteristic of, and universal in, ancient Mediterranean societies. By implication this means the appearance of the secular also. This study explores early Christian evidence from Perpetua and Tertullian and, after the Constantinian revolution, Augustine. This history of reflection on the relationship between belief and identity has interpretive significance for the changing character of religion, and of the secular, in Australian society today.
Ambiguities of the Future: Theological Hints in the Novels of Patrick White
Paul S. Fiddes, pp. 281-298
This essay explores the presence of and relationship between different visions of the future in the novels of Patrick White. In works such as Voss, A Fringe of Leaves, Riders of the Chariot and The Vivisector we can detect traces of what Moltmann calls “calculable” and “desirable” visions of the future. White’s treatment of the themes of the body and the land speak of a future that is made possible from within the framework of existing possibilities. Yet throughout his writing White also hints at a future that can only be received, often in moments of intense, and sometimes spiritual illumination. This dual vision comes to expression in the figure of the outsider, the judgement of art and, crucially, in White’s repeated use of crucifixion imagery. In this way White, though in many ways a quintessentially Australian novelist, helps us to reflect theologically on aspects of the human situation and the tensions inherent within it.
Feastings in God at Midnight: Theology and the Globalised Present
John C. McDowell, pp. 299-231
This study relocates talk of “the future of God” in talk of the world’s future in God, in God’s creativeness expressed in hopeful performance. The context for the theological discussion is the significant pressure on possibilities for the very existence of hope generated by the detemporalised conditions for the making of selves in a “globalised” environment. Modernity’s latest expression is closing the capacity for speaking adequately of the time required to become human, an erosion of selfhood in the accompanying erosion of certain ways of imagining time (Rowan Williams). This requires substantive ethical attention, conversation and interrogation simply because it renders fundamental possibilities for the shaping of human selfhood increasingly unavailable. In response, a theological vision is re-imagined to offer a constructive retemporalising interrogation and eschatological memory, with suggestions for beginning teased out broadly with reference to Eucharistic performance. Contrary to many expectations, this entails not so much a dreaming of a different world as a dreaming of this world differently, a temporality which is hope-generating, while critically attentive to the inequitable character of features of our world, and educative of ethical wisdom in a self-regulating and emancipatory witness of remembering and anticipating the transformative presence of God.
Respect, Tolerance and Reconciliation rather than Opposition and Denial: Indigenous Spirituality, Land, and the Future of Religion in Australia
Tom Calma, pp. 322-336
This paper, composed by an Indigenous Australian, who has been for many years national Race Discrimination Commissioner, discusses the future of religion in Australian society from the perspective of the anthropological, cultural and spiritual heritage of Indigenous Australians, who comprise the longest surviving culture in the world (over 60,000 years). Pervasive in every aspect of Indigenous life is a traditional spirituality, “the Dreaming”, that is also essentially tied to the Land. While Indigenous culture and the Christianity brought by missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can co-exist, contemporary Indigenous wellbeing is inseparable from spiritual wellbeing and in particular secure ownership of the land. Indigenous peoples of the world have a particular collective value as holders of a living heritage about the meaning of what it really is to be a human in relation to the natural world. The second half of the paper clarifies and reflects upon the reaction to research conducted by the author when Race Discrimination Commissioner and certain preliminary findings of that research. In the face of negative reaction in some quarters it is argued that people of faith should have nothing to fear about proposals to enshrine freedom of religion and belief in law.
The Word in the World: Then and Now
Francis J. Moloney, pp. 337-354
The celebration of the Centenary of the Melbourne College of Divinity generated an occasion for reflection on one of the reasons for the existence of Christianity: the restless and never-ending proclamation of, and response to, the Word in the world. In the “then” of the not-too-distant past the major Christian traditions of Catholicism and Protestantism faced this challenge with a renewed enthusiasm. The Catholic Tradition entered a new era with the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and the Protestant Tradition was urged to rediscover Luther’s overwhelming concern for the Word in the World, especially in and through the lives and work of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. Where are we “now”? This study suggests that both of these movements from the Twentieth Century have “run out of steam”. Reflection upon our new context, if the first decades of the Third Christian Millennium, requires new strategies and ever-deeper convictions to render the Word relevant in the contemporary world.
Book Reviews
God’s Wisdom or the Devil’s Envy: Death and Creation Deconstructing in the Wisdom of Solomon
Marie Turner
Alice M. Sinnott pp. 355-357
The Historical Jesus of the Gospels
Craig S. Keener
Gerald O’Collins pp. 358-359
How God Acts: Creation, Redemption, and Special Divine Action
Denis Edwards
Neil Darragh pp. 359-261
If Creation is a Gift
Mark Manolopoulos
Richard Colledge pp. 361-363
Contributors
SANDRA SCHNEIDERS IHM is Professor Emerita of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality at Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara University, California, where she teaches in the areas of the Gospel of John, hermeneutics, biblical spirituality, Christian spirituality, and Roman Catholic Religious Life. She has published ten books and numerous articles in these areas. In addition to five honorary degrees, she has received the John Courtney Murray Award for excellence in theology from the Catholic Theological Society of America (2006). She was President of International Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality in 1997 and has just concluded a term as President of the Catholic Biblical Association of America (2009-10).
ANDREW MCGOWAN, an Anglican priest, is Warden of Trinity College within the University of Melbourne. Following undergraduate studies at the University of Western Australia and theology at Trinity, he received a doctorate in the area of Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He has lectured at Harvard and Yale, at the University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, Western Australia, and was Associate Professor of Early Christian History at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge MA. His scholarly work on the social and intellectual life of early Christian communities has been published in leading journals in the USA and Europe, and in his book Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). He is currently President of the United Faculty of Theology, Parkville.
PAUL FIDDES, an ordained minister of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, is Professor of Systematic Theology at Oxford University. Author of more than fifteen books and numerous articles, his research and teaching interests include modern systematic theology, in particular the doctrines of the Trinity and Atonement; theology and literature; postmodernism; the impact of modern continental philosophy on literary theory and theology; theology of culture; ecclesiology. He is very active in ecumenical conversations and currently serves as the chair of the Doctrine Commission of the Baptist World Alliance.
JOHN C. MCDOWELL, after nine years of lecturing at the University of Scotland, currently holds the Morpeth Chair of Theology at the University of Newcastle, NSW. He is the author of Hope in Barth’s Eschatology (Ashgate, 2000), and The Gospel According to StarWars: Faith, Hope and the Force (Westminster John Knox, 2007), and the co-editor of Conversing With Barth (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. He is working on a book addressing the prospects of approaching Barth’s theology as conversation.
TOM CALMA is an Aboriginal elder from the Kungarakan tribal group and a member of the Iwaidja tribal group whose traditional lands are south west of Darwin and on the Coburg Peninsula in Australia’s Northern Territory. For 38 years he has been active in Indigenous affairs at local, community, state, territory, national and international levels, also serving as a senior Australian diplomat in India and Vietnam, 1995-2002. He was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission for five and a half years and served as Race Discrimination Commissioner from July 2004 until July 2009. In 2010 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Charles Darwin University in recognition of decades of public service, particularly in relation to his work in education, training and employment in Indigenous communities.
FRANCIS J. MOLONEY SDB, AM, foundation Professor of Theology at the Australian Catholic University and a member of the International Theological Commission of the Catholic Church 1986-2002, was Katharine Drexel Professor of New Testament at the Catholic University of America, Washington DC, 1999-2005. Author of numerous books and articles on the Fourth Gospel, on biblical interpretation, and on Christian spirituality, he has published a full-scale commentary on the Gospel of Mark (The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary [Hendrickson: 2002]) and is preparing a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. He is currently Provincial Superior of the Australian Province of the Salesians of Don Bosco.
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