Volume 20, Issue 1, February 2007

The stories of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira in the New Testament and of Uzzah and Uriah in the Old Testament are fraught with difficulties: notably, the pastoral implications of divine judgement and/or allowing. A close reading of John Calvin’s comments on these difficult passages shows that he consciously employs reading strategies to resolve the disturbing problems of the text – particularly as he faces the relation-ship and connection of God to the narrated deaths. The following examines his response.

Theologies portraying the church as a “communion” – with God and between believers – have become common in Roman Catholic thought in the last two decades. The ecclesiology of communion has been partic-ularly influential in shaping Catholic approaches to ecumenism, where “communion” merges neatly with “unity” and “catholicity” to promote a church that is both united and diverse. Despite its popularity, the ecclesiology of communion has also been subject to some significant critiques. The critics warn against the danger of communion models reinforcing authoritarian attitudes, being too idealistic, or, most particularly, lacking a focus on “mission”. In the eyes of the critics, understanding the church as communion leads only to an inward-looking church unconcerned with the needs of history and the implications of the Incarnation. This article reviews the emergence of the ecclesiology of communion, especially its relationship to the teaching of Vatican II, identifies its major emphases, surveys the content of the critiques, and assesses whether the theology of communion contributes to a positive and challenging sense of church.

Jean-Luc Marion is a contemporary French philosopher, whose theory of saturated phenomena is attracting increasing attention from theologians, because he proposes that the exemplary saturated phenomenon is divine revelation. Marion’s claims about revelation have also provoked philosophical controversy, with authors such as Dominique Janicaud objecting that Marion’s analysis of revelation compromises his avowal that he is engaged in phenomenology rather than theology. This article outlines the philosophical background to these debates, by describing the way Marion’s theory of saturated phenomena reconceives truth. Marion objects to truth being limited to the verifiable truth of the natural sciences, and insists on an excess beyond what we can grasp and understand. It is this excess that opens new possibilities for philosophical thinking about genuinely transcendent revelation. The article begins by describing an event that is one of Marion’s concrete examples of saturated phenomena, before sketching his theory for these phenomena, and setting out three corollaries that follow from this theory and concern the way we should conceive both phenomenality and subjectivity. Finally, it briefly indicates a number of reservations about the implications of some of Marion’s more dramatic and strident claims.

One of philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s most admirable moves is his insistence on the gift’s debt-erasingness. But it seems his – and not only his – passion for the gift’s gratuity – exemplified by the figure of Christ – obscures what is genuinely ingenious about the gift and the gift of the Christic : that it is dual, duplicitous, double-sided; both gratuitous and circular, both debt-erasing and debt-arousing. To be sure, what is required in an age of an all-calculating capitalism is a remembering and re-affirm-ation of excess. And yet, in an age of unparalleled ecological squandering, what is also required is a re-commitment to reciprocity. Christianity’s Geniestreich therefore appears to lie in its both/and.

A recent suggestion that public responses to developments in agricultural biotechnology raise deeper theological questions indicates a need and an opportunity for Christians to articulate a theological vision that might constructively shape the nature and priorities of research in modern genetics. In this article I draw on a cultural-hermeneutical under-standing of the practice of science and a Christologically grounded conception of imaging God in the created order to outline ways in which the practice of genetics could be revisioned within Christian communities: at the levels of mythos, world view, social practice and cultural reflection.