Incarnation

In his identity, words, and deeds Jesus of Nazareth provides the possibility and promise of ministry in his name.

The hermeneutical key to reading and interpreting the Gospel of Mark is the role which the Evangelist has given to the passion of Jesus as the primary perspective for understanding all the other traditions about Jesus incorporated in the Gospel.

Is God dead? -- The western split : transcendent, deity, desacralised nature -- The western split : God's otherness, humanity's degradation -- The western split : gender discrimination, its origins, and its consequences -- Energy and divinity -- Divinity within -- The Christian doctrine of incarnation : restricted immanence -- Incarnation and atonement mythology -- Creativity, divine, and human -- Divinity and ethics -- Religion and science -- The problem of evil : providence -- Death and beyond.

Who would the Saviour have to be, what would the Saviour have to do to rescue human beings from the meaning-destroying experiences of their lives? This book offers a systematic Christology that is at once biblical and philosophical. Starting with human radical vulnerability to horrors such as permanent pain, sadistic abuse or genocide, it develops what must be true about Christ if He is the horror-defeater who ultimately resolves all the problems affecting the human condition and Divine-human relations. Distinctive elements (...) of Marilyn McCord Adams' study are her defence of the two-natures theory, of Christ as Inner Teacher and a functional partner in human flourishing, and her arguments in favour of literal bodily resurrection and of a strong doctrine of corporeal Eucharistic presence. The book concludes that Christ is the One in Whom, not only Christian doctrine, but cosmos, church, and the human psyche hold together. (shrink)

From some philosophical points of view, the Incarnation is difficult to motivate. From others, a host of reasons appear, raising the problem of how to choose among and/or prioritize them. In this paper I examine how different substantive commitments and starting points combine with contrasting understandings of method in philosophical theology, to generate different analyses and answers to Christianity’s crucial question: cur Deus homo?

The article points to similarities between Radical Orthodoxy and the Post-Structuralist critique of rationalistic secularism together with a shared appraisal of aesthecism. However, although the people of Radical Orthodoxy are sympathetic to the modern experience of immanence, they criticize the flattened immanence which seems to result from a post-structuralist perspective, and claim instead that immanence has to be appreciated as creational (and therefore participating in the divine) in order to withstand the threat of nihilism. Thus, Post-Structuralism is only an ally (...) up until the point where it tends to undermine the foot-hold in pre-modern tradition and the commitment to revealed truth. Yet, the way in which Radical Orthodoxy appeals to the better myth (contrary to the ontology of difference pertaining to Post-Structuralism) still carries with it traits of postmodernism and thereby risks the relativism it strives to avoid. (shrink)

This article is a venture into a Christian Theology of Other Faiths. In contrast to History of Religions, which seeks to understand a religion from its own point of view, a Christian Theology of Other Faiths seeks to understand another religion from the perspective of the Christian revelation.Here I present Simone Weil’s claim that the Word of God is manifest in human form in other faiths, and that the Gospels are written from the point of view of a victim, and (...) are completed by the Bhagavad Gita which is written from the point of view of an agent who wields a sword. (shrink)

In what sense, if any, does the dominant conception of the traditional theistic God as disembodied inform our embodied experiences? Feminist philosophers of religion have been either explicitly or implicitly preoccupied by a philosophical failure to address such questions concerning embodiment and its relationship to the divine. To redress this failure, certain feminist philosophers have sought to appropriate Luce Irigaray’s argument that embodied divinity depends upon women themselves becoming divine. This article assesses weaknesses in the Irigarayan position, notably the problematic (...) move from a woman’s subjectivity to divinity. In the light of these weaknesses the author looks for a better alternative. Drawing on the work of feminist and nonfeminist philosophers, a feminist-friendly conception of theism is sketched in terms of incarnation and intersubjectivity. Philosophical accounts of the ethical formation of gendered subjects by way of bodily practices offer new concepts for con. (shrink)

From Oedipus to Moses and beyond, Freud's last book has been read with singular obstinacy as addressing a Jewish (or anti-Semitic) question, or as renewing a religious (or antireligious) agenda. Between Athens and Jerusalem, from Judaism to a more general “monotheistic religion,” and from Oedipus (the son) to Moses (the father), scholars have explored or refuted numerous traces the primal murder left and many among the founding fathers, the substitutes to which it gave rise. Yet it is easy to see (...) that the reception of Freud has been fairly consistent in skipping over not so much the general religious (monotheistic, or even civilizational and universal) import of Freud's work, but rather the exorbitant centrality in it of Jesus Christ, the acutely singular question of Christianity and its founder. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss certain aspects of Leibniz's theory and practice of 'soft reasoning' as exemplified by his defence of two central mysteries of the Christian revelation: the Trinity and the Incarnation. By theory and practice of 'soft' or 'broad' reasoning, I mean the development of rational strategies which can successefully be applied to the many areas of human understanding which escape strict demonstration, that is, the 'hard' or 'narrow' reasoning typical of mathematical argumentation. These strategies disclose an (...) 'other' reason, i.e. a complementary set of arguments and methods developed by Leibniz in order to deal with crucial issues such as the 'weighting' of probabilities and truths of fact. I will argue that one of the most compelling examples of the importance and fertility of Leibniz's 'other' reason is provided by his solution to the problems posed by the unique epistemological status of theological mysteries. (shrink)

The notion that Jesus' death is an atoning sacrifice is grounded in Jesus' own understanding of the temple and sacrificial cult in light of the dawn of the New Age.

Arbuckle, Gerald A The Christian belief that the Great Commission of Jesus Christ, 'Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations' (Mt 28:19), at first sight looks uncomplicated. As the Father sent the Son into the world, so the Son is missioning his followers to carry on his work in this context. Mission connotes a sending of persons, with authority, to preach the salvation of Christ in accordance with the text, 'they will never have a preacher unless one is sent' (...) (Rom 10:15). Evangelization describes the actual proclamation by word and example of the Good News of Christ to 'the nations'. (shrink)

The Eucharist is at the heart of Christian worship and at the heart of the Eucharist are the curious phrases, 'This is my body' and 'This is my blood'. James M. Arcadi offers a constructive proposal for understanding Christ's presence in the Eucharist that draws on contemporary conceptual resources and is faithful to the history of interpretation. He locates his proposal along a spectrum of Eucharistic theories. Arcadi explores the motif of God's presence related to divine omnipresence and special presence (...) in holy places, which undergirds a biblical-theological proposal concerning Christ's presence. Utilizing recent work in speech-act theory, Arcadi probes the acts of consecration and renaming in their biblical and liturgical contexts. A thorough examination of recent work in Christology leads to an action model of the Incarnation that borrows the notion of enabling externalism from philosophy of mind. These threads undergird a model of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 58 Heft: 2 Seiten: 229-243.

I articulate a real presence theory of the Eucharist that is coherent, attractive, and utilizes the resources of contemporary Christology. First, I review some of the recent analytic discussions of the metaphysics of the incarnation. From this, I distinguish two types of impanation, which I name Type-H and Type-S Impanation. I then exposit Type-S Impanation utilizing the notion of enabling externalism. I raise two potential objections to this view, the responses to which allows me to highlight the incarnation-like coherence and (...) attractiveness of this view as an exposition of the liturgical utterance, ‘This is my body.’. (shrink)