Abstract
This issue of the Anglican Theological Review clearly reflects the journal’s commitment to publishing creative engagement with the Christian tradition including interdisciplinary inquiry. In this issue, several essays explore the intersection of science and theology, or “science-engaged-theology.” Three in particular revisit the question of the meaning of the human in relation to modern scientific ideas of posthumanism, interspecies ecology, and evolutionary anthropology. These studies are complemented by essays that critically interrogate the Episcopal Church’s involvement with slavery and Anglicanism’s fraught navigation of gender and sexuality globally.
The science-oriented articles situate their analyses in the context of climate crisis and ecological inequality and injustice, including critiques of anthropocentrism. From this vantage, Charlotte Sleigh, of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University College London, offers a foray into the relationship between human beings and plants, trees, mosses, and fungi as a source of meaning-making. The issue opens with “In the Beginning Was the Wort: A New Natural Theology of Meaning for Ecological Catastrophe,” in which Sleigh places into relation two unlikely conversation partners. Here, she explores a surprising resonance between the contemporary work of Eduardo Kohn, via the post-humanist anthropology he articulates in his influential and widely cited How Forests Think (2013), and a retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’ teleology of non-human organisms. The starting place of this analysis are “wort-filled texts,” a new wave of popular scientific, literary, and cinematic reflections on the meaning of plants for human beings.
Bonhoeffer scholar and translator Lisa E Dahill (Hartford International University for Religion and Peace) similarly puts trees at the center of theological analysis in her provocatively titled practicing theology essay, “Holy Shit: Lutheran Carnality and Thinking Like a Tree.” This was an address delivered at the inaugural conference (entitled “Ecological Spiritualities”) of the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard Divinity School in 2022. As with Sleigh, here readers confront a surprising association between vastly different thinkers. In this case, Dahill puts feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s post-humanist thought in relation with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther, leveraging these toward the “truly ecological interspecies divine reality we need.” The Luther we encounter here is earthy and scatological. Feces is, for Dahill, an “under-explored theological locus in Martin Luther’s thinking” and also a “moral criterion”—it exposes the interdependence of all biological lives and simultaneously “the contours of justice itself.”
Matthew Seddon brings a third foray into theology and science in “Towards an Anthropologically Engaged Theology: Implications from Human Evolution for Theological Anthropology.” Seddon appeals to accurate scientific understandings of human evolution to compel theological anthropology beyond human essentialism toward more complex ideas of human diversity. The result is a more complex Imago Dei, consisting of our human diversity itself. The end result accords with Dahill and Sleigh—all three strive toward a revised theological anthropology that disrupts human domination and subjugation of the natural environment.
Two additional research articles add to the strengths of this issue. We are pleased to publish Christopher Poore’s, “The God of Virginia Theological Seminary, 1823–1871: Retracing a Tradition of Theological Liberalism and White Supremacy,” winner of the 2022 Charles Hefling Student Essay Competition. Poore (University of Chicago Divinity School) revisits the founding curriculum of Virginia Theological Seminary to show how, at its very origins, the white supremacy of The Episcopal Church was constructed in a “liberal” mode. Through a close study of the seminary’s central theological textbook, Poore shows how the doctrine of God espoused by the seminary “downgraded” scripture and lifted up human experience in a way that facilitated the seminary’s enslavement of human beings. Redirecting us to again consider the justice-making capacity of more doctrinal theologies, Poore concludes, “at the very moment when white liberal theology pretends to make a radical rupture with its past, it enacts a theological choreography developed in the very heart of the enslaving colonialist regime.”
Our final research article is part of the ongoing Brief Introduction to Anglican Theology series, an occasional series of articles providing chapter-length treatments of specific areas of Anglican theology. Susannah Cornwall (University of Exeter, UK) offers an introduction to the question of gender and sexuality in Anglicanism in “Incompleteness, Imperial Legacies, and Anglican Fudge: How Concerns about Gender and Sexuality Affect How Anglicans Do Theology.” Cornwall explores the ecclesiological fissures around these theological flashpoints across the globe, from the ordination of women to the consecration of LGBTQ clergy as bishops. This discussion is contextualized within power imbalances within the Anglican Communion and the necessity of “dismantling of imperial structures” before any authentic claims to unity can be made.
In the second of two practicing theology essays, Jesse Zink (Montreal Diocesan Theological College) describes the folding of two Canadian theological colleges into a single ecumenical institution. In “Institutional Change in the Church: A Theological Reflection,” we learn of the process of theological reflection that helped this institutional transformation be successful. This might perhaps serve as a model for other institutions facing similar changes.
In addition to many book reviews, this issue includes one review essay and two reviews in depth. Robert MacSwain (The School of Theology, The University of the South, Sewanee) responds to five recent works of analytic theology. The method of analytic theology has typically emerged from evangelical Protestant lines of thought, often more conservative in its approach. MacSwain identifies in these five works a “second generation” that critically interrogates and expands upon the foundational works. A review in depth from Thomas Breedlove, considers Robyn Horner’s recent book on a phenomenology of revelation, exploring whether we have lost the capacity to speak about and even experience revelation. Finally, Samuel Still (University of Exeter, UK) offers an in-depth review of the newest book by Stanley Hauerwas—a series of lectures on Karl Barth positing the church as the “one, true, peaceable alternative to the coercive, violent state.”