Abstract
Keenly aware of the historic impact of scientific developments on theology, Oliver Davies engages a paradigm shift underway in Western society resulting from what he calls the ‘second scientific revolution’: the shift to an understanding of the human as a unity of mind, body, and world. By drawing attention to one’s material existence in space and time, this change, Davies argues, demands a reconsideration of the question ‘where is Jesus Christ?’ that explains one’s encounter with the living Christ in space and time rather than in some transcendental sense. In response, Davies offers a new ‘orientation’ of theology around the exalted Christ’s commissioning of individuals and the loving Christian act toward the other. In this act, Christ becomes most present in the world, and the individual is transformed and used by Christ (through the Spirit) to effect transformation in the world. As Davies takes great pains to explain, he intends to offer not a new paradigm in theology to compete with others but instead a reorientation that helps theology engage the Christian’s life of faith in its particular material and temporal conditions within the world as science now understands it. After making his case for a reorientation around Christ’s transformation of the material world, Davies explores how such a reorientation might impact Christian views of scripture, ecclesiology, philosophy, and politics.
Throughout, Davies successfully keeps material circumstances and the life of faith in theological view with great consistency. But, paradoxically, his work never fully enters the realm of the particular: the ‘loving act’ and ‘the other’ always seem to hover a few inches off the ground, never receiving concrete definition or specific practical applications. To remain abstract in this way seems to be an inconsistency, given Davies’s hope to bridge the divide between systematic and practical theology. It also seems inconsistent, given Davies’s concern for the individual’s embeddedness in the world, that he gives virtually no attention to the import of the individual’s embeddedness in communities. In these ways, Davies’s project seems incomplete. Nonetheless, it remains recommendable: by locating true humanity in the loving act toward the other (which participates in Christ’s new humanity), Davies at least takes some persuasive first steps in theologically attending to the life of faith of the individual understood as a unity of mind, body, and world.