Theology Today

On the occasion of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s death in September 2014, Prof. Jürgen Moltmann reflects on how his own professional and personal life intersected over the last six decades with that of his former colleague, from their first meeting as students at the University of Göttingen to their time as colleagues at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal all the way to their regular meetings between Tübingen and Munich as professors emeriti. Prof. Moltmann lifts up both the mutual respect, which both men had for each other, and also where they parted ways on political grounds. These recollections are an important testimony of one giant of twentieth-century Protestant theology of another.

This brief article considers the implications of thinking of God as patient. It suggests that God exercises patience by giving human beings the time and space to try on diverse identities, and thereby supplies theological warrant for thinking beyond restrictive and essentialistic construals of human life.

This article offers a review of Kierkegaard’s inverse dialectic of forgiveness. It interprets his use of remembering and forgetting in the inverse dialectic as an ethical axiom, shifting the dialectic into an interpersonal register by invoking his concept of the upbuilding quality of love. It concludes with three insights into how this inverse dialectic might be useful within a congregation struggling with the reparation of communal identity in the wake of denominational votes concerning gay and lesbian ordination.

Josef Lukl Hromádka (1889–1969) was a controversial theologian and professor, whose support for the socialist government in Czechoslovakia caused many Western theologians to condemn him, but challenged others to reexamine their understanding of the relationship between Christianity and political ideologies. In 1958 Hromádka contributed Das Evangelium für Atheisten, later published in English as Gospel for Atheists, to a series of small theological books being published in West Berlin. Gospel for Atheists contrasts with Hromádka’s earlier work, while retaining continuity of thought, because the author’s motivation was to promote dialogue between Christians in the West and Marxists in the East. The audience to whom Hromádka directed Gospel for Atheists, the manner in which he reiterated the motifs that he first addressed in Doom and Resurrection, and the more controversial aspects of his theology that he excluded from Gospel for Atheists, demonstrate Hromádka’s goal of promoting respectful dialogue.

In this article I propose the initiation of a conversation between biblical interpreters and proponents of transhumanism. Transhumanists recognize that the rapid expansion of technological innovation is changing our understandings of human behavior, thinking, and physical makeup. The vitality of the post/transhumanism debate about human identity suggests that a “biblical conversation” should be part of a larger conversation not only with theologians, but also the social entities who will hold forth on the values of human/machine transformations. It becomes ever more clear that this debate about human identity will be a real issue in the near future since we will undoubtedly improve our technological capacities and geometrically increase our prosthetic capacities, leading to a possible conclusion that the body itself is best understood as a “prosthesis.” For better or worse, Scripture is and will be adduced on both sides of the debate and often in the form of proof-texting rather than actual consideration of the materials. So, it seems not only reasonable but necessary to reopen the idea of how scriptural materials conceive of the body–self relationship. This is happening in some quarters (e.g. Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves), but the use of biblical materials is not particularly strong. Hence, the viability of this project. This is a first foray into that matter and Paul is a good starting place since the question of the human being as an embodied being occupies a place of importance in many of his letters, especially Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians.

Julian Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending, follows his autobiographical meditation on mortality, Nothing to be Frightened Of, in offering a dystopian view of the meaningfulness of existence (“what it all adds up to”) in the face of an ending that amounts to annihilation, for the self and ultimately for the cosmos. In this he follows Frank Kermode’s elegant study in the theory of fiction, The Sense of an Ending, in which Kermode traces the fate of the modern novel in the wake, as he sees it, of the death of the traditional, biblically-grounded sense of existence as arising, continuing and ending under the providential hand of God. The present article provides the author’s own take on these issues, as exemplified in the experience—concurrent with reading Barnes—of a death in the family. The question arises, in this context: How do we assess competing claims to authenticy, and countering claims to mauvais foi, bad faith?

This article responds to Middle Eastern Christian positions concerning the Other, which have been dominant in most Christian–Muslim relations in the past, through the centuries, and is still prevailing in the Middle East through several Christian voices. As these positions, directly or indirectly, endeavor to appropriate the tradition of the Other and make it fit within the boundaries of one’s own theological heritage, the present article suggests the need for a genuine turn to the Other, in order to make the true perception and the understanding of the tradition of the Other possible. Hence, a method of rejuvenation is proposed, which implies first a critical consideration of one’s own tradition and then a genuine turn to the Other, making the meeting and the reading of the holy texts together possible with the Other in terms clarified through the post-critical method of scriptural reasoning.

Going to “all nations” to share the salvific message of Jesus Christ (Matt 28:19) means that the Christian gospel needs to resonate with the social and existential concerns of the current people of God as well as with changing culture and emerging generations. When the world changes, ecclesial praxis needs to change along with it if the church's missional emphasis is to be consistently relevant. When the church ignores the world, why should (or would) the world pay attention to the church? The church must rethink its ecclesiology through the hermeneutical lens of postmodernity and its interests in acts of (social) justice. ¹ This article proposes that a defense or apologetic of the postmodern ecclesia—an “ecclesi-odicy”— is best defended by a renewing of the church's original missional intent and the implementation of the church's (social) ethic. Ecclesi-odicy brings together “ecclesial” and “theodicy” and is an apologetic for the church itself. Ecclesi-odicy is not justification for the church to critique others; rather to critique itself. Deconstructed, ecclesi-odicy becomes a defense of the ecclesia in its interface with the social injustices caused by evil and suffering.