Theology Today

Luther’s Reformation began with a debate over proper repentance, a fact that tends to get overlooked in most accounts of its history. By focusing on a close reading of the first five of Luther’s “95 Theses,” the following article examines that debate in its context, seeks to understand Luther’s theological insights and places them in conversation with contemporary thoughts and practices of repentance.

Given its societal influence today, science is often thought to be more than just a technical approach to establish empirical observations that work. Although interpretations may vary, what generally is at stake since Galilei is the question of truth, of revealing the way the world we live in really is. Are science and theology hence dealing with the same question? Are they competing on the same territory or can they complement each other? The idea of critical realism assumes a fruitful relation and even parallelism between the two. It needs to be modified to constructive-critical realism to give the domain of culture its due weight in the concert of disciplines. This is important for theology as a cultural discipline.

The following article compares Bonhoeffer’s writings on “religionless Christianity” with the opinion, common among evangelicals, that Christianity is not about “religion,” based on a study of members of the Vineyard Church in T.M. Lurhmann’s When God Talks Back. While there are important similarities between Bonhoeffer and the evangelical rejection of religion, the article argues that the two theologies part ways on a number of points, most importantly concerning the theology of suffering.

Karl Barth has developed the Boethian concept of eternity as simultaneity by placing the person of Jesus Christ at the center of God’s eternity. Even though it is a momentous achievement, Barth’s conception still stands in need of clarification or modification, for otherwise it might impugn the victory of Jesus Christ unwittingly, since it logically entails a problematic notion of the simultaneity of Jesus’ past, present, and future. It follows that his past of death is never gone but simultaneously present in the divine eternal Now. To avoid this problematic ambivalence, I will suggest that even in God’s eternity there must be the indicator of God’s Now, the flowing “now” from the past to the future. And yet, my suggestion will not depart from the concept of simultaneity in God’s omniscience.

Contemporary critics of Christian supersessionism rightly despise its connection to Christianity’s historical persecution of the Jewish people. But theologians and other scholars have not paid enough attention to the political work Christian supersessionism continues to do today. To this end, I examine the work of Pope Benedict XVI, arguing that what I term “Euro-supremacist supersessionism” pervades and helps to shape his theology. Benedict’s supersessionism serves to describe Europe and Christianity as inextricably linked: just as Europe is an essentially Christian continent so is Christianity an essentially European religion. Because it perceives this cultural formation as uniquely universal, Benedict’s supersessionism also advocates a type of European supremacy. But despite its roots in and resonances with German philosophical anti-Judaism, Benedict’s Eurocentric supersessionism does not advance an anti-Jewish politics. His Eurocentric supersessionism instead leads him to take political aim at three initially surprising targets: one, the growing presence of Islam within Europe; two, Europe’s intensifying embrace of lesbian and gay rights; and three, certain strands of liberation theology that originate outside of Europe. Why? I argue that, for Benedict, each of these movements both endangers the marriage he has established between Europe and Christianity—a union he deems necessary to each entity’s survival—and undermines his claim that Christianized Europe possesses a unique universality, which I argue supplies the main source of his implicit belief in its supremacy over all other cultural systems.

This article delves into the biopolitical dimension of Jesus and Korean comfort women by engaging with the insight yet to be gleaned from Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life. Seen through this biopolitical prism, Jesus in the passion narratives of the Gospels can be understood as a paradigmatic bare life in his sheer ambiguity, which swings back and forth between terrestrial and celestial dominions. Similarly, Korean comfort women, albeit in a different historical and sociocultural context, can also be viewed as bare lives under ruthless Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). My contention here is that, through the process of theological thinking, the reconfiguration of Jesus as a subversive bare life offers fresh insight into the agency of Korean comfort women in the sense that their bare lives have so far resisted the unjust world in their search of human rights and dignity. In spite of his tribulations between the Jewish and Roman authorities, Jesus unsettles these sovereign powers in such an ambiguous space. In a similar fashion, Korean comfort women have broadcast the atrocious brutality of Japanese colonial rule in the ambiguous zone beyond the juridical realms—Korean, Japanese, or otherwise—at the national and international levels. The foremost point to remember is that a commemoration of Jesus’ life as the most paradigmatic example of bare life can inspire Korean comfort women to deal with their agony in assuming bare life in the unswerving hope of justice yet to be served through divine intervention in the terrestrial sovereignty in liminal space and time.

The reemergence of immanentist spiritualities, from New Age spirituality to African traditional spiritualities, has been indicative of the twenty-first century. The influx of these spiritualities in the West has ripples of implications to Christianity. At the least, spirituality has been separated from religiosity, with some people identifying themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). This work explores the triangular formulae of new spiritualities (the self, nature, divinity) to understand the intricacies of this divergence between religiosity and spirituality, and the implications for Christianity. It argues that theological negligence might not have directly caused the reemergence of many spiritualities, but it warranted the exit of many Christians into the new spiritualities. Through the appraisal of theological anthropology, natural theology, and spiritual theology, it suggests a reprioritization of Christian theology and a constructive relationship with the new spiritualities.

Recent years have seen a rise in nationalistic and even xenophobic rhetoric as well as actions animated by fears of the other and the foreigner. In light of these recent displays of xenophobia, this article theologically examines the category of otherness in conversation with the work of Nicholas of Cusa, specifically his De Li Non Aliud (On the Not-Other). This fifteenth-century German theologian offers insights not only for reading God’s difference in relation to the world, but also for conceiving of how God’s alterity transforms creaturely otherness from the impetus for violence and repression to the basis for genuine reconciliation and relationship.