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BIBLIOGRAPHY Baillie, John. The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 1956. Dulles, Avery. Models of Revelation. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1983. Fries, Heinrich. Revelation. New York: Herder and Herder, 1969. Haughey, John C., ed. The Faith That Does Justice. New York: Paulist Press, 1977. Moltmann, Jurgen. Theology …
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The author attempts to express the consensus of much recent theology (Jewish, Protestant and Catholic) that the idea of revelation in history does not imply a magical intrusion of foreign information, as is often imagined in popular piety. Rather it is the opening of the universe to the very possibility of a truly historical mode of existence. Such an interpretation of revelation need not conflict with the legitimate demands of reason.
Book Chapter
Faith, when viewed from the point of view of cosmology, may be defined as the act or state of leaving our human consciousness open to being patterned by a higher emergent dimension whose substance always remains beyond our comprehension. It is the allowing of our human existence to be taken up into a cosmic story whose final meaning is promised but not yet clear.
Book Chapter
Instead of our speaking only of God’s revelation in history, it is just as appropriate for us to speak in terms of God’s revelation of history. History is the content, and not just the medium of revelation. History is itself what is revealed or “unveiled.”
Book Chapter
The revelatory meaning of the Kingdom of God, and of suffering and death. The God whose very essence is a future filled with the eternal pledge of fidelity is promised anew to us in the social impossibilities that seem so hopeless to us today.
Book Chapter
Even though the church may seem deeply flawed, it has kept the memory of God’s promise alive and made it possible for us to recover it anew in each age. It is here we can still come into intimate encounter with revelation.
Book Chapter
The religious intuitions of our species have always suggested a wider context for our existence than the historical and the social – to a broader horizon even than cosmology. The most comprehensive situation in which we dwell is neither history nor society nor the cosmos, but mystery.
Book Chapter
It is through trust in the truth of being that revelation enters into our history and society. Without this individual response to the promise, we could not speak of “revelation in history.”
Book Chapter
A trust in the promise of unconditional divine love given by revelation provides the context in which the desire to know can be liberated from the restraints of self-deception.
Article
During several summers in the 1950s, Howard Mumma, a Methodist pastor, served as guest minister at the American Church in Paris. After Sunday service one day, he noticed a man in a dark suit surrounded by admirers. Albert Camus had been coming to church, first to hear Marcel Dupré playing the organ, and later to …
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Book Review: Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification. By Tuomo Mannermaa. Fortress, 158 pp., paperback. One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification. By Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen. Liturgical Press, 152 pp., $14.95 paperback. The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology. By Mark C. Mattes. Eerdmans, 216 pp., paperback. Justification: What’s at Stake in the …
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The book Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (edited by Eva Fleischner [KTAV, 1977]) contains an exchange between two theologians — a Roman Catholic and a Russian Orthodox — on the question of “fulfillment theology” and its significance for future Christian-Jewish relations. John T. Pawlikowski, following other Catholic scholars such as Rosemary Radford Ruether and …
Continue reading “Fulfillment Theology and the Future of Christian-Jewish Relations”
Article
For much of this century, professional philosophers have either shown little interest in religious beliefs and practices or have attacked the Judeo-Christian tradition, contending that it is intellectually and morally bankrupt. During the past couple of decades, however, philosophy of religion and philosophical theology have experienced a rebirth in the British Isles and North America. …
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Does God need to wear a wristwatch, or glance at a clock now and then? If God is eternal, and if God holds all events together simultaneously, does it matter to God that we experience events sequentially? Do openness, contingency and freedom in temporal affairs have any effect on God’s eternity? These sound like ancient …
Continue reading “God Happens: The Timeliness of the Triune God”
Article
Irving Howe sees a critical parallel between immigrant Jewish literature and literature of the American South in the 20th century. In each case, the passion to evoke a culture in letters seems driven by the authors’ sense that their cultures are fading away, doomed to certain and swift dissipation into the pervasive ethos of modern …
Continue reading “Is It Just Nostalgia? The Renewal of Wesleyan Studies”
Article
O Jerusalem! The Contested Future of the Jewish Covenant, by Marc H. Ellis, Augsburg Fortress, l86pp. $20.00 Marc Ellis is a proponent of Jewish liberation theology. Ellis is a critic of the national theology of Israel, which asserts that post-Holocaust Jews have a right to a homeland in Israel. Because that national theology ignores the …
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The 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth — November 10, 1483 — is still three years off; yet it is not too soon to begin pondering and reconsidering Luther in anticipation of that half-millennium celebration. The Christian Century earlier this year (June 4-11 issue) noted that Communist Party chief Erich Honnecker will officially chair the …
Article
My mind has not changed a great deal, because the biblical story has not changed. The account is still there, from countless witnesses, of God’s thrusts into history. God created his world to be "very good," but we corrupted his creation by attempting to be our own gods and goddesses and by trying to shape …
Continue reading “Renewed Appreciation for an Unchanging Story”
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Books Reviewed: Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us. By Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker Beacon, 288 pp. The Nonviolent Atonement. By Denny J. Weaver Eerdmans, 246 pp. The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical & Practical Perspectives. Edited by Roger R. Nicole, Charles E. Hill and …
Continue reading “Rethinking the Death of Jesus: Cross Purposes”
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Saving and Secular Faith: An Invitation to Systematic Theology By B.A. Gerrish (Fortress, 153 pp.) The Pilgrim Road: Sermons on Christian Life By B.A. Gerrish; edited by Mary T. Stimming. (Westminster John Knox, 213 pp.) As I read these two books by Brian Gerrish, I had three reactions in turn: first, I marveled at what …
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What does it mean that E. F. Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (Harper & Row, 1973), has caught on so strongly, especially among people who are exploring “alternatives” of various sorts — economic, political, spiritual? Originally published in England, the volume has now sold more than a million copies worldwide. …
Continue reading “Small Is Beautiful, and So Is Rome: Surprising Faith of E.F. Schumacher”
Article
Its midafternoon. In a borrowed ‘76 AMC Hornet, holding a fast-food chicken sandwich in one hand and balancing a cup of ice water in the other, I drive eight miles north from this Oregon university town to an abandoned air force base which now houses a modest, little-known alcohol treatment Center for American Indians. As …
Continue reading “Sweat, Stones and Visions: Native American Spirituality”
Article
It is a great paradox that nature is much more unambiguously susceptible to human understanding than is society past and present. That which man has not created and which it is beyond his power to create—the macrocosm of the stars and the microcosm of the cells and atoms—man can understand with an adequacy that points …
Continue reading “The Intellectual and Moral Dilemma of History”
Article
Early in 1984 a former student of mine from the sixties called me from Washington, where he is now working as a dedicated and notable labor lawyer. It was to give me bad news. He had been and remained an extraordinary person, having sailed around the world numerous times in the Merchant Marine both before …
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It’s difficult to predict which new theological movements will have real staying power and which are destined for the scrap heap. When a group of prominent British academics introduced their 1977 collection The Myth of God Incarnate at a press conference, people were stunned and the book sold like hotcakes. Today, it’s largely forgotten, difficult …
Book
(ENTIRE BOOK) How does God reveal himself to us? This question is basic to theology and is here addressed in a new light.
Article
The desire to re-image redemption may seem the height of folly or, worse, arrogance — folly when one considers the extent to which we have been shaped by patriarchal Christianity and arrogance when one considers the profound healing that both women and men have experienced by embracing Christian truths. Yet a recent symposium was dedicated …
Article
The preceding decades have been tumultuous, both within the theological world and outside it. For theology there was the post-Bultmannian school, the death-of-God theology, Vatican II and all that led to it and stemmed from it, the surge of ecumenical thought and dialogue, Christian-Marxist dialogue, Jewish-Christian discussions, liberation theologies. But other factors, both social and, …
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The Mystery of the Transfiguration. By Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap. Servant, 144 pp. Transfiguration. By Dorothy Lee. Continuum, 168 pp. Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography. By Andreas Andreopoulos. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 286 pp. The Uncreated Light: An Iconographical Study of the Transfiguration in the Eastern Church. By Solrunn Nes. Eerdmans, 207 …
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Trumpets a recent Newsweek cover: “The UFOs Are Coming!” Even as long ago as November 1973 a Gallup poll came up with the startling information that a majority (51 per cent) of adult Americans believed that UFOs (unidentified flying objects) are real. And I daresay that the release of Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood blockbuster Close Encounters …
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To think that that mystics are engaged in a series of private, transcendent encounters with God betrays a superficial understanding, says Bernard McGinn. Christian mystics, in particular, are not breakaway contemplatives who find their own way to God. They are bearers and interpreters of a common tradition built upon a concrete revelation: God became human …
Article
Is it dangerous to dwell upon heaven? Many of the world’s great religious teachers seem to have thought so. Confucius told his disciples to pay respect to the spirits, but keep them at a distance; it was the will of heaven, he believed, that we keep our eyes trained on earth. What becomes of the …
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The bewildering proliferation of theologies in the last quarter of the 20th century contrasts sharply with the blends of liberal, existential and neo-orthodox theologies outlined by H. R. Mackintosh in his Types of Modern Theology in the second quarter of this century. One is bewildered not only by the sheer multiplicity of theologies but by …
Continue reading “Who’s Catering the Theological Smorgasbord”
