Oliver Davies

The Sign Redeemed: A Study In Christian Fundamental Semiotics

A Christian engagement with the question of the nature of the sign has to begin in a theology of the creation. Signs exhibit features of both reference and address. The meaning of the incarnation is that in a world of Gods making the referring signs which constitute the world also implicitly function as divine address. The words of institution of the Lords Supper, taken as an integral part of the Passion narrative, are the fulfilment of this addressive function of the world and thus also mark the point at which the Church is constituted as the human community who are called to receive the divine address.

Theology of transformation : faith, freedom, and the Christian act

I: FOUNDATIONS: THEOLOGICAL RE-ORIENTATION II: CHURCH AND LIFE: CHRIST IN US III: SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: NEWNESS OF WORLD

Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place

New data is emerging from evolutionary anthropology and the neuroscience of social cognition on our species-specific hyper-cooperation (HC). This paper attempts an integration of third-person archaeological and second-person, neuroscientific perspectives on the structure of HC, through a post-Ricoeurian development in hermeneutical phenomenology. We argue for the relatively late evolution of advanced linguistic consciousness (ALC) (Hiscock in Biological Theory 9:27–41, 2014), as a reflexive system based on the ‘in-between’ or ‘cognitive system’ as reported by Vogeley et al. (in: Interdisziplinäre anthropologie, Heidelberg, Springer, 2014) of face-to-face social cognition, as well as tool use. The possibility of a positive or negative tension between the more recent ALC and the more ancient, pre-thematic, self-organizing ‘in-between’ frames an ‘internal’ niche construction. This indexes the internal structure of HC as ‘convergence’, where complex, engaged, social reasoning in ALC mirrors the cognitive structure of the pre-thematic ‘in-between’, extending the bio-energy of our social cognition, through reflexive amplification, in the production of ‘social place’ as ‘humanized space’. If individual word/phrase acquisition, in contextual actuality, is the distinctive feature of human language (Hurford in European Reviews 12:551–565, 2004), then human language is a hyperbolic, species-wide training in particularized co-location, developing consciousness of a shared world. The humanization of space and production of HC, through co-location, requires the ‘disarming’ of language as a medium of control, and a foregrounding of the materiality of the sign. The production of ‘hyper-place’ as solidarity beyond the face-to-face, typical of world religions, becomes possible where internal niche construction as convergence with the ‘in-between’ (world in us) combines with religious cosmologies reflecting an external ‘cosmic’ niche construction (world outside us).

Cognition, Emotion, and the Ethics of Authenticity

In this chapter, I argue for a connection between religions, with their emphasis upon the unity of reason and emotion, and our everyday beliefs, developing an argument from neuroscience on the observable character of this unity. I will suggest that this unity is brought about through a process of convergence, between our linguistic consciousness and pre-thematic social cognition, and that this convergence is already encoded in the work of a medieval theologian such as John Duns Scotus, where Scotus poses questions about the structure of cognition in the beatific vision.

Transformation Theology and Pentecostalism

In this article, in dialogue with Pentecostal theologians, I argue that our contemporary science allows us to return to a transformational account of the embodied self and the material world, with implications in particular for both Christology and pneumatology and their relation. On the basis of a reading of Acts 2.32–36, in which Christ in heaven ‘pours forth’ the Holy Spirit upon the first Church, I argue that the reality of the living Christ for us is itself the work of the Holy Spirit and itself communicates the work of the Spirit. This suggests the possibility of a Trinitarian koinonia which points to the unity of the Spirit-filled doxology and devotion of the worshipping Church on the one hand, and to the active life of discipleship through our acts of following Christ on the other.

The Challenge of the Past: Meister Eckhart, Reasoning and Contemporary Philosophy

Abstract It is argued that a fundamental shift took place in the application of cognitive terminology in theological discourse between the pre-modern and modern periods. For Eckhart, the cognitive term (intellectus), which denotes how we know God, remains embedded in ordinary cognition and witnesses to the ‘miracle’ of true perception by our creaturely mind in Gods world. This constitutes a ‘transformational’ model. In the Post-Kantian period, Jacobi separated ‘reason’ from ‘understanding’, allowing the emergence of a ‘transcendence’ model of the human mind in relation to God. In a modern debate between Marion and Derrida, Marion seeks to deploy ‘intuition’, a precise term in Husserlian phenomenology, to refer not only to knowledge of things but also to knowledge of the ‘divine excess’ in things. But he has to generate a rhetorical language of cognition, through exploiting possible theological associations of the term. With Derrida, we probe the legitimacy of this.

Book Review: Theology and Culture

conform to the changes in the series, and addition of some discussion in the footnotes. 3. Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter (BECNT; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2005.

Theology and Culture

39.99. pp. xvii + 364. ISBN 0–8010–2674–1). This is the most significant of the four commentaries being reviewed. Jobes identifies three fresh contributions she makes to the study of the text. First, the addressees were converted elsewhere prior to being displaced to Asia Minor; second, the Septuagint is employed to elucidate the interpretation of 1 Peter; and third, she utilizes the principle of ‘bilingual interference’ to argue that Greek was the author’s second language (xi). The introduction provides a sound overview of key issues that arise from the text, exegetical comments are balanced, and there is helpful interaction with secondary sources. 4. Grant R. Osborne, Revelation (BECNT; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2002.

Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation

49.99. pp. xx + 869. ISBN 0–8010–26299–1). Discussions concerning Revelation seem to be beset with terms such as preterist, premillennialism, and dispensationalist which often seem to have greater significance in a North American context than in a British or continental setting, unless one comes from a tradition influenced by the teachings of J. N. Darby. Osborne helpfully clarifies a number of these terms and adopts a synthetic approach, cherry-picking what he sees as the strengths of these positions. He maintains that the Apocalypse shares the same author as the Fourth Gospel (2–6); and was written in response to oppression and social ostracism under Domitian in the mid-90s (6–9). Interestingly 1 Clement is used to support this hypothesis, but no arguments are provided to link that document with the mid-90s, rather such a dating has become ‘canonized’ by repetition. Osborne has produced a solid treatment of the text, but there is little here that could not be found in earlier commentaries.

A Theology of Compassion: Metaphysics of Difference and the Renewal of Tradition

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