Sarah Coakley

Religious motivations for cooperation: an experimental investigation using explicit primes

The role of religion in human cooperation remains a highly contested topic. Recent studies using economic game experiments to explore this issue have been largely inconclusive, yielding a range of conflicting results. In this study, we investigate the ability of religion to promote cooperation by using explicit theological primes. In the first study, conducted in a church, we find that subjects who report a stronger connection with a Christian passage about charitable giving are subsequently more likely to cooperate in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game. In the second study, conducted over the Internet, we find that Christian subjects are more likely to cooperate after reading a Christian passage than a neutral one. However, in the same study, we find that Hindu and secular passages have no significant effect on Christians, and that none of the passages (Christian, Hindu, or secular) have an effect on non-Christians. Our results show the potential power of explicitly religious exhortations that promote cooperation, and also their selectivity.

The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God

This paper examines the obsession with the “body” that has been such a marked feature of late-twentieth-century Western culture, and argues that it hides a profound eschatological longing. By throwing into contrast the work of the contemporary secular feminist Judith Butler and that of the fourth-century church father Gregory of Nyssa, an ironic set of thematic continuities between them is highlighted. Despite their great differences in metaphysical commitment, both authors seek to upend gender binaries and to envisage a labile “body” capable of creative gender transformations. It is argued finally that Gregorys more explicit eschatological horizon satisfies a latent longing for the divine in Butlers complex (and much disputed) work.

The spiritual senses : perceiving God in Western Christianity

Introduction Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley 1. Origen of Alexandria Mark J. McInroy 2. Gregory of Nyssa Sarah Coakley 3. Augustine Matthew R. Lootens 4. Gregory the Great George Demacopoulos 5. Pseudo-Dionysis the Areopagite Paul L. Gavrilyuk 6. Maximus the Confessor Frederick D. Aquino 7. Alexander of Hales Boyd Taylor Coolman 8. Thomas Gallus Boyd Taylor Coolman 9. Bonaventure Gregory F. LaNave 10. Thomas Aquinas Richard Cross 11. Late medieval mystics Bernard McGinn 12. Nicholas of Cusa Garth Green 13. Jonathan Edwards and his Puritan predecessors William J. Wainwright 14. John Wesley Mark T. Mealey 15. Hars Urs von Balthasar and Karl Rahner Mark J. McInroy 16. Analytic philosophers of religion William J. Abraham Bibliography.

Introduction: Disputed Questions in Patristic Trinitarianism

This special issue of Harvard Theological Review is devoted to a critical discussion of fourth-century Christian trinitarian theology, a topic that is now in a significant new phase of scholarly debate amongst both historical and systematic theologians. The papers and conversation published here arose from a day-conference on 5 May 2006 at Harvard Divinity School, when a number of invited scholars and doctoral students from Yale, Chicago, Emory, Fordham, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, and St. Vladimirs Orthodox Theological Seminary, joined the students of the Harvard conference course, “Trinitarianism and Anti-trinitarianism: The Christian God in Dispute” (Spring 2006), for a day of shared papers and public debate. The immediate focus of the event was a roundtable on Lewis Ayress important new book, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and that discussion—in extended format—now makes up the first part of this issue. Other papers from students then followed, supplemented by comments from senior members from the floor. In the second part of this issue, two of those original papers, along with two other specially commissioned pieces—on Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine, respectively—extend and refine the debate outlined in the first part. This brief introduction will explain the wider significance of this ongoing debate about patristic trinitarianism, both East and West, and outline what this issue of HTR contributes to it.

Prayer, Politics and the Trinity: Vying Models of Authority in Third–Fourth-Century Debates on Prayer and ‘Orthodoxy’

This article presents a theory about a distinctive, but still neglected, approach to trinitarianism in the early church which was founded explicitly in demanding practices of prayer and personal transformation. The central thesis of the article is that this approach (with its characteristic appeal to Romans 8, and its Spirit-initiated prayer of an elevated or ascetic sort) was set on a course of almost inevitable tension with certain kinds of episcopal authority, and particularly with post-Nicene renditions of ‘orthodoxy’ as propositional assent. The theory is not to be confused, however, with a rather tired sociological disjunction between institution and ‘charisma’; the matter is spiritually more subtle than that, and implies vying perceptions of theological power, ‘orthodoxy’, and the nature of the ecclesial body. In this article I opt for a focus on the relation between Origens De oratione (one of the finest discussions of the implications of Romans 8 for Christian contemplation), the suggested influence of Origen on early Antonite monasticism, and the still-mysterious motivations for Theophilus’ first attack on Origenism and the monks of Nitria in 399. The picture that emerges, once this distinctive prayer-based approach to the Trinity is clarified, is one of a late fourth-century crisis of simultaneous rejection, domestication and attempted assimilation of this elite spirituality of intra-divine incorporation.

Why gift? Gift, gender and trinitarian relations in Milbank and Tanner

The category of ‘gift’ has become one of the central constellating themes for discussion in recent post-modern theology. This paper (originally given as an address at the AAR meeting in Atlanta, November 2003) first sets out to explain how and why the theme has come to exercise such fascination since the original appearance of Marcel Mausss anthropological monograph, The Gift , in 1924. It goes on to provide a critical comparison of the recent treatments of ‘gift’ in the systematic work of John Milbank and Kathryn Tanner. Arguing that questions of economic justice, inner-trinitarian relations and human gender hang together in Milbanks and Tanners rather different approaches to ‘gift’, a critique of both authors is then essayed from this systematic perspective. Whilst Milbanks attempt to ‘ground’ the gender binary in the Trinity causes question-begging claims about gendered ‘difference’ in God, and a texture of seeming assent to economic inequalities, Tanners obliteration of any sense of reciprocity or exchange within the divine economy veers in the opposite direction, seeking merely the suppression of difference. Returning finally to the New Testament, to the Cappadocian insistence on radical donation to the poor, and to Augustines insistence that donum applies specifically to the Spirit, it is concluded that the patristic heritage presents a more demanding and subtle account of divine ‘gift’ and human response than is found in either of these contemporary authors, for all their insight and flair.

Evolution, Cooperation and Ethics: Some Methodological and Philosophical Hurdles

Secular evolutionary theory presents a profound challenge to theological ethics in pressing the question of how ethics is related to derived instincts. As an introduction to the essays that follow, the meaning and significance of evolutionary cooperation is here briefly set out along with a sketch of some dangers attending the exploration.

Re–thinking Gregory of Nyssa: Introduction—Gender, Trinitarian Analogies, and the Pedagogy of The Song

This paper serves first as an introduction to the essays gathered in this collection on “Rethinking Gregory of Nyssa”. The critique of the so–called “de Regnon” paradigm for Nyssa’s Trinitarianism is laid out, and the significance for a new ecumenical rapprochement between East and West indicated. Some new principles are then outlined for reading Nyssa’s “spiritual” and exegetical corpus in tandem with his more polemical and apologetic writings on the Trinity, such that the Trinitarian themes in The Commentary on the Song of Songs, especially, along with their novel messages about “gender”, become seen as an intrinsic part of Nyssa’s contribution to Trinitarian theology.

Visions of the Self in Late Medieval Christianity: Some Cross‐Disciplinary Reflections

In a volume devoted to philosophy, religion and the spiritual life, I would like to focus the later part of my essay on a comparison of two Christian spiritual writings of the fourteenth century, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing in the West (1981), and the Triads of Gregory Palamas in the Byzantine East (1983). Their examples, for reasons which I shall explain, seem to me rich with implications for some of our current philosophical and theological aporias on the nature of the self. Let me explain my thesis in skeletal form at the outset, for it is a complex one, and has several facets.

Creaturehood before God

by providing its ideological underpinnings but also in some structural dualisms of its own. Branches of the Church differ, but in many of them there is still a very strong dualism between clerical and lay people, with the former regarded as having the authority and the truth on their side, and the latter as being the weak and ignorant flock who must be told what to think and what to do. Significantly, the branches of the Church with the most strongly institutionalized hierarchy are also the branches that find it hardest to allow women to be ministers, in many cases still refusing their ordination. Once we have noticed the way in which the fundamental dualisms on which western culture rests perpetuate themselves in increasingly alienating structures, this stance by the male-dominated ecclesiastical hierarchies is unsurprising; and it becomes clear that what is needed is not simply such changes as would permit women to be ordained into the existing structures, but a fundamental change in the structures themselves and a whole revisioning of the Church, humankind, and the whole world, along holistic rather than dualistic lines. And this is what feminism is about. GRACE M. JANTZEN