Tom Greggs

‘Jesus is victor’: passing the impasse of Barth on universalism

This is the PDF version of an article published in Scottish journal of theology© 2007. The definitive version is available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=SJT. The publisher version is included by kind permission of Cambridge University Press.

Ecclesial Priestly Mediation in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This article considers priestly mediation in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Little material exists in Bonhoeffer’s corpus that directly addresses the issue of priesthood. However, this article argues that the primary way in which Bonhoeffer construed priestliness is in relation to certain motifs associated with mediation focused on his theological approach to the church. There is a symbiotic twofold relationship in this. First, the article considers what one might think of as Bonhoeffer’s account of how the priestliness of the church is felt internally: Christ establishes a mode of sociality in the church which arises from mediation not only between God and humanity, but between human beings and other human beings; this is part of Christ’s salvific work. Second, there is an account of the external relationality established between the church and the world according to Bonhoeffer, whereby in Christ, the church shares in the task of vicarious representative responsibility for the world. This description of the church’s nature and life bears the hallmarks of priestliness. It is argued that for Bonhoeffer priesthood was an identity held collectively in the church as the person of Christ in the world today, rather than being a quality possessed by individuals, whether for all Christians or merely some.

David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), pp. 1092.

Without doubt, David Kelseys Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (henceforth, EE ) is one of the most significant and important contributions to the field of theology from this generation of theologians. The two-volume work of over a thousand pages (really one volume bound into two books because of its size) is Kelseys magnum opus , and arises from more than three decades of study and thought. It addresses directly and (properly) theologically central issues relating to humanity in relation to God and to creation (‘all that is not God’). This book has arisen within a theological setting of conversations with other members of the ‘Yale school’ (Hans Frei and George Lindbeck). Yet, there is a sense in which this book surpasses what that school of thought has offered thus far, not by beginning on an altogether different theological path, but by journeying further, and bringing what that theological approach has to offer to bear on one doctrinal locus in a way which the other key proponents of post-liberal theology have not yet done: Kelsey moves from discussing a theological method to using that theological method more fully and directly than has previously been the case in relation to the theological content of a single theological issue.

79.95.

In an age in which religion is a burning issue in the geopolitical sphere, the need for peoples of different religions to engage in inter-faith dialogue may seem clear; what is less clear is whether there is legitimacy for and an imperative to members of individual faith communities to engage with the religious other on the exclusive grounds of their individual faith. This article thus seeks to advocate that theology done in the service of individual faiths needs, as a priority, to engage in legitimizing and necessitating dialogue with the religious other as the religious other. The article considers the grounds on which exclusivist religious people can undertake inter-faith dialogue. In looking to the need to attend to particularity and the genuine otherness of the religious other, the article advocates that faiths should begin to understand what is internal to their traditions that makes inter-faith dialogue a necessity for intense and particular religious self-identity. Members of faith communities need to be legitimated on terms internal to their community and by leaders of their community to engage in dialogue with the other: they need to know not only how to engage with the other but also why they engage with the other. In considering the particular tradition of Christianity, the article attends to these themes by seeking hints from Scripture and Christ that a Christian should engage with the religious other in order to be more intensely Christian.