Union Seminary quarterly review最新文献

{"title":"Jesus and the Divine Name","authors":"R. K. Soulen","doi":"10.7916/D8251HHP","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8251HHP","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"14 1","pages":"47-58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71363961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Apophasis and the Trinity: On the Enduring Significance of Revelation for Theology","authors":"G. Morgan","doi":"10.7916/D88K78F5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D88K78F5","url":null,"abstract":"Plato understood that describing God is impossible.2 However, according to Gregory of Nazianzus, to know God is even less possible.3 Gregory radicalizes apophaticism in this way as a critique of Eunomius and his claim to know the divine nature by definition as that which is without origin. However, one can take apophaticism in at least two very different directions. One direction might argue that because God is unknowable and ineffable, therefore, in the words of Sallie McFague, “all language about God is human construction and as such perforce ‘misses the mark’.”4 Accordingly, one might argue that very few or even no religious or theological claims are any more inherently valid than another, and that such claims are to be evaluated by strictly moral or pragmatic considerations; theology should likewise progress from dogmatics to the methods of the general study of religion.5 However, another way of taking such radical apophaticism is precisely to recognize the enduring significance of revelation for theology. Rather than the final word, God’s ineffability and transcendence presupposes God’s condescension and revelation in the Trinitarian economy. The following paper is an exercise in historical dogmatics. In it I attempt to offer what Paul Ricoeur called a non-violent appeal concerning the enduring significance of revelation for theology, and its implications for how we should think of theology as a discipline and the methods that we use in its study. In this endeavor, I have chosen to draw extensively from Gregory Nazianzen’s Theological Orations, but complimented by material from Catherine LaCugna, Paul Ricoeur, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther. I have taken this route not in order to","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":"96-113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71364984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Moving Heaven and Earth: A Womanist Dogmatics of Black Dance as Basileia","authors":"Eboni Marshall Turman","doi":"10.7916/D8RN3764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8RN3764","url":null,"abstract":"What difference does heaven make for black women? What does it mean for black women to consider heaven? Does an announcement of the difference heaven makes or the assertion even that heaven makes a difference at all, matter for black women when the hellish truth of life too often scars the everydayness of their social and spiritual realities? These are decisive questions, especially for black women in the Black church—those preaching women, “mothers” of the church, Sunday school teachers, powder room attendants, choir soloists, ladies’ ushers, daytime receptionists, pastor’s aides, and pew warmers—all who count themselves","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":"122-141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71367871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chapel Reflections on the Start of the Iraq War","authors":"C. Morse","doi":"10.7916/D8G44PN2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8G44PN2","url":null,"abstract":"This is an occasion, I am sure, that all of us have hoped would never come. With every effort to prevent a military invasion of Iraq now having failed, we find ourselves meeting with a full scale war underway and the misery that it brings. For those who will most bear the brunt of the misery there is, of course, no time for reality television or academic discussion such as this. For the people on the ground in Iraq, the Iraqi population and the men and women of the Allied forces ordered there into battle—whose average age is younger than that of most graduate students—the demands of this hour are more immediate and in many ways, no doubt, beyond our comprehension. We must mean more than a platitude to say, in the first instance, that our prayers are for all who at this moment are suffering and dying and directly threatened—and for those who are trying to end the carnage and to care for them. The ten minutes that Dean Keller has invited us to speak set a useful limit that forces us to concentrate our attention on what each of us sees as most crucial to our vocational situation. The assignment has led me to question my own theological responsibility and what this task calls for at the present time. I confess that I have a very low tolerance for talk as rationalization about suffering, especially my own talk. Day and night finds no lack of “talking heads” on television delivering their opinions. Preachers exchange their sermons, retired generals boast of our latest weapons, academics rush into publication, politicians do their photo-ops. It all strikes me sometimes as exploitation—using the pain of others to increase our own particular network ratings. The most important witness to me after Nine Eleven came not so much from speeches or learned articles but from two business friends of mine whose task it was to determine who was alive and who was missing among the hundreds of employees in their firm at the World Trade Center. For days and many nights they worked over employee lists, calling families, checking and rechecking, with no time for talk about their agonizing or the “much speaking” (Mt. 6:7) going on around them. They simply turned to the immediate task at hand. There comes a time and place when faithful witness does call for speaking, and then we pray that it will not be idle chatter but a word that is needful, a word that conveys more power than our own. A statement from the book of Acts regarding Paul before King Agrippa has often seemed to me to epitomize such crisis situations. As Luke recounts the scene, Paul says, “And now I stand here on trial for hope in the promise made by God to our ancestors” (Acts 26:6). I call this verse to mind as one brief way of noting what strikes me as several of the most crucial points of a faithful calling. 1. “anD now I staNd hErE.”","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":"190-194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71365862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond Consolation: The Significance of Failure for Faith","authors":"Heather Wise","doi":"10.7916/D8H41QR0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8H41QR0","url":null,"abstract":"Christopher Morse, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor Emeritus of Theology and Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, teaches how to “test the spirits,” not only of the tradition, but also of we ourselves, as theology witnesses our transformation into who God made us to be.1 The following presentation, which I gave on April 25, 2013 at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College for non-theologians engaged in an interdisciplinary seminar series, shows how Morse’s work influences theology and theology’s engagement with other disciplines, so we can best find what it means to be human, or, as Bonhoeffer emphasized, following the apostle Paul, that “God is for us.”2 In gratitude for all Morse has taught me about doing dogmatics as a “theology of freedom”—each one of us invited to test the evidence presented because God, as “the One who loves in freedom,” can be trusted to confirm or convict what we conclude—I write as a witness to what God is doing and the difference it makes in our lives and communities as my mentor has so faithfully done for decades.3","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":"142-155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71366282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Faithful Disbelief: Christopher Morse Between Foucault and Barth","authors":"Wickware, E. Marvin","doi":"10.7916/D8SN08BH","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8SN08BH","url":null,"abstract":"“And what do you do?” As a graduate student studying Christian theology in a country that increasingly expects education institutions to focus primarily on the production of tech-savvy laborers,1 this is quite an awkward question. What role do academic theologians play in this kind of educational system? What is the task of theology in this context? In pursuing answers to these questions, I return to one of the first works on theology I studied, written by one of my first theology professors: Christopher Morse’s Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief. In Not Every Spirit, Morse examines the task of theology (in particular, dogmatics, that field of theology concerned with the faithfulness of claims regarding God), and rehearses the theological work he prescribes. As I will be focusing on the task of theology in this paper, I will engage with the corresponding section of Morse’s book here. Not Every Spirit begins with Morse’s claim that “to believe in God is not to believe in everything.” In other words, while the emphasis in some churches may be on what ideas about God or authorities on God are to be believed, such belief necessarily implies a disbelief of other ideas and authorities. Christian faith is, then, a matter of “faithful disbelief.”2 Morse clarifies this notion of faithful disbelief by comparing it to doubt and skepticism. Doubt refers to the “distrust of God that remains present even within our struggles to be faithful.” Skepticism is centered on the claim that one should not believe something without having been presented sufficient evidence. Faithful disbelief, by contrast, is a matter of discerning what one is called, by faith, to disbelieve. It is not about the distrust of God, but the distrust of what is not of God. It is not about the justification of belief in God, but about what that belief rejects as unjustifiable.3 So, while doubt and skepticism are each of value to an academic theologian and likely to any Christian, Morse rejects them as orientations that are definitive of theology, in favor of faithful disbelief. This provisional rejection is grounded in Morse’s reading of the Bible, rather than in a philosophical opposition to doubt or skepticism. This notion of a call to faithful disbelief, as well as the title of Morse’s book, is drawn from 1 John: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":"59-65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71368078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hearing the Music of the Festschrift: A “Listening Guide”","authors":"Heather Wise","doi":"10.7916/D8BK1BN1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8BK1BN1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71365264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Testing the Spirits","authors":"Trevor Eppeheimer","doi":"10.7916/D8319V6R","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8319V6R","url":null,"abstract":"Because I know that Christopher Morse is no fan of indulgent tributes or excessive sentimentality, I will keep these introductory remarks brief and restrained, except to say that learning from, working with, and befriending him have profoundly shaped me, both as a teacher of Christian theology and a person. At present my students at Hood Theological Seminary helpfully receive much of his wisdom and insights into the discipline of “dogmatic theology” through his influence on my thinking and approach to the same. I first met Christopher Morse at Yale Divinity School while enrolled in an excellent course he offered there in spring 1997 on twentieth century Christian theology. Two years later I entered the doctoral program at Union Theological Seminary as his student in systematic theology, completing my dissertation under his helpful direction in 2006. He married my wife and me in 2003 and today my two children, Nicholas and Grace, refer to him affectionately as “Uncle Kit.” I have read his excellent, one volume Christian dogmatics, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief, well over twenty times, cover-to-cover. Although it is commonly recognized to be in the “canon” of recent introductions to Christian theology, there remains in that book a treasure trove of insights and methodological ingenuities that wait patiently for other theologians to encounter and critically engage in print. One of these is the vision of theological education Christopher puts forward in Not Every Spirit’s first three chapters. After being tasked to deliver the 2014 Closing Convocation address at Hood Theological Seminary, I decided to use the occasion to present that vision to the Seminary community the night before graduation exercises. What follows is the text of that address, given May 16, 2014.","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":"10-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71364112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sed Contra, Ergo, Responsio: Honoring the Legacy of Christopher Morse as a Teacher of Christian Theology","authors":"D. Spencer, M. Walsh","doi":"10.7916/D8K35T05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8K35T05","url":null,"abstract":"In the fall of 1991, with two years of course work toward our doctoral studies completed, we began two years of work as UTS Tutors for Professors Christopher Morse and James Cone in the introductory theology sequence of ST103 and ST104. To say this experience was formative would be an understatement. A central component of Christopher’s ST104 course, Foundations of Christian Theology, was gaining skills in theological argumentation in order to demonstrate how Christian doctrines can be applied to contemporary issues. Generations of Union students developed this skill through writing Utrum essays. In this exercise Christopher adapted the steps of “theological dialectic” set forth by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. We were lucky to be working with Christopher as he was completing his seminal work, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief, and enjoyed applying the Utrum form to the foundational theological claims. In Not Every Spirit Christopher states, “The purpose of this exercise is to develop the complementary skills in addition to doing scriptural exegesis and historical exposition required for what is called “dialectic,” meaning here the pros and cons of argument involved in adjudicating disputed issues, a task of dogmatic theology as a “testing of the spirits.”1 Reading dozens of Utrum essays and watching Christopher demonstrate this skill in many classes over two semesters of tutoring ST104 shaped our own theological method profoundly. Learning to examine contemporary theological and ethical issues through the Utrum format remains one of the most important intellectual and academic skills we gained in our doctoral programs at Union. When we were approached individually to contribute to a volume honoring Christopher and his career we responded enthusiastically “Yes!” Given our joint work together as tutors with Christopher we thought it appropriate to coauthor an essay for this festschrift by choosing two contemporary issues central to our own current work and using the Utrum format to examine them and develop our own positions. That is what follows in the two sections below.","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":"26-41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71366781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Approaching Calvin Today in “The Spirit of the Explorer”","authors":"C. Morse","doi":"10.7916/D8QN6636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8QN6636","url":null,"abstract":"A century ago at Union Seminary where I teach in Manhattan a public celebration was held in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. The speaker on that occasion in 1909, a distinguished theologian of the day, began his address by apologizing for the difficulty of saying anything original or new about Calvin. “There are,” he remarked, “certain great thinkers whose systems it is possible to approach in the spirit of the explorer, conscious as one turns each page of the chance of some new discovery; but with Calvin it is not so.”1 I am happy to have this opportunity to be with you today because I have found this judgment not to be true. For some years it has been my privilege to offer a seminar on Calvin’s theology for graduate students. Most, but not all, are Presbyterians or members of the Reformed Church in America, and they enroll in the course not because they especially want to, but because they are trying to meet ordination requirements. They often begin the course with a sense of apprehension, sometimes even dread, because of the negative associations that have come to surround the mention of Calvin. A typical example in my files is an editorial in The New York Times that once described the faltering prospects of a political candidate by saying that he sounded “buttoned-up, moral, serious to the point of sour,” in short, “like the model Calvinist” (NYT, 10/9/84). One very bright and committed student a couple years ago may serve as an illustration of what I mean by beginning the study of Calvin with a sense of apprehension. Ian and his wife had just had their first child a few months before and were overjoyed at this birth of a beautiful little boy. When he agreed to give one of the first reports on the reading early in the course he did a power point presentation in which he showed the class pictures of this endearing child. And then flashing beneath them on the screen lines from Calvin that speak of “the whole human race delivered to the curse and degenerated, bound over to miser-","PeriodicalId":83394,"journal":{"name":"Union Seminary quarterly review","volume":"65 1","pages":"181-189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71367657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}