Circumcision in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture
Let us move now to the second example of the cultural politics of the circumcision of Jesus and its representation interpretation. This brings us closer to home historically and geographically and rescues me from troubled waters of New Testament exegesis and the sharks within those waters ready to take lumps out of unwitting theologians who wander in there untrained, unlettered. The circumcision ofJesus, as already mentioned, has been celebrated by the Church since the sixth century, but it...
The Divine Subject
Irigaray starts her examination of the relationship between divinity and human sexuality elsewhere, and that is why we will pursue the alternative avenues for thinking incarnation that her work opens up. Religion plays such a central role in her thinking because of its implications for the psycho-sexual development of the subject. As she writes 'To posit a gender, a God is necessary guaranteeing the infinite If women have no God, they are unable either to communicate or to commune with one...
Kenosis Philippians 2511
Much of what follows rests upon an interpretation of seven verses in this Pauline epistle in the Jewish context of Isaiah's suffering servant . Therefore we begin our exploration of the configurations of the doctrine of kenosis with exegesis. This is not because my exegesis can avoid being any less impartial than anyone else's, but because we need at the outset a detailed map of the kenotic trajectory. In this way we can locate particular emphases placed by theologians on one part of the...
Kenosis and the End of Modernity
The doctrine of kenosis was not a point of intense theological debate until the seventeenth century, but because here my concern lies with the doctrine at the end of rather than the entry into modernity, we will pick up kenosis as it came to be developed in the nineteenth century by Lutheran theologians. The focus of the doctrine is now upon the religious self-consciousness of Jesus. The contents ofJesus the Christ's consciousness as the focus for understanding the man God paradox dominate the...
Irigarays Christ
In her long review article of Schussler-Fiorenza's book In Memory of Her, entitled 'Equal to Whom ', Irigaray declares that she began the book with astonishment and joy only to find she was eventually disappointed. Her joy lay in Schussler-Fiorenza's reconstruction of the women in Jesus's life 'The way in which they are described in the text bears the hallmarks of Aphro-ditism.'24 The text here is the Gospels as Schussler-Fiorenza read them. By 'Aphroditism' Irigaray refers to a female...
Eschatology and the Economy of Desire
Mimesis like allegory and irony always functions through mirroring repetition that creates significances and, by associating one object or event 33 This is a good place to introduce a book whose presence has been, for the most part, subliminal throughout this study Frank Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1979 . Kermode's fundamental observation about Mark's Gospel 'a good deal of the story seems concerned with failure to understand the story' p. 69 is...
a The sexuate body of the Son of Man
Can we really speak of incarnation if we castrate the Christ 'What Christ did not take, he did not redeem', Gregory of Nazianzus among other early 52 London Routledge, 2001, pp. 97-116. Church Fathers reminds us.53 By an evasion of his sexuality are we not already setting our feet, if not on some docetic trajectory, then on a path leading towards Apollonian enhypostasis the heresy Gregory is countering There is a need to explore what it is to be sexuate, a person experiencing all the passions...
On the Eros of the Ecclesial Body
Allow me to step back at this point, because in order to develop this argument in terms of Christology and ecclesiology, I need first to define the formation of a Christian 'enmattered soul', since discipleship implies a formation, a following, a disciplining such that the knowledge attained is a knowledge of Christ. In other words, if the 'enmattered soul'is determined by the body's negotiations with other bodies, then what is distinctive about this determination when those negotiations...
c The Trinity and ecclesiology
Difference, thought theologically, is rooted in the difference of hypostasis in the Trinity the operation of God in the world opens up the recognition 77 The wounded body of Christ, even following the resurrection, can perhaps be understood theologically in terms of a love that cannot operate beyond the violences which are the necessary consequence of the forced relations within which all objects and actions participate. Irigaray's insistence on the primordiality of sexual difference, while...
Christology Mimesis and the Economy of the Spirit
It is in Mark's Passion narrative that the complex inter-association of Christology, story-telling, discipleship and a theology of history realised through the working of the Holy Spirit achieves its most profound expression. The movement of the Spirit through historical contingencies, that has governed the sending and now the handing-over of the Christ, is paralleled by the operation of faith in the disciples and in the readers of listeners to the narrative . Both movements or economies...
Flows
Two Greek terms are at the theological heart of understanding motion and flows kenosis and pleroma. These terms are also the theological heart for our third topos, relation. This is a giving of oneself that can only come from the ongoing and endless reception of the other. This outpouring, both divine and human, is only possible, and for human beings only sustainable, in terms of the infinite plenitude of God's ousia. Here lies the basis for a sociality that is the burning vision in all...
Beyond Dogmatic Enquiry
If what I am setting out is a different agenda for Christology today, these essays are only exercises that go towards fulfilling such an agenda. Nothing here is systematic, but the essays written here over the last ten years are trying to clear a space in which a more systematic work can appear. Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile indicating as clearly as possible how, specifically, does the approach to Christology in these essays differ from and supplement the approach found in more...