“Illius sponsi thalamus fuit uterus virginis”

This article examines the image of Mary’s womb as the bridal chamber in which the Word and the flesh, the divine and the human natures of Christ, are united. The image presents the reader with a paradox – the Word and the flesh engage in a divine unification and comingling in the womb of the virgin. The study traces the development of the image in the earlier works of Augustine, and contextualises it within Augustine’s later thought, in which the body and sexuality are considered in a more positive light. The study aims to demonstrate that Augustine’s structuring of incarnational theology served as a framework for his views on sexuality – prelapsarian, postlapsarian, and eschatological sexuality – and the discourse of the incarnation, especially in his later thought, should be seen primarily as a discourse of sexuality.

Ritualizing Christian Iconic Texts

Christian iconic texts are easily recognizable books and images that signify Christian scripture. From the earliest forms of Christianity until the present day, Christians have used their iconic texts, such as Bibles and Gospel books, in rituals such as processions and displays that create and maintain the legitimacy of the tradition and its adherents. Related to the incarnational theology of God’s Word, early Christian rituals often claimed to make Christ present in ritual spaces, so that Bibles operated as icons. After the Reformation and Protestants’ denials of most objects and images for worship, the Bible became the primary ritual object and image for Christian salvation. It is this ritual dimension of scripture that adds value, meaning, and power to the text when it is read or performed.

Geoffrey Hill’s Poetic Incarnational Theology

Geoffrey Hill’s poems are saturated with the cluttered bleakness of the nihilistic view of the natural world, but in Hill’s own Christian incarnational theology it is precisely this filthy world into which Christ was incarnated in order to redeem humans from Original Sin. Fortified with but also rattled by the Incarnation and the doctrine of Original Sin, in his poems Hill is faced with the profound, agonizing existential choice to embrace Christ or reject Christianity as a farce, and it is this perilous pose that serves as the theological grounding of the oeuvre the man who now, sadly, was the greatest contemporary Christian poet.

Conclusion

This brief, final chapter, summarizes the main points made in the previous chapters to demonstrate the relevance of Bonhoeffer’s theology for our time. In creatively appropriating biblical and patristic anthropology for our modern age, Bonhoeffer contributes important insights to Christian reflection on current debates about human nature, politics, and secularity. In drawing his insights from the Christ-centered, incarnational theology of the greater tradition, Bonhoeffer’s work also possesses a deeply ecumenical appeal much needed for our time. His Christian personalism, together with his careful correlation of the nature-grace relation appeals to Eastern Orthodox theologians and strongly resembles the integral humanism of Catholicism in thinkers like Henri de Lubac and Jacques Maritain. Given our present postmodern, secular culture, Bonhoeffer’s hermeneutic theology, his humanist ethics, and integral humanism offer exactly the biblically based, philosophically informed and ecumenically appealing model of engaging life, i.e., the kind of Christian humanism, Christians ought to consider in responding to current cultural issues.

Moving Forward

The Augustinian vision of humankind, on which so much Christian thinking about war is based, is false. Thanks to Darwinian evolutionary biology we know there was no original couple, Adam and Eve; there was no eating of the apple; there is no original sin. We are not innately depraved in this way. Morbid fatalism is inappropriate. The killer-ape vision of humankind, on which so much Darwinian thinking about war is based, is equally false. Thanks to updated Darwinian evolutionary biology, we know that we did not evolve in the violent ways often presumed, and that in major respects we are designed to avoid war. Culture, particularly agriculture, changed much of that and war became common. Changing this is not to go against our nature. Naïve optimism is no more in place. There is hope of more constructive engagement between Christians and Darwinians. On the Christian side, there are alternative theologies to Augustinian Atonement theology, notable Incarnational theology, not dependent on a literal Adam and Eve. On the Darwinian side, there are fresh empirical findings and interpretations, with truer understandings of human history and nature. Perhaps now, together, we can move forward the debate on the nature and causes and possible ending of human warfare.

Born from below: Urban regeneration through incarnational theological formation in Guatemala City and beyond

This article sets out to describe the development of and engagement with a global training collaborative around the formation of urban ministry leadership committed to the act of loving cities and working for peace. The collaborative is an initiative of Street Psalms called the Urban Training Collaborative and each urban training hub has agreed to be shaped and formed by an Incarnational Training Framework (ITF). The ITF was constructed over a 20-year period in the midst of a global missional community made up of leaders from cities all over the world. The ITF is infused by an incarnational theology as interpreted from below and focused on the message, method and manner as exemplified in the life and mission of Jesus Christ such that messengers are free of fear and unleashed to love their cities and seek their peace. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ animates faith-based engagement around the complex issues of poverty, injustice, social inequity and violence, and shifts paradigms from scarcity to abundance, theory to practice and rivalry to peacemaking. To shed light on the practical outworking of an incarnational theology from below, we will critically reflect on Guatemala City as a case study to illustrate how the formation of a city-wide missional community was developed through engagement around the aforementioned ITF which led to the corresponding paradigm shifts and then subsequently seeding a global training collaborative

Shaul Magid, Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity and the Construction of Modern Judaism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 271 pp.

This chapter reviews the book Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity and the Construction of Modern Judaism (2015), by Shaul Magid. In Hasidism Incarnate, Magid shows how incarnation works in Hasidism and discusses the potential of Hasidism to mediate between Judaism and Christianity. According to Magid, Hasidism’s theology is incarnational: as in Christianity, he argues, God in Hasidism becomes incarnate by suffusing human beings with divinity. Magid builds on an extensive set of writings by Elliot Wolfson regarding how the medieval kabbalists adopted a theology of incarnation. As opposed to medieval Jewish mysticism, however, Magid believes that Hasidism developed “outside the Christian gaze,” which gave it the freedom to adopt an incarnational theology without the need for apologetics. He views Hasidism as modern in that it lays the groundwork for a real dialogue with Christianity, even if that was not its original intention.

The Face of the Contemporary: Lost World Fantasies of Finding Lot’s Wife

Chapter six examines a relatively unknown Victorian lost-world romance fantasy, Alfred Clark’s The Finding of Lot’s Wife (1896). The novel converts the legend of Lot’s wife, traditionally a cautionary tale of moral turpitude, into a stark lesson on the perilous consequences of intercultural contact in the Orientalizing theatre of colonial Palestine. Clark’s central contribution to the Sodom archive, however, resides in the novel’s prescient staging of a world in which insights associated with Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology of myth converge with the theological residue in Levinas’s writings – notably, the self-emptying action of kenosis, which Levinas takes from Pauline incarnational theology. Clark is no theologian, but his interest in the ethical provocations of kenosis is as keen as Levinas’s—and perhaps more viscerally arresting because of its narrative immediacy. This feature powerfully contributes to the innovation The Finding of Lot’s Wife brings to the Sodom archive. Clark’s ingenious intertwining of Blumenbergian and Levinasian treatments of myth effectively imagines the urgent contemporariness of the legacy of Lot’s wife. Clark shows how the lethal and reparative dimensions of that legacy asymmetrically impinge on each other, producing an arresting narrative image of dread commingled with hope and urgent consequence.