Christian Teaching as Trinitarian Kenotic Praxis of Love: A Practical Theological Approach

This article seeks to construct a model for holistic Christian teaching grounded in the trinitarian kenotic praxis of love from the practical theological perspective. As a praxis of mutual caring, Christian teaching is considered as participating in and modelling the trinitarian kenotic praxis of love to help learners live the eschatological reign of God in the world. Christian teaching is a hermeneutic process and an interdisciplinary and missional enterprise that emphasizes conversation and solidarity with the world.

Promoting the Constants of the Mission with Muslims in Today’s Middle East

One of the most important facts that the Second Vatican Council has revealed is that the point of the Church is not itself, but to go beyond itself, to be a community that preaches, serves, celebrates, and witnesses to the reign of God with due respect to the text and context. During the past century, the Church of the Middle East experienced the absence of an authentic missionary enthusiasm and the lack of a clear and pertinent theology with which it could face the challenge presented to Christianity by Islam. This challenge resides in its special role and mission before the Muslims, which this paper will further discuss and, in doing so, answer the question, How can the Church of the Middle East try to approach the Muslims in a time of violent Islamic fundamentalism and persecutions, in a region where most of the Christians are opting to remain distant or to emigrate?

Debra Mumford, Envisioning the Reign of God: Preaching for Tomorrow

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Liturgy and Public Theology

Liturgy is an act of public theology, when considered from the point of view that Christian ritual performance is publicly enacted for the sake of a wider public, and joins the assembly to Jesus Christ, who is himself God's logos tou theou and God's liturgy. Liturgy does this work through its scripted repetition, formality, spatial and temporal patterning, focus on the body, and deployment of the familiar and unfamiliar. Through these modes, a worldview is enacted and valorizes a certain set of virtues and an orientation to living that correspond to that worldview. Among those virtues are gratitude, a desire for reconciliation, the recognition of our dependency of God and responsibility toward others, and a compassionate commitment to the dignity of humanity and the created order. These ritually enacted virtues, practiced in the hope for the full and coming reign of God, will orient the liturgical assembly to particular social, moral, political concerns as worthy of Christian engagement; but liturgical formation will not, in most cases, prescribe detailed courses of action to take when facing specific instances of those concerns.

Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark

The thesis of this study is that the Markan Jesus’ activities of healing and exorcisms are evocative of resurrection of the body. Through the accumulation of these stories Mark communicates that Jesus has come to address the problem of human mortality in the light of the nearness of God’s reign. These activities anticipate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, which pioneers the purification of the body at the turn of the ages. I show that Mark’s presentation of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms crucially reflects ideas of (im)purity in Jewish scripture and tradition that are bound up with mortality. In the light of this background, I show that Mark presents Jesus’ healings and exorcisms as anticipations of his bodily resurrection. These resurrection-type stories depict the movement from the mortality incurred by defiling diseases or defiling spirits to the immortality of God’s reign. The repetition of resurrection-type healings that eventually culminate in Jesus’ own resurrection suggests that the announcement of God’s reign is not only about responding to the call for repentance from sin (1:14–15), but also about having one’s body raised. Thus, Mark presents not only a theology of the cross, but also a theology of the resurrection as the purification of God’s people.