Externalizing Faith: Countering Individualism Through an Embodied Emphasis

While the importance of an embodied theology has been recognized, in light of recent literature that sees a growing modern-day shift from emancipated individuality to ideological individualism, the aim of this article is to deepen the theological reflection on the urgent need for a more intentional embodied emphasis. This strategic approach is particularly significant, since in spite of the current challenge there remains a tendency toward a disembodied, anti-liturgical orientation that prioritizes words and cognition, locating theological truth on the inside of the autonomous individual thinking subject, who remains free to either accept or reject its propositional content. Drawing from relevant literature that provides a conceptual framework, this article argues that especially in today’s context, an overt emphasis on the externalization of faith and the embodiment of theological normatives performed together in community offers more promising pedagogical effectiveness. A bodily focus is principally important since it provides an experiential platform for the communal enactment and consequent appropriation of religious knowledge, thus potentially circumventing the present challenge of increasingly rigid individualism.

Scarred savior: A sermon on crucifying an ableist God

This sermon addresses the necessity of embodied theology in order for Christ’s crucifixion to maintain practical relevance to marginalized people, specifically individuals with disabilities. Personal experience is combined with critical analysis in this reflection on “doubting Thomas” (John 20:24–29). According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, disabled people are one of the country’s most prolific minorities. Consequently, millions in the United States are experiencing visceral and debilitating pain not only from physical disabilities, but also from ableist micro-aggressions and ignorance. This sermon uses personal experience to describe how the church has insufficiently addressed disability. Thomas is a reminder that a Christ distant or unaffected by physical pain is irrelevant to human experience. A scarred, disabled Savior is necessary to put to death any notions of an ableist God. Crucifixion without scars would make a disembodied Messiah, and the disability community, one in which all take part as they age, cannot afford to follow a disembodied God. Modern bioethical debates make clear that the disabled body is considered a disposable one, so disabled people need to know their bodies are not disposable to God. If life consists only of waiting for death and resurrection, then God is of no more use to the disability community than the trite theologies used to poorly address it. This sermon is a challenge to imagine a God impacted by imperfections, a God for whom scars matter.

Eating the Forbidden Fruit: Pottery and Protestant Theology in Early Modern England

This article offers insight into Protestant attitudes towards food by exploring seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English delftware dishes and chargers decorated with the biblical motif of the Temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It investigates the biblical story and doctrinal assumptions that underpinned this iconography and considers how objects decorated with it illuminate the ethics of eating in the godly household and reformed culture. Analyzing a range of visual variations on this theme, it approaches this species of Christian materiality as a form of embodied theology. Such pottery encouraged spectators to recognize the interconnections between sexual temptation and the sensual temptation presented by gluttony and to engage in spiritual and moral reflection. Probing the nexus between piety and bodily pleasure, the article also seeks to complicate traditional stereotypes about puritan asceticism.

Thealogy Matters

In this article Carol P. Christ states that ‘thealogy matters’ because religious symbols not only articulate meaning but also provide orientation for ethical decision-making. Rejecting the notions that religious meaning is delivered from on high and that traditions must be uncritically accepted, she proposes a model of ‘embodied theology’ in which individuals and communities take responsibility for religious worldviews. She asks us to question Jungian theories of the feminine, images of the Goddess in patriarchal traditions, models of ritual practice in the Wiccan tradition as articulated by Gerald Garner, and the idea of divine omnipotence modelled on the ‘tyrant ideal’ of God. She explores two ways in which process panentheism can help us to understand the divine power we call Goddess.

Pentecostal Theology

The book Pentecostal Theology identifies the so-called ‘full gospel’ as a comprehensive theological narrative of the Pentecostal movement. The full gospel is essentially a liturgical narrative aiming at participation in Pentecost through an experiential, hermeneutical, and theological move to and from the altar that yields a biblically and theologically organized and embodied theology. The reviewers of the book have raised a number of observations concerning the systematic and constructive argument of Pentecostal Theology. This essay responds to the concerns by discussing the nature of theological inquiry among Pentecostals, the method of the full gospel, and the continuity and discontinuity in Pentecostal theology.