Category: Articles

J. Kameron Carter replies to questions concerning his recent work Race: A Theological Account. Carter expounds on his thesis that the problem of whiteness in the west may be traced to roots in early Christianity’s split with Judaism, explaining that it was the biologization of the split between that created the white, Christian race, as opposed to the Jewish, oriental race. Throughout Carter counters historic Christianity’s culpability in the genesis of racial reasoning with ways in which a proper Christology may offer ways of conceiving identity that may avoid the violence inherent in the discourse of modern identity politics, finding specific application with gender and other instances of oppositional identity formation in the modern west.

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Despite the significance of Philip Pullman’s award winning His Dark Materials trilogy, and the widespread acknowledgement that it contains anti-religious themes, there has been no serious theological engagement with this important work. This article is intended to address this lack. The key religious themes of the trilogy are isolated and are seen to reflect a characteristically modernist critique of religion as an outdated power structure, opposed to intellectual enlightenment. Hal Duncan’s less well known The Book of All Hours is utilized as a natural conversation partner to Pullman’s trilogy, one that, by contrast, reflects a much more postmodern understanding of power structures, in which the instinct to coerce is a universal human one, manifested in, but not limited to, religion. The conversation between the two works facilitates theological reflection on the gospel’s critique of religious practice and suggests that there is much in these books that the church should heed.

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Fantasy movies are structured by a Pelagian optimism, in which protagonists discover that they can solve their own problems. This contrasts with a more hopeful Christian anthropology, which locates human flourishing in the Triune God. The essay makes this case by a close theological reading of “Pleasantville,” structured around the movie’s climactic courtroom affirmation that “there are so many things that are so much better, like silly, or sexy, or dangerous or brief.”

In brief, “Pleasantville” recommends a silly life where people live as if actions bear no consequences; a sexy life where transcendent sex is the path to genuine self-knowledge and fulfillment; a limitless life that refuses external limits in the name of freely creating the self; and a mobile life that refuses to allow past promises to bind our futures. The essay disputes these points along the way, and concludes with the counter-suggestion that the Triune God is our true home.

This essay will suggest that Thomas F. Torrance may be read as a theologian of culture, and that in his writings may be found the clues and resources necessary for the development of a theology of culture that is distinctively Trinitarian. Those resources, in particular, may be found through thinking together his doctrines of God as triune Creator, creation as contingent and the human person as a ‘priest of creation and mediator of order.’ For Torrance these three ideas stand as the basis for ‘the ontological substructure of our social existence.’ This substructure both necessitates and generates what Torrance refers to as ‘social coefficients of knowledge.’ It is these social coefficients of knowledge that bear a striking resemblance to modern anthropological theories of culture, both in their formation and function.

A critique of dynamic-equivalence translation methodology forms the basis for insights intended to broaden the outlook of Bible translators. The same critique is extended from the Bible and shown to have pertinence to contemporary mission activities of the West reaching to Africa. Translation of people and projects is found to need the same attention as Bible translation, suggesting that merely translating the Bible but not theological and other curricula for Africa is problematic. Practical missionary advice based on careful study of the relation between language impact and cultural context related to real-life situations is given, along with reasons why ‘inappropriate’ missions methodologies these days all too often continue.