Browsing by Subject "Barth"

This dissertation explores the meaning and importance of migration and home for the Christian Life in the context of modernity and the colonial history of the Americas. In doing so, it offers a constructive theological proposal that addresses two interrelated questions. First, what does a truly flourishing human life look like in view of the realities of migration and home? That is to say, how are migration and home aspects of God's created order that are deformed by human sinfulness yet still caught up in the eschatological renewal of all things? Second, can Christianity, despite its role in the colonization of the Americas, offer a vision of migration and home that leads to the flourishing of all creatures? This dissertation addresses these questions by locating the realities and experiences of migration and home within the Triune drama of God's creative, reconciling, and redemptive work as enacted within the story of the Americas—its peoples, lands, and cultures, from the moment of colonization up to our current modern moment.This study makes a methodological contribution to the fields of Reformed and Latinx theology by engaging in a mode of ressourcement from the margins. In dialogue with the works of Karl Barth, George Tinker, Willie Jennings, and Latinx theologians, like Virgilio Elizondo and Ada María Isasi-Díaz, I demonstrate how Christianity's eschatological vision of all creation joined together in Christ by the Spirit provides an alternative to a colonial and modern vision of home grounded in the commodification of the land, the destruction of native cultures, and the segregation of peoples into racial and national enclosures. Moreover, I argue that the Virgin's appearance to Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico in 1531 summons the Church to look for God's redemptive homecoming at the margins of society where the political, economic, and socio-cultural negotiations that displaced peoples make in order to make a home in the world become the site of the Spirit's reconciling and redeeming work in creation. The final chapter provides a theological account of what sociologist Paolo Boccagni describes as the "migration-home nexus" by arguing that a flourishing human life takes place at the nexus of migration and home and the forms of political, economic, and cultural negotiations and mestizaje that this nexus produces. I argue that through these, the Spirit works to transform creation into the eternal home of God. I conclude by drawing on the notion of ‘transplantation’ to describe wise ways of migrating and homing in anticipation of the Triune God's redemptive homecoming.

This dissertation explores the implications of the doctrine of providence for Christian life in the context of racialized modernity, offering a constructive theological response to two interrelated questions. First, how should Christians relate the doctrine of divine providence to the task of political judgment? That is, how should doctrinal accounts of the nature and shape of God’s ongoing activity in history between creation and eschaton inform attempts to come to specific judgments about what God is doing in and through particular historical events? Second, how has whiteness insinuated itself into and distorted Christian attempts to discern the movement of God in history? In short, the dissertation engages divine providence not simply as a doctrine, but as a hermeneutic—a theological lens through which to actively interpret the world in relationship to God—and, more specifically, as a hermeneutic with a problematic history of identifying God’s providential action with the interests and activities of white Christian peoples.

In dialogue with the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Barth, and James Cone, the dissertation examines the role played by the doctrine of providence in both theological justifications (Hegel) and critiques (Barth, Cone) of modern theories about European progress, the superiority of Western civilization, and white racial supremacy. I argue that Hegel articulates his problematic vision of providence through an operation of Christological displacement, wherein the figure of European man replaces Jesus Christ as the human subject in relationship to whom world history and global humanity find order, meaning, and purpose. I then turn to Barth and Cone, interpreting their writings on providence and divine action as critiques of the theological problem on display in Hegel.

Through analysis of this conversation within modern Protestant theology about providence, politics, and race, I outline a set of conditions for contemporary theological reflection on these matters. These include commitments to the centrality of the incarnation of Jesus Christ for conceptualizing providence, to the creatureliness of human beings, and to the active work of the Holy Spirit. I also argue that contemporary engagements with the doctrine must address two problems which neither Hegel, Barth, nor Cone sufficiently resolve: the persistent masculinity of Christian accounts of providence and a competitive construal of the Spirit-Son relationship.

The final chapter formulates a constructive hermeneutic of providence in light of these conditions. I develop an account of divine providence as the two-fold work of the Holy Spirit in (1) making Jesus Christ present to creation between ascension and eschaton and (2) enabling human creaturely participation in Christ’s providential presence. Building on themes in womanist theology and contemporary pneumatology, I suggest that the work of the Spirit manifests in three characteristic activities in particular: the Spirit gives life to ordinary, overlooked, and oppressed material bodies; the Spirit joins, drawing those who would normally be strangers and enemies into intimate relationships; the Spirit anticipates the end of time in the midst of the present. By way of conclusion, I suggest how this hermeneutic of providence might help to shape particular judgments about where, how, and in whom the Spirit is making Christ present in the specific context of Durham, North Carolina in the second decade of the twenty-first century in light of the resurgence of thinly veiled white supremacist politics and the rapid gentrification of historic black communities facilitated by urban revitalization initiatives.

As a work of Christian dogmatic theology, this dissertation proceeds from the primary theological claim that human existence in time is determined by the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. It also examines how the predominant accounts of time in the modern West have been affected by, and produced by, claims of scientific authority. The implications of these accounts are not only a matter of abstract doctrinal and philosophical reflection. Instead, they have had, and continue to have, concrete ramifications for human life together. They have been death-dealing rather than life-giving, characterized by a set of temporal pathologies that participate at the deepest level in marking some lives as expendable.

There are four particular pathologies that this project addresses in turn. The first is the mystification of theology by questions of human origins, especially as those questions are addressed by figures of scientific authority. The second is the problem of progress and politicized eschatology, in which securing a desired vision of the future becomes a human project. The third is temporal distancing, in which some human beings are marked as temporally retrograde or outside of history. The fourth, and final, problem addressed is the Hegelian perspective outside of time from which time is evaluated.

This dissertation offers a set of Christological temporal recalibrations through a reading of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, highlighting the ways that both figures rejected an approach to time that is not coincidentally intertwined with a racialized account of history, and with the co-opting of Christianity by the modern Western state. It also suggests how the liturgical calendar may, and may not, provide Christians with the formational resources to think differently about their own time, and about their neighbors.

With the rise of the modern nation-state in recent centuries, "the people" has emerged as the most determinative concept of human community, the decisive imaginary for negotiating and producing human difference. It has become the primary basis for killing and the measure of life and death. John Howard Yoder sought to articulate the Christian political alternative in the face of the violence of modern peoplehood, a violence that cannot be understood apart from its anti-Jewishness. After expositing Yoder's account, I argue that it is inadequate insofar as it does not attend to God's election of Israel. I then trace the rise of modern peoplehood from "the West," particularly in the case of the people of the United States, in order to expose both the peculiarly Christian racism that has informed it and the key trope of "new Israel" for the imagination of political independence and exceptionalism. Following this historicization and analysis of modern peoplehood, I build critically on Karl Barth's account of the elect people of God in order to offer a Christian understanding that can subvert the violent, racist tendencies of modern political formations and embody a peaceable alternative in the midst of them. I sustantiate my Christian account of peoplehood as determined by God's election of Israel in Messiah with readings of key passages in the Tanakh/Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Epistle to the Romans.