Browsing by Subject "Theological anthropology"

This dissertation takes up questions of how theologies and practices of baptism shape visions of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and a participant in Christian ecclesial communities. In particular, the dissertation investigates how baptism as the paradigmatic initiatory practice of the Church might transform communities to cultivate radical belonging for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

In order to address these questions, the dissertation engages a variety of methods, including historical and thematic analysis of theological texts (particularly in the field of disability theology), theological engagement of New Testament texts and biblical scholarship on the Pauline epistles, as well as an analysis of qualitative research conducted by the dissertation’s author (in-depth, semi-structured interviews) among adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, their families and key support persons, as well as clergy and lay leaders in Christian denominations across the ecumenical spectrum. An integrative analysis of theological texts, biblical texts, and narratives arising from the qualitative research analysis provides a foundation for constructive theological suggestions, in a practical and pastoral register, at the conclusion of the dissertation.

This dissertation concludes that a baptismal hermeneutic provides a critical lens to faithfully reflect on disability, as well as transformative practices to support the flourishing, belonging, and witness of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Christian faith communities. Baptismal theologies and practices suggest the centrality of communal, Jesus-centered, and participatory accounts of Christian identity in the Church – the community this dissertation names as the baptized Body. In particular, the dissertation commends practices of baptismal preparation, testimony, and reaffirmation as key avenues for participation of all people in ecclesial spaces (robustly inclusive of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities). These practices constitute transformative pathways to affirm the centrality of baptismal identity and baptismal vocation to discipleship for an ongoing, radical transformation of ecclesial life, empowered and sustained by the Holy Spirit. In addition, the baptismal hermeneutic and baptismal practices explored throughout the dissertation critically expand discourse on intellectual and developmental disabilities in the field of Christian theology.

This dissertation asks how the theological anthropologies of T. F. Torrance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Willie Jennings help Christians diagnose and subvert the idolatry of our current racial imagination. It concludes that an idol we can call “whiteness” competes with Christ to function as the mediator of social identity, our goal and ideal human, and the icon held between us. This idolatry interferes with our ability to become the people we are meant to be together in Christ by the power of the Spirit. This theological anthropology enables us to identify the idol of whiteness at work in popular media like blockbuster movies, and it equips us to undermine this idol through our engagement of the arts, popular or otherwise, so that we might together develop a new, healthier, and holier imagination.

In this dissertation, I develop a theological account of human embodiment by exploring the relationship between the liturgical practices of an Episcopal parish during Lent and Easter and church members’ bodies. My objective was to analyze the normative constructions of saved bodies at work in seasons that call attention to the body while also emphasizing sin, repentance, and salvation. I conducted qualitative research at a church in the American South using ethnographic methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, and I analyzed the body postures, gestures, movements, sensory experiences, and corporeal interactions that constituted the community’s liturgical practices as well as members’ personal experiences of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter in 2014. By examining the philosophical, theological, and social layers of how the church inhabited these seasons, I discovered that church members’ participation entailed implicit conceptions of bodies as malleable, as journeys, and as sensorially interactive, which are conceptions that tend to conflict with modern Western ideals of bodies as solid, whole, and independent from one another as well as from their surroundings. Yet rather than seeking to suppress these dimensions of embodiment, the church’s practices made bodily malleability, journeying, and sensory interaction normative for the bodily shape of salvation.

To exist racially "in-between," has been characterized as a tragic existence in the modern world. The loneliness and isolation of these lives have given rise to the term the "tragic mulatto." The dissertation Mulatto Theology: Race, Discipleship, and Interracial Existence theologically interprets mulatto lives making visible and interrogating the wider reality of racialized lives in modernity. The mulatto's body is significant in that it discloses what is masked in modern (and particularly white) identities.

Culture, identities (individual and communal) are not only interconnected, but they are mixtures where peoples become presenced in the lives and practices of other "alien" peoples. This mixture requires reflection upon the formation of all identities, and the ways these identities become visible within the world. Given this arc of identity any reflection upon Christian identity must articulate itself within the tensions of these identities and the practices that mark such identities within the world.

In examining the formation and performance of mulatto bodies this dissertation suggests these bodies are theologically important for modern Christians and theological reflection in particular. Namely, the mulatto's body becomes the site for re-imagining Christian life as a life lived "in-between." The primary locus of this re-imagination is the body of Christ.

A re-examination of theological reflection and Scripture regarding his person and work display his character as mulatto, or the God-man. But not only is his identity mulatto, but his person also describes the nature of his work, his re-creation of humanity. So

understood Christian bodies can be construed as "interracial" bodies -- bodies of flesh and Spirit that disrupt modern formations of race. The Christian body points to a communal reality where hybridity is no longer tragic, but rather constitutive of Christian discipleship. This new, hybrid and "impure" way of existing witnesses to God's redemptive work in the world.

Christian theology and discourse work by separating the human individual from “the environment.” The science of the human microbiome exposes the ecological, social and theological inadequacies of this and other western conceptions of the human individual. As multiple disciplines work to accommodate the reality of the human as a multispecies amalgam, the increasingly accepted anthropology of the holobiont presses against theological anthropology’s main trope of the imago dei. While the imago dei is classically identified as some combination of human freedom, self-movement and intellect, holobiont science suggests none of these are possible apart from our microbial symbionts. The idea that I am not myself without God may sometimes be forgotten, but the idea that I am not myself without microbes has scarcely been thought. At least it has scarcely been thought by theologians. Doing theology alert to the boundary-breeching microbe opens the door to a more symbiotic anthropology that re-centers humanity’s dependence on creation.

Barriers to developing a holobiont theology include not only a theological genealogy that is prone to set the human at odds with animality, but also a history whereby theology, theories of disease and a pasteurian microbiopolitics have co-evolved to support a habit of self-deceit that traces back to the Fall, both the event and the doctrine.

This dissertation develops a theology of the holobiont by fusing aspects and interests of relational theology, new materialism and animality studies to suggest imaging God and epistemology are symbiotic.

After addressing the crisis of the microbiome to theology, I analyze a history of the doctrine of the Fall and a history of disease to suggest that germ theory is a palimpsest of the Fall; it impresses upon, writes imperfectly over the still partially visible ancient doctrine of the drama of evil and sin. I construct a doctrine of the Fall and recovery from it in an ecological mode to show that symbiosis extends beyond matters of biology to matters of grace. A microbially-informed doctrine of the Fall as “turning to the wrong tree” paves the way for an embrace of holobiont theology. The project of holobiont theology exposes the ancient and theological distortions about being human that fund and amplify in germ theory, a modern epidemiological framework, and reforms these distortions by centering microbial matter in the story of how God makes, humbles and saves humans.

I test this thesis on the pivotal theologian of Thomas Aquinas. His treatment of spontaneous generation, his theology of digestion and personhood and his non-subject-centered, participatory way of knowing and being human anticipates holobiont theology. His doctrines of creation and anthropology are a fitting tool to think towards a holobiont theology that takes up the wisdom of indigenous accounts of the ecological body, where human and world support, absorb, assimilate and become each other without violation.

Christian theology and discourse work by separating the human individual from “the environment.” The science of the human microbiome exposes the ecological, social and theological inadequacies of this and other western conceptions of the human individual. As multiple disciplines work to accommodate the reality of the human as a multispecies amalgam, the increasingly accepted anthropology of the holobiont presses against theological anthropology’s main trope of the imago dei. While the imago dei is classically identified as some combination of human freedom, self-movement and intellect, holobiont science suggests none of these are possible apart from our microbial symbionts. The idea that I am not myself without God may sometimes be forgotten, but the idea that I am not myself without microbes has scarcely been thought. At least it has scarcely been thought by theologians. Doing theology alert to the boundary-breeching microbe opens the door to a more symbiotic anthropology that re-centers humanity’s dependence on creation.

Barriers to developing a holobiont theology include not only a theological genealogy that is prone to set the human at odds with animality, but also a history whereby theology, theories of disease and a pasteurian microbiopolitics have co-evolved to support a habit of self-deceit that traces back to the Fall, both the event and the doctrine.

This dissertation develops a theology of the holobiont by fusing aspects and interests of relational theology, new materialism and animality studies to suggest imaging God and epistemology are symbiotic.

After addressing the crisis of the microbiome to theology, I analyze a history of the doctrine of the Fall and a history of disease to suggest that germ theory is a palimpsest of the Fall; it impresses upon, writes imperfectly over the still partially visible ancient doctrine of the drama of evil and sin. I construct a doctrine of the Fall and recovery from it in an ecological mode to show that symbiosis extends beyond matters of biology to matters of grace. A microbially-informed doctrine of the Fall as “turning to the wrong tree” paves the way for an embrace of holobiont theology. The project of holobiont theology exposes the ancient and theological distortions about being human that fund and amplify in germ theory, a modern epidemiological framework, and reforms these distortions by centering microbial matter in the story of how God makes, humbles and saves humans.

I test this thesis on the pivotal theologian of Thomas Aquinas. His treatment of spontaneous generation, his theology of digestion and personhood and his non-subject-centered, participatory way of knowing and being human anticipates holobiont theology. His doctrines of creation and anthropology are a fitting tool to think towards a holobiont theology that takes up the wisdom of indigenous accounts of the ecological body, where human and world support, absorb, assimilate and become each other without violation.