An opening chapter that addresses literary issues in the first book of the Bible, along with a review of some major works of influence scholarship that have shaped the field.

This chapter introduces the key metaphysical concepts that are integral to understanding the nature of time. It also critically assesses the leading arguments in this intellectual landscape, arguing that there are compelling metaphysical reasons to endorse a B-theory or C-theory and reject all A-theories (particularly presentism, the growing block, and the moving spotlight).

The book comes in three parts. In Part I I set out the full extent of incarnational theology, in terms of abundance, relationship, transfiguration and blessing. I explain seven ways in which my account seeks to correct the ways conventional theology departs from a truly theocentric approach. This is a story about God (rather than us). It is a story about Jesus (rather than overcoming sin and death). It is a story of abundance (not deficit). It is a story of God’s sovereignty (not rules God must obey). It is a story about Jesus from the beginning (not just from the annunciation). It is a story of flourishing (not inhibition). It is a story in which God’s means and ends are identical.

Why would anyone ask such an odd question about a possible connection between Christology and biology? Of course, here we mean the classic Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, as formulated by the Great Councils of the historic church, and the best information in contemporary biology, as presented in the best peer-reviewed scientific journals and texts. But, again, why would anyone be interested in pursuing answers to this very specific question? One reason is that both important areas, Christology and biology, have much to say about the nature of humanity. We must see if the respective narratives are compatible or incompatible. Another reason is that we seek a comprehensive worldview and must explore how Christology and evolutionary biology might fit in that overall conceptual framework.

Artificial intelligence (AI) as an object and term remains enmeshed in our imaginaries, narratives, institutions and aspirations. AI has that in common with the other object of discussion in this Cambridge Companion: religion. But beyond such similarities in form and reception, we can also speak to how entangled these two objects have been, and are yet still becoming, with each other. This introductory chapter explores the difficulty of definitions and the intricacies of the histories of these two domains and their entanglements. It initially explores this relationship through the religious narratives and tropes that have had a role to play in the formation of the field of AI, in its discursive modes. It examines the history of AI and religion through the language and perspectives of some of the AI technologists and philosophers who have employed the term ‘religion’ in their discussions of the technology itself. Further, this chapter helps to set the scene for the larger conversation on religion and AI of this volume by demonstrating some of the tensions and lacunae that the following chapters address in greater detail.

Introduction; Barth’s theology of religion in the Church Dogmatics.

The idea of ‘sublimation’ in Hegel and Barth

Certain stories act upon us. They shape the way that we see, encounter, and understand the world. A phenomenological approach to a narrative encounter with the world in terms of the mythic helps to illuminate a certain sensibility that mediates the world to human persons such that it is experienced as meaningful. Understanding the mythic in terms of a sensibility rather than in terms of a genre of literature or a form of cultural expression sheds light on how mythopoiesis is not a phenomenon restricted to archaic societies and the tales of either a bygone age or a culture or religion not our own. Among the most visible places of such mythopoiesis is so-called ‘mythopoieic literature’, fantasies that actively play with the sense of the possible, with narratives shaping the lives of characters, and what can be brought to the surface when meaning and being more closely and obviously co-inhere. A phenomenology of play, both in terms of the ludic fancy of the mythic and fantastic and the perception-shaping power of a game’s rules over the players, opens up the way that stories act upon our perception of the world and the meaning that we encounter.

The introduction introduces the concept of imagination used in the book, explains the relation of art and of faith to this concept, and discusses the approach and method of the book, highlighting its understanding of theology and theology’s relationship to phenomenology and to other disciplines. The introduction concludes with an overview of the plan of the book.

David Hume’s famous argument against believing miracle reports exemplifies several key issues relating to the emergence of modern naturalism. Hume uncritically assumes the universal and unproblematic nature of core conceptions such as ‘supernatural’ and ‘laws of nature’. Hume’s argument also presents him with a dilemma. He relies upon the weight of testimony to establish his case against believing miracle reports, but must also contend with the weight of testimony, across different times and cultures, to the existence of the supernatural. Hume resolves this by an appeal to historical progress accompanied by a dubious racial theory. These enable him to discount testimonies emanating from the past and from other cultures. ‘Hume’s dilemma’ has not gone away and, if anything, is even more acute since the traditions and beliefs of non-Western cultures are now more difficult to dismiss on the basis of dubious historical accounts of Western exceptionalism. This dilemma amounts to a tension between the ethics of belief and the demands of epistemic justice.

In an introductory way, and in the context of ‘embracing subjectivity,’ the claims of being ‘spiritual but not religious’ (and of its ‘pop-culture pantheism’ version) are examined in relation to their associated rejection of ‘doctrinal religion’. Both the Origenist sense of ‘seeming history’ in scripture and Vladimir Lossky’s sense of the meaning of ‘mystical theology’ are seen as relevant to exploring the importance of this rejection of doctrinal religion, especially in relation to Lossky’s focus on the way in which theology should not be seen as abstract and discursive but as essentially contemplative in nature. The relevance of divine action understandings to the concept of religious pluralism is outlined, and five theses are set out that link a naturalistic perspective on this action with the revelatory experience that is the basis of any religious tradition.

Chapter 1 considers the academic teachers who were instrumental in Ratzinger’s formation and the historical theologians he engaged with in the shaping of his own theology.

The first part of the chapter offers three reasons for going beyond the three most common types of approach in exclusivism, pluralism or inclusivism (always seen as culminating in one’s own religion). These are the transformations of the modern world in which other faiths are now often one’s immediate neighbour; changing perceptions of the origins of the major faiths (in which the impact of specific contexts is fully acknowledged); and the need to reject over-simple explanations for religious phenomena, whether from believer or non-believer. The second part then presents the preferred model of revelation across the religions as rather like a beautiful but incomplete pattern only partially visible on broken pots. Taking the revelatory dimension seriously involves going beyond the ‘equalities’ of pluralism in two ways: entering sympathetically into the historical evolution of each of the religions and being prepared to identify where that religion might carry better or more profound truth than one’s own.

David Tracy’s theological formation and work stretch across more than five decades of his emergent ‘theology-in-culture’. Diachronically, this essay highlights: (1) the influence of Bernard Lonergan; (2) how Blessed Rage for Order (1975) articulated a ‘critical not dogmatic’ theology turned towards a ‘twofold crisis’ of Christian meaning in post-Christian times and modern meaning in post-modern times; (3) how The Analogical Imagination (1981) clarified this ‘mutually critical’ reading-together of historical tradition and contemporary situation, opening it to radical problematisings of interpretation and culture; and (4) how this then has led Tracy to identify cultural and religious classics as ‘fragments’ and ‘frag-events’. Taken as a whole, Tracy’s theology-in-culture follows ‘an analogical paradigm’ that regards the human creature as having a transcendentally driven grace-informed nature, in spite of tragedy and sin. Hence, art and conversation remain theological hopes for Tracy, and when the noble endeavours of modernity yield to post-modern fragmentation even this remains hopeful for Tracy, because humans inhabit an invisible infinity which exceeds the visible world.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

This chapter recounts the history of theological and philosophical discussions about whether there are, or could be, other habitable worlds beyond Earth.

Volf and McAnnally-Linz ask to what extent the Christian obligation to be grateful to God should be construed as a burden. By placing Martin Luther and Anthony Kronman in dialogue with each other, Volf and McAnnally-Linz take issue with the debt-creating view of gratitude as repayment, proposing in its place an account of gratitude as a joyful recognition of the divine gift-giver.

Rome, in the year 590, was beset by the plague.1 On 25 April, Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) called for a procession to take place at dawn. The faithful gathered in groups around the city, and, singing and praying, walked through the streets towards the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the first churches built in Rome in honour of the mother of Christ. Eighty people died from the effects of the plague as they walked towards the church. Pope Gregory met them upon their arrival, and the procession continued on its way, preceded by a picture of the mother of Christ said to have been painted by Saint Luke. In the version of this legend in The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, we are told that ‘voices of angels were heard around the picture, singing’.2 The sacred image cleansed the air of infection, ‘as if the pestilence could not withstand its presence’.3 As the procession neared the fortress that was to become known afterwards as Castel Sant’Angelo, Saint Michael the archangel appeared sheathing his bloody sword. From this, Gregory understood ‘that the plague was at an end, as indeed it was’.4

What possesses a cisgender woman to attempt a constructive theology of gender variance? The fact I have used the term ‘cisgender’ already marks me out for some readers as someone who accepts the reality and legitimacy of the concept of gender and holds that ‘normative’ and ‘unmarked’ modes of sex, gender, and sexuality are themselves contested and in doubt. For some ‘gender-critical’ readers, including gender-critical radical feminists,1 my use of the term ‘cisgender’ renders me a ‘handmaid’: someone in thrall to an agenda being imposed by trans people, particularly trans women, to the detriment of those who have lived as women and girls since birth. For some conservative Christian readers,2 ‘cisgender’ strikes a note of caution of a slightly different kind: it suggests that I do not accept that gender must, to be a licit reflection of the orders of creation, supervene on physiological sex only in certain ways. ‘Cisgender’ is not an unproblematic term by any means,3 but it has the advantage of making clear that trans people are not the only ones to have a gender and that there is no such thing as an unmarked default when it comes to sex and gender identity.4

This chapter introduces the concept of providential naturalism by way of discussion of contemporary perceptions about “scientific” and “religious” explanations of phenomena in nature. It also introduces the specific historical and geographical context -- early modern England -- on which the book focuses.

This chapter argues that there is a logical aporia at the very heart of the Chalcedonian Definition: namely, that Jesus of Nazareth contributes nothing to the constitution of the “person,” or, said differently, that he stands in no real relation to the Logos. This aporia has its origins in a twofold historical pressure: the desire to affirm a unified subject and in Gregory of Nazianzus’ declaration that “the unassumed is the unhealed.” Throughout this chapter the historical conditions for this aporia are explored in the theologies of Origen, Apollinaris, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cyril of Alexandria. The chapter argues that the majority of the bishops at Chalcedon followed Cyril in making the preexistent Logos as such to be the “person of the union,” leading to this aporia in the Chalcedonian Definition. The chapter ends with John of Damascus’ Christology and his solution to working with the given Chalcedonian definition.