For most readers the conceptual elements of Whitehead's doctrine of God stand out more than the imaginative elements. If we take a more careful look at his understanding of the role of imagination in various realms and at his choice of particular images to illustrate his view of God, however, we can appreciate better the primary concerns that underlie his reformulation. We also find a consistency of purpose in relating images to his philosophical system and a richness that otherwise goes unnoticed. The shortcomings in his use of imagination result from a neglect of certain aspects of experience.

This essay studies the treatment of Jesus' crucifixion in contemporary theology. After presenting four influential systematic conceptions, it isolates four historical issues with immediate systematic implications and concludes with some reflections on principles for constructing and evaluating theologies of the cross.

Drawing lessons from literary dialogues on religious issues, this essay offers a rhetorical and hermeneutical analysis of the workings and achievements of theological discourse. The rationality proper to theological discourse is found to be a function of interlocutors' communicative actions and reactions, describing the social processes by which speakers sustain common space and time for persuasion and understanding. Standards of rationality are idiosyncratic not simply to individual cultural-linguistic frameworks, but to public, dialogical situations which speakers must create and sustain in their communicative interaction.

After tracing the history of the term “spirituality” and the discipline of spirituality up to the mid-twentieth century, this article describes the contemporary understanding of spirituality as lived religious experience and of the academic discipline which studies this subject. This phenomenology of the discipline grounds a position on the relationship between lived spirituality and theology on the one hand, and the academic disciplines of spirituality and theology on the other.

How different from each other are transcendental method and reconstructive hermeneutics as approaches to foundational theology? Not so different that there is no room for dialogue between Bernard Lonergan and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. Some parallel areas of concern which Lonergan and Schüssler Fiorenza develop idiosyncratically include the self-correcting process of learning, the role of faith in foundational theology, the relationship between experience and interpretation, and the specific connection within Christian foundational theology of inferiority with the data on Christianity. Imagining how the authors could be open to each other's theory yields points of complementarity.

Although Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism characteristically view each other only at great distance, the present article finds evidence of methodological similarity between leading figures of each tradition. The similarities between Karl Rahner and Edward John Carnell may be traced not to mutual influence, but rather to a common desire to overcome the epistemological weaknesses of Kant by means of beliefs and categories expressive of the Christian tradition which nonetheless appreciate the subjective beginning point of the modern period. In particular, this article explores the significance of Jesus within a theological approach broadly construed as transcendentalism It asks what role is played by an incarnate God in a theology whose distinctive mark is that all moral and cognitive progress is possible only on the presupposition of the existence of God, thus seemingly making an incarnation of God redundant. Through different perspectives, both Rahner and Carnell show on the contrary that it is only because God's character is to transcend Himself that the phenomenon and the question of human transcendence arise as possibilities at all. A summary critique suggests that Carnell's emphasis on cross is not as successful in making this point as is Rahner's on cross and resurrection.

Relativism is a central issue in anthropology, philosophy of science, and a number of other disciplines. It is usually contrasted with objectivism or foundationalism, the quest for universal and absolute norms. Richard Bernstein has recently written an illuminating overview of the relativist-objectivist tension and has sketched out a notion of rationality “beyond objectivism and relativism.” This paper is an effort to follow Bernstein's lead and consider the theological implications of objectivism and relativism and the attempt to move beyond them. The first two parts of the paper take up objectivism and relativism in their philosophical and theological forms. The third section briefly explores some aspects of a non-relativist and non-objectivist model of rationality.

A critique of the distinction in the Peace Pastoral between stating moral principles and addressing concrete questions. The distinction seems to be an example of the invalid dichotomy between analytic and synthetic truths; it is also inapplicable to the bishops' condemnation of nuclear war as a concrete action immoral in principle. Thus the use of the distinction introduced confusion into the bishops' interpretation of the principles of just war and obscurity into their conclusion about the concrete question of nuclear deterrence. A dialectical methodology, critically sounder and implicit in much of the pastoral, would have made their argument more consistent and more cogent.

This essay examines an approach to the first course which aims to be flexible enough to allow for a diversity of emphases reflecting the strengths and interests of specific teachers, but specific enough to justify its status as a core requirement and as the first course in theology. The correlation between theology and anthropology provides the key for maintaining this balance. The syllabus which illustrates this coalesces around several sets of interrelated images, questions, and themes which seek to formulate a theology for the head, heart, hands and feet.

This paper explores an issue raised by psychologist Robert Lifton in The Broken Connection. Lifton believes the present threat of total extinction through nuclear war has drastically affected humanity's ability to reconnect life and death, and to make individual death meaningful. The death of everyone—as an imaginable possibility—defeats all expressions of “symbolic immortality,” affirmations of continuity and hope.

How has Christian theology met this predicament? Twentieth-century history has been so menacing and overwhelming that some theologians have found in apocalyptic-eschatological imagery the most appropriate framework to encounter that history and discern its spiritual meaning. Yet this imagery, even when de-literalized, provides at best ambiguous answers. Early twentieth-century theology—Schweitzer, Case—recognized the importance of apocalyptic thought for the New Testament, but easily repudiated this for contemporary life. In contrast, later thinkers such as Cullman, Brunner, and Moltmann make extensive use of eschatological imagery. However, they face the problem raised by Lifton: how to make “hope” vivid to readers already gripped by a future of possible universal catastrophe.

Traditionally, western theologies have been systematic, orthodox, dogmatic, and ecclesiastical. Recently, however, liberal, neo-orthodox, philosophical, and radical theologians have begun to reform the theological enterprise, and in turn to prepare the way for what has been called “world theology.” Whereas the traditional theologian viewed other faith communities as less truthful than his or her own, the world theologian is the Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist who views other theologies and world views non-exclusivistically, and from within the other's viewpoint.

W. C. Smith captures the Janus-nature of this emerging world theology in one sentence—“All theology is self-theology, and yet it must exclude no one.” According to this assessment, today's theological task must be autobiographical (self-theology) and world-oriented (excluding no one). Each person's life-story is significantly related to each other's, for without personal history (autobiographical and biographical) theology reverts to a scholasticism of structures, rules, and restrictions, and without a world-orientation, theology retreats into exclusivistic, specialized edifices, and thereby surrenders any claim to speak to and for all humans.

Simone Weil was a mystic obsessed with the search for absolutes and with a holistic vision of the world. At the same time she was deeply concerned about the plight of the outcasts of society. This concern rooted her mysticism in reality and, like the biblical prophets, she decried societal abuses. She saw the Church as larger than the institution she was invited to enter through baptism. Her refusal to enter symbolically united her with the members of “common humanity” who were excluded from the institutional Church. This mystical vision was prophetic of the Church of Vatican II.

While awareness of feminist issues has not left its mark on all professors of theology, much less on all who teach christology, those whose awareness has been changed by facing these issues often find themselves asking how they can bring them to bear on courses with already substantial content. The point of raising feminist issues, however, is not a matter of adding content but of uncovering questions that have not been asked and of transforming the way we look at key areas of the discipline. This is turn leads to the discovery of new resources and new insights.

My own approach in teaching “Christ in Tradition and Culture” to undergraduates has been to uncover feminist issues and concerns that are in the mainstream of christology. I have done this by looking at scriptural, theological, and soteriological/spiritual perspectives that are central to the development of a contemporary christology. The purpose of this article is to share the ways I deal with feminist issues within the perspectives noted and to indicate some of the more important bibliographic resources that address them. Before examining issues that surface in the various perspectives, it may be helpful to underscore some aspects of feminist theology that should be kept in mind.

It is difficult to speak calmly and quietly about what one loves passionately, and next to my wife and my children I love the Catholic church more than any other thing. The passion for it has perdured all the years, and grows stronger the longer I live in it even though it must be said that my years with it have been far from easy. I do not love the church because I examined it and found it lovable; I loved it long before I could have examined it, and no examination has lessened my love for it. I cannot go back far enough in time or dig deeply enough in my psychic archaeology to find the root of that love. I think the root is the grace of God, yet I do have memories of important places and persons.