Session 1: Joint session with the Paul Seminar
Review panel: Matthew Novenson, Paul and Judaism at the End of History (CUP, 2024).
Session 2
Invited paper: Andrew Torrance, University of St Andrews, ‘Knowing the Cosmic Christ as the End of Creation’
Christopher de Stigter, University of Durham, ‘Necessary Knowledge: Paul and Modern Apophaticism’
Since the rise of Kantian epistemology, there has been a steady movement towards apophaticism in modern theology. This is evident in the ubiquitous insistence upon God’s ‘non-objectifiability’ or ‘wholly otherness’ (Bultmann, Barth), the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and humanity (Kierkegaard), and the grammatical limits of ‘God talk’ (McCabe). Knowledge of God, even knowledge through revelation, is bracketed by human finitude and divine transcendence. This epistemological turn often relied on Paul for its exegetical support. I argue, however, that Paul sits uneasy next to this modern apophaticism. I explore this through two interrelated loci: 1) Paul’s Christology and 2) Paul’s epistemology of love. In short, Paul’s Christology requires a necessary connection between knowing the man Jesus Christ and knowing the essence of God’s love. If this claim is sustained, it reframes and limits the undergirding claims of modern apophaticism. Any remainder or apophatic caution regarding theological knowledge is not due to the philosophical limits of human knowledge or the metaphysical distance of God, but in the surplus of knowing God in Christ.
Session 3
David Johnson, Regents Theological College, ‘Calculating Affects: Affects, Embodiment, and the Epistemology of Wisdom in Revelation 13.18’
What knowledge does? What scripture does? This paper explores the interplay between Affect Theory and biblical interpretation, drawing insights from the author’s Pentecostal context where experience plays a significant role in understanding scripture. Affect Theory, emerging from various disciplines, assumes humans are non-dualistic, seeking an integrated mind-body experience. Moving beyond the linguistic dominant worldview, Affect Theory analyzes feelings, emotions, passions, bodily experiences, and affects, asking what the biblical text does. By considering pre-cognitive affects, embodied forces, and ‘sticky’ moments, the paper seeks to understand the relational, political, and transformative nature of affects in shaping epistemology by examining Revelation 13.18 as a case study. The paper investigates the affective dimensions of the call to have ‘wisdom’ in calculating the number of the beast. In addition to considering the interpretative possibilities of the text, the paper contributes by examining what this process does to the readers. The paper considers the nature of wisdom in Revelation by discerning the impact and experience of this difficult process on readers.
Emma Swai, ‘“I was blind but now I see”–The Theology of Seeing-Knowing in Contemporary Worship Lyrics’
New Testament depictions of healing can be texts of terror for disabled Christians; contemporary worship music has that same potential embedded within its use of disability as metaphor and narrative prosthesis. This is particularly true with reference to the use of the see-knowing blended metaphor domain, where blindness is designated as the state from which someone with spiritual knowledge or understanding departs.
The function of worship lyrics as a method of communicating knowledge and theology has been historically recognised, one example being the statement ‘Methodism has always been able to sing its creed’ in The Methodist Hymn Book of 1933. If worship lyrics conceivably shape and embed cultural knowledge, they can also reinforce theological assertions (Saterlee, 2009); Christian traditions use ‘ableist language and metaphors, without examining the values at the heart of the oft-repeated hymns and stories’ (Lawson Jacobs and Richardson, 2022).
Using the example of blindness, this paper will argue that although worship lyrics are mediated objects of New Testament writings, they actually display a different theology of disability and spiritual knowledge. Whereas New Testament authors can both employ and challenge metanarratives of blindness through the utilisation of nuance, such as in the depictions of Bartimaeus (Mark 10) and Paul (Acts 9; 22; 26), original linguistic analysis evidences that contemporary worship lyrics display a more binary model, positioning visual impairment as explicitly and unequivocally a negative lack of spiritual knowledge, thereby creating the linguistic exclusion of blind Christians.
Through its comparison of New Testament and worship lyric depictions of blindness, this paper will demonstrate how worship lyrics create a theology of knowledge which marginalises visually impaired people on the basis of their inadequacy in Christ, in opposition to New Testament perspectives.