Church Podmatics

Simon P. Kennedy’s March 2022 article in the Journal of Religious History, “The Decalogue, Resistance, and Political Obedience in Early Protestant Thought” provides an outline of how key figures in church history have interpreted and applied the command to ‘honour your father and mother” in regard to our relationship with other authority figures. In this episode, we not only discuss the article, but also the theology and Christian ethics behind and drawn from these historical insights that Kennedy has provided.

Kennedy has written a book expanding on this subject, called “Reforming the Law of Nature: The Secularisation of Political Thought, 1532–1689” (Edinburgh University Press, March 2022)

Katherine Sonderegger's May 2022 article in Pro Ecclesia, "The Bible as Holy Scripture", argues that modern understandings of scripture have been overly determined by notions of either "history" or "story",  and the result is that the Torah has been diminished, and that Messianic readings have come to be seen as the only legitimate mode of Christian interpretation. Sonderegger wants to challenge all of this by paying attention to Scripture's self-identification as writing, as "Holy Book". 

In this episode we discuss Ian McFarland's 2022 article "Rethinking Nature and Grace: The Logic of Creation 's Consummation", available in the International Journal of Systematic Theology.

Professor McFarland address an old and important theological problem, of how to construe the relation between 'nature' and 'grace' in such a way that both continuity and discontinuity may be maintained between the life of creatures now and that of eschatological consummation. Arguing that both Catholic and Protestant treatments of the problem have left the conundrum intact, McFarland proposes to reframe the question around David Kelsey's notion of different modes of grace. It's a novel approach that has some intriguing possibilities for how we think of both this life and the life to come. 

In this episode we discuss Michael S. Burdett's 2022 article "Incarnation, Posthumanism and Performative Anthropology: The Body of Technology and the Body of Christ." It is available in the journal Christian bioethics. 

According to Burdett, posthumanism is more pervasive than we realize, both in the contemporary public discourse and in the field of medicine, but Christian engagement with posthumanism has focused too narrowly on the cognitive beliefs of posthumanism while ignoring the practices of posthumanism in which we are all already enmeshed. Thus Burdett seeks to uncover some of the core practices of posthumanism, and then proposes the core Christian practice of the Eucharist that can, at the very least, serve as a corrective to posthumanism.

In this episode we discuss the 2021 Modern Theology article by Darren Sarisky: "Judgments in Scripture and the Creed: Reflections on Identity and Difference". 

In 1994 David Yeago published an article that has been influential for the recovery of theological exegesis. Introducing a distinction between judgments and concepts, Yeago argues that, when viewed properly, the creeds are saying the same thing as the biblical texts themselves. Now Sarisky attempts to think both with and against Yeago. He attempts to bring further nuance to the way in which the church's creedal statements might be said to be both similar and different to the biblical texts. But this more nuanced account of the positive relationship between canon and creed only works, Sarisky argues, if we abandon the postliberal and ecumenical ecclesiology of Yeago in favour of a Reformed account of the Spirit's relation to the church and its practices and traditions.