Sean the Baptist (in the UCA)

Welcome to Monica Melanchthon

My soon-to-be colleague in Old Testament, Revd Dr Monica Melanchthon will be moving to Melbourne very soon, and we will be welcoming her into the community of the Centre for Theology and Ministry at our worship service on the last Friday of semester. If you are around Parkville that day, then please come and join us. Details below:

PhD Scholarships at MCD University of Divinity

News through from the MCD University of Divinity about funding for 2 Australian Postgraduate award scholarships and 1 International Postgraduate Research Scholarship. Spread the word!

PhD Scholarship Opportunities in Theology and Religious Studies - Call for Applications

MCD University of Divinity invites applications from suitably qualified candidates for Australian Postgraduate Awards (APA) and International Postgraduate Research Scholarships (IPRS). This is an extraordinary scholarships round, and presents an exciting opportunity to undertake fully funded doctoral research at Australia’s newest university. MCD intends to offer 2 APAs (valued at $23,728 pa each). These are open to Australian and New Zealand citizens, and to Permanent Residents of Australia who have lived in Australia continuously for 12 months, and who are eligible to apply for entry to a doctoral program at MCD University of Divinity. MCD also intends to offer 1 IPRS. This is open to any overseas student who has, or is intending to apply for, a student visa to study in Australia, and who is eligible to apply for entry to a doctoral program at MCD University of Divinity. The awardee will have her or his tuition fees and medical insurance covered, and will also be eligible for a stipend of $23,728 pa. Further details about MCD University of Divinity, including eligibility requirements, and application forms for scholarships and candidature, are available at http://www.mcd.edu.au/forms-hdr-students Applications should be submitted to the Director of Research, Dr Mark R. Lindsay, by Friday 29 June 2012.

 

Creation, Conflict and Cosmos: Watch the Presentations

As some will have noted, I had started to post my own summaries on some of the papers I heard at the excellent conference in Romans 5–8 at Princeton Theological Seminary last week.

I am now back in Australia, and am delighted to note that videos of the presentations have been made available. At the moment only the opening sermon (a rhetorical tour de force if ever there was one), and presentations from Thursday and Friday are avaialble. I hope the presentations from Saturday are also posted, especially that by Lou Martyn which I had to miss in order to catch a plane home.

So rather than me offering inadequate summaries, go and look at/listen to the papers themselves here.

God's Earth, Our Care: Eco-Theology Conference 2nd June 2012

I have just recieved information about a helpful looking one-day conference that will be held at the Centre for Theology and Ministry here in Melbourne on Saturday June 2nd.

Flyer can be found here: Download Eco-theol day flyer

Registration form can be found here: Download Registration form

 

Creation, Conflict and Cosmos: Short Paper 1 (Douglas Campbell)

The afternoons of the conference have been largely made up of a choice of either workshops or short papers. Given the fact that these sessions were preceded by three plenary sessions, I chose just one of the short papers on each afternoon.

One of the great aspect of this conference for me has been the chance to talk at some length to Douglas Campbell about his work. His paper on 'The Deliverance of Justification in Romans 6:7­–8'. In this text Paul says the following:

Romans 6.7 ὁ γὰρ ἀποθανὼν δεδικαίωται ἀπὸ τῆς ἁμαρτίας.  8 εἰ δὲ ἀπεθάνομεν σὺν Χριστῷ, πιστεύομεν ὅτι καὶ συζήσομεν αὐτῷ,

Romans 6.7 For whoever has died is freed from sin.  8 But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. (NRSV)

The basic claim of the paper was that the reference in 6.7 is actually christological. 'the one who has died' is Christ, δεδικαίωται refers to God's deliverance of Christ from the realm of sinful existence. This christological affirmation grounds the account of the believer's participation in the resurrection which is in turn the true reality now for believers (not just the nature of future eschatological hope - Campbell regards the future tenses in this section as referring to present, not future reality).

The paper received the inevitable push back from those (including me) who were not convinced of this reading of 6.7, not least in the light of the 'bodies of sin' in 6.6 cf 6.12 which seem clearly to have an anthropological referent. In later discussions with Doug and in the light of the ῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ ἀπέθανεν ἐφάπαξ of 6.10 and Paul's words in 2 Cor. 5.21 I am slightly more amenable, but the key will be to see whether the christological reading of 6.7 really does do better justice to the overall argument of 6.1–10.

 

Creation, Conflict and Cosmos: Plenary 3 (Susan Grove Eastman)

Next up was Susan Grove Eastman who gave a presentation on ‘Double Participation and the Responsible Self in Romans 5–8’

The paper aimed to explore the ways in which human existence is construed by Paul in Romans 7 using the category of 'double participation', namely participation in the Adam and Christ narratives. Eastman argued that in Romans 7 (where the turn to the self is explicitly marked by use of the 1st person singular) Paul offers a sustained account of the self by means of which the self is reconstituted as 'responsible' in the light of the Christ-event or 'under the agency of grace.' Especially interesting was the concluding connection to recent therapeutic approaches to eating disorders, in which, rather than allowing the human subject to be defined by disorder, the disorder is construed as a hostile occupying power against which the self must wage war. The resonance of this approach to enabling recovery from eating disorders with the apocalyptic dimensions of Paul's construals of the self are clearly apparent.

Creation, Conflict and Cosmos: Plenary 2 (Ben Myers)

Ben Myers gave what, if the length of applause at the session was anything to go by, was a brilliant presentation on "Christ, Adam and the Self: Revisiting Augustine’s Interpretation of Romans". The paper relates to Ben's wider project on Augustine as a reader of the Psalms, and aimed to contribute to a certain 'rehabilitation' of Augustine who, for many Pauline scholars who have read Krister Stendahl's reading of Augustine as the theologian of the 'introspective conscience', is often read as someone who imposes his own hangups onto Paul.

Ben set out to show how Augustine's account of the self is not a pre-determined theological imposition on the text of Romans, but arises out of Augustine's struggles to understand the letter in the late 390s culminating in the Confessions.

The two garden scenes in the Confessions are, Ben argues, essentially an autobiographical rendition of the narratives of Adam and Christ in Romans 5 and thus Augustine's account of the corporate, relational, non-autonomous self is an account reached by interpretative work on the text of Romans. Thus the account of the self in the Confessions is not dominated by the introspective conscience, but instead by the only two possible personae that shape human identity: the face of Adam and the face of Christ,

Creation, Conflict and Cosmos: Plenary 1 (Stephen Westerholm)

The first plenary session in the Princeton conference on Romans 5–8 was by Stephen Westerholm on the topic of "Righteousness: Cosmic and Microcosmic"

Taking his cue from Paul's dikaiosune language in Romans 5:1 and 5:19 Westerholm sought to spell out the overall meaning and purpose of Paul's righteousness and faith language within his theology. The argument would be unsurprising to anyone who knows Westerholm's work. Righteousness is a category of cosmic morality: the ordering of the universe towards which human life (individual and communal) can be directed, or not, and in line with which human behaviour can (or can not) correspond. God's dikaiosune is God's action in re-ordering a disordered world. Paul's contribution lies in the largely pessimistic assessment of human capacity to be righteous, an assessment that is retrospective in the light of the Christ event, as well as the emphasis on faith as the believing response to the word of the gospel.

This soteriological framework, present in Romans 5.1 and drawing out all that Paul has been saying about the exemplary role of Abraham as 'believer' in Romans 4, is really what makes Paul tick. The language of 5:19, and the more objective, inclusive, perhaps even universal dimensions of Paul's soteriology, are to be read in the light of the basic righteouness/faith paradigm as outlined above.

As usual, Westerholm steered a path between aspects of the 'traditional' (pre-New Perspective), New Perspective and apocalyptic readings of Paul. The first question was asked, as one might expect, by Douglas Campbell who, rightly in my view, challenged the 'having your cake and eating it' aspects of Westerholm's presentation. Does God's 'No' to a disordered universe ground God's 'Yes' in the Christ event, or is it the other way round? My own concern was especially around Westerholm's use of wisdom literature as the primary matrix for understanding the meaning of righteousness within Judaism. By appealing to notions of 'the order of the universe' as something epistemologically and theologically prioor to notions of covenant, election and, of course, Christology, Westerholm continutes to read Paul primarily as a theologian of the human condition.

New Book: Simon Perry, Resurrecting Interpretation

My former BUGB colleague Simon Perry has published a revised version of his doctoral thesis on theology and hermeneutics:

Resurrecting Interpretation: Technology, Hermeneutics, and the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Wipf and Stock, 2012)

Hermeneutics is the work of Hermes, the Greek demigod, a messenger from the gods and from the dead. Simon Perry sets out to explore the contemporary face of Hermes through a reading of Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). This parable has one distinguishing feature that marks it out from other ancient stories following the same basic storyline: that a visitor from the dead is not granted leave to return with a message to the land of the living. In order for Scripture to be heard, Hermes is not necessary.

Where does this leave the role of hermeneutics? Perry looks to philosophers, ethicists, and theologians for an answer.

I wrote an endorsement for the book, which I enjoyed reading and wrestling with:

"Simon Perry offers a sustained and strong account of the difference that the resurrection of Jesus Christ makes to theological hermeneutics. Biblical interpretation and the practice of discipleship, the world of the text and the real world of human striving and suffering, are inextricably linked in Perry's vision of the interpretative task. Elegantly structured and demanding both intellectually and existentially, Perry's work offers a new voice into the conversation about biblical interpretation today."

Other endorsements and details can be found here.

For Paul Fiddes on his 65th Birthday

It is rumoured that this coming Monday, 30th April 2012, marks the 65th birthday of Professor Paul Fiddes. Other celebrations may well be planned in Oxford, but from a distance I want to be included among those who will, over the next day or so, signal their debt to Paul for the ways in which his theology has shaped life, faith and vocation. Pages could be written about Paul's role within the contemporary Baptist theological scene. At times it has felt as if, almost single-handedly, he has re-energized and re-conceptualized the ways that Baptists have approached and thought about the task of theology. Let me name the ways: the suffering of God; the pastoral significance of trinitarian faith; the relationship between Christianity, culture and the arts (especially literature); the nature of the atonement; the role of theology within the university; the centrality of covenant for Baptist self-understanding; the question of authority and its relation to the nature of the church and the exercise of Christian ministry; the relation between Baptist identity and the catholicity of the Church; the significance of wisdom for understanding theology etc etc etc. No-one has done more to shape my sense of why theology is important, and of what theology can and should be in relation the life of the church and the world.

So, responding to a suggestion from Andy Goodliff, I post here a quotation from a recent essay by Fiddes in which many of the chords of thinking, signalled above, are struck. Above all they speak of his, and my own, sense of vocation to the work of Christian scholarship. If I understand things aright, the others will join in this online tribute to Paul, and perhaps, if there is time, I will add links to the thread of tributes that will hopefully spring up. I quote Paul's words with a sense of inadequacy in the light of Paul's own intellectual gifts (I mean, no-one should really be that clever!) only exceeded by a sense of gratitude for them:

As I have suggested, it is the apostolic responsibility of the pastor or episkopos to bring the tradition of the universal church onto the local scene. Professional theologians from the academy will have helped him or her in an initial formation to gain this vision. While they may also have to offer ongoing assistance to the pastor in representing the tradition to the local community – and it is a sign of grace and graciousness when such help is accepted – this will surely be rectifying a deficiency in the situation rather than being the distinctive contribution of the professional scholar.

In shaping and renewing the tradition, in finding the mind of Christ about its place in the mission of God, should not the church also be listening for the word of God spoken in the world? If Christ is the one Word of God alongside whom there is none other, then as Karl Barth reminds us, 'the sphere of his dominion and his word is ...greater than that of the kerygma, dogma, cultus, mission and the whole life of the (Christian) community. In an early essay, Barth protests against the 'binding' of secular culture 'to a Christian conscience' but at the same time he states that 'there is even less place for a basic blindness to the possibility that culture may be revelatory, that it can be filled with promise'. Later he urges that 'Even from the mouth of Balaam the well-known voice of the Good Shepherd may sound, and it is not to be ignored in spite of its sinister origin.' We recall the words of Newman here about 'the incantations of Balaam'. Or again, Barth writes, Christ can 'make use of human beings [inside or outside the Bible] in such a way that to hear them is to hear him.' Those who transmit the tradition must be sensitive to hearing the word of Christ spoken in strange and unexpected places, and to being open to the challenge of the Spirit of God through (but not imply as) the cultures of the world. Barth does not think that hearing the word of God in the world as 'secular parables' will ever contradict scripture, but that such parables will open up scripture for the community in a new way and for a new situation. Renewal, thinks Barth, will often come from outside. True words from secular culture will demand a real hearing from the community, assisting, comforting and strengthening it. They prompt the community to become a 'better, more attentive and convincing' servant of the Word.

Now, the professional Christian scholar has stood in the place of conflicting discourses. in the market-place of secular culture and has aimed to connect the Christian faith with other disciplines of knowledge, with confidence in a covenant-making God. This, I suggest, was what was already happening in the interdisciplinary syllabus of the Dissenting Academies,  and for which there can be even greater possibilities in the context of a modern, public university. From this perspective, the scholar has guidance to offer to the local church in shaping its mission, as it gathers to find the mind of Christ together. The scholar should also offer a special resource to church members who are seeking to work out their Christian vocation in their own professions, whether in teaching, medicine, law, industry, banking or the public services. From their own interaction with theorists and practitioners of these professions in the university, Christian scholars should be able to assist church members in working out their 'everyday theology', in negotiating the demands of Christian discipleship with the ambiguities and pressures of modem society. At the same time, of course, the scholar's own theology should be shaped by the experience of these disciples in their daily life. Alongside the pastors of the church there stand, then, the 'doctors of the church' and the Christian community needs their witness too as it seeks to discern the mind of Christ, Lord of Athens and Jerusalem.

Paul S. Fiddes, 'Dual Citizenship in Athens and Jerusalem: the PLace of the Christian Scholar in the Life of the Church', in Anthony R. Cross and Ruth Gouldbourne (eds.), Questions of Identity: Studies in Honour of Brian Haymes (Centre for Baptist History and Heritage Studies 6; Oxford: Regent's Park College, 2011),139–140.

New Testament Job at Oxford

News from the British New Testament Society mailing list:

Departmental Lecturer in New Testament Studies
 
FACULTY OF THEOLOGY
 
Grade 7: Salary £29,249 - £35,938 p.a.
 
The Faculty of Theology in the University of Oxford wishes to appoint
a Departmental Lecturer in New Testament Studies for a fixed-term of
two years (1 October 2012 - 30 September 2014).
 
The Lecturer will have a primary field of expertise in New Testament
Studies and be qualified to lecture and give tutorials on the
interpretation of Paul and the Gospels. Working closely with the other
New Testament colleagues, the successful candidate will teach for both
compulsory and optional papers in the undergraduate Theology and
Religion and Philosophy and Theology degrees, as well as for relevant
taught postgraduate degrees (MSt and MPhil). The appointee will be
expected to contribute to undergraduate examining for the Preliminary
and Final Honours examinations. Introductory and advanced teaching in
Greek is an important aspect of the faculty’s New Testament provision;
the appointed lecturer may be asked to take a role in the delivery of
that teaching.
 
The successful candidate will have already submitted a doctoral thesis
for examination no later than 24 May 2012; candidates should have a
research and publication record of a level appropriate to their career-
stage and clear plans for the production of research of distinction in
the future. Some experience of undergraduate teaching is desirable.
Candidates should be willing to participate in the administration of
the faculty.
 
This is an exciting opportunity to join the Faculty of Theology at a
time of promise and transition, and to contribute to the development
and delivery of its teaching and research. Further particulars, which
all candidates are asked to consult, and which include details of how
to apply, can be downloaded from the faculty website at
http://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/vacancies.html. Candidates may also
contact the faculty by email: recruitment@theology.ox.ac.uk.
 
Applications must be submitted by email to the Faculty Administrator
no later than 12.00 noon on Thursday 24 May 2012. Candidates should
ask two referees to write independently to Mrs Frances Jenkins at
recruitment@theology.ox.ac.uk by the same date.
 
Interviews will be held in Oxford on Friday 8 June 2012.

On Locked Doors: John 20.19, 26

I have been at a Conference of Uniting Church Theological Educators all week and had to prepare a very short sermon for the final Eucharist. I took the Gospel reading for the coming Sunday, John 20.19-31 (Easter 2). While my research was minimal, I did notice one thing that caught my eye. In the NRSV the two main scenes in this section are introduced in the following way:

John 20.19   When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

John 20.26  A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

The point is that the Greek term for locked/shut is the same in each case.

καὶ τῶν θυρῶν κεκλεισμένων (v19)

τῶν θυρῶν κεκλεισμένων (v26)

Why the NRSV chooses to render the 2nd version 'shut' I have no idea. I managed to get a brilliant sermon point out of this little Greek observation, but I am not going to tell you what it was.

 

William Dever in Melbourne: Did God Have a Wife?

For those in the Melbourne area, you may be interested to know that archaeologist William Dever, a critic of the biblical minimalist school of OT interpretation, will be giving a public lecture at the University of Melbourne on Wednesday 18th April at 6.30 p.m., entitled 'Did God Have a Wife?' (Lecture Theatre A, Elizabeth Murdoch Building). Here is the blurb:

The Hebrew Bible portrays the religion of ancient Israel as monotheistic, the worship of a single male deity named Yahweh. Yet the archaeological data recently accumulated shows thatthis may have been the ideal, the reality was quite different. We have hundreds of nude female figurines that represent the old Canaanite Mother Goddess ‘Asherah’. We even have 8th century BCE Hebrew inscriptions naming her as the consort of Yahweh in the context of blessing. This illustrated lecture will show how monotheism developed slowly and with great difficulty in ancient Israel.

It would have been much more fun if the estimable Francesca Stavrakopoulou were here to give the lecture, but Dever might be interesting nonetheless. He is also giving lectures at the Australian Instittue of Archaeology on 20-21 April. Details here.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works at up to 40% discount

The good people over at Eisenbraun's have marked the anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's execution (April 9th) by offering a substantial discount on all volumes of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, published by Fortress Press. The sale lasts for 10 days, so there is still time if you have some gaps in your collection, or if you want to start (in which case I would recommend Discipleship, Life Together, Ethics, Conspiracy and Imprisonment as the best places to start). Go here for the details.

Ferdinand Christian Baur

I have just started reading Peter Watson's impressive looking The German Genius and then today came up against an early assessment of F. C. Baur, who along with Schweitzer and Bultmann is the pre WW2 German Neutestamentler that everyone working in NT should have read.

"Ferdinand Christian Baur is indeed one of the most eminent representatives of the intellectual nobility of Germany. What he lacks when compared with his rivals, is abandonment, fire, personal sympathy. He resembled Schleiermacher in nothing."

F. Lichtenberger, History of German Theology in the Nineteenth Century (trans. and ed. by W. Hastie; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1889), 379–380.

As with Bultmann, Baur is as important for the questions he asks of the New Testament as for the answers he provides. Not sure he was up for a beer after the weekly Tübingen NT Seminar though.

Boring, Commentary on Mark

I am teaching Mark again this year, both online in Semester 1 and face to face in Semester 2. It has provided a good opportunity to get to know some of the more recent commentaries on the Gospel that had previously passed me by (or that I had passed over as I made use of Hooker, Moloney and Marcus - the three commentaries I know best). It has been a delight to start to work in more detail with M. Eugene Boring's Mark: A Commentary (New Testament Library; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006). Although now a few years old, I have only just started reading and using it in earnest, and can thoroughly recommend it, not least to preachers in this Year of Mark.

Of special importance is Boring's insistently theological reading of the Markan story:

"[T]he story is about God, who only rarely becomes an explicit character, but who is the hidden actor in the whole drama, whose reality spans its whole narrative world from creation to eschaton, and who is not an alternative or competitor to the view that regards Jesus as the principal subject. To tell the story of Jesus is to tell the self-defining story of God." (3)

Boring makes the creative suggestion (building on his earlier research) that the author of the Gospel is suspicious of literary reminiscences of Jesus that took the form of sayings collections (Boring thinks that Mark knew Q or a Q-like collection). Such collections were 'dangerously open to contamination by sayings of Christian prophets' (14) and in their place 'Mark' writes an unparalleled (much less like a Graeco-Roman bios than many would suggest) and subversive narrative which is fundamentally kerygmatic rather than sapiential in its intent.

All of this has no small contemporary resonance. The teaching of Jesus in the Gospel takes its rightful place in the context of the claims that the Gospel makes about the identity of Jesus - no ethics without Christology. For that reason alone it would be a useful commentary for any preacher seeking to direct a congregation's attention towards the key kerygmatic intention of gospel texts (kerygmatic in the sense that they both narrate the gospel and call for decision). But this is a commentary that also draws on the latest Markan scholarship (throughout there is a judicious supporting case made for Marcus' deeply apocalyptic reading of Mark), leads the reader clearly into the detail of the Markan text, provides any number of helpful summaries and excurses, and is constantly alert to the text's capacity to surprise the reader into new ways of understanding.

The Markan text for the coming Sunday (2nd in Lent) is Mark 8.31–38. Here are a few lines from Boring's commentary on that section:

"The call to deny oneself does not mean to relinquish the enjoyment of certain things, as though doing without or enduring suffering as such made one holy or a disciple of Jesus. The word translated "deny" (aparnesastho) is found elsewhere in Mark only in reference to Peter's denial of Jesus (14:30,72). "Deny" is thus the opposite of "confess," "acknowledge"; the hearers are called to deny themselves rather than deny Jesus, that is, no longer to make oneself the top priority and the center of one's own universe ... likewise, taking up one's cross does not refer to the inconveniences, or even the sufferings, that are a part of human life as such, as often interpreted when one's troubles are described as "just the cross I have to bear." The Markan Jesus is not commending endurance of the inevitable pains of life, but the voluntary taking up of the cross as sharing the suffering involved in discipleship and Christian mission." (244)

If you haven't yet bought a commentary to accompany you through the year of Mark, I can highly recommend the Boring commentary.

Day Conference on the New Testament and Ethics

For more information download the following

Download NT Ethics Conference 2012 Information.

Crisis, What Crisis?: Bonhoeffer and the Need for Theological Leadership

One of the joys of returning to Melbourne has been the chance to open lots of lovely book packages; ordered while we were in Italy, but delivered to Australia to await our return. One of these contained the most recent volume in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English series: volume 15 entitled Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940. The bulk of the volume consists of letters written by Bonhoeffer in the run up to, during and after his decision to leave Germany for the USA and then, within a month, to return again.

The longest of these letters are circular epistles to former seminarians from the recently closed Finkenwalde seminary, of which Bonhoeffer was Director. There is a growing sense of looming danger in these letters, as the stakes for Confessing Church pastors are raised by (among others) the Gestapo, the German Christian movement and the so-called 'neutrals' within the Confessing Church itself. In her excellent Editor's Introduction, Victoria Barnett makes the acute observation that Bonhoeffer's response to the crisis that all see coming is not yet the call to decisive action, or prophetic/sacrificial gesture (that comes arguable with his decision to return to Germany from the USA). Instead we see Bonhoeffer working as pastor pastorum, and his concern again and again is to remind his former students that they will offer leadership to the church exactly to the extent that they are prepared to wrestle theologically with questions of truth, which is to say gospel.

It struck me that both for Baptist colleagues in the UK, currently thinking about new possibilities, vision and strategies, as well as for UCA colleagues here, who face the common challenge of identifying what constitutes authentic Christian witness in a changed culture, Bonhoeffer's insistence pn the need for sustained theological effort is instructive. Here he is, in a letter written in late-January 1938. After a call to prayer, Bonhoeffer insists that prayer is not sufficient:

'But then we want to tackle what has been neglected. We want to struggle for full theological clarity about the insghts of the Confessing Church. We are not willing to let go before we have reached firm ground. We tend to move from questions of truth to the order of the day all too easily. Yet how should a clear leadership for a parish or a church be possible without a clear theology? The false front lines ... arise whenever the question of truth is bypassed. Let us resume the discussion also with those who confront us with questions! But it should be a discussion in ultimate truth. ... Only then will the inexhaustible field of work that is the Confessing Church's specific task begin.' (pp.35–36)

Pacifica Themed Issue on Bonhoeffer: Invitation to Contribute

This is a shot in the dark, but perhaps one that might meet with a welcome response from Bonhoeffer scholars, whether based in Australasia or beyond.

I am hoping to produce an issue of the journal Pacifica later this year celebrating the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the light of the recent completion of the DBWE project. 5 articles are currently commissioned, but I am looking for a sixth article that we might include in the proposal to go the journal's editorial board. I am looking for someone who is on Faculty (i.e. with their PhD and in an academic role) who might be able to contribute a 6,000 word article on an aspect of Bonhoeffer's thought, with special concern for Bonhoeffer's relevance for contemporary Christian thought and practice. The piece would need to be a fully critical research article, from someone with a track record in Bonhoeffer research. The articles already secured cover the following topics: Bonhoeffer and Spiriituality; Bonhoeffer and Theological Hermeneutics; Bonhoeffer and State Power; Bonhoeffer and Reading the Signs of the Times and Bonhoeffer's legacy in the light of the DBWE project. The sixth article should not overlap with these themes.

The deadline for final copy would be the end of April 2012 (the reason for the short notice is that other prospective contributors no longer feel able to meet that deadline).

If this is something that interests you then please send me an email with a proposal for your article, along with a brief academic CV, by 31st January 2012. I will only be able to select one proposal, but will contact everyone who sends one in with an indication of my decision. Emails can be sent to the address at the top of my staff page.

Please feel free to share this invitation with others on your own blog or by other means.

Biblical Studies Position at University of Sheffield

News has come through of a newly advertised Lecturship in Bible and Contemporary Culture at the University of Sheffield, joining the strong team already in place there. There is a preference for someone in the NT field.

Details can be found on the Department's blog here.