My Theology – serie

My Theology: The world’s leading Christian thinkers explain some of the principal tenets of their theological beliefs.‘How can people racialised as black conceive God, Jesus, and the Spirit within contemporary concrete social and political worlds?’ asks pioneering black theologian and broadcaster Robert Beckford. ‘What would facilitate a radical theology committed to confronting racialised injustice, social inequality and environmental degradation?’In Duppy Conqueror Beckford explains how he has recontextualised African-American black and womanist theologies of liberation to answer these questions for second and third-generation black British. His methodologies have included a correlation of linguistic concepts from black cultural history and urban life with theological concepts, and the inscription of black theology onto documentary filmmaking and contemporary gospel music.

Priest, poet and broadcaster Rachel Mann believes the world is charged with a divine spark. She explains how in our encounters with what she terms ‘the spectres of God’, one can become at peace with limitation, precariousness, lack of certainty, and one’s fragility and fractures - and at the same time find in divine fragility the hope of the world. Drawing on her own experiences, in three short chapters (on the body, on love, and on time) Mann explores how God invites us, repeatedly, to live in a rich three-dimensional mystery that subverts the depressing flat-earth of modern life.

Reflecting on the particular challenges facing a schoolgirl of the 1950s attracted to the possibility of going to university to read Theology, and her path to becoming the first woman to be given a personal Chair at the University of Durham, Professor Emerita of Divinity at the same, an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews, and a CBE for services to Theology, Ann Loades introduces some of the key tenets of her theological thinking, including: theodicy; women in theology; worship; engagement with actual living; biography and theology in various writers.

A short definitive account of Keith Ward’s theology, based on the philosophy of Personal Idealism. It records Ward’s views about God, revelation, the kingdom of God, life after death, the incarnation, atonement, and Trinity. In summary, it is a concise and clear account of most central Christian doctrines, formed in the light of modern science and Idealist philosophy.

In The Corner of Fourth and Nondual, a title inspired by Thomas Merton’s moment of revelation ‘at the Corner of Fourth and Walnut’ in his celebrated essay ‘A Member of the Human Race’, Cynthia Bourgeault – internationally-renowned retreat leader, practitioner and teacher of Centering Prayer – describes the foundations of her theology: a cosmological seeing with the eye of the heart, and classic Benedictine daily rule informed and enlightened by wisdom from the Asian traditions. She explains the influence of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Teilhard de Chardin, Boehme, Barnhart, Keating and Gurdjieff, among others in a philosophy built on the cornerstones of the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery, tied by the Trinity as a cosmogonic principle, the fundamental generative mechanism through which all things came into being.

John Swinton argues that theologians' own stories inevitably matter in relation to the study of the divine. It follows that Swinton describes his place of formation walking alongside people living with intellectual disabilities, mental health challenges and dementia, and how it has gifted him with the opportunity to ask different questions of the tradition; questions that emerge from the lives of people who see the world differently. That learning has shaped him as a theologian and raised some crucial questions around the nature of faithfulness, discipleship and the question of exactly what kind of community the church is and should be in both theory and in practice - one, Swinton hopes, that can encourage Christians to begin to appreciate even more deeply the goodness, kindness and love of God for all human beings.

The God that we were brought up on is not big enough to be God. To be both religious and spiritual, modernity must be able to absorb the notion of a cosmic and evolving God. This notion redefines the place and purpose of humanity itself. The old notions of who is in charge, who is superior and whose theology is paramount is in a state of flux. Unless, or until, this new vision comes into play, directs our hearts, guides our business, underlies our technology, the world itself is not ready to understand or survive the horizon of Newness on which it stands.

Grace Ji-Sun Kim's book centres on the Spirit as an avenue for better understanding God and reconciling with our faith. The Spirit is present in the Old Testament as ruach and in the New Testament as pneuma. When the field of theology was prominently German led, theologians used the word geist to talk about the Spirit. As an Asian American theologian, it is necessary to retrieve and disseminate Asian words and religious symbols into the mainstream discourse to revolutionize the accessibility and global understanding of God today. One important Asian concept is Chi, translated as wind, breath, spirit, energy, much like ruach, pneuma and geist. Chi is a term adept for coming to know God as the Spirit as it effectively conveys God's presence in the world. As such, we can move towards a nondualistic theology that provides an abundant space for everyone, including the marginalized and the subordinated, paving a path towards liberation and radical demarginalization.