This article argues that the concept of personhood is intrinsically relational and that a relational understanding of created personhood can be derived from divine personhood and understood systematically in relation to itself, the pre-personal world and to other persons. Insofar as this set of three relationships is understood to be dislocated by sinful self-enclosedness in the penultimate reality and standing in contradiction to the ultimate reality retrospectively constituting it, the article suggests that all created personhood at present could be called ‘potential’ personhood. The article then examines the concept of personhood maintained by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva in their recent paper on ‘after-birth abortion’ in comparison to Johannes Fischer’s discussion of embryonic stem cell research and personhood. In response to both, the article concludes that it is not possible at present for humans to make a concrete external identification of the divine relation that internally constitutes created personhood. As a result, the article proposes adopting a veil of ignorance with reference to the status of embryonic personhood, as it would be worse to deny the status of personhood to an actual person than to attribute personhood to a non-person.
AbstractThis article examines Karl Barth's earliest engagements with Pietism, rationalism and liberal Protestantism against the backdrop of the theologies of Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm Herrmann. The analysis then follows Barth through his rejection of liberal theology and his development of a dialectical theology over against Wilhelm Herrmann and with particular reference to Martin Luther's theologia crucis. The article concludes by examining Barth's comments on religious experience to a group of Methodist pastors in Switzerland in 1961.
Book reviews kaleidoscope of positions Lim details reminds us that there is no necessary connection between a 'low' doctrine of our dependence on 'operative grace', and a rejection of the Trinity. It also prompts the question whether a robust doctrine of the Holy Trinity can go with a range of accounts of how Christ's sacrifice saves us. The editors would have made the endnotes less troublesome by using 'Notes to pages mm-nn' as a running header. They could make this kind of book more accessible to the non-historian by including a table of the main protagonists analysed, giving their dates, affiliation and basic details, to save us having to look some of them up elsewhere. And they should prevent a computer turning X into , or putting into the Latin alphabet a word that is meant to appear in Greek (pp. 99, 280)! But such complaints are few. Lim has given us an admirably thorough and balanced analysis of the seventeencentury debates; he makes us reflect on the roles of reason, tradition and authority in interpreting scripture, wonder at the Socinian claim to complete the work of the Reformation by rejecting all three 'T's (Transubstantiation, Tradition and Trinity), and ask afresh how the mystery of the Holy Trinity may be robustly preached and praised.
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