Constantine R. Campbell

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Michael J. Thate

Nineteen biblical scholars and theologians in this volume explore the notions of union and participation within Pauline theology, teasing out the complex web of meaning conveyed through Paul's theological vision of being "in Christ." With essays that investigate Pauline theology and exegesis, ex-amine highlights from reception history, and offer deep theological reflection, this exemplary multidisciplinary collection charts new ground in the scholarly understanding of Paul's thought and its theological implications.

Explorations in Paul's Theology of Union and Participation

"In Christ" in Paul

James Carleton-Paget

In the 1940s and 1950s, Albert Schweitzer was one of the best-known figures on the world stage. Courted by monarchs, world statesmen, and distinguished figures from the literary, musical, and scientific fields, Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, cementing his place as one of the great intellectual leaders of his time. Schweitzer is less well known now but nonetheless a man of perennial fascination, and this volume seeks to bring his achievements across a variety of areas—philosophy, theology, and medicine—into sharper focus. To that end, international scholars from diverse disciplines offer a wide-ranging examination of Schweitzer’s life and thought over the course of forty years. Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action gives readers a fuller, richer, and more nuanced picture of this controversial but monumental figure of twentieth-century life—and, in some measure, of that complex century itself.

A Life in Parts

Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action

If scholars no longer necessarily find the essence and origins of what came to be known as Christianity in the personality of a historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it nevertheless remains the case that the study of early Christianity is dominated by an assumption of the force of Jesus's personality on divergent communities. In The Godman and the Sea, Michael J. Thate shifts the terms of this study by focusing on the Gospel of Mark, which ends when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome discover a few days after the crucifixion that Jesus's tomb has been opened but the corpse is not there. Unlike the other gospels, Mark does not include the resurrection, portraying instead loss, puzzlement, and despair in the face of the empty tomb. Reading Mark's Gospel as an exemplary text, Thate examines what he considers to be retellings of other traumatic experiences—the stories of Jesus's exorcising demons out of a man and into a herd of swine, his stilling of the storm, and his walking on the water. Drawing widely on a diverse set of resources that include the canon of western fiction, classical literature, the psychological study of trauma, phenomenological philosophy, the new materialism, psychoanalytic theory, poststructural philosophy, and Hebrew Bible scholarship, as well as the expected catalog of New Testament tools of biblical criticism in general and Markan scholarship in particular, The Godman and the Sea is an experimental reading of the Gospel of Mark and the social force of the sea within its traumatized world. More fundamentally, however, it attempts to position this reading as a story of trauma, ecstasy, and what has become through the ruins of past pain.

The Empty Tomb, the Trauma of the Jews, and the Gospel of Mark

The Godman and the Sea

In this book, Michael J. Thate offers an experiment in reception criticism in its consideration of the formation and reception of the historical Jesus discourse. He also attempts to historicize Leben-Jesu-Forschung within debates and narratives of secularization. These two foci guide the book through its two parts. First Thate explicates Schweitzer's dominant archival function in Leben-Jesu-Forschung, while aiming to make fragile the "grand architect's" receptive hegemony. Then he combines critical memory theory and other theoretical readings of the material in an attempt to refocus the study of the historical Jesus as early Christian memory politics in the service of identity explication. He attempts to problematize Schweitzer's legacy of a tidy systematic approach in which much of historical Jesus scholarship continues to operate.

Michael J. Thate

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