John Calvin and the Jews: A Problem in Political Theology

Abstract

Although John Calvin rejected the angry invective of Martin Luther against the Jews, he nevertheless agreed with him that Christian biblical interpretation was a more reliable guide to the mind of the patriarchs in Genesis than the exegesis of Rabbinic Judaism. The Hebrew Bible was therefore properly understood as Christian Scripture and had always been addressed to the Church as well as to ancient Israel.     

LIVING IN A TIME OF MADNESS: LAST DAYS OF JAVA'S LAST PROPHETIC POET

Shortly before his death in December 1873, the renowned Javanese court poet R. Ng. Ronggawarsita composed a short work of social criticism and Islamic ethics that is among the most celebrated of Javanese literary texts. Serat Kalatidha (The Time of Darkness) reflects upon the avenues that remain open to the ethical subject in what Ronggawarsita calls the “time of madness,” the time of darkness and error that marked his dismal present in high colonial Java. Most celebrated as a prophecy, the poem is, in part, a critical reworking of an early nineteenth‐century prophetic reflection on the Javanese past. My article explores the troubled context in which the author wrote this twelve‐stanza (108‐line) poem and how its text forms both a critical commentary on the state of the poet's current‐day society and a pensive reflection on the ethical imperatives of Islam. In the course of this exploration, I reveal how Ronggawarsita's poem forms a prophecy, not as a foretelling of an already determined future, but rather as a work that moves along prophetic time to provoke in his readers a productive intimacy with both pasts and futures.     

Prophetic Activism in an Age of Empire

Abstract

The paper explores the emergence of prophetic activism as a counter-narrative to the dominance of conservative Christianity in national politics. It is based on the premise that the use of religion in American politics remains highly contested. While portions of American Christianity support an imperial project, alternative visions of a more humane future are simultaneously gaining strength. These new forms of prophetic activism are emerging in two distinct yet overlapping social locations: the borderlands and among cosmopolitans. Given the marginality of the borderlands context, prophetic activism has become firmly grounded in liberative religious paradigms that empower people to identify the commonalities between contemporary forms of exploitation and those against which the ancient biblical prophets once raged. An embrace of these same liberative paradigms also enable cosmopolitans to enter into solidarity with the struggles of others for justice.     

Miroslav Volf on Living One’s Faith

Abstract

In this essay the author reflects on Miroslav Volf’s discussion, in A Public Faith, of Christianity as properly a prophetic religion. The author focuses especially on the two main malfunctions that Volf cites as accounting for the fact that the faith of individual Christians is often not prophetic, namely, what he calls “idleness of faith” and what he calls “coerciveness of faith.”     

The Prophetic and the Limitation of Authority in Modernist Islam

ABSTRACT

The “prophetic”, as a central concept in modernist Islamic political philosophy, has been invoked to show that Islamic political philosophy takes into account the spiritual as well as the material world. However, this expansion of the prophetic had remained relatively silent as to the authority that is granted to experiencing individuals. This essay is a story of these reinterpretations the “prophetic” by three major Muslim thinkers – Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), Ali Shari‘ati (d. 1977), and Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945). Writing in different periods and trying to respond to different questions, these authors engaged with the question of politics by reference to prophetic experience. I will explain their intellectual context, according to their cosmologies and their notions of language (participation vs. representation). Then, I will see how in different intellectual context, the force of a democratic notion of the prophetic was undermined by different reinterpretations.     

“A Different Kind of Theo-Politics: Abraham Joshua Heschel,the Prophets and the Civil Rights Movement”

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the sharp differences in the understanding of the Hebrew prophets by theologians, Jewish and Protestant, in Germany and the United States, with a particular focus on their invocation of prophetic teachings in relation to social and political movements. The sharp denigrations of the prophets – described as ecstatics (Gunkel) or rural naifs (Troeltsch) rendered the prophets useless as figures of inspiration in Germany in relation to racism, colonialism, and WWI. By contrast, the prophets have played a crucial role in American civil thought, especially in the Civil Rights Movement. The distinctive and influential interpretation of prophetic consciousness developed by the German-American Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel is examined for its parallels with the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the political ramifications of Heschel's link between prophetic revelation and political leadership.