Kärkkäinen - Christ and Reconciliation (A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World)

Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from patristic writers come from the standard series listed above.

Bible references are from Revised Standard Version unless otherwise indicated.

The Quranic references are from The Holy Qurn: A New English Translation of Its Meanings 2008 Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Amman, Jordan. This version of the Qurn is also available online at http://altafsir.com.

The current book is one of the five volumes in the series titled CONSTRUCTIVE CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY FOR THE PLURALISTIC WORLD . This series conceives the nature and task of Christian systematic/constructive theology in a new key. Living as we are in the beginning of the third millennium in a world shaped by cultural, ethnic, sociopolitical, economic, and religious plurality, it is essential for Christian theology to tackle the issues of plurality and diversity. While robustly Christian in its convictions, building on the deep and wide tradition of biblical, historical, philosophical, and contemporary systematic traditions, this project seeks to engage our present cultural and religious diversity in a way Christian theology has not done in the past. Although part of a larger series, each volume can still stand on its own feet, so to speak, and can be read as an individual work.

The lays out this methodological vision in a more detailed way. That discussion will continue in a shorter form in the epilogue to this volume. Each subsequent volume continues honing the methodological approach, including specific issues related to specific topics at hand such as method in Christology in this volume.

For constructive Christian theology to speak to the issues, questions, and challenges of the pluralistic world, it has to open up to a dialogue with diverse voices from both inside and outside. On the one hand, the hegemony of aging white European and North American men to which company I myself belong! must be balanced and corrected by contributions from female theologians of various agendas such as feminist, womanist, and mujerista; women from Africa, Asia, and Latin America; other liberationists, including black theologians of the USA and sociopolitical theologians from South America, South Africa, and Asia; and postcolonialists, as well as others. Rather than considering the insights from these and similar traditions as contextual in the sense that they are shaped by the context whereas mainstream views are not and can therefore be incorporated into the conversation at the authors wish, as ornaments or means of enrichment, this project engages these contributions as equal conversation partners with traditional and contemporary systematic views. On the other hand, it is about time for Christian theology to break out from its ghetto and engage insights and contributions from other faiths. However, unlike naive pluralisms of Enlightenment traditions, this project believes that in order for the conversation to be meaningful, it is of utmost importance for each tradition to remain faithful to its core values, convictions, and beliefs. One does not have to be a postmodernist of any particular strand to realize that it is in the freedom and safety of a diversity of views rather than in an artificial consensus that personal testimonies and truth claims can be best presented and compared. That one remains faithful to ones own tradition does not of course mean an unwillingness to learn. A mutual dialogue is just that a mutual dialogue in which one listens to and speaks with the other. Authentic dialogue does not seek to subsume the other under ones own way of understanding the world but rather, in the spirit of hospitality, makes room for the other.

The series plans to include the following volumes: Christ and Reconciliation, Triune God and Revelation, Creation and Humanity, Spirit and Salvation, and Community and Future. The ultimate goal of the series is to provide a fresh and innovative vision of Christian doctrine and theology in a way that, roughly speaking, follows the outline, if not the order, of classical theology. Among contemporary constructive theologies, the German systematician Jrgen Moltmanns six-volume series Contributions to Theology shares some common interests in its approach. Rather than attempting a theological summa in the long and honored tradition of Christian theology, this multivolume series seeks to focus each volume on particular topics and look at them in the matrix of the whole.

While roughly following the typical systematic outline, theological argumentation in this series also engages a number of topics, perspectives, and issues that are missing by and large in traditional and even most contemporary theologies. These include topics such as violence, race, environment, ethnicity, inclusivity, and colonialism. A constant engagement with religious and interfaith studies is a distinctive feature of this series. Depending on the specific topic, discussion may include sustained dialogues in other kinds of interdisciplinary settings including natural sciences, cultural studies, and behavioral sciences. The discussion of christological topics in the present volume calls for a sustained engagement of the current New Testament scholarship.