The Inalienable Gift
Godelier's fundamentally anthropological account of gift-giving and human identity makes a valuable contribution to theological considerations of relationship with the divine. Though it is ultimately inextricable from our discussion of reciprocity in Chapter 3, Godelier's major contribution has been retained until now to emphasize the key distinction between things that are 'alienable' and explicitly 'given' through reciprocal acts and 'inalienable' things that can never be 'given' in exchange....
Theological Symbolics
Symbols and symbolism have always been important within Christianity, because theologians of every age have known that in speaking of God they must use language that is other than God. In ritual practice, too, theologians, with all believers, have been immersed in symbolic activity related to the divine. So theological necessity and ritual experience highlight the nature of symbolic forms as the means of rendering the infinite in finite terms. While this symbolic necessity is often expressly...
Embodiment and Incarnation
Embodiment - the awareness of 'being' as a body - is the major theoretical perspective underlying this chapter and the entire book. Not only is embodiment concerned with how people talk about themselves, but also with how that awareness may be analysed. It combines basic information and the analysis of information. Anthropology is just beginning to study 'how people feel' and how 'somatic states' - states of the body, or soma as the body is called in Greek - might be classified and analysed...
Symbols and Brains
One of the clearest distinctions between two broad types of anthropologists of symbolism concerns psychology, for, while most operate solely with social explanations of human activity, a few see great advantage in drawing upon psychological theories. Behind this lies a theoretical debate originating in Durkheim and leading to a sharp divide between social scientific and psychological thought, a divide that is artificial and unnecessary Moscovici 1993 . The developing field of cognitive...
Inhering Conflicts
Even this brief consideration of one eucharistic rite reveals a degree of ambivalence present in the use of reciprocal language when relating grace and reciprocity. The differences between religious traditions often depend upon the place of human endeavour in the scheme of salvation, and this is profoundly true for Christianity, whose theological history moves around the weighting given to merit in the ongoing life of faith. In the liturgy just considered a very high profile is given to the...
Bibliography
Aberbach, David 1989 , Surviving Trauma Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis, New Haven, CT and London Yale University Press. Aberbach, David 1996 , Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media, Private Trauma, Public Ideals, London Macmillan. Akinnaso, F. Niyi 1995 , 'Bourdieu and the Diviner, Knowledge and Symbolic Power in Yoruba Divination', in The Pursuit of Certainty, ed. Wendy James, London Routledge. Aquili, E. G. d' and C. D. Laughlin Jr. and J. McManus 1979 , The Spectrum of Ritual, NY...
Spirit Replaces Blood
As was intimated earlier, Spirit replaces blood in the embodied spirituality of the earliest Christianity. This does not mean that the purity-impurity distinction disappears, but that it now operates through the grammar of discourse of spirit and not of blood. The case of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts expresses this schema, and makes greater sense if discussed in terms of 'blasphemy' against, lying to or tempting the Spirit, as in our final chapter Acts 5 3, 9 . Blasphemy against the Spirit...
Introduction
This book fosters a conversation between the two intellectual worlds of theology and anthropology by exploring related, often paired, concepts that have usually been pursued separately within those disciplines, as in the cases of incarnation and embodiment, salvation and merit-making, and symbolism and sacrament. Three theoretical themes of anthropology, viz., gift-theory, ethical vitality and rebounding violence, are introduced and developed in a theological direction, and three further ideas,...
Mysticism and Dual Sovereignty
Romantic love also mirrors those forms of mystical faith in which devotees sense a close mutual unity expressed in love-language, echoing sexual intimacy and intimating a vision of grand totality. This expression of love-mysticism for ever haunts legalistic and reciprocally focused Christianity, hovering in the wings to redeem rule-bound situations. Its distinctive yet often ignored characteristic lies in the absence of idioms of reciprocity, as exemplified in George Herbert's...
The Eucharist
The Holy Communion Service in the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer exemplifies the reciprocal model in relation to grace. It does so because, as the outcome of the 1549 and 1552 services with all their weight of Reformation and Catholic theological debates, it reflects the increasing effects of Reformation theology upon the newly established English Church, forged as it was from traditional Catholicism, but without entirely adopting the wholesale theological and ritual reform of European...
Rebounding Vitality
The concept of 'rebounding vitality' is one way of depicting this process. I first introduced this hybrid term, derived from Bloch's 'rebounding conquest' and Tambiah's 'ethical vitality', in a brief study of the 'conversion' of Peter in Acts, arguing that 'the life of Christ generated that ethical vitality which, symbolised in the resurrection and conceptualised as merit, provided the energy for rebounding violence, symbolised in the coming of the Holy Spirit, which both empowered the new...
Systematic and Clustered Thinking
Another foundational aspect of our argument contrasts scholarly system-atization of belief with what ordinary people experience in clustered bits and pieces. Much academic theology and anthropology is logic-sentential, accounting for ideas, events and phenomena by describing and analysing them in a logical way expressed in formal sentences arranged to introduce, develop and conclude an argument. This 'logical approach' of formal education allows educated people to be described as 'disciplined'...
Knowing Action
Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine 1984 offers a sketched theory of both religion in general and Christianity in particular. Drawing upon several perspectives related to ideas on embodiment discussed earlier in this book, he affords a good example of dialogue between theology and the social sciences. He invokes Weber, Durkheim and Berger, and often refers to Geertz and the broad anthropological tradition of symbolic interpretation of social action to construct what he calls a cultural-linguistic...
Defining Religion
Trying to understand religion assumes, of course, that we have some notion of what it is. What often passes for anthropological definition of religion might, more properly, be viewed as no more than a 'summarized description' Boyer 1994 34 . Certainly, the variety of anthropological 'definitions' of religion moves from Tylor's intellectualist stress on belief in supernatural beings through Durkheim's sociological focus on unified system of beliefs and practices uniting people as a moral...
Salvation
The fact that there never has been one exclusive Christian doctrine of salvation qualifies 'Salvation' as a term that is more a 'conceptual mystery' than an exclusive assertion of doctrine, exemplifying the process -described below - in which a higher-order 'frame' is placed around a group of related, mixed and potentially contradictory ideas, enabling them to be discussed in a relatively simple way. As such salvation involves a set of relations between God and mankind that creates a sense of...
Ritual Purity and Power
Although ritual purity is regularly discussed in both theological and anthropological accounts of sacrifice, religious life and death, the concept is far from transparent. Mary Douglas's influence has been great, but has, perhaps, tended to create an over-attention to boundary maintenance to the ignoring of other potential directions of thought, as in Malina's otherwise useful biblical reflections 2001 161-97 . At the outset it is important to distinguish between the notion of ritual purity as...
Embodiment as Unity
From inner-otherness in relation to any notion of partition of the self, Holy Spirit or evil force, we now direct attention to inner-otherness as an aspect of embodiment, of the view of human being as subsisting in and as a body, and affirm that the sense of inner-otherness is part of the nature of embodiment. It is, however, hard to grasp the way people conceive of themselves as embodied individuals. It is not enough simply to speak of the images that people carry of their own personalities...
Incarnation and Embodiment
Morality and embodiment also underlie the Incarnation, the doctrine that God became human in the man Jesus of Nazareth. This doctrine argues, first, that because Jesus was sinless he could be a sacrifice for sin and, second, that he genuinely entered into human experience. The paradox in this juxtaposition of intentions is that he was able to know the human condition without actually being a sinner like the rest of humanity, the unintended consequence of this being that while many Christians...
Dimensions of Superplausibility as Rebounding Vitality
The following examples of superplausibility are all interpreted through the notion of rebounding vitality. Though they are described briefly, it would be possible to expand each into a small monograph, so extensive are the associated implications. Luther's notion of Beruf expressed a distinctive attitude towards work as a vocation or 'calling'. For Weber, 'calling' represented the Protestant replacement of Catholic life, with his analysis of the Protestant Ethic demonstrating the transition...