John P. Keenan is professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College and a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont. His previous works include The Emptied Christ of Philippians: Mahāyāna Meditations; The Meaning of Christ: A Mahāyāna Theology; The Gospel of Mark: A Mahāyāna Reading; and A Study of the Buddhabhūmyupadésa: The Doctrinal Development of the Notion of Wisdom in Yogācāra Thought.
摘要
This is the introductory volume of a multivolume, verse-by-verse, interfaith rereading of the New Testament letter to the Ephesians. It looks to the Tiantai Buddhist master Zhiyi and his "threefold truth" to enhance our appreciation of nascent trinitarian themes in Ephesians. And it draws upon a broad array of scientific, theological, and philosophical thinkers in aid of rejecting the epistle's ancient, geocentric cosmology and its accommodations to the misogynistic, patriarchal, and slaveholding norms of its first-century surroundings. As a whole, the work constitutes a twenty-first century apologetic for doctrinal humility and for theologizing within a global theological commons.
目次
Abbreviations vii
PART I INTRODUCTION 1 Overview 3 2 First-Century Christians in a Greek Cosmos 17 3 The Colossian Inheritance-Rejection of Empty Philosophy 44 4 Astrophysics and the Limits of Theological Diction 84 5 Who Was Zhiyi? And what might his model of a threefold truth add to our understanding of the Trinity? 97 6 Reading Ephesians on Today's Global Commons in a Vastly Expanded Cosmos 115
PART II COMMENTARY ON EPHESIANS 1:1-2 7 Paul, an Apostle of Christ Jesus by God's Desire 131 8 Grace and Peace 160 9 "God Our Father" and Threefold Truth 171 10 Being "in Christ" 190 11 Emptying Selfhood-Why Identity Is Not a Gospel Category 205 12 Looking Ahead to the Berakah, the Ephesian Blessing 224
