Current Research
My current research concerns the concept of life, considered in the double sense of embodied life and of life as a divine name, and the tendency of metaphysics to become detached from one or both of these senses. That is, one might see formalistic appeals to God as life itself (or more abstractly still, as being itself), with little attention to what difference this makes for life in the concrete. Alternately, one observes efforts to attend to life and lived experience which exclude the theological as a threat or distraction from this task.
This project attempts to build upon a loose modern tradition of what I term a 'prophetic' mode of philosophical intervention, which opposes separating not only divine and concrete life, but life from thought. This mode overlaps to some degree with the concept of antiphilosophy as articulated variously by Alain Badiou or Boris Groys, but is characterized more specifically by its use of concepts of voice or call - a divine address, often with Christological structure - to orient philosophy to life in the concrete, and so also concerns the relation between philosophy and theology. Relevant figures include J.G. Hamann, Kierkegaard, Lev Shestov, Michel Henry, and Jean-Yves Lacoste. Behind several of these, the influence of Luther is particularly strong. This research is part of the Widening Horizons in Philosophical Theology project through St Andrews University, which itself is funded by Templeton Religion Trust.
Past Research
My earlier research on the human as created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27) argued that an understanding of the divine image against the background of common ancient Near Eastern cult images brings to light a pair of implicit and productive tensions within the Bible and subsequent Christian tradition: between the role of a particular individual or individuals to function as divine images (the king, priests, or prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and Christ in the New Testament) and the universal scope of Genesis 1, and between the explicit voicing of the human image of God in Genesis 1 and its non-appearance in much of the rest of scripture, as in daily life. These tensions were traced through early Jewish and New Testament literature, and through certain early Christian theologians (Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus). I used the theology of Martin Luther, not only his interpretation of the imago Dei but his concept of God as hidden and verbally revealed, to further develop a concept of the human as hidden and eschatologically revealed in speech. This was supplemented with the work of the 18th century thinker Johann Georg Hamann and his linguistic, Christological understanding of creation to articulate a theology of the image of God as the hiddenness and spoken revelation of the material human being in Christ. Critiques were offered of an approach to the divine image through analogical metaphysics, viewed through the work of Erich Przywara, and of Christological understandings of the divine image which presuppose an ontological chasm or opposition between divinity and humanity, or God and creation generally.