Emerging Scholars

What is the connection between Christian doctrine and concrete social action? This question marks the often unarticulated divide between systematic theology and liberation theology, each often emphasizing one primarily or formally over the other. Examining the work of Karl Barth, T. F. Torrance, and Jon Sobrino, here Nathan Hieb contests this bifurcation, specifically around the nodal points of the crucifixion, or the doctrine of atonement, and the context of suffering. This book is an innovative study that bridges the boundaries of method, doctrine, and praxis, creating a strong theological and action-oriented relationship between systematic and liberation theology.

Hezekiah is a critical figure in the Hebrew Bible, which credits him with major political, social, and religious reforms in Judah's history and the weathering of a major crisis in the invasion of the Assyrians under their emperor, Sennacherib. Examining the different accounts of Hezekiah's reign in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Isaiah, Song-Mi Suzie Park describes a "Hezekiah complex" that developed over a long time, in which the figure of Hezekiah served as a symbol for the vicissitudes of Judah's history. The king could be understood as a positive reformer of the "pagan" ways of the country, or as a sinner, at least partly responsible for the threats and disasters that befell Judah, from Sennacherib's invasion through the Babylonian exile more than a century later. By showing how the stories about Hezekiah developed over time through a process of response and counterresponse, forming at the end a dialogue of memory, Park elucidates the ways in which biblical stories in general function as loci of continual dialogue, dispute, and discussion.

Were eunuchs more usually castrated guardians of the harem, as florid Orientalist portraits imagine them, or were they trusted court officials who may never have been castrated? Was the Ethiopian eunuch a Jew or a Gentile, a slave or a free man? Why does Luke call him a "man" while contemporaries referred to eunuchs as "unmanned" beings? As Sean D. Burke treats questions that have received dramatically different answers over the centuries of Christian interpretation, he shows that eunuchs bore particular stereotyped associations regarding gender and sexual status as well as of race, ethnicity, and class. Not only has Luke failed to resolve these ambiguities; he has positioned this destabilized figure at a key place in the narrative-as the gospel has expanded beyond Judea, but before Gentiles are explicitly named-in such a way as to blur a number of social role boundaries. In this sense, Burke argues, Luke intended to "queer" his reader's expectations and so to present the boundary-transgressing potentiality of a new community.