Editorial

This issue concludes the conversation on the post-foundational approach to theology and science, and in particular to the question of human uniqueness, of J. Wentzel van Huyssteen (Princeton Theological Seminary) that began in workshops at the University of Toronto in February 2010 and continued in the fall 2010 issue of the Toronto Journal of Theology. The workshops were co-sponsored by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and Emmanuel College. While the fall 2010 issue includes the paper van Huyssteen presented at one of the workshops and three responses to it and other aspects of his work, this issue includes five more responses to van Huyssteen and his own reply to all eight of the responses. The three responses in the previous issue focused on theological issues; the essays published here raise biblical, ethical, philosophical, and methodological considerations as well as theological concerns.

Andreas Schuele (Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, VA) takes up the idea of the imago Dei—used by van Huyssteen as a touchstone for his consideration of human uniqueness—and examines the text and context of Genesis to illuminate what he describes as its “functional and representational rather than ontological point.” That point, Schuele argues, is that humans are the creatures capable of shaping the world in which they live, including their relationships with other creatures, and that their distinct task (at least as envisioned by the Priestly tradition within Genesis) is to suppress “the inherent potential for violence in the world” that is a consequence of the chaos out of which God created. Arguing that what makes us truly human is more than the capacity for creating symbolic meaning, James Peterson (McMaster Divinity College and McMaster University, Hamilton) also links the imago Dei with relationality and ethics. Being made in the image of God entails for humans “an actual experience of relationship with God and a resulting way of life.” This way of life, for Peterson, is “a special calling to tend the garden of this world” and “a responsibility to nurture and shape what is entrusted to us for a time.”

The essays by Erin Green and Simon Watson (both of Emmanuel College, Toronto) turn our attention to the methodological considerations in van Huyssteen’s work. Reviewing key elements of van Huyssteen’s publications, Green provides an orientation to the development of his concern for rationality and interdisciplinarity in a credible public theology and summarizes his proposal for a post-foundationalist rationality as an alternative to the foundationalism and non-foundationalism that have dominated Western thought, including science and theology. She notes that van Huyssteen affirms the differences among various “reasoning strategies,” but also that he affirms a “wide-angled view of the world” by which theologians and scientists (among others) might employ diverse reasoning strategies, with their particular methods and insights, in order to collaborate on matters of common concern. Watson specifically engages van Huyssteen’s understanding of “transversal rationality” (based on the work of Calvin Schrag) and questions the “cognitive parity” he assigns to theology and science. Drawing on Lawrence Blum’s critique of some elements of contemporary discourse on multiculturalism, Watson cautions that assuming cognitive “equivalency” of theology and science runs the risk of treating “each in the abstract as if either could be assessed in its totality and assigned a value, which could then be compared” and argues for careful attention to the boundaries marking the differences between them. Yiftach Fehige (Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Toronto) also engages methodological issues in the relationship between theology and science, but does so by examining the phenomenon of transsexuality in light of possible implications of van Huyssteen’s transversal rationality and post-foundational theology. Fehige calls for “a revision of a heterosexual ontology of the human body” that prevails in Christian theology and criticizes the “reductive naturalism” on which such ontology relies. As an alternative, he argues for a “normative pragmatism” that not only permits a “pluralistic ontology of the sexed human body” but may also enhance van Huyssteen’s understanding of transversal rationality.

In his reply to these and the three earlier responses, van Huyssteen carefully...