This article engages with supralapsarian Christology, that is, the idea that the cause of the incarnation precedes the fall, to actualize the axiomatic tension between speculation and God’s abiding mystery. Taking a cue from Kathryn Tanner, I present the maintenance of this tension as an instance of theological grammar. I initially hypothesize that approaching supralapsarian Christology without adequate theological grammar plays God’s mystery and theological speculation off each other. The article then grounds this hypothesis by inquiring into Karl Barth’s and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s approaches to supralapsarian Christology. While they aim to overcome supralapsarian Christology, I contend that both fail to maintain this axiomatic tension. The reason is that both theologians are radically Christocentric to the degree that their theologies fall apart without the incarnation. Consequently, their attempts to overcome spec-ulative inquiry stand in tension with their doctrines of revelation, creation, and grace. Considering these areas of conflict, I argue that reflection on supralapsarian Christology might help bring greater awareness of this axiomatic tension in contemporary theology to the surface. I conclude by giving three theological grammatical rules of thumb that show how supralapsarian Christology might help to develop this theological grammar.
This article examines the Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalist organization Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), focusing on how anti-Muslim rhetoric is inter-twined with broader projects of nationalism, religion, and identity formation. Drawing on digital material published by BBS, including articles, statements, and visual content, the study analyses how Muslims are portrayed as religious, cultural, demographic, and political threats to Buddhism and the Sri Lankan nation. The article argues that BBS’s discourse cannot be understood solely as an expression of Islamophobia, but must also be situated within longer historical traditions of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, shaped by colonial experiences, postcolonial tensions, and narratives of Buddhist protec-tionism. By engaging theoretical perspectives on religion and nationalism, particularly Bruce Lincoln’s work, alongside recent scholarship on Bud-dhist Islamophobia, the study demonstrates how BBS combines locally rooted historical narratives with transnational discourses concerning Islam, security, and civilizational conflict. The analysis suggests that anti-Muslim rhetoric contributes to linking Buddhism, ethnicity, and national belonging in ways that reinforce exclusionary nationalist narratives. In this context, BBS portrays itself not only as a defender of religion, but also as a protector of the nation and its perceived continuity.
The medieval forest provided the stage for stories of getting lost in the wilderness, encountering strange and dangerous creatures, and receiving divine salvation from these threats. This article explores the narrative function of the forest in the medieval Swedish miracle stories, sermons and revelations of St. Bridget. It showcases how the forest is depicted as a liminal space where the inhabitants of orderly society met with wild, untamed creatures. Getting lost in the woods appears a common phenomenon in medieval Swedish society, built on the verge of the great forests. This proximity has inspired a rich tradition of stories about encounters with wild animals, outlaws and even the devil himself in the woods. Not only could a person get lost physically, but they could also lose their sanity and become wildmen, living like wild animals in the woods, or turn into outlaws hiding in the dark woods. These stories lack depictions of the mythological creatures that did not fit with the teachings of the church, but the imagery of the devil tempting with sexual relations and riches to wanderers in the wood have much in common with the folklore on elemental beings.
This paper argues that a corporatist framework underlies Schelling’s metaphysical account in the Freedom Essay (1809). Through an analysis of Schelling’s pervasive use of bodily imagery – organs, disease, fever – I examine how this framework shapes his conception of individuality, freedom, and evil. The standard interpretation sees the Freedom Essay as marking Schelling’s break with systematic idealism through its emphasis on contingency, worldly autonomy, and radical human freedom. Arguing against this reading, I contend that the corporatist framework points in a different direction. The world appears in Schelling’s account as a corporate whole, where all individuals serve their instrumental role as organs. The paper first examines Schelling’s concept of the Ground and nature, showing how what appears as contingent, blind striving is actually teleologically organized in service of a rational order. Subsequently analysing human freedom, Schelling’s portrayal of evil as disease reveals how the corporatist logic eliminates the possibility of genuine autonomy from the divine order. It makes evil’s actualization impossible by design and guarantees the final incorporation of all beings into a unified body. Through the guiding metaphor of the bodily organ, Schelling presents a vision of human personhood that sees its fulfilment in personal self-effacement. The paper argues that his corporatist logic brings the person into an impossible position: it must either efface itself willingly or be forcibly eliminated as a sick organ.
Drawing on a playful notebook entry from Hans Jonas’s student years, this article examines why Jonas consistently sidestepped Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in his writings on philosophical biology. It begins by outlining the many affinities between the two thinkers, as noted in previous scholarship: both articulate an asubjective teleology, both understand organisms as self-individuating unities, and both reject mechanistic reductions of life. It then considers several possible explanations for Jonas’s dismissal of Schelling, arguing that their deepest point of divergence lies in their differing attitudes toward the anorganic realm. Whereas Schelling understands nature – organic and inorganic alike – as animated by a primordial, dynamic freedom, Jonas draws a sharp ontological boundary between living and nonliving matter: arguing that freedom originates only with metabolism, while the inorganic world is characterized by blind necessity and existential opacity. This split yields fundamentally different conceptions of the relationship between philosophy and nature, of action, and, ultimately, of what it means to live and act responsibly.
This paper begins by asking whether a philosophy of nature that takes the organism as its point of departure still possesses critical potential today, at a time when technology itself is becoming increasingly organic – a development that renders the classical dichotomies between physis and techne, and between natural and human life, obsolete. In spite of this development, the article makes a case for the continued relevance of F. W. J. Schelling’s philosophy of nature. Specifically, it shows how Schelling, in his late works, abandons his systematic concept of the organism and his investigations into the “life of nature” in favor of a philosophy that explores the “nature of life.” To elucidate this shift, the article focuses on two central figures in Schelling’s thought: on the one hand, the depiction of “real life” as a river in the essay Clara; on the other hand, Schelling’s differentiation of human life from the rest of nature through the figure of the whirlpool – a pulsating formation that imbues life with an intrinsically restless, unsettled, or anxious character.
This article examines Friedrich Schelling’s understanding of the beginning of reality through the concept of contraction and its relation to his view of life as struggle. Drawing on his rejection of mechanistic accounts of life, the article shows how Schelling envisions all life – divine as well as finite – as arising through tension, polarity, and dynamic becoming. God is not a static principle but life unfolding, shaped by the interplay between darkness and light, ground and existence. The analysis highlights Schelling’s indebtedness to speculative pietism, particularly Oetinger’s understanding of life as structured through opposing forces. Within this theological‑ philosophical context, contraction appears as the primordial movement that grounds the possibility of both creation and revelation; without it, neither God nor the world could manifest. Contraction and expansion emerge as inseparable aspects of a single living rhythm that underlies all being. Building on this, the article argues that Schelling’s account of the beginning already carries an incarnational structure.Creation becomes the condition for divine self‑revelation, since the infinite becomes actual only through the finite. In this way, the article shows how Schelling’s conception of creation and incarnation belong to the same movement through which divine life becomes manifest in the finite.
Theology and Religious Studies is still fraught with biases that in different ways underline the (religious) other. I try to uncover some of these biases, by calling attention to the infrastructures that do not allow certain people, questions, or themes to feel at home in the discipline. This is a call to provincialize theology and religious studies in Europe and North America.
