The Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 64, No. 1 – Fall 2021
Editor: David S. Dockery
By Michael Welker. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021, xii+155pp., $21.00
Michael Welker, senior professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and executive director of the Research Center for International and Interdisciplinary Theology, has developed his 2019/2020 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which were originated “to promote, advance, teach and diffuse the study of natural theology” (p. 1). Though concentrating on anthropology, Welker unfolds through his six lectures the comprehensive aspect of the human spirit and the divine Spirit, as a basis for natural theology, in which “humanity can realistically be ennobled by calls to justice, freedom, truth, and peace and thereby transformed into a joyful and loving ‘image of God’” (pp. ix-x).
In the first lecture, Welker articulates the focus for the overall theme of all lectures: “Whether and, if so, how human beings in their natural, social, and cultural existence can be understood as the image of God (imago Dei)” (p. 3). Drawing upon a few appropriate but disconsolate instances in various situations from different angles of human existence, Welker describes the tension and breadth of human life through which one cannot escape encountering deep agony as well as mental disability and disaster throughout history (pp. 6-9).
Based on the human reality, which has demonstrated self-endangerment and destructive inclinations in history, Welker engages the relationship between the divine Spirit and the human spirit, seeing them not as bipolar relations, but as multimodal powers, which helps to bring more focus on a realistic natural theology. Human beings in the social, cultural, and religious domain are surrounded by complex circumstances involving the human spirit and the divine Spirit that are too rich and complex to be conceived by a bipolar or triadic completion of thought (pp. 29-35). He understands the multimodal spirit to be functional “not only in human minds but also in a multitude of historical and cultural environments” (p. 43). In order to capture the clear contour of the divine and human multimodal spirits working within justice, freedom, truth, as well as efforts toward peace, Welker explores each concept throughout the rest of his lectures, which ultimately confronts the human agony, deep depression, and mental challenges present within the human experience.
Welker initially explores the shape of the image of God in justice. The United Nations Human Rights Convention of 1948 declared, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (p. 45). Human beings have struggled to realize freedom and equality of all people by means of natural law; they have done so by appealing to a combination of law and mercy, justice and institutionalized protection of the weak. In fact, however, “all life lives at the cost of other life.” Natural law which has ignored this fact has failed in keeping an ethos of equality to protect the weak (p. 55). The perspective of a multimodal spirit of justice, “nourished by various impulses from family ethos, by a broad spectrum of feelings of empathy, and by religious perspectives that direct our attention across multiple generations and toward the grand destiny of human beings,” provides power for peace and enhances the human beings as the image of God (p. 66). In other words, ultimately, people with a multimodal spirit of justice, called and shaped in the image of God, become capable of managing themselves in the secular world with its inequality and injustice (pp. 129-30).
In the same manner, the multimodal spirit of freedom, truth, and peace works inextricably in connection with the multimodal spirit of justice. In the circumstances of the personal and social manifestations of suppression and the lack of freedom, those who espouse a multimodal spirit of freedom manifest the image of God and gain strength to fight for liberation, understood morally, legally, and politically (pp. 75-87). Similarly, with a multimodal spirit of truth, people “struggle to bring truth to bear critically and self-critically on the many levels of the search for truth” (p. 130). Finally, these contexts and circumstances of the multimodal spirit come to focus on the peace of the spirit, which brings about warm and loving friendships, creating opportunities for benevolence rather than a spirit of hostility, hatred, and warmongering. This indivisible interaction of the multimodal spirit in all circumstances and situations of social, cultural, and political realms helps to generate the possibility of living and acting commensurate with the image of God.
Welker asks what it means to be persons created in the image of God in our multifaceted pluralistic societies. Beyond the typical approach of natural theology, which focuses on the existence and attributes of God without referring to any divine revelation, Welker is to be commended for developing a concept of the multimodal spirit in natural theology that draws attention to the anthropological function of the spirit in the complicated world where simple bipolar relations are insufficient to explain the complexities so prevalent in our society. This insightful study, which connects natural theology to a more complete understanding of the image of God, leads readers to think more deeply about living faithfully in this world while growing in godliness.
