http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/services/Feed ${session.getAttribute("locale")} 5 http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:9397 This essay offers the first close reading of Karl Marx’s early (1835) essay on the Gospel of John. Coming out of the wealth of material of the early Marx, it shows a brilliant young man engaging with and coming up against difficulties with a biblical text (John 15). Careful attention to Marx’s essay shows him struggling with two tensions. The first tension concerns two different models of salvation, either a mediatory one (Roman Catholic) or a dialectical one (Protestant). The essay begins with the former and ends with the latter, although it does not resolve the tension. The second tension is between the formal requirements of catechism and the poetic flights of the biblical text: Marx seeks to answer in light of the former but is drawn into the very different formal features of the latter. Apart from indicating the importance of contradiction itself in Marx’s later work, the article closes by considering the inevitability of encountering contradictions when engaging closely with a biblical text. 2011-11-16T01:00:04.815Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:8203 I have always been intrigued by a tension at the heart of John Calvin's thought, a tension between what may be called radical and reactionary possibilities. In particular I am interested in grace, gratia in latin, charis in Greek. Grace appears in Calvin's work as the bedrock for the great themes of providence, election, justification by faith (and not works), redemption and santification. To be completely reliant on God for salvation is to rely entirely on his grace. This much is all too well known. But there is another dimension to Calvin's doctrine of grace that is far less known. Calvin glimpses the radical possibilities of grace only to try and contain it. 2011-07-11T04:30:22.887Z ]]>