Every once in a while, through fortuitous happenstance, one finds that articles are submitted or offered for publication in Religion & Theology, completely independent of each other, that just happen to speak to each other thematically or theoretically in a manner that makes it possible for an attentive reader to discern a line connecting these articles such that a common theme can be proposed that binds the contents of the issue together.¹ This happened here with this issue. The golden line tying the articles collected here together can be imagined as a collective digging at foundations, hence the issue theme: “Digging at Foundations: History and Discourse.”

The first cluster of essays, that of Stephen Smith (“Square Pegs for Round Holes: Applying Historical Method to Jesus’s Resurrection”), Pieter Craffert (“Reframing the Debate on the Post-Mortem Experiences: Sights, Hallucinations, or Visionary Experiences?”), and Justin Meggitt (“The Resurrection and Comparative Microhistory”), are gathered under the heading “Still … The Revivification That Will Not Die: The Resurrection of Jesus in Contention.” As much as belief in and confession of Jesus’s resurrection may be considered the foundation of Christianity (as the apostle Paul argues in his lengthy argument in the First Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 about the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the critical foundation and inception of a general resurrection of humankind, esp. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished” [1 Cor 15:17–18], and which is confessed in every formal creed since the fourth century), it is also the case that already in the first two or three centuries of Christian formation the reality and nature of the resurrection had been contested (and not only from external critics like the second-century Egyptian-Greek philosopher Celsus, but also among Christians did various understandings of Christ’s resurrection circulate that did not simply map on to what came to be seen later as the standard theological conception of Christ’s resurrection).² If one can call the period from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century (when the so-called European Enlightenment hit home with a vengeance to reshape conceptions of knowledge, science, and religion) a “mediaeval hiatus,” the post-eighteenth-century growth in critical studies of the historical Jesus and historiography of Christian origins, led in recent years, within redescriptive studies of the historical Jesus and Christian origins as discursive constructions, as mythmaking enterprises – in opposition to orthodox theological positions – also to highly critical views of Jesus’s resurrection. And so this is the question, namely, how historical Jesus’s resurrection is (i.e., did it happen or not? And, what is it that happened, how can the experiences and accounts of Jesus’s resurrection be explained?). This has been an arena of strident debates, with – as Smith shows – Christian apologists like Michael Licona, William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and N.T. Wright drawing on statistical methods to substantiate the claim to historicity of the resurrection as plausible and likely to have taken place as described in New Testament literature (the Resurrection Hypothesis), against scholars like Michael Goulder, John Crossan, Gerd Ludemann, Bart Ehrman, and Pieter Craffert who pursue naturalistic explanations for the accounts of Jesus’s resurrection.

Pieter Craffert, in his essay in this issue, resets the terms of the debate by insisting that if you view history as what really happened, then both the proponents of the Resurrection Hypothesis and the Hallucination Hypothesis work with the same theory of history, just standing on opposite sides of the fence (it really happened, therefore it is history; it could not have happened, therefore it is not history). By contrast, Craffert offers a different take on the materiality of the event through perspectival realism as an alternative scientific framework, reframing the post-mortem appearance reports not as accounts of perceptual sight or pathological hallucination, but as residues of culturally embedded visionary experiences. In other words, visionary experiences are not unreal – they are real perception-events, and from here it is but a short step to seeing such visionary experiences as bodily-cultural, that is, as somatic events that have become culturalised in habituated traditions, practices, and matrices of experience. It is at this point that Meggitt’s article connects with that of Craffert’s. Framing his reading of the resurrection through comparative microhistory as historiographical practice first established by Carlo Ginzburg – microhistory being the analysis of small-scale historical cases centring on marginal and exceptional figures to gain a perspective on the broader, encompassing context, a perspective enriched by studying the test case(s) alongside analogous cases and events – Meggitt focuses on the resurrection of Jesus through the lens of “anomalies, inconsistencies, omissions, and anything otherwise curious” in the accounts of the resurrection in the Gospels. Focusing on the many inconsistencies in references to resurrection appearances, most prominently Matthew 28:17 (“When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted”), and putting this in comparative perspective through the accounts of the resurrections (claimed, disputed, retracted, doubted) of John Robins and Dorcas Erbury between 1650 and 1656 in London and Bristol, England, respectively, Meggitt undermines any facile taken-at-face-value understanding of the resurrection of Jesus.³ When, as Deane Galbraith argues, “the empty tomb vision-narrative presents a different mode of historytelling, due to its claim to be revealed by a visionary figure,”⁴ we are moved towards a different understanding of what history is. History (in the sense of what happened) is not the referential content of historical texts or literary artifacts comprising the tradition, rather it is the narration that is the historical event, the speech act is the event that constitutes and makes history,⁵ and one can add, what constitutes history is narration-as-cultured-performance. Such a take moves critical historiography of the historical Jesus and Christian origins in very different directions, and in general, provides a foundation for a new practice of reading evidence for the history of religions.

The essays by Zainab Amin (“The Silent Apophasis: Divine Hiddenness, Trauma, and the (Im)possibility of Theology in a Secular Age”), Auwais Rafudeen (“On the Possibility of Thinking Machines: Contemporary Islamic Approaches to a Western Question”), and Jeremy Punt (“The Politics of Reading: The Bible in Democratic South Africa”) appear here under the sign of “Making Religion-Sense in Times of Disruption.” The heading embraces two elements that have to be considered in conjunction with each other: first, disruption – the sense that there is no “business as usual” in discoursing religion, that is, tying this discoursing to the essential historicity and contextuality of our stipulating and doing “religion” – and doing so in a context where, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the old order is passing and we do not know yet what will replace it. And second, making religion-sense, a statement about “religion” as a discourse, the collective noun for sets of significations (ranging from the spoken word, texts, gestures, rituals, symbolising with/through objects, constructing spaces the materiality of which is inscribed with meaning, practiced embodied affectivity, etc.) that is, all the kinds of acts of signification that not only construct our way of knowing the world but, as Bruce Lincoln explained, reference this knowing of the world in relation to a transcendent order, with the added implication of its authority;⁶ which referencing, signification, and knowing are historically, contextually, and socially conditioned; and that is institutionalised in accepted (one can say, “canonical”) ways of thinking about whatever topic or states of affairs are at issue (“institutionalised,” in the sense of habituating actions, affects, and dispositions, that is, creating a habitus). Therefore, it tends to shape the way we know, experience, and move in the world we live in. Understood like this, the study of “discourse” is a way into investigating all the concrete operational sites of a given historical social formation or society’s sense of self – its self-understandings, its self-representations, and its self-reinscriptions.⁷

Taking the cue from the latter part of the above statement on discourse, Amin’s proposal of a “silent apophasis,” a standing “inside the hiddenness of God” translates the discursive meaning of historical contexts of overwhelming trauma – as a way of entering the historical moment in our variously social situatedness.⁸ While the citation of Elie Wiesel’s Night evokes the Holocaust as background (and which traumatic experience gave rise to a – Christian and Jewish – genre of “theology after Auschwitz” writing) we are again living through a massive trauma of what is now generally recognised as the genocide in Gaza, an event so well-documented it plays out in real time in front of our eyes but mobilising social/political/moral position-taking (and violent repression) across the world.⁹ It is a kind of God-talk and religious discoursing that proceeds from an understanding of Jesus’s crucifixion as a symbol of the human condition (the eternal reoccurrence of what the Marquis de Sade portrayed in The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Licentiousness, namely, the way the bodies of the powerless become objects of exploitation and destruction to those who wield power)¹⁰ and thus, speaking of crucifixion is not referencing a singular, exceptional, once-for-all-time event (and by contrast, resurrection discourse becomes an act of rebellion, a refusal to accept the destruction of life and limb as normal). From this follows Amin’s call for a reorientation of theology from a mere acceding to the secular age’s deus absconditus, to thinking through trauma towards “the end of a certain kind of theology: one predicated on mastery, certainty, and a logic of resolution,” to a witnessing ethical commitment to the traumatised other. If divine kenosis implies a turn towards the world (as Amin suggests by referring to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s discernment that “the God who is with us is the God who forsakes us, compelling us to live etsi deus non daretur [as if God were not given], in a responsible, worldly faith”),¹¹ then the discourses of theology, society, science, and economy are not insular or isolatable discourses. Instead, Bonhoeffer’s concepts of a “religionless Christianity” and the “non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts” for a world come of age, imply that exactly the seemingly untheological discourses and fields of politics, ecology, the natural sciences, economic interchange and social formation, are indeed the domain of religious and theological discourse. This means that the proprium of theological and religious discourse is no longer a sui generis language and conceptual apparatus, but the language spoken in the fields of “ordinary” human ways of doing things. If, following Bonhoeffer, a “religious interpretation” is one conceiving of an otherworldly salvation concerning a worldless, transcendental, subject, the so-called “worldly interpretation” implies that the world is the theatre of action for fully immersed human agents, who have to act out their social vision on their own responsibility. Such a kind of theology enunciates a come of age social agency, of moral authority residing squarely with the human sphere. It means, furthermore, that other conceptual languages, namely, those deriving from the world of human doings (i.e., the humanities, the social sciences, economics, the natural and medical sciences, etc.) now become the languages with which to speak religion and theology, as disciplines and as practices. Silence, apophasis, is the absence of transcendence and the metaphysical, but instead of being a mere loss, silence is a call to be fully human for others.

Auwais Rafudeen reflects on the implications of a different kind of disruption – that of artificial intelligence. The sudden eruption of Large Language Models (LLM s) and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) since 2021 with the launch of ChatGPT¹² brought with it a sense of disruption in the way the world of work and learning is understood and organised. There are already intense debates on the impact AI is making – and going to make (although no-one can predict the future yet) – to the organisation of society. But now a question has also arisen regarding the possible impact of AI on religion – the construction of religions and the practicing of religion – and here Rafudeen raises the question of what to make of the use of AI chatbots in generating counselling and religious guidance, a debate current among Islamic legal experts as to whether AI chatbots or robots can exercise agency, that is, whether machines can think and thus be assigned legal competency (Rafudeen is himself a participant in a discussion group called “AI and Religion”). Rafudeen surveys the opinions on whether machines can think, or perhaps reach a stage in the near future where they can. And while contemporary Islamic perspectives can admit of both affirmative and negative responses to the question, amidst the varied and deep engagement of Islamic scholars with both classical Islamic thinking and Western theoretisation, there is an openness to the possibility of machine thinking suggested by seeing artificially intelligent entities (chatbots and machines) as existents “endowed by God with a certain role and, being ultimately created by God … manifest[ing] the power and creative act of God in a particular way. Further, techno-optimism and techno-doomerism in relation to AI cannot exist outside the purview of God’s control and will, and so should be experienced in relation to divine activity.” Looming over this is a more deep-reaching question, namely can machines eventually be conscious and exhibit consciousness? In Craffert’s essay in this issue, the phenomenon of consciousness is not explicitly thematised, but in describing consciousness as interactive ecology (something equally applicable to what is commonly seen as mere matter, as set forth in the New Materialism), a door is opened to raising this possibility.¹³ This raises the spectre, of course, of reaching the singularity, not only understood as that stage when advances in AI can create machines that are smarter than humans, or when humans are replaced by machines, but that stage when humans and machines become indistinguishable (something foreshadowed long ago in the 1927 German science fiction film, Metropolis, the plot of which centres on the role of a robot-human, Maria, in the struggle between machines and human workers).

Jeremy Punt’s essay maps the way in which biblical language and imagery still function as a discourse with authority, the performativity of which provides a window on to attempts to shape South African political attitudes, but also to provide cover for and justification for a range of actions, from overt political motivation to exculpating dubious actions. With an overwhelming majority of South Africans self-identifying as Christians (though this says nothing about the character of the Christianities involved), the Bible is still a powerful cultural matrix continuously drawn on for purposes of identity-maintenance and boundary-drawing and habitus-inculcation. However, if biblical language is used to shore up support for particular political parties and programmes, the other side is also noteworthy – the deeply ingrained Christian orientation of the majority of South African notwithstanding, “Christians did not extend their biblical worldview to political matters.” This disengagement with politics is evidenced particularly in the exponential growth in the broad range of entrepreneurial Evangelical-Charismatic-Neopentecostal formations typically exhibiting a focus on matters of well-being and prosperity.

The last essay, that of Russell T. McCutcheon (“The Eternal Return of the Same Critique: Continuing Ambiguities in the Study of Religion”), appears under the heading, “On Tilling the Field, Over and Over and Over – The Questions Still Beg Being Asked.” While the article is a reworked version of the introduction the new (second) edition of McCutcheon’s 1997 published thesis, Manufacturing Religion,¹⁴ the heading has been deliberately formulated like this to demonstrate the persistence of this argument through McCutcheon’s work over the years, but also to link it to essays that had been published in this journal before.¹⁵ In the course of his long career, McCutcheon found himself the bête noire of scholars in religious studies, especially scholars leaning in the direction of either phenomenology and history of religion, or – lately – cognitive studies of religion.¹⁶ Together with others who pursue a similar kind of discourse study of religion, McCutcheon’s work has been characterised as anti-realist in the sense that he is claiming that religion does not exist, it is merely “manufactured,” merely a name without a substance.¹⁷ On this basis McCutcheon has been accused of helping to at least undermine, or at worst, destroy, the study field and its associated institutionalised disciplines. But this is to completely mischaracterise his work. Russell McCutcheon has spent a career in pursuing an ethnography of scholarship, studying the definitional and classificatory practices of scholars on religion, focusing not so much on the contents of the various case studies in the field, but on the social, cultural, political, and ideological work performed in doing religious studies and writing on and theorising religion.¹⁸ Hence, as he puts it in his introduction to the 2018 theme issue, “religion – and even the habit of using that very word to name certain things in our social worlds as religious or not – is an ordinary element of mundane, but no less fascinating, human situations in which ordinary people signify their worlds and, in the process, debate (and, yes, at times fight openly) over those very significances” (157). And as he continues further on:

While we might call this shift a move toward a metatheoretical focus, we could also understand our experiment as an effort to redescribe (with a nod toward the work of the late J.Z. Smith) not just our data but the field itself, seeing it as but another place where not religion is studied but, instead, where those things commonly classified by some as religion are the points of entry into examining the complexity of human behavior in general and signification in particular – a complexity that is no less exemplified in our own scholarly habit of debating among ourselves which things should be known as religions, myths, rituals, traditions, scriptures, cults, symbols, orthodoxies, cultures, etc.

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In this essay here in this issue, Russell T. McCutcheon returns to his influential critique of traditional scholarship on religion, given that, in his estimation, little has changed in the field despite the progress often said to have been made by recent generations of scholars.¹⁹ As is clear from his article (and of much of his scholarly writing) the problematic sites where the redescriptive work is to be undertaken are still the widespread disciplinary formations of phenomenology and history of religion with their foundational assumptions of sui generis “special case-ness” requiring special theory-and-method tools in order to reach the deep meaning and timeless value at the heart of religion and its study, to be carefully curated empathetically by the religious studies scholar. And so, here again, as the Press abstract puts it, McCutcheon analyses the ideological effects of the claim that religion is some sui generis in-itself-standing thing, a claim that functions to stipulate and constitute a particular sort of object, ahistorical apolitical, personal, fetishised, and sacrosanct – all claims that not only helped to establish publicly funded college departments but also to justify for the wider public a variety of geo-political actions.

This issue of Religion & Theology thus stands in the ambit of the anthropocentric turn in the study of religion and theology: it gives expression to the fact that “our object of scholarly study is always people: what they claim, how they organize, and whatever they might leave behind when they’re gone (e.g., their texts, laws, architecture, art, etc.)”²⁰ on the level of what is studied (the objects of study) but also at the level of the operations of the study itself.