Systematic Theology

In June 2016 a lone shooter killed 49 queer people in Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida. This became know as the deadliest attack against the queer community around the world.  However, there was little mention that the victims of the attack were people of color. In this paper, as a Latinx/o Puerto Rican  Queer person, I will engage in the development of a spatial eschatological discourse using the Pulse Massacre and the metaphor of the closet. I start by demonstrating how the colonial influences to the development of today’s mainstream understanding of Gender and Sexuality, which affected negatively people who lived diverse sexual orientation and gender identity, to explain how the nightclubs became for some sort of a sanctuary to live their life and their identities fullest. I continue by engaging and problematizing the metaphor of the Closet as another space, utilizing my experience as a queer person of color, currently living in the United States. The inside of both the Nightclub and the closet are queer space that are spaces of salvation and condemnation at the same time, whose wall are semipermeable membranes that allow for gift and death to pass by.  I utilize, Brazilian theologian, Vitor Westhelle’s framework of a spatial view of eschatology to develop my discourse.  I want to propose that Pulse and the closet can provide a framework to view Eschatology in a different way and that in the queer space of these eschata can produce a messianic power that disrupts the status quo,  which created a needs for queer nightclubs and closets.

Rudolf Bultmann preached the Gospel to an age he believed could no longer accept the mythical worldview of the Bible. He stripped away the mythical wrappings surrounding the Christ event in the New Testament, in order to proclaim the kernel of the Gospel message existentially. Bultmann’s existentialist interpretation of the Gospel kerygma centers on trusting God rather than the false stumbling block of biblical literalism and has important implications for Christian faith today. This essay interprets Bultmann’s hermeneutic in relation to Martin Luther’s theology of the cross to argue that the Marburg professor’s work continues to be an asset to the Lutheran tradition.

Paul Tillich is a traditionally rooted, yet progressive, theologian and philosopher who sought to bring the Christian message to the predicament of existential meaninglessness faced by modern people. The present article addresses a scholarly gap by emphasizing Tillich's use of Martin Luther's theology of the cross, in order to demonstrate Tillich's theological relevance for today from a Lutheran lens.

As the founder of Black liberation theology, James Cone radicalized the best of 20th century European systematic theology by doing constructive theological work centered on Jesus Christ’s radical solidarity with and liberation of suffering black bodies.  As a committed theologian of the cross, Cone turned European systematic theology on its head to address radical activism for and on behalf of suffering black bodies, while still drawing from the best aspects of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Jürgen Moltmann.  Cone’s radicalization of the theological tradition he inherited through the cross of Jesus Christ is the core of his constructive theology.  What is often missed in Cone, though, is his connection to the sixteenth-century radical theologian of the cross, Martin Luther. This post is a connection between Luther and Cone for the church today.