Journal: Southeastern Theological Review
Volume: STR 11:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: Interview With Daniel L. Hill Of Dallas Theological Seminary
Author: Anonymous

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Interview With Daniel L. Hill Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Dr. Hill is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary where he earned a ThM. He holds a BA from Hampton University and a PhD from Wheaton College where he researched the nexus of ecclesiology and anthropology. His research interests include ecclesiology, theological anthropology, and political theology.

How can believers embody the way of Christ in our contemporary context without making Jesus captive to their cultural norms?

One of the primary problems that runs Christian Christological reflection adrift is our tendency toward projection. Projection, according to Karen Kilby, is the three-step process whereby we first take a concept to explore an aspect of Christian mystery. Next, we fill out the contours of this concept using notions borrowed from our own experiences. Finally, we then present this concept to the wider world as a resource from Christian theology.1 While Kilby’s focus is primarily on Trinitarian doctrine and the concept of perichoresis, the same error emerges in our Christological reflection. In so doing, we fail to allow God to ground and determine our reflection of him, substituting idols that cohere with our preconceptions in the place where he once stood. In other words, our conceptions of Christ begin to reflect our local notions of humanity, manhood, liberation, politics, and the like. The danger here is that we risk turning Christ into a mere cipher for our own conceptions of deity and humanity. And this projection is particularly pressing as we end up evaluating the humanity of others in accordance with our preferences.2

Some might worry that this fear of idolatry might stagnate our Christological thinking in a quagmire of contextual relativity or lead us to seek out Kant’s “view from nowhere,” disregarding context altogether. However, these two concerns reflect an overreaction. Instead, we would do

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well to recognize that insofar as God has come near to us in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and in our communion in the Spirit, he ensures that we can know him. We can therefore adopt a critical realism wherein we recognize that God has indeed made himself known to us, granting us a degree of theological confidence, while also recognizing that our conceptions of him remain limited. God accommodates his self-disclosure to the human creature in an act of supreme benevolence, even as he remains ever above and beyond these very categories.

Faithfully embodying the way of Christ demands at least three things. First, we must be aware...