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This thesis examines the role that the motif of divine abandonment played in the exegetical and ascetical literature of late antiquity. Divine abandonment of the soul was an integral part of the spiritual life. Its "normativeness" was related to the notion of divine paideia: God instructed the soul by abandoning the soul to ethical trials. This paideia had eschatological implications: divine abandonment highlighted the eschatological orientation of the Christian faith. Divine abandonment of Christ, however, is treated in Christological, rather than ascetical, terms. The experience of abandonment by the ascetics was not based on a "Christ-like" ethical model: Christ's abandonment was only connected to the ascetical abandonment within the scope of divine providence. The first part introduces the Patristic exegesis on the Song of Songs. It shows that Patristic exegesis related divine abandonment of the soul to ethical trials and highlights the role of the motif as part of divine paideia that leads the soul to an eschatological ethical perfection. The second part discusses Christ's abandonment on the cross, which Patristic literature handled with a certain hesitancy, even uncertainty. The last part examines the ascetical tradition. The motif illustrated God’s providential care for the ascetic soul where God remedied the soul's weakness and led her to the ethical fulfilment in the eschaton. This part also addresses the subtle way in which ascetical literature envisaged Christ as a spiritual model. The conclusion that this thesis draws is that it is within the theological framework of divine paideia and eschatology that the Patristic literature understood the notion of divine abandonment. Furthermore, it suggests that it is in this framework of their common tradition that the Eastern and Western spiritual traditions might mutually approach and understand each other.

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This thesis intends to make a contribution to the understanding of human destiny with reference to Wolfhart Pannenberg. Our research is best described as a theological anthropology in a historical perspective as opposed to Pannenberg's secular anthropology in a theological perspective. We present history as a way to map out the movement of humanity over the course of its history to its common destiny from creation (chapter 2) through sin (chapter 4) and ethics to eschatology (chapter 5). Anthropology has been taken here as only the starting point for our study, which presents openness to the world or exocentricity (chapter 3) as an anthropological constant to historicity. Chapter 2 evaluates Pannenberg's assertion, based on Herder, that the full image of God is realised not from the beginning but only through the destiny of humanity, which lies yet in the future. However, we argue that Pannenberg differentiates himself from Herder in a crucial respect in that Pannenberg grounds Herder's anthropology on a christological foundation in order to present a salvific, rather than a providential, account of the renewal of the imago Dei. Chapter 3 delineates the reasons for the original human state being characterised by openness toward one's supernatural fulfilment, which is already present as a future destiny, and corresponds to the single saving event of Jesus Christ in history. Openness to God becomes, for Pannenberg, the bridge out of the poverty of the natural beginning point of humanity into the full realisation of human destiny. The aim of chapter 4 is to argue the case for defining sin explicitly in relation to human destiny, namely, as passivity to destiny. In our sin, we are robbed of our true identity, and the separation of sinners from God means at the same time our separation from our own destiny, which is communion with God. Chapter 5 opens with a more detailed examination of eschatology, and examines the deep structure of the later Pannenberg's system of ethics, which he now explicitly argues for an anthropological foundation, with a claim of universal validity. The final chapter concludes with arguments leading to the uniting of nature, essence and destiny of humanity as one.

The thesis explores the theological implications of intersex conditions (those involving the congenital development of ambiguous genitalia, a congenital disjunction of the internal and external sex anatomy, sex chromosome anomalies, or variations in gonadal development) and their medical treatment. Christian theology has valued the integrity of the body and the goodness of God reflected in creation, but has also set much store by the “complementarity” of “normal” male and female physiology (and gender as mapped onto these). It has been threatened by liminality, shifts in sexed and gendered identity, and non-marital sexual activity. However, a deconstruction or querying of male and female as essential or all-embracing human categories changes conceptions of legitimate bodiliness and of what it means for human sex to reflect God. Theologies based too unmovingly in sex or gender complementarity are dubious in light of intersex, and fail to resist imperialism, hegemony and heteronormativity. Theologies which value incarnation and bodiliness must speak with stigmatized or marginal bodies too: the Body of Christ is comprised of human members, and each member changes the Body’s definition of itself as well as being defined by it. Accepting the non-pathology of intersexed and otherwise atypical bodies necessitates a re-examination of discourses about sex, marriage, sexuality, perfection, healing and the resurrection body. Informed by existing theologies from three marginal areas (transsexualism, disability and queer theology), this beginning of a theology from intersex demonstrates the necessity of resisting erotic domination in defining bodies. Theology is always self-queering, since it contains tools for hermeneutical suspicion, for overturning religious and cultural practices which do not meet the demands of love and justice. Although intersexed people do not always align themselves with the politically queer, intersex is, unavoidably, theologically queer. The ongoing erasure of intersexed bodies and experiences demands theological responses motivated not by fear but by a desire to expand the ways in which human lives and bodies tell stories. Until theologians, medics and others accept that the male-and-female world is not the only “real” world, and that the normalizing procedures of surgery and signification which bolster it are themselves grounded in something partial and arbitrary, the silencing and devaluing of otherness in human bodies will go on. This cannot be justified.