The Old Testament is rich in animal imagery. There has been a considerable amount of work done on the imagery connected with animal sacrifice and on the theological significance of this, but little work done on the wider use of animal imagery in the Old Testament. To attempt to document and review this for the whole Old Testament is beyond the scope of this article, but what I wish to do is to focus on a particularly neglected area—the use of animal imagery in the psalms and wisdom literature of ancient Israel. I have divided the material mentioning animals in the books of Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes into seven categories, which I believe are helpful for defining the material but necessarily involve some overlap. The first three categories are concerned with animals as seen from a human viewpoint. They involve humans looking at the world and attempting to illuminate and prescribe human behaviour on the basis of what is observed of animal behaviour. The last three categories involve God and his relationship with the created world, with humanity and with animals. Again this is expressed from a human standpoint, but very often the limitations of the human quest for understanding is stressed. The middle and bridging category is the simple observation of animal behaviour which seems to me to go some way towards counterbalancing the others which are inevitably humanocentric and theocentric respectively.

Enlightenment optimism concerning man's ‘natural goodness’ is out of fashion. The many instances of monstrous evil on a mass scale (Nazi extermination camps; Gulags; Cambodia; Kosovo, etc.), the widespread reporting of the activities of sadistic torturers and killers, the great increase in violent crime and drug addiction in the most affluent and welleducated societies, expose to ridicule Condorcet's prediction that 'the time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason … the human race, emancipated from its shackles [will] advance with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness. Yet there have been few recent philosophical or theological attempts to consider afresh the nature of human evil, and most of them still tend, if mutedly, to cling to the notion of mankind's essential moral goodness. Thus the hesitant conclusion of Ricoeur's reconsideration of human moral responsibility is that ‘however radical evil may be, it cannot be as primordial as goodness’, and that we should think of an ‘existential superimposition of radical evil on primordial good’.2 In 1963, Hannah Arendt declared that ‘evil is never “radical”, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension … Only the good has depth and can be radical.‘ Instead she wrote of the ‘banality of evil’, generalising from the case of Eichmann.

Without creating certain illusions, to which hope could also be added as a moving beyond despair, the early Nietzsche felt one would be resigned to a paralysing, despairing life-denying, nausea. After all, some form of hope is necessary to human existence in order to open otherwise closed avenues towards the future, one that can resist the contemporary loss of certain imaginings of our futures.

The purpose of this article is to suggest that dogmatic theology is best practised through description of the world. Its method is to marry two unlikely characters: Karl Bardi, Swiss Reformed theologian, and Michel Foucault, French atheist philosopher and historian. The thesis we propose can be presented directly. Barth is well known for insisting, in his ethics lectures in Münster and Bonn (1928/29 and 1930/31 respectively) and volume II of his Church Dogmatics, that ethics is dogmatics. Foucault famously rejected ethics which makes universal normative claims in favour of producing descriptions of historical phenomena and letting the reader make moral judgments accordingly. His method, we suggest, understands ethics as ethnography. We have taken these two ways of thinking together and excluded the middle term: ethics. This has yielded the abbreviated form: ethnography is dogmatics.

There has been a growing interest in recent years in the question of meaning as it relates to liturgical performance. There is a long tradition within liturgical writing of deriving some kind of theological meaning for the liturgy from the content of the text that is used. More recently, however, this understanding of ‘meaning’ has been considered too limiting. It treats the liturgy as a literary/theological text and ignores the fact that the liturgical text is only one small part of a much wider act of worship. Bridget Nichols, for example, in her book Liturgical Hermeneutics: Interpreting Liturgical Rites in Performance suggests that the traditional theological/literary meaning is misleading. The liturgical text is designed to be performed, it comes into existence in performance, and outside of that performance, it is nothing. Kieren Flanagan also claimed to address the question of meaning and performance in his book on Sociology and Liturgy: Re-presentations of the Holy. Nichols rejected this approach, however, because of what she claims is Flanagan's particular misreading of Hans-Georg Gadamer's writing on ‘play’. This led Flanagan to suggest that there is only one single ‘unitary’ meaning in liturgy which is constantly renewed in each and every act of worship. Joyce Ann Zimmerman has written a book entitled Liturgy as Language of Faith: A Liturgical Methodology in the Mode of Paul Ricoeur's Textual Hermeneutics but this also ignores the performative aspect of liturgy and, like Flanagan, asserts a definitive meaning for the text.