Michael Welker is a systematic theologian who works through the biblical traditions and through philosophical and sociological theories to address questions of contemporary culture. Warning against a reductionist systematics that can block as well as guide thought, he has focused on the interplay among religious, legal, moral, scientific, and other cultural codes that shape the ethos of the postmodern world. His work is exceptionally wide-ranging, and he has recently considered problems of pluralism in societies, cultures, and canonic traditions, as well as exploring notions of human personhood in pre-modern, modern, and contemporary periods. In God the Spirit (1992 and 1994), he articulates a broad spectrum of experiences of the Spirit, searches and quests for the Spirit, and skepticism toward the Spirit that define the contemporary world. His interweaving of diverse testimonies and accounts of God and God's action among human beings illuminates how different people and different groups of people throughout history have served as bearers of God's revelation. Professor and chair of systematic theology in the Theological Faculty of the University of Heidelberg, he has been director of the university's Internationales Wissenschaftsforum since 1996. Dr. Welker is a graduate of the University of Tübingen where he studied with Jürgen Moltmann and earned a doctorate in theology in 1973. Ordained in the Evangelische Kirche der Pfalz, he received a Ph.D. from Heidelberg in 1978. He was professor of systematic theology in the Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen from 1983 to 1987 and, for the next four years, professor and chair of Reformed theology in the Theological Faculty of the University of Münster. He has held an honorary research fellowship at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion of the University of Chicago Divinity School and been a visiting professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and the Princeton Theological Seminary as well as a guest professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Dr. Welker serves on the board of advisors of the John Templeton Foundation. A member of the Consultation on Science and Religion of Princeton's Center for Theological Inquiry since 1993, he is a member of the editorial boards of Dialog: A Journal of Theology, Evangelische Theologie, Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie, the Journal of Law and Religion, Process Studies, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Verkündigung und Forschung, and Word and World. He has published some 200 articles in scholarly journals and written or edited more than twenty books. In addition to four recent works in German, including Kirche im Pluralismus (2000), his latest studies are: What Happens in Holy Communion (2000), which has been published in six languages; (edited with John Polkinghorne) The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology (2000), which has been translated into Korean; (with John Polkinghorne) Faith in the Living God: A Dialogue for Troubled Friends and Educated Despisers of Christianity (2001), which has been translated into Korean and Chinese; (edited with Ted Peters and Robert John Russell) Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments (2002); and (with Wallace M. Alston), Reformed Theology: Identity and Ecumenicity, which was published in 2003 by Wm. B. Eerdmans.