Christianity In Iberian America
Alden, Dauril, The making of an enterprise The Society of Jesus in Portugal, its empire, and beyond, 1540-1750, Stanford Stanford University Press, 1996. Block, David, Mission culture on the upper Amazon Native tradition, Jesuit enterprise and secular policy in Moxos, 1600-1880, Lincoln, NB University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Brading, D. A., Church and state in Michoacan, 1749-1810, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1994. Mexican Phoenix Our Lady of Guadalupe Image and tradition across five...
V God Loves Everyone A New Doctrine Not Believed by the GodFearing Puritans of
Before the 20th Century God loves everyone was largely a foreign theology to the United States even though they had the same Old Testament and New Testament that we have. The Puritans that stepped off the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620, and their progeny that inhabited the United States for nearly 300 years, largely did not believe that God loves everyone. Whether you call these early Americans, Puritans, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, or most other...
Conclusion 1
At no moment after the Council of Chalcedon was the Christian church able to achieve its vision of unity. In this contested environment, the Persian and then Arab conquests perpetuated the extant divisions of doctrine and allegiance. Moreover the spread of Islam exercised lasting influence upon the character of the Christian cultures of the Near East. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, conquest, conflict, and persecution gave the churches of this area the impulse to anchor...
The CP for chains
We assume in this argument that we are dealing with a kind of causation such that the causes relation is transitive if x causes y and y causes z, then x causes z and irreflexive x does not cause x . A causal chain of items is a set S of items totally ordered under the causes relation. In other words, if x and y are members of S, then either x y, or x causes y, or y causes x. The relata of the causal relation can be concrete things or events or concrete states of affairs - I shall call these...
Circumcision in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture
Let us move now to the second example of the cultural politics of the circumcision of Jesus and its representation interpretation. This brings us closer to home historically and geographically and rescues me from troubled waters of New Testament exegesis and the sharks within those waters ready to take lumps out of unwitting theologians who wander in there untrained, unlettered. The circumcision ofJesus, as already mentioned, has been celebrated by the Church since the sixth century, but it...
a Historical Text as Historical Text
If the Renaissance and Reformation recognition of the distance and difference of the past continues to provide a fundamental perspective for historical inquiry, so too their reappropriation of the fact that the original texts of the NT were not first composed in the lingua franca of western Europe Latin likewise continues to provide a fundamental hermeneutical principle. In other words, the necessity and character of translation become a basic factor in any contemporary use of these texts to...
The Epistemic Status Of Religious Experience
Attention to spiritual experience's epistemic status has taken two forms. Some have attempted to explain the mechanism of spiritual perception, i.e., to show how it works, its place in the human psyche. Others have offered reasons for believing that these perceptions are or are not veridical. The most interesting examples of the first approach are Rudolf Otto's Philosophy of Religion and The Idea of the Holy, and discussions among Roman Catholic theologians and philosophers in the first half of...
The mendicant orders the problematic Franciscans
The Franciscans, like the Dominicans, came to experience problems in university and parish life, but their difficulties were much more fundamental. They had a founder whose words and impact were controversial and disturbing. Everything that Francis of Assisi said and wrote was a challenge to the way the Christian Church had functioned until that time. In marrying Lady Poverty he insisted that the imitation of Christ meant a literal abandonment of all worldly goods. To become a follower of...
Inflated Claims for the Trinity
Many contemporary theologies overestimate the progressive political potential of the Trinity. Monotheism, it is alleged, supports monolithic identities and authoritarian forms of government in which power is held exclusively by a single leader or group while an internally diverse triune God, whose persons share equally with one another, avoids these dangers Peterson 1935 Moltmann 1991 192-202 Boff 1988 20-4 . Overlooked in such a simple contrast are the complexities of theological claims, their...
Father Gapon
The above Father Gapon incident is typical of applied Judaism. The dramatic prayer addressed by Gapon to the Czarist government with the threat that if it were not granted, we shall die here on the Square before thy Palace, combined with mutinies, strikes involving more than 2,000,000 people, are related in William Henry Chamberlin's The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 1935 . We read Gapon himself was doubtful about the wisdom of bringing large masses to present this petition Vol. I, p. 48 . Yet...
The Economic Trinity The Single Gendered Drama Continues
Balthasar's trinitarian drama - at the economic level - makes two key assumptions. Following the Johannine testimony, Balthasar argues that the Father is known only through the Son. This is the witness of most of the New Testament. Furthermore, for Balthasar, the Son as male is key in properly representing the supramasculine originless begetting Father. A woman could not represent this aspect of the Father. This is why, so to speak, God became incarnate in a man. Balthasar never tells us how...
The Primitive Environment
HOW THE THEORY TELLS IT According to the evolutionary theory, life began in this way 1 There was just the right atmosphere and it was totally different than the one we now have. 2 The ground, water, or ocean where life began had just the right combination of chemicals in it which it does not now have. 3 Using an unknown source of just the right amount of energy, amino acids then formed in sufficient quantities that 4 they could combine into lots of proteins and nucle-otides complex chemical...
The Sign of Gods Authority
We want to search in God's law to see which part actually does constitute the seal. But first, let's find out what constitutes God's power and authority. The President exercises authority by virtue of his office as President. God claims power based on His office as Creator of the universe. Notice the words found in leremiah 10 10-12 But the Lord is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even...
The Church in Early America
Upon arriving in Rhode Island, the only American colony founded upon the principle of religious liberty, the Mumfords began to fellowship with Baptists in Newport. They were not quiet, however, about their belief in the Sabbath. In 1665, within the first year of the Mumfords' arrival, Tacy Hubbard started keeping the Sabbath with them, becoming the first convert in America. Shortly afterward, her husband Samuel joined her. In 1671 the first Sabbath-keeping church in America officially began...
Macedonian and Komnenian Dynasties
Byzantine art from the end of iconoclasm in 843 to the fall of Constantinople to the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 is frequently termed Middle Byzantine. The whole period is dominated by two imperial dynasties, the Macedonian dynasty, which dominated the imperial throne between 867 and 1056, and the Komnenian dynasty, between 1081 and 1185. The cross-in-square church which entered metropolitan use in the ninth century became the norm in Byzantine architecture and in the tenth century...
The High Priests Annas And Caiaphas
The Bible states that at the time of the trial of Jesus, there were two high priests, Annas and Caiaphas. Luke 3 1-3 says the following Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness. And he went...
Early Masonic Ties
Heber C. Kimball,41 Hyrum Smith brother of Joseph Smith, Jr. 42 and others of Joseph's family43 were Freemasons at Palmyra before Joseph ever announced any of his visions or gold plates. Men like the Mason itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow came through their territory.44 Items used by the Smith family prior to Joseph's revelations, also indicate a Masonic influence. A Masonic dove medallion from an English Masonic Lodge was used by Joseph Smith, Jr. Some of the magic items that still survive today...
Bible College
The Bible college is essentially a nineteenth-century North American evangelical invention. A Bible college is a cross between a Bible institute training center and a Christian liberal arts school. Its students concentrate in religious studies and are trained for Christian service. The founders of the first Bible colleges were influenced by London pastors H. G. Guinness 1835-1910 and Charles Spur-geon 1834-1892 . In response to the revivalism of D. L. Moody, the Bible college movement blossomed...
Series
Acta S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Ecclesiam Catholicam Ucrainae et Bielorusijae spectan-tia. Ed. A. Welykyi. 4 vols. Rome, P. P. Basiliani, 1953- . Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica. Ed. Samuel Cramer and Fredrik Pijper. 10 vols. 's-Gravenhage M. Nijhoff, 1903-14 . Bibliotheca sanctorum, 12 vols. Rome Citta nuova editrice, 1961-9 , Index 1970 , 2 appendix vols. 1987, 2000 . Calvin, John, Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia. Ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz et al. 59 vols. Braunschweig...
An Ecclesial Cosmology
The images that we use for the cosmos are important. We have seen over recent centuries the effects of a mechanistic model, followed by efforts to redress the balance by introducing more organic metaphors. The images that have predominated in Orthodox thought are essentially ecclesial. The Orthodox understanding has been variously described as sacramental cosmology, eucharistic cosmology or cosmic liturgy, but the common factor is summed up in Maximus's words, 'the world is a church'.40 It is...
The Styles Of Protestant Worship
For most people, Protestantism is encountered primarily through the regular acts of worship of its churches. Protestantism is most regularly experienced and encountered as a living reality through its Sunday worship and its marriages, baptisms, and funerals. Any account of how Protestantism manifests itself must therefore include description and analysis of Protestant worship. Yet this is not the easiest of tasks, mainly because of the astonishing variety of forms of worship now encountered...
of doing theology
The question of the relationship between socially engaged biblical scholars and ordinary poor and marginalised readers of the Bible lies at the heart of this chapter. While it may seem strange to begin an essay on 'The Bible and the poor5 with such a statement, liberation theologies in their various forms all emerge from the interface between socially committed theologians and ordinary Christians from poor and marginalised communities- The task of this chapter is to understand the contours of...
The Modern Revival
The strong revival of Coptic monasteries in the twentieth century is surprising. The leadership of Cyril VI patriarch 1959-71 was crucial, but even before Cyril's term of office, there is evidence that greater numbers of more educated people were joining monasteries perhaps stimulated by the Sunday school movement . Monasteries that had operated continuously e.g., St Macarius increased their membership others e.g., the White Monastery were re-founded. Under Shenouda III 19 71- , the trend has...
The Equinoctial Points
These are the points where the sun crosses the celestial equator, which he necessarily does twice in his yearly circuit of the zodiac, at two opposite points, distant from each other in space 180 , and in time six months. The point where the sun crosses in spring, coming north, is called the vernal or spring equinox and the other, where he crosses six months afterward, going south, is called the autumnal equinox. At these periods the days and nights are equal, and that is the reason why they...
election
Having recognized the sovereign right of God over His creation and having assigned to Him a rational purpose in all His plan, the truth contained in the doctrine of election follows in natural sequence as the necessary function of one who is divine. When there arises unbelief and resistance in the human mind against the tenet of divine election, it is engendered only because this larger conception of divine necessity has not been considered. It is hard, indeed, for men who have adopted the idea...
Old Covenant vs New Covenant
The Old Covenant is the Letter of the Law which kills vs. The New Covenant is the giving without measure of The Spirit which quickens . The Old Covenant is The Law of sin and death. The New Covenant is the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus Romans 8 1 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. 3 For what...
Reading the Signs of the Times
The Second Vatican Council tract, Gaudium et Spes, among the more significant documents to emerge from the Council, was organized around the proposal that At all times the Church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the time and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel, if it is to carry out its task. This trope, reading the signs of the time, is an allusion to Matthew 16.3, in which Jesus criticizes religious leaders who can interpret the skies for tomorrow's weather, but...
Political Philosophy in Aquinas
On Kingship is not an independent treatise on political philosophy composed by Thomas from his own reflections. Analyses of its choices among authorities and structures show that On Kingship is a clarification of inherited topics, arguments, and materials. Its novelties are novelties of balance and selection, not of doctrine or discovery. Thomas subordinates even the newest Aristotle, the Aristotle of a more complete Politics, to traditional themes and ends. Those themes and ends carry with...
The Structure of Metzs Fundamental Theology with a Practical Intent
These concerns pull in different directions, a fact that goes a long way to explain the tensions in Metz's thought. Yet there is an underlying coherence that can be disclosed by considering the genre, determinative question, and doctrinal locus of his theology. First the genre. Metz calls his a practical fundamental theology, or a fundamental theology with a practical intent Metz 1980 ix, 49, inter alia . A brief historical detour into the recent history of Roman Catholic theology can help...
Difference and indistinction Meister Eckhart
In the formulation of Meister Eckhart's theology, however, the Dionysian hierarchy - whether in the form of an ontology of degrees of being, or in that of the outflow of descending illuminations - notably plays little if any part. If 'difference' is central to that theology and spirituality, the carefully structured hierarchical gradings of the pseudo-Denys found in chapters 4 and 5 of his Mystical Theology in Eckhart are relatively underplayed, yielding central place within his theological...
Marcion and the Canon Harry Y Gamble
Aalders, G. J. D. 'Tertullian's quotations from St Luke', Mnemosyne 5 1937 , 241-82. Aland, B. 'Marcion Versuch einer neuen Interpretation', ZTK 70 1973 , 420-47. .'Marcion Marcioniten', TRE 22 1992 , 89-101. Balas, D. L. 'Marcion revisited a post-Harnack perspective', in Texts and testaments, W E. March ed. San Antonio, TX Trinity University Press, 1980 , 95-108. Barton, J. 'Marcion revisited', in The canon debate, L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders eds. Peabody, MA Hendrickson, 2002 , 241-354....
Jude And The Ungodly Christians
The discussion of the end-time false Christians begins with a programmatic statement describing the licentiousness of these, the contemporary ungodly who crept into the community of the saints Jude 4 and concludes with a saying of the apostles38 predicting the coming of these licentious end-time teachers. This final apocalyptic warning cautions the church to watch out for the mockers of the last-days who follow their own ungodly desires Jude 18 . Thus, the charge of licentiousness repeated in a...
New Models Of The Church
The limitations of the traditional denomination were being felt by some by the late 1950s.25 Some strongly entrepreneurial Protestants found themselves increasingly frustrated by the institutional inertia of denominational structures, which increasingly appeared to them to be unresponsive bureaucracies that were uninterested in local initiatives or innovations. Such frustration, of course, is not new. The great Protestant preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, who played such an important role in the...
What The Bible Says About Fear
MAT 1 20 But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. 10 28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. 28 5 And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was...
The final stages of the Christological controversy Monotheletism
The lack of unity among Christians, and especially between Monophysites and the majority, which Justinian had failed to eliminate, continued to pose a major problem to both Church and state, and Emperor after Emperor wrestled with it. The issue became urgent when, in the seventh century, Arab invaders bearing a new religion, Islam, began their conquests. The Emperors believed it imperative to have Christians and the Empire present a common front against the invader. A fresh approach was made...
Greek sacrifice
K. Meuli's article 'Griechische Opferbrauche', in Phylloboliafur P. Von der Muhl 1946 , constitutes a genuinely new approach to Greek sacriWce, especially animal sacriWce. Meuli concentrated on the type of sacriWce where the kill precedes a feast. He was the Wrst to have claimed that the ritual behaviour involved in a Greek sacriWce derived from that of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunters. Meuli Wrst coined the term Unschuldkomodie comedy of innocence this is a kind of 'staging' during the...
Eschatology In The Revealed Sources
Eschatology is a large subject. It possesses both an individual and a cosmic element in which the fate of the individual is inextricably bound up with the purpose and destiny of the entire creation within a religious vision. Sacred time finds its culmination, fulfilment and, ironically, its negation or deconstruction in the drama of the Last Things. Theologians typically held that it is among the three most fundamental Islamic doctrines - the unity and uniqueness of God tawhid , prophecy...
Thomas Aquinas on the Neoplatonic Hierarchy of Virtues
Like Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas directly addresses the Neoplatonic theory of a hierarchy of virtues. The theory makes an appearance in the Summa Theologiae, where Aquinas, like Bonaventure in the Collations, does not attribute the theory to Porphyry but to Macrobius.40 The fifth article of question 61 Iallae asks Are the cardinal virtues appropriately divided into political, purifying, purified, and exemplar virtues 41 After citing some Aristotelian and one Ciceronian objections that seem to...
A New Way to Do Theology The Preferential Option for the Poor
The first systematic articulation of a liberation theology, grounded in a preferential option for the poor, was set forth in Guti rrez' A Theology of Liberation, published in 1971 English translation 1973 . Here Guti rrez argued that all theology should be a critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word Guti rrez 1973 13 . Theology must be grounded in the concrete, lived faith of the Christian people - the vast majority of whom are poor, in Latin America and indeed throughout...
V Athanasius In Rome
1. For a modern example of the commonplace, compare Newman to Bishop UUathorne on 28 January 1870 with reference to the Vatican Council 'What have we done to be treated, as the faithful never were treated before ' Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. S. Dessain and T. Gornall 25 Oxford, 1973 , 18 . 2. For a more detailed analysis, see Schneemelcher, 'Die Epistula encyclica des Athanasius,' Aufs tze 1974 , 290-337. 3. Opitz on 173.14ff. rightly rejects the common view that the Friday in...
The Transfigured Christ and the Two Natures Controversy
In addition to seeing the variations in Jesus' image based on his different roles savior and teacher versus judge and king , a key text of Scripture also points to a variation in the appearance of Jesus at the crucial moment of his transfiguration. Up on a high mountain, Jesus appeared to Peter, James, and John as Lransligured, his face shining like the sun and his clothes dazzling white Matt 17 1-8 and parallels , Origen pointed to this text as the proof that all persons were not equally able...
Argument II
Theism fails in terms of explanatory power. Some see theism as a quasi-scientific hypothesis. This is Richard Dawkins's position I pay religions the compliment of regarding them as scientific theories and . . . I see God as a competing explanation for facts about the universe and life. This is certainly how God has been seen by most theologians of past centuries and by most ordinary religious people today. . . . Either admit that God is a scientific hypothesis and let him submit to the same...
Yo Mamas Last Supper
Our popular culture is often anti-Christian, and the government itself at all levels sometimes gets in the act-with total disregard for the usual hypersensitivity to church state involvement. The Brooklyn Museum, for example, is no stranger to controversy involving antiChristian expression. In 2001, it placed on display a work of art known as Yo Mama's Last Supper a color photograph by Renee Cox, a Jamaican-born Roman Catholic, depicting twelve black men and a nude woman at Christ's Last...
The Sinners Prayer And A Personal Savior
As stated earlier, the sinner's prayer eventually replaced the biblical role of water baptism. Though it is touted as gospel today, this prayer developed only recently. D. L. Moody was the first to employ it. Moody used this model of prayer when training his evangelistic coworkers. But it did not reach popular usage until the 1950s with Billy Graham's Peace with God tract and later with Campus Crusade for Christ's Four Spiritual Laws.' There is nothing particularly wrong with it. Certainly, God...
What does the word Hosanna mean
Hosanna means save now, help now, or save, we pray thee CP Psa 118 25-27 . Save now in V25 is from the Hebrew word hoshiana, which translates to hosanna in the Greek New Testament where it is an exclamation of adoration, an acclamation of praise CP Mk 11 9-10 Lu 19 37-38 Jn 12 12-13 . The whole multitude of disciples who followed Jesus here acknowledged Him as Messiah -the one sent from God to save them. They acclaimed Him as King and were shouting His praises at the top of their voice. The...
Theologians and the Study of Culture
Christian theologians are notorious for either preemptively dismissing theory that is making the rounds outside their discipline, or rushing headlong to embrace it. The work of cultural studies has caught the attention of many of us, and, true to form, some view it as yet more evidence for the decline of godly civilization, while others, at the opposite end, herald it as the key to understanding all past failures of godly civilization.1 What has caught the interest of its heralds, in...
Inquisition today the case of Allegro77
At the very outset it would be well to recognize that John Marco Allegro is not a scholar who can even remotely be compared to Galileo. And yet he posed a greater threat where Galileo was persecuted for defying the authority of the Church, the case of Allegro was different he questioned the very foundation of Christianity and Church doctrine. When in a particularly impetuous mood, he wrote one of the Catholic scholars on the International Team who had expressed the wish to become a priest - 'by...
Where Did The Protestant Order Of Worship Come From
Pastors who routinely tell their congregations that we do everything by the Book and still perform this ironclad liturgy are simply not correct. In their defense, the lack of truthfulness is due to ignorance rather than overt deception. You can scour your Bible from beginning to end, and you will never find anything that remotely resembles our order of worship. This is because the first-century Christians knew no such thing. In fact, the Protestant order of worship has about as much biblical...
The Spiritual Resurrection Theory
Then there is the view of the Jehovah's Witnesses, which is the spiritual resurrection theory. This theory also seems to be gaining currency with some theological liberals today. They say that Jesus' resurrection was not physical, but it was spiritual, and that He was just a spirit. But the Bible directly refutes this Now as they said these things, Jesus Himself stood in the midst of them, and said to them, 'Peace to you.' But they were terrified and frightened, and supposed they had seen a...
The Brazen Serpent
If Moses and Akhenaten are the same person and Moses did not lead the Israelites in their Exodus from Egypt until a quarter of a century later, it follows that he must have survived the threat of revolution and possible assassination that caused him to abdicate and flee to the safety of Sinai. However, this has been the subject of as much scholarly debate as whether or not he shared a co-regency with his father, Amenhotep III. The tomb prepared for Akhenaten, with the doorway facing roughly...