scholarly journals A Protestant and Social View of the Church

1914 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-202
Author(s):  
Thomas Cuming Hall
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Culture ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Community Or ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
The University ◽  
Level Of Importance ◽  
The Church

The Church is a divine institution, just as all legitimate organizations, like the State, the university, the political party, or the private club, are divine institutions. This is the outcome of any thoroughgoing acceptance of the Protestant position of the essentially divine character of all life, the priesthood of all believers, and the rejection of local divine places. Any special claim the Church can make must be based not on its essential character but upon its purpose and aim, and its special efficiency in pursuit of some end. That some ends in life are higher than others goes without saying. The end of a private club is legitimate and praise-worthy, but it is not in the judgment of thoughtful men on the same level of importance for life as a university. It is true that any scale of importance is finally based upon judgments of value which are in the last analysis extra-rational. The end aimed at by all churches, and among them we must include synagogues, cathedrals, and the lecture-halls of the Ethical Culture Society, is the mediation to men of the unseen and eternal values of religion and ethics. And each particular church bases its claim for recognition upon its assertion that it is attempting to mediate the truest and highest of these values in the most efficient way it knows. We thus see that the Church or churches represent the community, or rather parts of the community, organized for a particular purpose. The older distincrtion between a visible and invisible church should have lost all meaning for a consistent Protestantism, because it was fundamentally based on the false assumption that our relationships with God depended upon the mediation of the church, and that outside of the church there was no salvation. Hence to account for certain obvious facts, an invisible church had to be postulated. The logic of Protestantism makes any such assumption needless. Our relationships to God and salvation are not in the keeping of any church.

The Indirectly Political Word of the Church

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge
Keyword(s):  
Word Type ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
The State ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Type 3 ◽  
The Church

This chapter continues the examination of Bonhoeffer’s first phase of resistance through an exposition of “The Church and the Jewish Question,” turning now to the modes of resistance proper to the church’s preaching office. Because such resistance involves the church speaking against the state, it appears to stand in contradiction with Bonhoeffer’s suggestion earlier in the essay that the church should not speak out against the state. This is in fact not a contradiction but rather the coherent expression of the political vision as outlined in the first several chapters of this book, which requires that the church criticize the state under certain circumstances but not others. The specific form of word examined here is the indirectly political word (type 3 resistance) by which the church reminds the messianic state of its mandate to preserve the world with neither “too little” nor “too much” order.

The Political Theory of the Disruption

1916 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Laski
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Political Principles ◽  
The Church

“Of political principles,” says a distinguished authority, “whether they be those of order or of freedom, we must seek in religious and quasi-theological writings for the highest and most notable expressions.” No one, in truth, will deny the accuracy of this claim for those ages before the Reformation transferred the centre of political authority from church to state. What is too rarely realised is the modernism of those writings in all save form. Just as the medieval state had to fight hard for relief from ecclesiastical trammels, so does its modern exclusiveness throw the burden of a kindred struggle upon its erstwhile rival. The church, intelligibly enough, is compelled to seek the protection of its liberties lest it become no more than the religious department of an otherwise secular society. The main problem, in fact, for the political theorist is still that which lies at the root of medieval conflict. What is the definition of sovereignty? Shall the nature and personality of those groups of which the state is so formidably one be regarded as in its gift to define? Can the state tolerate alongside itself churches which avow themselves societates perfectae, claiming exemption from its jurisdiction even when, as often enough, they traverse the field over which it ploughs? Is the state but one of many, or are those many but parts of itself, the one?

The Genealogy of Arabic Modernism

2018 ◽  
pp. 52-93
Author(s):  
Robyn Creswell
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Internal Dialogue ◽  
The University

This chapter attempts to re-create the “internal dialogue” about their pasts as militants that the Shi'r poets chose not to make public. This narrative is centered on the career of Yusuf al-Khal, who as editor in chief played a leading role in determining the principles of the Shi'r movement. But the real protagonists of the story are institutions: the political party, the university, the Cénacle, and the little magazine. These settings constitute the backstory to al-Khal's engagement with the institutions of late modernism itself—the global network of actors and discourses examined in Chapter 1. This focus on institutional history is intended, in part, as a corrective to the Shi'r poets' insistence that modernist literature is the work of heroic, deracinated individuals.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Joel Zogry
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Student Newspaper ◽  
Research Institution ◽  
The University

The introduction explains the role of the Daily Tar Heel, the UNC student newspaper, in the broader context of the university and the state of North Carolina. It outlines the key arguments and themes in the book: academic freedom, freedom of speech and press; the ideological evolution of the university; the political push-pull over progressivism and conservatism in the state; and the role of big-time athletics at a top-tier research institution.

The Trocadéro

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-246
Author(s):  
Jennifer Walker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Right ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Music ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Concert Programs ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Church

This chapter takes for its focus the high point of the Parisian musical season in 1900: the ten state-sponsored concerts officiels of the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris. As had been the case in 1878 and 1889, the goal of these concerts was to promote specifically Republican ideals through music. Yet in 1900, these ideals had transformed into a secular construction of Frenchness that absorbed Catholicism as a foundational trait of national identity. Although the Church was not represented in any official capacity either on the musical planning commission or on the concert programs themselves, the repertoire performed throughout these concerts created a narrative that centered around a sense of reconciliation between Church State. The carefully crafted vision put forth by the State relied heavily on transformations of the Church for the formation of a cohesive Republican identity such that the Church was present in its displays, theaters, and concerts in a way not seen in any previous Exposition. In the heart of Paris, the Trocadéro hosted a significant amount of explicitly religious music that, when mediated through actors deployed through the state apparatus on an international stage, transformed the Church into an integrated facet of French Republicanism that could be proudly displayed to the Exposition’s international audiences. These concerts functioned not as nostalgic emblems of a Revolutionary past nor as attacks against the political and religious right, but, rather, as a site of transformation at which the Republic co-opted Catholicism as an indispensable aspect of its own French identity.

Soviet Atheism and Its Aftermath

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Luehrmann
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Integration ◽  
World War ◽  
Freedom Of Conscience ◽  
The Church

If Soviet atheism is a variety of secularism, it more resembles eliminationist movements viewing religions as obstacles to the political integration of citizens into the state. Before World War II, the Bolshevik government issued decrees to disentangle the state from the church. Later, Khrushchev emphasized atheism and closed churches as part of a general populist, mobilizational approach to promoting communist values. By the 1970s, religious practices were not precluded but were assigned a marginal space outside of public engagement. The post-Soviet era has seen self-reported religiosity increase, while self-reported atheism has diminished, although remaining significant. Russia’s 1997 law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations requires a denomination to exist in a region for fifteen years to enjoy the full legal and tax status. Today, Russia differentiates between “good” religions that help to promote particular moral visions and “bad” religions that create social strife, promote violence, and endanger public health.

Corporate Life in the University of Paris, 1249–1418, and the Ending of Schism

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-523
Author(s):  
Osmund Lewry Op
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
University Of Paris ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church

As many had done long before, John Henry Newman, in his sermon of 1842 on ‘The Christian Church an imperial power’, drew his model of the corporate life of the Church from the state: ‘We know what is meant by a kingdom. It means a body politic, bound together by common law, ruled by one head, holding intercourse part with part, acting together’. This description, little changed, could have applied as well to the university community of Newman's Oxford, and it is not implausible that an experience of fellowship there, strained and divided as it sometimes was, could have provided an unconscious model for his understanding of the ecclesial community. Even if it did not become explicit in Newman's thought, the analogy of head and members was present to the thinking of university men at Paris with regard to their own corporate life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly when relations were strained and division of the body threatened. Whatever the origins of conciliarist theory, then, in the reflections of canonists and theologians, there was an experience of ecclesial community in the corporate life of medieval Paris that could have given living content to speculation about the Church in the most influential intellectual centre of Christendom. The shaping of that experience deserves some attention as a matrix for conciliarist thought.

The State Political Party and the Policy-Making Process

1973 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah McCally Morehouse
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Socioeconomic Variables ◽  
Policy Making Process ◽  
Party Cohesion ◽  
Party Support

This research investigated the proposition that variation in the structure of the political party can account for variation in the type of policy produced. The conditions under which legislators of the governor's party supported his legislative requests in sixteen sessions chosen for different degrees of party cohesion were investigated. The findings indicate that there is very little correlation between the legislator's district primary or election competition and his support for the governor's requests. The Democratic governor is supported by legislators from the districts in which he himself has strong party support as measured by his primary vote. The Republican governor's support cannot be geographically located in this manner. With respect to socioeconomic legislation, the pattern of support for a successful governor does not depend upon socioeconomic variables within the legislators' districts, but if the governor cannot control his legislators, socioeconomic variables provide the major basis for the factions which develop.

The Bureaucracy and the Nazi Party

1966 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. N. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Individual Resistance ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Failure Life ◽  
Group Resistance

THE individual in the twentieth century finds himself dwarfed by two giant institutions which decide his political destiny: the state, with its efficient bureaucrat methodically signing papers that may mean success or failure, life or death, for everyman and his world; the other is the political party, which aspires to control the state by mobilizing the masses. Nineteenth-century bureaucracy tended to be rigid and authoritarian, yet unrelated to popular support and limited in its impact on daily life. The nineteenth- century liberal, suspicious of the state, attempted to protect the individual by further limiting the bureaucrat; the twentiethcentury liberal hopes to use the bureaucrat to limit the privately powerful, whereas the totalitarian party hopes to dominate the state and therewith to dominate everyman. When a monopolistic party controls a monolithic state, the individual seems to have no choice but to flee, to obey or to disappear into a concentration camp. Overt individual resistance appears senseless; overt group resistance extremely dangerous and almost certainly doomed to failure.

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