The Son of Man and History

1952 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-122
Author(s):  
W. Manson
Keyword(s):  
External Reality ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Son Of Man ◽  
The World ◽  
Good Will ◽  
The Face ◽  
Foreign Mission ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Church

In an age like the present, when the good will to establish a reasonable order of international life on earth is beset at every turning by impediment and frustration, there exists a temptation, if not to think of history as irredeemable, at least to moderate considerably our confidence in the relevance of Christianity to mundane affairs. We should not be surprised to find an increased tendency to mysticism, or if the hold of external reality over the mind is too strong to permit such with-drawal of the soul into itself, a lapse may set in towards an apocalyptic judgment on history with a hardened sense of the opposition of God to the world. In evangelism the effect may be to give preference to the Home Mission task of the Church over its Foreign Mission and ecumenical commitments. Certainly a change has come over the face of things and over our own temperaments since the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910. There has been a screwing down of the lights. There has been a retractation of many hopes. In 1910 the Christian Churches stood on the tip-toe of missionary enthusiasm. The doors were swinging open in all lands to the entrance of the Christian Gospel. The day of the Son of Man was believed to have come near. Optimism with relation to history was of the order of the day. Today the world-scene has grown clouded and ambiguous.

Reconciliation in the Cathedral: Isaac's Religion in “Owen-Mass”

10.34690/125 ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 6-36
Author(s):  
Роман Александрович Насонов
Keyword(s):  
Song Cycle ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
War Requiem ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Tradition

Статья представляет собой исследование религиозной символики и интерпретацию духовного смысла «Военного реквиема» Бриттена. Воспользовавшись Реквиемом Верди как моделью жанра, композитор отдал ключевую роль в драматургии сочинения эпизодам, созданным на основе военных стихов Оуэна; в результате произведение воспринимается подобно циклу песен в обрамлении частей заупокойной мессы. Военная реальность предстает у Бриттена амбивалентно. Совершая надругательство над древней верой и разбивая чаяния современных людей, война дает шанс возрождению религиозных чувств и символов. Опыт веры, порожденный войной, переживается остро, но при всей своей подлинности зыбок и эфемерен. Церковная традиция хранит веру прочно, однако эта вера в значительной мере утрачивает чистоту и непосредственность, которыми она обладает в момент своего возникновения. Бриттен целенаправленно выстраивает диалог между двумя пластами человеческого опыта (церковным и военным), находит те точки, в которых между ними можно установить контакт. Но это не отменяет их глубокого противоречия. Вера, рождаемая войной, представляет собой в произведении Бриттена «отредактированный» вариант традиционной христианской религии: в ее центре находится не триумфальная победа Христа над злом, а пассивная, добровольно отказавшаяся защищать себя перед лицом зла жертва - не Бог Сын, а «Исаак». Смысл этой жертвы - не в преображении мира, а в защите гуманности человека от присущего ему же стремления к агрессивному самоутверждению. The study of religious symbolism and the interpretation of the spiritual meaning of “War Requiem” by Britten have presentation in this article. Using Verdi's Requiem as a model of the genre, the composer gave a key role in the drama to the episodes based on the war poems by Wilfred Owen; as a result, the work is perceived as a song cycle framed by parts of the funeral mass. The military reality appears ambivalent. While committing a blasphemy against the ancient belief and shattering the aspirations of modern people, the war offers a chance to revive religious feelings and symbols. This experience of war-born faith is felt keenly, but for all its authenticity, it is shaky and ephemeral. The church tradition keeps faith firmly, but this faith largely loses the original purity and immediacy. Britten purposefully builds a dialogue between the two layers of human experience (church and military), finds those points where contact can be established between them. But this does not change their profound antagonism. In Britten's work, faith born of war is an “edited” version of the traditional Christian religion: in its center is not the triumphant victory of Christ over evil, but a passive sacrifice that voluntarily refused to defend itself in the face of evil-not God the Son, but “Isaac.” The meaning of this sacrifice is not in transforming the world, but in protecting the humanity of a person from his inherent desire for aggressive self-assertion.

scholarly journals Music-Makers and Reformed Theology

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Jahdiel N Perez
Keyword(s):  
Final Part ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The World ◽  
Christian Apologetics ◽  
The Church ◽  
Unique Power

ABSTRACT: If Reformed theology hopes to impact contemporary and future societies as much as possible it will have to harness the unique power of music to influence the world beyond the walls of the Church. In this essay, I want to draw attention to the ways in which Christianity, in general, and Reformed theology, in particular, are criticized through music and what we can do to respond. I will introduce an approach to Christian apologetics, which I call sonic-apologetics that enables our music-makers to defend the faith musically. In the first part of this paper, I will discuss five problems to which sonic-apologetics is an answer. This will anchor the second part of this essay, in which I construct sonic-apologetics from three notions: (1) methodological emphasis on effects, (2) genres of expression, and (3) the distinction between linear and angled apologetic responses. In the final part of this essay, I present two different study cases of sonic-apologetics. Nothing about what I will discuss regarding sonic-apologetics changing existing liturgical norms of Christian churches, especially Reformed ones. It does, however, call for those producing and performing music in these churches to direct their music-making interests and abilities toward the world outside the church walls. KEYWORDS: reformed theology, music, sonic-apologetics.

Buddhist Psychology

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bommarito
Keyword(s):  
Buddhist Psychology ◽  
External Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

This chapter studies the importance of examining the nature of mental habits—the normal ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling. The source of the problem is a mismatch between the usual way of relating to the world and how it really is, so it is important to closely examine mental habits and understand how exactly they obscure reality. Some Buddhists take this even further: It is not that one's mental projections do not match reality, they will say, but it is that there is no reality aside from an individual’s projections. For them, the problem is not a mismatch. The projections themselves are defective, obscuring not an external reality but the nature of the mind itself. The mental habits that distort reality are often called hindrances or poisons. These are things that the mind does that prevent an individual from seeing reality clearly.

scholarly journals In Search of the Postmodern Utopia: Ben Okri’s In Arcadia

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Graeme Fox
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Empty Universe

This essay explores how Ben Okri’s most recent novel, In Arcadia(2002), attempts to reconstruct the possibility of utopia in the face of a fragmentation of identity and destruction of determinate certainties affecting contemporary society in the aftermath of postmodernism. By tracing the intertextual relations existing between this work and earlier works in an intellectual/literary tradition that extends from Theocritus and Virgil through Dante, More, Milton, Sannazzaro, Sidney and others, Fox shows how Okri develops the proposition that men and women confronting an ‘empty universe where the mind spins in uncertainty and repressed terror’ can recover sanity through art. Even though, in Okri’s vision, the world may be ‘a labyrinth without an exit’, presided over by Death without any hint of transcendence, men and women, he concludes, can recover paradise through the ‘painting of the mind’ which can creative complete forms that can be fed into ‘spirit’s factory for the production of reality’. This generative activity, which is at the heart of the Arcadian vision, in Okri’s view, has the power to make life a place of ‘secular miracles’, despite the limitations imposed upon it by the realities of finitude and death. The essay concludes by suggesting that Okri’s concept of utopia is very close to Kant’s idea of Aufklärung as expounded by Michel Foucault –– that is, neither a world era, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment, but rather a process of which men and women are at once elements and agents, and which occurs to the extent that they decide to be its voluntary actors. While in some respects Okri’s vision is strikingly similar to certain of its antecedents, it is thus nevertheless distinctively postmodern in the ways in which it is inflected.

The Culture of the Church

1954 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-154
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

Among the preparatory prayers of the Mass, there are these words from Psalm 42: “Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy.” However inadequately accomplished, the purpose of this essay is to affirm and distinguish our cause as Catholic minds and human beings from the nation and from the world that are not holy—to affirm the strength and meaning of the world of the Church for our varied worlds of living and working. As Christopher Dawson points out in a remarkable essay, there is, even in the modern world, “a tradition of sacred culture which it has been the mission of the Church to nourish and preserve”—and to nourish and preserve it even in the nation that is not holy. “However secularized our modern civilization may become,” Dawson continues, “this sacred tradition [this sacred life] remains like a river in the desert, and a genuine religious education can still use it to irrigate the thirsty lands and to change the face of the world with the promise of a new life. The great obstacle is the failure of Christians themselves to understand the depth of that tradition and the inexhaustible possibilities of new life that it contains.”

scholarly journals Catholic Ajornamento is a manifestation of time

2002 ◽  
pp. 20-30
Author(s):  
Iryna Viktorivna Bogachevska
Keyword(s):  
John Xxiii ◽  
The World ◽  
Good Will ◽  
Christian Love ◽  
Rerum Novarum ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Pope John Xxiii ◽  
The Church

When more than four decades ago, in 1959, Pope John XXIII announced the convening of a high forum of bishops of his Church, many considered his decision to be the least risky. Although the official doctrine of Catholicism, systematized in Pope Leo's encyclical XIII "Rerum novarum" (1891), remained virtually unchanged from its adoption, and each successive head of the Church only developed its position in specific circumstances, John XXIII was convinced: after a long time In centuries of controversy and divisions, the time has come to speak to the world in the language of Christian love, to emphasize not what separates people, but what unites people of good will.

The Laity — Bishop's pawn? Ignatius of Antioch on the Obedient Christian

1991 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Alvyn Pettersen
Keyword(s):  
Local Communities ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church

In c.lO6 AD Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, was being led through the province of Asia to Rome and to martyrdom. As he went, he wrote letters to a number of the Asian Christian churches on the Aegean coastline. His aim was to ensure the cohesion of these local communities by encouraging their maintenance of purity in practice and in idea. To this end his letters stressed a strongly constituted, centralised ecclesiastical authority, whose sphere of activity was delimited by a clear boundary between the church and the world.

scholarly journals Missional church and local constraints: A Dutch perspective

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rein Brouwer
Keyword(s):  
Missional Church ◽  
Faith Communities ◽  
Local Churches ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Church

The missional church concept promises to guide local churches in the direction of a new identity and mission. It is a response to a sense of ecclesiological and congregational urgency that is felt all over the world. In Africa, North America and Europe, churches and local faith communities have been challenged by the changes in the religious state of affairs since the 1960s. Whether we still call it �secularisation� or rephrase it as �differentiated transformation�, the face of religion is changing globally. In many parts of the world, this raises a feeling of crisis that gives way to the redef nition of the mission and purpose of the church. �Missional church�, however, is a precarious concept. Nobody disagrees with the intention but can it be more than an inspiring vision? In order to realise this vision, a multi-layered and multi-dimensional analysis of �culture� is essential. We should move the analysis beyond the philosophical interpretation of relatively abstract and evasive macro-level processes, such as �modernity� and �post-modernity�. The future of the missional church depends on a differentiated and empirical, informed perspective on culture. For this purpose, this article proposes the concept of ecology: A system of diverse populations, including populations of congregations and faith communities, that interacts with these populations and with their specific environments. Preparing a missional congregation for the future should be accompanied with a thorough empirical investigation into the ecology of the congregation. We should be thinking intensively about and looking for vital ecologies.

A.J. Tomlinson’s Emerging Ecclesiology

Pneuma ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-389
Author(s):  
Harold D. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Church Of God ◽  
World Council Of Churches ◽  
Western North Carolina ◽  
The World ◽  
World Council ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis study seeks to engage the question of how A.J. Tomlinson formulated the theological platform that influenced the ecclesiologies of various Churches of God. The cast includes R.G. Spurling and R. Frank Porter, a forgotten figure but one who, together with Spurling, organized the Holiness Church at Camp Creek in western North Carolina on May 15, 1902. I will argue that, absent the intervention of A.J. Tomlinson on June 13, 1903, the work of Spurling, Porter, and W.F. Bryant would have suffered the ill-fated demise common to hundreds of like works in Appalachia. Yet Tomlinson was more than an organizer; he was also someone who influenced the mission adopted by the early Church of God (Cleveland, TN). This article has particular relevance in the face of awakened sensitivities to Pentecostal ecclesiology in the light of the Edinburgh 1910 centenary celebrations around the world and the World Council of Churches’ working document, Nature and Mission of the Church. Here I will frame the discussion as a response to Dale Coulter’s article, “The Development of Ecclesiology in the Church of God (Cleveland, TN): A Forgotten Contribution?” in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 29, no. 1 (2007): 59-85.

scholarly journals Between Rigidity and Chaos

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 427-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Enosh ◽  
Zvi Eisikovits ◽  
Chen Gross
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Partner Violence ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Future Research ◽  
External Reality ◽  
Major Life ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

The goal of this article was to examine the worldviews of cohabiting or married men and women who experienced domestic violence in their relationships. The study was based on content analysis of in-depth interviews with 48 men and women (24 couples), who were living together after experiencing at least one violent event in their relationships over the previous 12 months. Using constructivist grounded theory, the authors examined the deep structure of the ways by which partners living with intimate partner violence constructed their world. The men and women under study constructed heuristic models in two major life domains—psychological processes and how the world works overall. The analysis has revealed two axes resulting in four worldviews. The two axes were the construction of the world and the construction of the mind. Constructions of the mind ranged from chaotic to deterministic. Constructions of external reality ranged from static to fluid and uncontrollable. The theoretical model developed suggested four different types of basic worldviews. The suggested typology was examined in relation to existing typologies in the field of intimate partner violence and in relation to future research and interventions.

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