The Atonement and the Oneness of the Church

1954 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. F. Torrance

In August 1952 the Third World Conference on Faith and Order meeting at Lund, formulated its Ecumenical objective in terms like this: Our major differences clearly concern the doctrine of the Church, but let us penetrate behind the divisions of the Church on earth to our common faith in the one Lord. Let us start from the central fact that Jesus Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it, and by His Spirit made it His own Body. From the oneness of Christ we will try to understand the unity of the Church in Him and from the unity of Christ and His Body we will seek a means of realising that unity in the actual state of our divisions on earth. What is envisaged here is a thorough-going Christological criticism of our differences in order to open up the way for reformation and reunion of the Church in obedience to the one Lord.

1950 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. F. Torrance

It is often claimed that the problem of communicating the Gospel is the major practical problem facing the Church to-day, as it may also be the major theological problem. This concern is a very healthy sign, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that we are apt to be so concerned with devising new methods of evangelism as to forget the one factor of supreme importance: the burden of the Gospel itself, that is, to forget that the Gospel is not simply the message of divine love, but the actual way in which God communicates Himself to us in history. No technique that forgets that the Gospel has already been made supremely relevant to sinful humanity in the Incarnation and death of Jesus Christ will ever avail for the communication of the Gospel. This is therefore an attempt to probe into what the New Testament has to say to us about this, and into the way in which, as a matter of fact, the New Testament actually communicates the Gospel to us.


Author(s):  
Graham Ward

Revelation cannot be approached directly. It is mediated all the way down. That is not just because of ‘sin’. Though sin is the manifestation of our alienation from God—an alienation overcome by God’s reconciling operations in salvation—a diastema between Creator and creation still pertains. There is no immediate encounter with the Word of God available to us as such. It is always mediated to us through human words and human acts, stories (biblical and autobiographical) and material practices, the Church and its liturgies, and the cultures we inhabit that shape us. The voice of the Lord comes to us in and through the darknesses and ambivalences of our various unredeemed and yet to be redeemed states. We are addressed, continually addressed, by God’s transformative grace, by his love and mercy, in and through our condition as created. The voice is accommodated to that condition, and can be accommodated because the Word of God is written into creation, coming finally, and intensively, in Jesus Christ. So the voice can be heard: makes itself available to be heard. But the eternal presence of God pro nobis (where the ‘we’ is not just humankind but all God’s creatures, pace Barth), the eternal presence of God-with-us that is the touchstone and content of revelation, bubbles up intrinsically through the obscurities of created and creative experience.


1985 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 782-790 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Koletsos

Introduction. This paper contains a new proof of the Church-Rosser theorem for the typed λ-calculus, which also applies to systems with infinitely long terms.The ordinary proof of the Church-Rosser theorem for the general untyped calculus goes as follows (see [1]). If is the binary reduction relation between the terms we define the one-step reduction 1 in such a way that the following lemma is valid.Lemma. For all terms a and b we have: ab if and only if there is a sequence a = a0, …, an = b, n ≥ 0, such that aiiai + 1for 0 ≤ i < n.We then prove the Church-Rosser property for the relation 1 by induction on the length of the reductions. And by combining this result with the above lemma we obtain the Church-Rosser theorem for the relation .Unfortunately when we come to infinite terms the above lemma is not valid anymore. The difficulty is that, assuming the hypothesis for the infinitely many premises of the infinite rule, there may not exist an upper bound for the lengths n of the sequences ai = a0, …, an = bi (i < α); cf. the infinite rule (iv) in §6.A completely new idea in the case of the typed λ-calculus would be to exploit the type structure in the way Tait did in order to prove the normalization theorem. In this we succeed by defining a suitable predicate, the monovaluedness predicate, defined over the type structure and having some nice properties. The key notion permitting to define this predicate is the notion of I-form term (see below). This Tait-type proof has a merit, namely that it can be extended immediately to the case of infinite terms.


1967 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-311
Author(s):  
William Nicholls

The Fourth World Conference on Faith and Order, meeting at Montreal in July 1963, recommended the renewal of the study of the Ministry, within a new programme of theological study to be initiated by the Faith and Order Commission. As was noted at Montreal, the Ministry had not been the subject of Faith and Order study for twenty-five years. There were good reasons for this. While the Ministry continued to be the thorniest of the practical problems facing union negotiators, it was widely agreed that theologically it had failed and would continue to fail to yield to a head-on treatment. Only in the light of the doctrine of the Church, considered in its christological and eschatological dimensions, would the Ministry appear in a form that could draw Christians together in church union. So, without altogether losing sight of the hope that something helpful could be said about the Ministry, Faith and Order turned, first to the doctrine of the Church, and then, in the period after Lund, to a study of Christ and the Church. Now the time has come to return to the Ministry, in the light of the work done at these deeper levels of Christian doctrine.


Author(s):  
Randall C. Zachman

Karl Barth seeks to restore the Gospel to the centre of Protestant theology by orienting dogmatic theology to the witness of the prophetic and apostolic authors of Scripture and to the theology of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Barth especially endorses Luther’s claim that the proclamation of the living and free Word of God in Jesus Christ lies at the heart of the commission laid on the church, and that the task of theology is to test the truth of that proclamation. However, Barth becomes increasingly critical of Luther and Calvin when they distinguish God revealed in Jesus Christ from God in Godself and when they distinguish a Word of God in Scripture—be it a Word of the Creator or the Word as Law—that is distinct from the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. Barth also disagrees with Luther and Calvin regarding the sacraments, insisting at the end of his career that Jesus Christ is the one and only sacrament of God.


Author(s):  
K.S. Matytsin

The main period of development of new territories of Western Siberia that located outside the borders of the Russian Empire falls on the period from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 19th centuries. This is due to the Old Believers processes. It was found that the main reasons for the colonization of Western Siberia were: on the one hand, the resumption of repressive policies towards the Old Believers in Altai by the state and the official church, in connection with the transfer of the Kolyvan-Voskresensky factories under the control of the Cabinet; on the other hand, the creation of new dogmatics current of the Old Believers. The latter allowed the Old Believers to reconsider their attitude to historical events, power, and the sacraments of the church. Thus, in the study we identified three interrelated areas ofbespopov's thought: eschatology (the doctrine of the end of the world), ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church), soteriology (the doctrine of salvation). Having established that the confessional composition of the Old Believers, who were the founders of settlements in Western Siberia we came to the conclusion that the development of these territories took place for religious reasons.


Problemos ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arvydas Šliogeris

Straipsnyje keliama hipotezė, kad patyrimo esmė ir specifika iki šiol nebuvo apmąstyta nei Vakarų filosofijos, nei Rytų išminties, nei technomokslo, nes patyrimas naiviai ir klaidingai buvo traktuojamas kaip žmogaus instrumentinis santykis su esiniu ar net kaip „objekto“ konstravimas ar dirbimas. Patiriu tik tai, ką pagaminu, – tokia pamatinė, bet neapmąstyta tezė grindė ligšiolinę patyrimo sampratą, susiformavusią dar laukinių visuomenėse, bet lygiai taip pat lemiančią ir dabartinį patyrimo provaizdį, kurio pavyzdine vieta laikoma laboratorija, fabrikas, dirbtuvė ar prekybos centras, lygiai kaip tradicinėse religijose pavyzdiniu patyrimu laikoma, pavyzdžiui, bažnyčia – pavyzdinio patyrimo „objekto“ – Dievo – fabrikas. Straipsnyje bandoma parodyti, kad tikroji patyrimo vieta – konkretaus, štai šito kūniškai ir jusliškai predikuojamo individo sandūra su absoliučiu nežmogiškumu; vadinasi, patyrimas traktuotinas kaip visiška instrumentinio santykio priešybė: tai grynasis, t. y. bekalbis, „mano“ santykis – ar veikiau sandūra – su Jusline Transcendencija, pasirodančia per konkretų, štai šitą daiktą, kaip absoliutaus nežmogiškumo telkinį. Daiktas patiriamas tik tiek, kiek jis priešinasi instrumentinėms manipuliacijoms. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: patyrimas, instrumentinis santykis, horizontas, nežmogiškumas. ON THE WAY TO EXPERIENCEArvydas Šliogeris SummaryThe paper deals with the concept of experience. The hypothesis is put forward that the essence and specifics of experience have not yet been adequately dealt with either in the Western philosophy or in the Eastern wisdom and even in the techno science, because experience has been plainly treated as an instrumental relation of a human with beings or even as the constructing or making of an “object”. We experience what we make – was the basic and unreflected thesis that lay in the foundations of the concept of experience. The thesis grounds the concept that has originated already in the primitive cultures as well as the one that prevails in the modern idea of experience. The prototype of the latter could be found in the laboratories, factories and supermarkets. The same pattern could be observed even in religions. Therefore the church in a sense could be treated as a factory producing God as the exemplar “object” of experience. However, true experience takes place when a concrete, this particular person, predicated by his body and senses, collides with an absolutely inhumane entity. Consequently, experience should be treated as a total opposite of instrumental relation, namely as ‘my’ unutterable relation, or rather collision, with Sensual Transcendence, which emerges as a concrete, this one thing, the absolute mass of inhumane. A thing is experienced as much as it resists instrumental manipulations.Keywords: experience, instrumental relation, horizon, inhumanity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-41
Author(s):  
Philip Suciadi Chia ◽  
Juanda Juanda

There are 7 letters written by Ignatius from Antioch, while traveling to Rome. One of them is the church at Ephesus which consists of 21 chapters. In this letter, Ignatius urges these Christians to be in unity with their bishop, because the Docetists were denying the true humanity of Christ. We also find here the unique emphasis on Jesus Christ as the one physician and the Eucharist as ‘the medicine of immortality’. Furthermore, by insisting on the virgin birth to explain Jesus’ existence as the Christ, Ignatius makes a vigorous anti-docetic statement. In this exegetical study, the writer will specifically examine only chapters 18-19, to find the meaning of the writing of these two chapters, which are related to suffering through self-sacrifice. Ignatius speaks in self-deprecating terms as he gives his life as a self-offering. By the world, he is regarded as a criminal but in God’s plan of salvation (oikonomia) his sufferings benefit the church. Ignatius merely makes this more explicit with his remark that what God had prepared ‘had its beginning’. He probably would have gone on to stress the passion as the culmination of God’s plan, though he was also conscious of the fact that Satan’s power had not even yet been completely destroyed.  


2020 ◽  
pp. 661-670
Author(s):  
Tomasz Pawlikowski

"e modern social doctrine of the Catholic Church supports all of the abovementionedviews with the exception that it treats some of its elements as theso-called “signs of the times” in which the creators of these views lived andwrote. "erefore, we cannot say that they became somehow time-barred. "eyhave entered the tradition of the social doctrine of the Church. Similarly, onecannot reasonably claim that the basic theses of the socio-political theoriesof Saint Augustine or Saint "omas Aquinas are obsolete in philosophical terms.At the most, one can disagree with them or try to correct them. Nevertheless, itseems that there are no better analyses of the nature of authority and its originfrom God. Considering these issues from the perspective of historical applicationsof the theories, especially the one coined by St. "omas, it is impossible notto notice the significant analogies of the reflections of Doctor Angelicus and theidea of a “nobles’ democracy” implemented in the First Polish Republic threehundred years later. It is also difficult to believe that a$er the creation of thescientific community of the Jagiellonian University in the fi$eenth century, theydid not affect the minds of Polish politicians at a time when the foundationsof this democracy were formed. Moreover, it seems that these considerationswere widely applied in the centuries-old process of crystallizing other modernand contemporary democratic system.


Author(s):  
Grant Macaskill

This chapter considers the role that the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist play in fostering a proper attitude of intellectual humility within Christian community. The sacraments dramatically enact the union with Christ that we have argued in previous chapters to define Christian intellectual humility, embodying the truth that our intellectual identities are not autonomous, but are dependent upon the constitutive identity of Jesus Christ and are located within the community of the church. Both baptism and Eucharist are understood within the New Testament to communicate the eschatological identity of the church, and therefore the distinctive character of our relationship to the reality of evil. The chapter will pay particular attention to the way that Paul directs his readers to think differently in response to the significance of the sacraments. It will also consider the close connection of the command to ‘love one another’ to the sacraments.


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