In Search of a Foundation for Christian Ethics

1970 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-165
Author(s):  
S. H. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Practical Theology ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
Blue Print ◽  
The Church

At the present time the Church is frequently exhorted to give an ethical lead. Yet what would be the nature of such direction—the dissemination of practical wisdom from the Scriptures, the provision of a blue-print for the realisation of the Kingdom of God on earth, or just emotional encouragement to moral effort? Theological colleges offer courses on ‘Christian Ethics’, and for certain degrees there are papers bearing this title, yet what exactly is the nature of the discipline? Is it any more than the retailing of the moral judgments of distinguished Christians in the past, and information concerning certain important areas of life in regard to which Christians ought to come to some sort of practical decision? Is Christian Ethics a discipline at all, or just an unmapped, and possibly an unmappable, field between dogmatics and practical theology?

Die koninkryk van God in die Ou Testament: ’n Kort oorsig

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel F. O'Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Real Difference ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
Psalm 22 ◽  
The Church ◽  
Technical Terms

The kingdom of God in the Old Testament: A brief survey. The kingdom of God is a central concept in the teaching of Jesus, but the question posed by this article is the following: What does the Old Testament say about the kingdom of God? Several Old Testament terms convey the concept of kingdom, kingship and rule of God. This article focuses on the Hebrew and Aramaic ‘technical’ terms for kingdom: mamlākâ, malkût, mělûkâ and malkû. One finds only a few Old Testament references where these terms are directly connected to God, most of them in the post-exilic literature: 1 Chronicles 17:14; 28:5; 29:11; 2 Chronicles 13:8; Psalm 22:29; 103:19; 145:11–13; Daniel 2:44; 3:33 (4:3); 4:31 (4:34); 6:27; 7:14, 18, 27; Obadiah 21. A brief study of these specific references leads to a few preliminary conclusions: The kingdom of God refers to a realm and the reign of God, the God of the kingdom is depicted in different ways, God’s kingdom is eternal and incomparable with earthly kingdoms, the scope of the kingdom is particularistic and universalistic, the Old Testament testifies about a kingdom that is and one that is yet to come, et cetera. It seems that there is no real difference when comparing the ‘kingdom of God’ with the ‘God is King’ passages. One cannot unequivocally declare that ‘kingdom of God’ is the central concept in the Old Testament. However, we must acknowledge that Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom of God did not evolve in a vacuum. His followers probably knew about the Old Testament perspective on the kingdom of God.Contribution: The concept ‘kingdom of God’ is relevant for the church in South Africa, especially congregations who strive to be missional. Unfortunately, the Old Testament perspective was neglected in the past. The purpose of this brief survey is to stimulate academics and church leaders in their further reflection on the kingdom of God.

scholarly journals Screening the church: A study of clergy representation in contemporary Afrikaans cinema

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Joynt ◽  
Chris Broodryk
Keyword(s):  
Practical Theology ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
The Past ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Religious Conservatism ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Church

The church-funded CARFO or KARFO (Afrikaans Christian Filmmaking Organisation) was established in 1947, and aimed to ‘[socialise] the newly urbanized Afrikaner into a Christian urban society’ (Tomaselli 1985:25; Paleker 2009:45). This initiative was supported and sustained by the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), which had itself been part of the sociopolitical and ideological fabric of Afrikaans religious life for a while and would guide Afrikaners through tensions between religious conservatism and liberalism and into apartheid. Given Afrikaans cinema’s ties with Christian religious and political conservatism, we explore the role – even the centrality – of the Afrikaans church in cultural activity before 1994, and then after 1994. Here, Afrikaans church is an inclusive term that brings together various denominations of Afrikaans-speaking churches, but which mainly suggests the domination of the DRC. After establishing the role of the Afrikaans church in the way described above, we move towards the primary focus of our study: exploring the representation of clergy in the contemporary Afrikaans film Faan se Trein in order to describe certain theological implications of this representation. With reference to Faan se Trein, our article notes and comments on the shifts that have occurred in clergy representation in Afrikaans cinema over the past decades. Osmer’s four tasks of practical theology, namely, descriptive, interpretive, normative and strategic are used for theological reflection. With due contextual reference to Afrikaans film dramas such as Broer Matie [Brother Matie], Saak van Geloof [A Matter of Faith], Roepman [Stargazer], Stilte [Silence], Suiderkruis [Southern Cross] and Faan se Trein, we arrive at some preliminary conclusions about the representation of clergy in mainly contemporary Afrikaans cinema.

scholarly journals Golem i Lewiatan. Judaistyczne źródła teologii politycznej Thomasa Hobbesa

Politeja ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2(59)) ◽  
pp. 207-232
Author(s):  
Tomasz Tulejski ◽  
Arnold Zawadzki
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The State ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Church

Golem and Leviathan: Judaic Sources of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theology In the article, the Authors point out that Hobbes’s political philosophy (and in fact theology) in the heterodox layer is inspired not only by Judeo-Christianity, but also by rabbinic Judaism. According to them, only adopting such a Judaic and in a sense syncretistic perspective enabled Hobbes to come to such radical conclusions, hostile towards the Catholic and Calvinist conceptions of the state and the Church. In their argument they focused on three elements that are most important for Hobbesian concept of sovereignty: the covenant between YHWH and the Chosen People, the concept of the Kingdom of God, salvation and the afterlife, and the concept of a messiah.

scholarly journals Kristi Genkomst og kødets opstandelse. Det eskatogiske hos Grundtvig

1950 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-56
Author(s):  
C. I. Scharling
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Body ◽  
Essential Point ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
Personal Understanding ◽  
The Church ◽  
Second Coming

The Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection of the Body. Grundtvigs Eschatology. By C. I. Scharling. This essay shows how Grundtvig, in contrast to his contemporaries in the Church, laid great stress upon the eschatological hope of the future. He may have been partly inspired by Scandinavian mythology (the myth of Ragnarok) and partly by Schellings theories about the great drama of existence (the coming forth of ideas from the Absolute and their returning thither). But the essential point is that the eschatological hope grew forth naturally from his personal understanding of life and death, of the meaning and object of human life, and from his faith in the living, risen Christ as Lord and victor over the powers of darkness and death. It is remarkable that while after 1825 Grundtvig lived with such intensity in the experience of the realisation of the Kingdom of God here and now in the Church’s fellowship with the risen, present Saviour, at the same time, both in his hymns and in his preaching, he gives such powerful expression to the eschatological hope of the future. The author finds the explanation of this in the fact that for Grundtvig (unlike many others) it was not the need and distress of the time that gave life to the Biblical promises of the Second Coming of Christ and the setting*up of the Kingdom of Glory at the Last Day, but his very joy in God’s great Salvation, experienced in the Church. Thus the peculiar thing about Grundtvig’s eschatological expectation is that the tidings of the Second Coming of the Lord are for him an evangel in the full sense of the word; his feelings about the Last Day are far removed from the feeling of fear and horror which meets us in many of the mediaeval frescoes of the Lord’s Return to Judgment or in the old hymn, “Dies irae, dies ilia”. Characteristic of him, too, is his stress on the contin uity between the present world, which came into being at the Creation, and the world to come; the old world shall not be destroyed, but reborn and transfigured; its for this reason that he lays so much stress on faith in the resurrection of the body. On the other hand the author rejects the theory put forward by the Norwegian writer, Paulus Svendsen, that Grundtvig was a Chiliast and “believed in an external, perfect Kingdom of God on earth” ; he refutes it by reference to the fact that Grundtvig explicitly rejected Edward Irving’s conception of the millennium.

Probing the past and imagining the future

Focaal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (66) ◽  
pp. 69-72
Author(s):  
Frances Pine
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
Moral Questions

The socialist states of the Soviet Bloc fell, some gently and some far more abruptly and even violently, between 1989 and 1991. In the two decades that have followed, there have been continual attempts by politicians, social scientists, and other academics, as well as by the citizens of these “former socialist countries” themselves, to come to terms with competing memories of what socialism meant, was, and might have been. Simultaneously, efforts to weigh up and assess a range of very different pasts are matched by forecasts of imagined futures that somehow continue to be driven by and predicated on this complex and kaleidoscopic remembered history. The present, the here and now, can, however, be even more complicated; in some ways it neither escapes entirely from the past nor really sets the stage for the future, but rather is a continual state of “becoming”. Just as “memory” is never a “true” reflection of a time or an event, but rather a multiple layering of recollections that change each time they are evoked, none of these complex and rather messy temporalities actually matches the “real” past, present, or future—all carry complex moral judgments, reflect moral questions, and embody the tension between what might have been, what is, and what should be.

scholarly journals Teologie van die koninkryk (Basileiologie)? Teologies nagedink oor die plek en betekenis van die koninkryk van God in die teologie en die kerk

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan H. Van Wyk
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Dynamic Effect ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
The Past ◽  
Separate Locus ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Hierdie artikel is ’n poging om aan te toon dat daar ’n groot leemte bestaan in die wyse waarop die klassieke leerstukke in dogmatiek in die verlede hanteer is, omdat dit ’n sentrale tema soos die koninkryk van God óf volkome geïgnoreer, óf totaal onderbelig het. Hierdie leemte word vervolgens nader ondersoek. Eers word aandag gegee aan die eskatologiese modelle wat in hierdie verband ontstaan het. Daarna word op die sentraliteit van die tema van die koninkryk in die Ou en Nuwe Testament gefokus en hierna word op die dinamiese uitwerking daarvan gelet wat dit op die samelewing behoort te hê. Die konklusie waartoe die outeur kom, is dat die tema van die koninkryk van God in die geheel gesien in die kerk en in die teologie totaal onderbeklemtoon was en steeds is. Vir ’n relevante kerkbeskouing (ekklesiologie) kan dit ’n groot bevryding bring indien die fokus van die kerk na die (gekome en komende) ryk van God verskuif. Die dogmatiek benodig ’n afsonderlike locus wat oor die Basileiologie handel.Theology of the kingdom (Basileiology)? Theological reflections on the place and role of the kingdom of God in church and theology. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that there is a great void in the way in which classical doctrine was treated in dogmatics in the past, since it either completely ignored a central theme like the kingdom of God, or shed altogether insufficient light on it. This void will subsequently be investigated more closely.Firstly, attention is given to the eschatological models which came into being for it. Next, the focus is on the centrality of the theme of the kingdom in the Old and New Testament after which its dynamic effect on society is pointed out.The conclusion reached by the author is that the theme of the kingdom of God was and is on the whole underemphasised in the church and in theology. For a relevant view of the church (ecclesiology) it could be liberating if the church shifted its focus to the kingdom of God (that has come and is coming). Dogmatics needs a separate locus dealing with Basileiology.

Brownson's Search for the Kingdom of God: The Social Thought of an American Radical

1954 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
M. A. Fitzsimons
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Past ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church

In 1815 the rulers and political leaders of Europe—men who had known the terror of witnessing the violent destruction of their social and political institutions—finished their work at the Congress of Vienna, work designed to prevent the resurgence of revolutionary threats. State and Church—and on the continent this meant the Catholic Church—cooperated in this conservative and reactionary task. The task was doomed, for the vision of a free, equal and fraternal society throbbed with all the more compelling radiance in the world of privilege and inequality which the Congress of Vienna restored. Later industrial changes propelled the revolutionary tide, and waves of liberalism and socialism beat against the old order, menacing not only the governments of Europe but the Church. To those captivated by the vision of a better or perfect society on earth, conservative Catholic admiration for the past and reverence for the order and treasures of the present seemed peculiarly obscurantist, obstinate blindness to the cause of progress.

The Possibility of Apologetics

1963 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-150
Author(s):  
J. H. Gill
Keyword(s):  
Christian Ethics ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Christian Apologetics ◽  
To Come ◽  
Theological Task ◽  
The Church ◽  
Ultimate Purpose ◽  
Christian Message

Anyone who enters the batter's box of contemporary theology carrying a bat labelled ‘apologetics’ finds that he has two strikes against him before he even begins. Gone are the days when Christian apologetics held a prominent position in theological endeavour. Today such issues as the nature and situation of man, Christian ethics, the unity of the church, and the task of missions dominate the centre of the theological stage. Undoubtedly this is as it should be and it is not the purpose of this article to belittle any of these concerns. There are, however, certain observations which do bear mentioning with regard to the importance of apologetics for contemporary theology. To begin with, it should be noted that the primary purpose of all theological endeavour is to come to a better understanding of the Christian message and effectively to relate it to man and his situation. Even the above-mentioned areas of contemporary concern all have as their ultimate aim to witness to the new life in Christ. The significance of this fact is appreciated when one realises that apologetics also has this witness as its ultimate purpose. It is clear that apologetics is not unrelated to the basic theological task of this or any age.

scholarly journals Diakoniologie en rasionaliteit - ’n verkenning

1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. H. Venter
Keyword(s):  
Practical Theology ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Rationality Model ◽  
The Way

In this article the dimension of rationality in Diaconiology is investigated. With a short overview of the development of Diaconiology and Practical Theology as a starting point, nine rationality models are analysed in order to outline relevant data for a possible rationality model for Diaconiology. In line with this reflection and from an accepted paradigm of research, it is indicated that rationality in Diaconiology should he sought in the way Scripture, as part of reality, is utilized in diaconiological research, as well as in the empirical reality in which the ministry of reconciliation takes place in the church, the world and the kingdom of God. In conclusion, a definition of Diaconiology is aimed at. In this definition the varied aspects of rationality investigated in the line of argumentation are unified in a 'new’ frame.

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