“All Will Be Well”: Julian of Norwich's Counter-Apocalyptic Revelations

Horizons ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-210
Author(s):  
Christopher Denny
Keyword(s):  
Julian Of Norwich ◽  
Process Theology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Catherine Keller ◽  
The Church

To resolve the impasse between various competing apocalypticisms, I suggest the writings of Julian of Norwich exemplify an eschatology that incorporates features of what Catherine Keller calls counter-apocalyptic while avoiding the risks of deconstructionist theology. Julian faced an impasse as she struggled to reconcile the traditional apocalyptic claim of the church that some human beings were damned with her own revelatory experience that “all would be well.” According to the long text of the Revelation of Divine Love, in facing this crisis Julian did not abandon the belief in divine omnipotence. Like Keller's position, Julian's apophatic counter-apocalyptices chews understandings of Christiane eschatology as the simple disclosure of divine power and justice. Instead, Julian's counter-apocalyptic is founded upon the vulnerability of Christ's body. Julian's vision of Christ's kenotic love transcends the impasse between eschatological determinism and Keller's process theology, and his love establishes a stronger foundation for a truly liberating eschatology.

Spiritual Healing, Sick Kids and the Law: Inequities in the American Healthcare System

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 269-299
Author(s):  
Janna C. Merrick
Keyword(s):  
Medical Science ◽  
Spiritual Healing ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
Human Need ◽  
East End ◽  
The Church

Main Street in Sarasota, Florida. A high-tech medical arts building rises from the east end, the county's historic three-story courthouse is two blocks to the west and sandwiched in between is the First Church of Christ, Scientist. A verse inscribed on the wall behind the pulpit of the church reads: “Divine Love Always Has Met and Always Will Meet Every Human Need.” This is the church where William and Christine Hermanson worshipped. It is just a few steps away from the courthouse where they were convicted of child abuse and third-degree murder for failing to provide conventional medical care for their seven-year-old daughter.This Article is about the intersection of “divine love” and “the best interests of the child.” It is about a pluralistic society where the dominant culture reveres medical science, but where a religious minority shuns and perhaps fears that same medical science. It is also about the struggle among different religious interests to define the legal rights of the citizenry.

The Goodness of Home

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Marandiuc
Keyword(s):  
Attachment Theory ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Middle Term ◽  
Human Love ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Theological Argument

The question of what home means and how it relates to subjectivity has fresh urgency in light of pervasive contemporary migration, which ruptures the human self, and painful relational poverty, which characterizes much of modern life. Yet the Augustinian heritage that situates true home and right attachment outside this world has clouded theological conceptualizations of earthly belonging. This book engages this neglected topic and argues for the goodness of home, which it construes relationally rather than spatially. In dialogue with research in the neuroscience of attachment theory and contemporary constructions of the self, the book advances a theological argument for the function of love attachments as sources of subjectivity and enablers of human freedom. The book shows that paradoxically the depth of human belonging—thus, dependence—is directly proportional to the strength of human agency—hence, independence. Building on Søren Kierkegaard’s imagery alongside other sources, the book depicts human love as interwoven with the infinite streams of divine love, forming a sacramental site for God’s presence, and playing a constitutive role in the making of the self. The book portrays the self both as gifted from God in inchoate form and as engaged in continuous, albeit nonlinear becoming via experiences of human love. The Holy Spirit indwells the attachment space between human beings as a middle term preventing its implosion or dissolution and conferring a stability that befits the concept of home. The interstitial space between loving human persons subsists both anthropologically and pneumatologically and generates the self’s home.

Love Divine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Wessling
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
God's Love ◽  
The Creation ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Wrath Of God

This book provides a systematic account of the deep and rich love that God has for humans. Within this vast theological territory, the objective is to contend for a unified paradigm regarding fundamental issues pertaining to the God of love who deigns to share His life of love with any human willing to receive it. Realizing this objective includes clarifying and defending theological accounts of the following: • how the doctrine of divine love should be constructed; • what God’s love is; • what role love plays in motivating God’s creation and subsequent governance of humans; • how God’s love for humans factors into His emotional life; • which humans it is that God loves in a saving manner; • what the punitive wrath of God is and how it relates to God’s redemptive love for humans; • and how God might share His intra-trinitarian love with human beings. As the book unfolds, a network of nodal issues are examined related to God’s love as it begins in Him and then overflows into the creation, redemption, and glorification of humanity. The result is an exitus-reditus structure driven by God’s unyielding love.

St Symeon the New Theologian (969-1022): Byzantine spiritual renewal in search of a precedent

1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 75-90
Author(s):  
John Anthony McGuckin
Keyword(s):  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
The West ◽  
Conference Theme ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Church

St Symeon the New Theologian is, without question, one of the most original and intriguing writers of medieval Byzantium. Indeed, although still largely unknown in the West, he is surely one of the greatest of all Christian mystical writers; not only for the remarkable autobiographical accounts he gives of several visions of the divine light, but also for the passionate quality of his exquisite Hymns of Divine Love, the remarkable intensity of his pneumatological doctrine, and the corresponding fire he brings to his preaching of reform in the internal and external life of the Church. He was a highly controversial figure in his own day. His disciples venerated him as a saint who had returned to the roots of the Christian tradition and personified its repristinization. His opponents, who secured his deposition and exile, regarded him as a dangerously unbalanced incompetent who, by overstressing the value of personal religious fervour, had endangered the stability of that tradition. The Vita which we possess was composed in 1054, in an attempt to rehabilitate Symeon’s memory and prepare for the return of his relics to the capital from which he had been expelled when alive. This paper will investigate how he himself understood and appropriated aspects of the earlier tradition (particularly monastic spirituality), hoping to elucidate why he felt himself inspired to reformist zeal, and why many of his contemporaries (not simply his ‘worldly opponents’ as his hagiographer would have us believe) regarded him as unbalanced. It will end by attempting some reflection on what the controversy reveals on the larger front about how the Church ‘selectively looks back on itself, so to paraphrase our president’s description of the conference theme, and whether the model of tradition and its reception exemplified in this Byzantine writer can offer anything to the dialogue between history and theology which the doctrine of Tradition (Paradosis) inevitably initiates.

El parecer de Agustín del amor como gracia, en la controversia con Juliano de Eclana

Augustinus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-142
Author(s):  
Mathijs Lamberigts ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Pelagian Controversy

During the Pelagian controversy, the precise relation between grace and free will was an important issue. Augustine emphasized the priority of grace over human beings’ free will after the Fall. Pelagians such as Julian of Aeclanum were of the opinion that such view annihilated human beings’ free will. Throughout history, time and again, scholars belonging to different schools and denomina­tions have discussed this issue at length. In this article, we concentrate on Augustine’s view on love as grace during his debate with Julian. We argue that one should broaden the scope of this question and pay attention to the role of divine love as an important and decisive factor with regard to the proper activity of grace in the redemption and liberation of human beings. Thinking the relation between human beings and God in terms of love is a help in order to overcome the unfruitful grace-freewill antinomy. In fact, such approach does justice to both the Scriptural sources of Augustine’s position and the bishop’s spiritual view on the topic under consideration.

scholarly journals PKM KATEKESE TENTANG MENGHAYATI NILAI KERAJAAN ALLAH DALAM ERA DIGITAL BAGI ANGGOTA KMK. ST. MARTINUS PAROKI PERSIAPAN ST. MARINUS PU’URERE

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-41
Author(s):  
Aurelius Fredimento ◽  
John M. Balan
Keyword(s):  
Kinetic Energy ◽  
Technology Development ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Flowing Water ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Church

The development and the progress of media communication at the present is a fact of the knowledge and the technology development that must be accepted. It presence like the flowing water which has a fast current that brings also two influences both positive and negative that must be accounted for the members of the Catholic Students Community Of St. Martinus Ende (KMK St. Martinus Ende). Both positive and negative influences the media community like a kinetic energy or a power attraction that attract  them in a tiring ambiquity. Let them walk alone without escort of a decisive compass where they should have a rightist attitude and responsible. On the point, the guidance and assistance of the church is an  offering  if the church will be born a generation  of the future  of the  church  that is mature and has a certain quality  based  on the growth  and the development  of acuteness and inner  to determine the attitude to the development of media communication. The process of sharpening of mind and the sharpeness of the participants can be realized by giving some activities such as: awareness, deepening and even  the sharpeness of the actor of  media communication as an  alternative of reporting work of the God Kingdom for human beings. It becomes the main moving spirit or activator  for the board of KMK Of St. Martinus Ende  to plan and boring  about the activity of catechism. The activity rise the method of Amos.  By this method, the participants are invited to build a deeply reflection that based on thein real experiences about the media communication, while keep on self opening to the God planning will come  to them  and  give them via  the commandment of God.  The commandment  of God  come to light, inspiration, motivate, power and critics to the  participants about the using of the media communication as a media of the commandment of the kingdom of God  to the world that is more progress and development lately.

scholarly journals Existential Chaos: A Critique of Catherine Keller’s Position Towards Creation and Divine Omnipotence

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Linthicum
Keyword(s):  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Creation Theology ◽  
Catherine Keller ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Creatio Ex Nihilo ◽  
Ex Nihilo

The two dominant concepts Catherine Keller examines in her study of creatio ex profundis, creation out of chaos, are the feminine tehomic language and refutation of divine omnipotence. She studies both these concepts through a feminist lens as well as with an overarching question as to why creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing, has commandeered the thought behind Genesis exegesis and creation theology. Using various literary styles, both religious and secular, Keller attempts to deconstruct creation out of nothing and argue how a theology of becoming is more appropriate given the language of Genesis and creation as a whole. Rather than merely substitute the present masculine understandings of God and creation with the feminine, she persuades for a return to the foundation of tehomic language in an effort to reconstruct the negative feminine connotations of chaos and support a theology of becoming without a “divine dominology.” The purpose of this paper is to offer an examination of Keller’s text and counterarguments to her understanding of creatio ex nihilo and ex profundis. There are various examples of male dominant thought in theology throughout history; however, divine omnipotence, both in general and as associated with creation theology, is not an affront to the feminine and creatio ex profundis. Keller’s fault does not lie in the notion of creatio ex profundis and its validity; rather, her argument concerning the domineering power of divine omnipotence and its association with creatio ex nihilo remains insufficient.

scholarly journals Why Catholic Theology Needs Metapshysics: A Christological Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Thomas Joseph White
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Nature ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
The One ◽  
Human Intellect ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The Church

The Chalcedonian confession of faith asserts that Christ is one person, the Son of God, subsisting in two natures, divine and human. The doctrine of the communication of idioms is essential to the life and practices of the Church insofar as we affirm there to be properties of deity and humanity present in the one subject, the Word made flesh. Such affirmations are made without a confusion of the two natures or their mutually distinct attributes. The affirmation that there is a divine and human nature in Christ is possible, however, only if it is also possible for human beings to think coherently about the divine nature, analogically, and human nature, univocally. Otherwise it is not feasible to receive understanding of the divine nature of Christ into the human intellect intrinsically and the revelation must remain wholly alien to natural human thought, even under the presumption that such understanding originates in grace. Likewise we can only think coherently of the eternal Son’s solidarity with us in human nature if we can conceive of a common human nature present in all human individuals. Consequently, it is only possible for the Church to confess some form of Chalcedonian doctrine if there is also a perennial metaphysical philosophy capable of thinking coherently about the divine and human natures from within the ambit of natural human reason. This also implies that the Church maintains a “metaphysical apostolate” in her public teaching, in her philosophical traditions, as well as in her scriptural and doctrinal enunciations.

Epilogue and Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-272
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Church

This chapter draws together the themes of the book and looks forward to the later-seventeenth century. It argues that for much of the sixteenth century politics was subordinate to religion; temporal authorities needed the additional sanctions provided by religious belief if they were to exert any power over the consciences of individuals. The effect was to entangle temporal power in the deepening conflicts over religious truth, and thus to reveal the brittleness of any conception of political authority which relied on the support of the Church. At the same time, older traditions of political thought did not go away and often became stronger. The circulation of classical ideas, the discovery of new peoples, the growing interest in historical change and development all suggested alternative ways of legitimizing political power, often using natural law and avoiding any reliance on specifically Christian commitments. What happened in the early-seventeenth century, and most obviously in the writing of Hugo Grotius, was a move not only to ground political society in a particular conception of human nature (conceived of juridically, as a source of rights and obligations) but also to detach Christianity from that view of human nature. It was this understanding of human beings which enabled the development of a social contract tradition through the seventeenth century and beyond, and became an important source for modern liberalism. The questions it raised would help to shape the thought of the next century.

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