Jan Amos Comenius

Author(s):  
Stephen Tomlinson

Jan Amos Comenius (b. 1592) is widely recognized as a pivotal figure in the history of educational thought. Living during a period of great turmoil he promoted universal schooling as the means to engineer a perfectly harmonious world. His argument turned upon claims to scientific knowledge and a didactic method that could instill truth in all minds. As the ever expanding scholarship on Comenius demonstrates, many still find inspiration in this visionary project. But Comenius’ work must be read in the context of Early Modern thought. Convinced that life was situated in the divinely crafted cosmos pictured in the Book of Genesis, his overarching goal was to restore “the image of God in man” and realize the Golden Age depicted in prophecy. The school was to be a workshop for the reformation of mankind, a place to manufacture of right thinking and right acting individuals. I explore these epistemological and pedagogic arguments and demonstrate their role in his hugely successful Latin primer, Orbis pictus (1658). Comenius, I conclude, was a revolutionary thinker who married subtle observations about the process of learning with sophisticated instructional practices. However, given current views about human nature and the social good, these principles cannot be applied uncritically to contemporary educational problems.

2000 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Dreyer

Woman created in the image of God: From the Reformation through the twentieth century. The purpose of this artirle is to trace how woman has been represented in the history of theology, in the period stretching from the Renaissance to the feminist movement of the twentieth century, as the image of God. The focus is on the views of Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Bonhoefer, Brunner and Barth. As far as the feminist movement is concerned, attention is paid in particular to the views of Daly, Coll and Ruether. The discussion proceeds from the presupposition that, apart from the master narrative (the patriarchal-hierarchical perspective), acounter-narrative (a more egalitarian perspective) is also present in the Bible.These two perspectives form the criterion according to which woman as image of God has been traced in the history of theology. The article has been written with a view to pastoral interaction with women.


2020 ◽  
pp. 45-74
Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller

Perkins’ basic understanding of human freedom drew on the resources of earlier English and continental Protestant thought, including the work of thinkers like Jerome Zanchi and Zacharias Ursinus. Early modern Reformed writers, whether of the Reformation or of the era of orthodoxy, were participants in a long history of conversation and debate over the nature of voluntary choice. This debate was rooted in theological treatments of grace and freedom extending back into the patristic era. Like the earlier English and continental Protestant thinkers, Perkins carefully worked through the traditional faculty psychology, in order to counter the accusation of Roman Catholic polemicists that Reformed theology utterly denied human freedom and responsibility. From the outset, Perkins’ approach rested on an analysis of the interrelationship of intellect and will, the creation of human beings in the image of God, and the relationship of human to divine willing.


HISTOREIN ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Costas Gaganakis

<p>This article attempts to chart the “paradigm shift” from social history, dominant until the early 1980s, to new cultural history and the various interpretive trends it engendered in the 1990s and 2000s. The privileged field of investigation is the history of the Protestant Reformation, particularly in its urban aspect. The discussion starts with the publication of Bernd Moeller’s pivotal <em>Reichsstadt und Reformation </em>in the early 1960s – which paved the way for the triumphant invasion of social history in a field previously dominated by ecclesiastical or political historians, and profoundly imbued with doctrinal prerogatives – and culminates in the critical presentation of interpretive trends that appear to dominate in the 2010s, particularly the view and investigation of the Reformation as communication process.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (2 SELECTED PAPERS IN ENGLISH) ◽  
pp. 31-42
Author(s):  
Bogumił Szady

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 61 (2013), issue 2. The article addresses the question of the fall of the Latin parish in Chorupnik that belonged to the former diocese of Chełm. The parish church in Chorupnik was taken over by Protestants in the second half of the 16th century. Unsuccessful attempts at recovering its property were made by incorporating it into the neighbouring parish in Gorzków. The actions taken by the Gorzków parish priest and the bishop together with his chapter failed, too. A detailed study of such attempts to recover the property of one of the parishes that ceased to exist during the Reformation falls within the context of the relations between the nobility and the clergy in the period of Counter-Reformation. Studying the social, legal and economic relations in a local dimension is important for understanding the mechanisms of the mass transition of the nobility to reformed denominations, and then of their return to the Catholic Church.


2010 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER MARSHALL

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the social history of death, there has been little scholarly examination of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on perceptions of and discourses about hell. Scholars who have addressed the issue tend to conclude that Protestant and Catholic hells differed little from each other in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of printed English-language sources, and finds significant disparities on questions such as the location of hell and the nature of hell-fire. It argues that such divergences were polemically driven, but none the less contributed to the so-called ‘decline of hell’.


1974 ◽  
Vol 39 (2Part1) ◽  
pp. 194-204
Author(s):  
Mark A. Gordon

AbstractIt has come to be common for scientists to study the history of scientific thought. But too often even today, we assume our present theories are "Truth." Scientific histories usually describe intellectual events as either having enhanced or impeded discoveries consistent with modern theory. However, by applying the same standards to Western thought that we apply to non-Western cosmologies, we find that the development of Western worldview closely reflected its own changing social structure. The idea that nature was fixed permanently by God during the creation gave way to the idea of a constantly changing, evolving world-and, at the same time, the fixed class system of European society gave way to an industrialized society characterized by class mobility. This paper will analyze British scientific theories and biohistoric models from the Reformation to Darwin's Origin of Species.


2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-100
Author(s):  
Bernd Oberdorfer

Abstract According to Notker Slenczka, Jesus redefined the early Jewish understanding of God so radically that the Old Testament could not remain an adequate expression of the Christian idea of God. Moreover, in the light of historical criticism, the messianic promises of the OT could no longer be read as prophetic references to Jesus, either. The OT could hence only be seen as revelation to Jews; for Christians, however, it is valuable as paradigmatic expression of human reality and their necessity of salvation only, and to them authentic information about redemption is provided only by the New Testament. The essay discusses this position and defines a possible Christian view on the relation between Old and New Testament based on the insight that Jesus’ redefinition of the image of God can only be understood in the light of the history of God’s self-revelation to Israel, of which Jesus is a part; from a Christian perspective, the words, actions and fate of Jesus then also shed new light on the history of God’s self-revelation to Israel.


1975 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy

When I offered to read a paper on this subject, I had a particular hypothesis in mind. I thought—perhaps it would be more honest to say, I hoped—it would be possible to show that, during a period roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, the practice of the sacrament of penance in the traditional church had undergone a change which was important in itself and of general historical interest. The change, I thought, could roughly be described as a shift from the social to the personal. To be more precise, I thought it possible that, for the average layman, and notably for the average rural layman in the pre-reformation church, the emphasis of the sacrament lay in its providing part of a machinery for the regulation and resolution of offences and conflicts otherwise likely to disturb the peace of a community. The effect of the Counter-Reformation (or whatever one calls it) was, I suspected, to shift the emphasis away from the field of objective social relations and into a field of interiorized discipline for the individual. The hypothesis may be thought an arbitrary one: we can but see. I think it will be admitted that, supposing it turned out to be correct, we should have learnt something worth knowing about the difference between the medieval and the counter-reformation church, and something about the difference between pre- and post-reformation European society. If if did not turn out to be correct, we might nevertheless expect to pick up some useful knowledge about something which is scarcely a staple of current historical discourse, though it threatens to become so.


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