Divine Guidance

2020 ◽  
pp. 255-272
Author(s):  
John A. Jillions
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Eastern Orthodox ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Rational Thought ◽  
The University ◽  
Divine Guidance

This chapter compares and contrasts the approaches to divine guidance in the Greco-Roman, Jewish, and early Christian worlds of Paul’s Corinth and their relevance for the present. Their debates about healthy and unhealthy religious life and rational thought remain remarkably contemporary. The chapter considers modern religious experience, both positive and negative, including a seminal event in the life of Martin Luther King. The Religious Experience Research Centre, based at the University of Wales, has collected over 6,000 accounts. The Centre interviewed at length two Eastern Orthodox scholars (Kallistos Ware and Lev Gillet) for their views on discerning the value of such experiences. They are wary of delusion and independently conclude that claims to divine guidance ought to be evaluated by what results they produce. But they and others hope that rational and mystical experience can be held together for the full flourishing of human life.

Divine Guidance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Jillions
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Rational Thought ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intertestamental Literature ◽  
Divine Guidance

How are claims to God’s guidance to be understood against the background of fears, fundamentalism, and violence inspired by religious belief? But equally, how are acts of humanity, love, and sacrificial service to be understood, when they also claim to be inspired by God? How is healthy religion to be distinguished from unhealthy religion? Questions like these were the subject of lively debate in the first-century world of Corinth, where the views of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian residents mixed continually, and where Paul established one of the first Christian communities. While their differences were real, there was also common ground and a shared critique of destructive religion. This study looks at how believers and unbelievers confront questions about divine guidance, discernment, delusion, and rational thought. Part I looks at Greco-Roman views, focusing on the archeology of ancient Corinth and the writings of Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Posidonius, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and others. Part II surveys Jewish attitudes by looking at Philo and Josephus, Qumran, early rabbinic writers, and other intertestamental literature. Part III unpacks Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians to show that issues of divine guidance and discernment are woven throughout as Paul shapes a distinctly Christian approach. Part IV brings the historical strands together and considers religious experience research to draw some conclusions about discernment and delusion today in the hope that rational and mystical need not be mutually exclusive.

Greek and Roman Political Philosophy

Classics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jed W. Atkins
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ancient Political Philosophy

In this bibliography “Greek and Roman political philosophy” is taken to mean philosophical reflection on politics in the Greco-Roman world from the 5th century bce to the 5th century ce. More particularly, ancient political philosophy involves reflection on the establishment of political institutions and laws; the nature of political rule; central social and political concepts such as liberty, justice, and equality; the rights and duties of citizenship and its relationship to a flourishing human life; civic education; and the different possible forms of constitutions or regimes. Scholars frequently distinguish political philosophy from political thought. Political thought encompasses any thinking about politics at all and may be expressed through a wide range of media and literary forms, from epistles to comedy to inscriptions. Political philosophy represents thinking about politics that is more specifically theoretical and systematic in nature. Thus, political philosophy may be seen as a subset of political thought. Because this bibliography is concerned with the narrower of the two categories, it focuses primarily on philosophers and theoretical discourse. This focus also informs the general organization of this entry, which adopts a chronological, author-by-author approach rather than the thematic approach sometimes utilized by historians of political thought. This bibliography covers Early Greek, Athenian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Christian political philosophy, extending from the Presocratics to St. Augustine.

Neither Jew nor Greek

2020 ◽  
pp. 187-251
Author(s):  
John A. Jillions
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Lord's Supper ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Rational Thought ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Divine Guidance

This chapter shows how issues of decisions, divine guidance, discernment, and delusion are woven throughout 1 Corinthians. Paul’s community was shaped by Greco-Roman and Jewish views, but he presents a distinctive new way based on the Cross. As he himself told them, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). Identification with the crucified and risen Christ gave access to the Spirit and a life of communion with God in various ways: through the scriptures (reinterpreted in the light of Christ), the liturgical life of the community (especially baptism and the Lord’s Supper), tradition, preaching, apostles and community leaders, service, co-suffering, and, above all, love. But this does not eclipse individual divine communion, calling, and discernment. Nor does it exclude rational thought, which in Paul’s approach is equally illumined by divine guidance to integrate rational and mystical.

scholarly journals What Counts as Religious Experience? The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences as a Tool for Analysis across Cultures

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Taves ◽  
Melissa Gordon Wolf ◽  
Elliott Daniel Ihm ◽  
Michael Barlev ◽  
Michael Kinsella ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Cultural Validity ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Traditional Research ◽  
Item Level ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Way

When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden concepts, such as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual,’ are used to interpret or appraise contested aspects of human life within and across cultures. To illustrate the distinction, we contrast the traditional research design that the Religious Experience Research Centre used to survey and compare “religious experience” in the UK and China with the appraisal-based design used by the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE). Instead of operationalizing “religious experience,” the INOE distinguishes between generically-worded experiences and the way the experiences are appraised. When coupled with item level validation to ensure that queries are understood as intended, the generically-worded experiences function as common features that allow us to compare similarities and differences between culturally-embedded “lived” experiences. Separating generic experiences from appraisals allows us to (1) treat culture-bound concepts, such as ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual,’ as appraisals, and (2) view these and other concepts (e.g., dharmic, paranormal, psychotic) as advancing claims about how and why an experience occurred. In so far as we can establish the cross-cultural validity of common features, we can set up culturally-balanced (rather than Western-centric) comparisons and avoid operationalizing culture-specific concepts.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
John A. Jillions
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Public Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
Divine Guidance

For good or ill, people throughout the world of the 21st century continue to act on perceptions of divine guidance, inspiration, and revelation in personal and public life. Religious experience can lead to both extraordinary lives of human creativity and lives of crippling religious fear and violence. The first-century world of the apostle Paul’s Corinth brought together Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians in vigorous conversation and debate about mystical experience, religion, divination, superstition, providence, the rational mind, discernment, and delusion. Contemporary biblical scholarship has generally been wary of religious experience, but the texts themselves swim in this environment. The introduction argues that religious and biblical scholars as well as those who pursue or question spiritual exploration in the 21st century will benefit from engagement with these first-century debates.

Philosophy of Religious Experience and the Nag Hammadi Texts

2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-22
Author(s):  
Stephen Bush
Keyword(s):  
Attachment Theory ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Experiential Knowledge ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Nag Hammadi ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Theoretical Issues

This essay, in response to Michael Kaler and Philip Tite, examines several theoretical issues about mystical experience in the Nag Hammadi texts. First is the problem of whether experiences can be an object of study at all, and I argue that they can, so long as we attend to the causes of the experiences. Attending to the causes of experiences, however, means that neo-perennialists must articulate and defend an account of the cause(s) of the cross-culturally universal experiences that they suppose occur. As for the attempt to apply contemporary psychologists' attachment theory to the experiential knowledge described in the Nag Hammadi texts, questions remain about the relation between attachment to the divine figure purportedly experienced and the experiencer's attachment to his or her religious community.

What's Divine about Divine Law?

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Philo Of Alexandria ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
Jewish Writers ◽  
Divine Law

In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. This book untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition—Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis—struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy. This book shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine by virtue of its inherent qualities of intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutability, while for the biblical authors, divine law was divine because it was grounded in revelation with no presumption of rationality, conformity to truth, universality, or immutability. The book describes the collision of these opposing conceptions in the Hellenistic period, and details competing attempts to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance. It shows how Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish writers, from the author of 1 Enoch to Philo of Alexandria, were engaged in a common project of bridging the gulf between classical and biblical notions of divine law, while Paul, in his letters to the early Christian church, sought to widen it. The book then delves into the literature of classical rabbinic Judaism to reveal how the talmudic rabbis took a third and scandalous path, insisting on a construction of divine law intentionally at odds with the Greco-Roman and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized West. This book sheds critical light on an ancient debate that would shape foundational Western thought, and that continues to inform contemporary views about the nature and purpose of law and the nature and authority of Scripture.

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Relationship

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions brings together thirteen scholars of late-antique, medieval, and renaissance traditions who discuss magic, religious experience, ritual, and witch-beliefs with the aim of reflecting on the relationship between man and the supernatural. The content of the volume is intriguingly diverse and includes late antique traditions covering erotic love magic, Hellenistic-Egyptian astrology, apotropaic rituals, early Christian amulets, and astrological amulets; medieval traditions focusing on the relationships between magic and disbelief, pagan magic and Christian culture, as well as witchcraft and magic in Britain, Scandinavian sympathetic graphophagy, superstition in sermon literature; and finally Renaissance traditions revolving around Agrippan magic, witchcraft in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and a Biblical toponym related to the Friulan Benandanti’s visionary experiences. These varied topics reflect the multifaceted ways through which men aimed to establish relationships with the supernatural in diverse cultural traditions, and for different purposes, between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance. These ways eventually contributed to shaping the civilizations of the supernatural or those peculiar patterns which helped men look at themselves through the mirror of their own amazement of being in this world.

Sexual Defilement in Early Christian Texts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Blidstein
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Family ◽  
Main Target ◽  
Christian Society

Chapter 7 demonstrates that sexual sin became the main target for purity discourse in early Christian texts, and attempts to explain why. Christian imagery of sexual defilement drew from a number of traditions—Greco-Roman sexual ethics, imagery of sexual sin from the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple texts, and both Jewish and pagan purity laws, all seen through the lens of Paul’s imagery of sexuality and sexual sin. Two broad currents characterized Christian sexual ethics in the second century: one upheld marriage and the family as the basis for a holy Christian society and church, while the second rejected all sexuality, including in marriage. Writers of both currents made heavy use of defilement imagery. For the first, sexual sin was a dangerous defilement, contaminating the Christian community and severing it from God. For the second, more radical current, sexuality itself was the defilement; virginity or continence alone were pure.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document