The New World in Salvation History

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-47
Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina

Readers of Miguel Sánchez’s Imagen de la Virgen María, which contained the first published account of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s acclaimed apparitions to the indigenous neophyte Juan Diego, rarely recognize that he was trained in the theology of the church fathers, particularly in the writings of Saint Augustine. Interpretations of Sánchez have ranged from positivist condemnations for his lack of historical documentation to laudatory praise for his defense of pious tradition to emphases on his criollo patriotism as expressed through his adulation of Guadalupe and the baroque culture of New Spain. This chapter assesses Sánchez’s work as well as the origins and formative phase of Guadalupan devotion over the century preceding his publication. It illuminates the influence of patristic thought and theological method on Sánchez, as well as the frequently ignored but foundational role of his theology and that of the church fathers on the Guadalupe tradition.

Author(s):  
Rosalva Loreto López

The process of establishing women’s convents in Hispanic America must be understood as the result of converging expectations from the crown, the church, and important laypeople who were interested in re-creating a Catholic world in the cities of the New World. The importance of women’s convents depended on the regular clergy as well as the secular, both of whom were invested in replicating their own religious identity. The role of families was also critical in the processes of establishing and populating the fifty-eight convents, as it was the nun’s families who expanded their networks of power, pedigree, and the reproduction of their own lineage by way of these institutions. Finally, the study of convent wealth is also essential to understanding the mutual dependence between the urban growth of cities and the expansion of these women’s institutions.


Augustinianum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-206
Author(s):  
John Joseph Gallagher ◽  

The sex aetates mundi constituted the defining framework for understanding biblical and salvation history in the Early Christian and Late Antique worlds. The origins of the idea that history can be divided into six epochs, each lasting roughly a thousand years, are commonly attributed to Augustine of Hippo. Although Augustine’s engagement with this notion significantly influenced its later popularity due to the prolific circulation of his works, he was by no means the sole progenitor of this concept. This bipartite study undertakes the first conspectus in English-speaking scholarship to date of the origins and evolution of the sex aetates mundi. Part I of this study traces the early origins of historiographical periodisation in writings from classical and biblical antiquity, taking account in particular of the role of numerology and notions of historical eras that are present in biblical texts. Expressions of the world ages in the writings of the Church Fathers are then traced in detail. Due consideration is afforded to attendant issues that influenced the six ages, including calendrical debates concerning the age of the world and the evolution of eschatological, apocalyptic, and millenarian thought. Overall, this article surveys the myriad intellectual and exegetical currents that converged in Early Christianity and Late Antiquity to create this sixfold historiographical and theological framework. The first instalment of this study lays the groundwork for understanding Augustine’s engagement with this motif in his writings, which is treated in Part II.


Author(s):  
Emma Mason

This chapter locates Rossetti in the context of the book’s ecotheological argument, which traces an ecological love command in her writing through her engagement with Tractarianism, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Church Fathers, and Francis of Assisi. It establishes her Anglo-Catholic imagining of the cosmos as a fabric of participation and communal experience embodied in Christ. The first section reads Rossetti in the context of current Victorian ecocriticism, which underplays the role of Christianity in the development of nineteenth-century environmentalism. The next sections question critical readings of Rossetti as a reclusive thinker and argue instead for an educated and politicized Christian for whom indifference to the spiritual is complicit with an environmental crisis in which the weak and vulnerable suffer most. This introduction also refers to the wider field of Rossetti studies and introduces her reading of grace and apocalypse as a major contribution to the intradiscipline of Christianity and ecology.


Vox Patrum ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 291-315
Author(s):  
Jan Iluk

In 1CorHom, edited in the autumn and winter of 392 and 393 AD, John Chrysostom found a natural opportunity to return to his numerous utterances on the role of love in the lives of people. Obviously, the opportunity was the 13“ chapter of this Letter - The Song of Love. Among his works, we will find a few more smali works which were created with the intention of outlining the Christian ideał of love. Many of the contemporary monographs which were devoted to the ancient understanding of Christian „love” have the phrase „Eros and Agape” in their titles. In contemporary languages, this arrangement extends between sex and love. Both in the times of the Church Fathers (the 4th century AD) and currently, the distance between sex and love is measured by feelings, States and actions which are morę or less refined and noble. The awareness of the existence of many stops over this distance leads to the conviction that our lives are a search for the road to Agape. As many people are looking not so much for a shortcut but for a shorter route, John Chrysostom, like other Church Fathers, declared: the shortest route, because it is the most appropriate for this aim, is to live according to the Christian virtues that have been accumulated by the Christian politeia. There are to be found the fewest torments and disenchantments, although there are sacrifices. Evangelical politeia, the chosen and those who have been brought there will find love) - as a State of existence. In the earthly dimension, however, love appears as a causative force only in the circle of the Christian politeia. Obviously, just as in the heavenly politeia, the Christian politeia on earth is an open circle for everyone. As Chrysostom’s listeners and readers were not only Christians (in the multi-cultural East of the Roman Empire), and as the background of the principles presented in the homilies was the everyday life and customs of the Romans of the time, the ideał - dyam] - was placed by him in the context of diverse imperfections in the rangę and form of the feelings exhibited, which up to this day we still also cali love. It is true that love has morę than one name. By introducing the motif of love - into deliberations on the subject of the Christian politeia, John Chrysostom finds and indicates to the faithful the central force that shaped the ancient Church. This motif fills in the vision of the Heavenly Kingdom, explains to Christians the sense of life that is appropriate to them in the Roman community and explains the principles of organised life within the boundaries of the Church. It can come as no surprise that the result of such a narrative was Chrysostonfs conviction that love is „rationed”: Jews, pagans, Hellenes and heretics were deprived of it. In Chrysostonfs imagination, the Christian politeia has an earthly and a heavenly dimension. In the heavenly politeia, also called by him Chrisfs, the Lord’s or the


2021 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Gilles Dorival

The role of the Septuagint in the building of the Christian identity during the first Christian centuries is more important than it is generally said. The word ‘testament’ or ‘covenant’, for example, comes from the Septuagint, via the New Testament. The Greek and Latin liturgies are filled with references to the Septuagint. The same is true in the case of the Christian spirituality: for instance, the concept of the Christian life as a migration comes from the Septuagint. The Christian hermeneutics is indebted to the Greek Bible: even if knowledge of the allegorical method comes from the Greek philosophers (and Philo), support could be found for it in the verses of the Greek Bible. Finally, the theological vocabulary of the Christians was founded upon the Greek Bible. For instance, in the case of the doctrine of the Trinity, the word ‘person’ comes from the Septuagint. Furthermore, some passages of the Greek translation gave rise to theological interpretations which are not possible on the grounds of the Hebrew text. In Gen 1:2, the Septuagint reads ‘the earth was invisible and unorganized’ and this came to be quoted both in support of the creation of matter ex nihilo. In Exod 17:16, where the Hebrew has a difficult hapax legomenon, the Greek speaks about the ‘hidden hand’ with which the Lord makes war against Amalek; this ‘hidden hand’ played a role in the Christian doctrine of the Logos, which is hidden in the Old Testament.


1976 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Robert H. Ayers

In spite of the fact that it is often ignored, one of the interesting features in the thought of some of the early Church Fathers, was a considerable skill at language and logical analysis. Given the basic liberal disciplines of Greco-Roman education it is not surprising that those Fathers who were fortunate enough to receive formal education were able to utilise the skills of rhetoric and logic as well as other skills of the liberal arts. Also it is ńot surprising that later great thinkers of the church informed by the liberal arts and by the writings of the earlier Fathers should make use of these skills. This is surely the case with Saint Augustine.


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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hennie F. Stander

A response to Van der Watt’s article on ‘Intertextuality and over-interpretation: References to Genesis 28:12 in John 1:51?’ This article is a response to an article of Van der Watt titled ‘Intertextuality and over-interpretation: References to Genesis 28:12 in John 1:51?’ (2016). He states in this article that his aim is ‘to illustrate the dangers of over-interpretation when dealing with intertextual relations between texts, especially when allusion is assumed’. He then gives a brief survey of different interpretations of John 1:51. Van der Watt shows in his article how theologians use themes from Genesis 28:12 (like the ladder, Jacob or Bethel, which are not mentioned in John 1:51) in their expositions of John 1:51. Van der Watt regards some of these expositions as examples of over-interpretation. The aim of my article is to show how Church Fathers interpreted Genesis 28:12 and John 1:51. I show in my article that the Church Fathers saw several parallels between these two sections from the Bible. Furthermore, I suggest that the early theologians’ interpretations formed a tradition that probably influenced modern interpreters of the Bible. I also discuss the role of typology in the history of interpretation, specifically also in the case of Genesis 28:12 and John 1:51. I then argue that it is perhaps not so far-fetched to see an intertextual relation between Genesis 28:12 and John 1:51.


Author(s):  
Kristina Bross

Chapter 2 analyzes Thomas Gage’s The English-American (1648), which urges Oliver Cromwell to invade New Spain (the “Western Design”). Gage, an English Catholic, lived in New Spain for twelve years, apostasized and returned to England as a Protestant minister, and published accounts of his travels. Gage’s works imagine an alternative history in which England, not Spain, backed Columbus’s explorations and prognosticates a worldwide English empire. He presents himself as a latter-day Columbus, offering the discovery of America to Cromwell in the role of King Henry VII. The coda takes a 1628 document preserved in the British National Archives as a starting point to consider how the Victorian Calendar of State Papers and especially one of its editors (and author of the children’s gift-book Hearts of Oak), W. Noel Sainsbury, made meaning of such materials, establishing “what the past will have meant” in the late nineteenth century and beyond.


Perichoresis ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
André A. Gazal

Abstract John Jewel, regarded as the principal apologist and theologian for the Elizabethan Church, was also esteemed as one of England’s most important (if not the most important) authority on the subject of usury, and therefore was cited frequently by opponents of usury towards the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century. One of the most sustained interpretations of Jewel as a theologian on the subject of usury was by Christoph Jelinger, who observed that the late bishop of Sarum employed the same theological method in opposing usury as he did in defending the doctrines and practices of the Church of England against its Catholic opponents, that is, by appealing to the Scriptures, the Church Fathers, Church Councils, and the example of the primitive church. This article seeks to confirm the opinion of Jelinger, and in doing so show that Jewel’s opposition to usury stemmed primarily from the conviction that it was both a vice and heresy that eroded the unifying attribute of Christian society which was love.


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