Christian Martyrdom and Christian Violence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Lundberg
Keyword(s):  
Just War ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Majority Opinion ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Way ◽  
Christian History

What is the place—if any—for violence in the Christian life? This book explores this question by analyzing a paradox of mainstream Christian history, theology, and ethics: at the heart of the Christian story, the suffering of violence stands as the price of faithfulness. From Jesus himself to martyrs who have died while following him, at the core of Christian faith is an experience of being victimized by the world’s violence. At the same time, the majority opinion for most of Christian history has held that there are situations when the follower of Jesus may be justified in inflicting violence on others, especially in the context of war. Do these two facets of Christian ethics and experience—martyrdom and the just war—represent a contradiction, the self-defeating irony of those who follow a Lord who refused to defend himself taking up deadly weapons? In arguing that they do not, the book contends that any meaningful coherence between a theology of martyrdom and commitment to a just war ethic requires shifts away from a common heroic conception of Christian martyrdom and a common secularized realpolitik conception of necessary violence. Instead, it requires a view of martyrdom that acknowledges even the martyrs as subject to the ambiguities of the human condition, even as they present a compelling witness to Jesus and the way of the cross. And it requires an approach to justified violence that reflects the self-sacrificial ethos of Jesus displayed in the lives of true Christian martyrs.

Kierkegaard, Metaphysics, and Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Alternative Reading ◽  
The Way

AbstractNoting Heidegger’s critique of Kierkegaard’s way of relating time and eternity, the paper offers an alternative reading of Kierkegaard that suggests Heidegger has overlooked crucial elements in the Kierkegaardian account. Gabriel Marcel and Sharon Krishek are used to counter Heidegger’s minimizing of the deaths of others and to show how the deaths of others may become integral to our sense of self. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s discourse on the work of love in remembering the dead. Against the criticism that this reveals the absence of the other in Kierkegaardian love, the paper argues that, on the contrary, it shows how Kierkegaard conceives the self as inseparable from the core relationships of love that, despite of death, constitute it as the self that it is.

Strange Cases: Jekyll & Hyde Narratives as Rhetorical Strategy in Sir Alexander Morison’s Physiognomy of Mental Diseases

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-170
Author(s):  
Madeline Bourque Kearin
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Fluid Dynamic ◽  
Physical Symptoms ◽  
The Self ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
The Core ◽  
Mental Diseases ◽  
Radical Transformation ◽  
The Way

Abstract Sir Alexander Morison’s Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (1838) was created as a didactic tool for physicians, depicting lunatics in both the active and dormant states of disease. Through the act of juxtaposition, Morison constituted his subjects as their own Jekylls and Hydes, capable of radical transformation. In doing so, he marshaled artistic and clinical, visual and textual approaches in order to pose a particular argument about madness as a temporally manifested, visually distinguishable state defined by its contrast with reason. This argument served a crucial function in legitimizing the emergent discipline of psychiatry by applying biomedical methodologies to the observation and classification of distinctly physical symptoms. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “quintessentially Victorian parable” serves as a metaphor for the way 19th-century alienists conceptualized insanity, while the theme of duality at the core of Stevenson’s story serves as a framework for conceptualizing both psychiatry and the subjects it generates. It was (and is) a discipline formulated around narrative as the primary organizing structure for its particular set of paradoxes, and specifically, narratives of the self as a fluid, dynamic, and contradictory entity.

The Idea of the Church in Christian History

1952 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilhelm Pauck
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Church History ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian History

It is customary to describe and interpret the history of Christianity as church history. To be sure, most church historians do not emphasize the special importance of the “church” in the Christian life they study and analyse; indeed, they deal with the idea of the church, with ecclesiological doctrines and with ecclesiastical practices as if they represented special phases of the Christian life. But, nevertheless, the fact that all aspects of Christian history are subsumed under the name and title of the “church” indicates that the character of Christianity is held to be inseparable from that of the “church”; the very custom of regarding Christian history as church history indicates that the Christian mind is marked by a special kind of self-consciousness induced by the awareness that the Christian faith is not fully actualized unless it is expressed in the special social context suggested by the term “church.”

Een wandelgids bij het leven: Een analytische evaluatie van de Christelijke Dogmatiek

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Rik Peels
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Analysis And Evaluation ◽  
The Core ◽  
General Perspective ◽  
The Way

This article provides a critical analysis and evaluation of Gijsbert van den Brink and Kees van der Kooi’s Christian Dogmatics, a lucid and welcome presentation of the core ideas that can be found in the Christian faith. First, the book is characterized, both from a more general perspective and from a specifically theological point of view. Next, it is argued that there is a discrepancy between the way the authors characterize systematic theology and the way they practice systematic theology themselves. After that, their assessment of natural theology is criticized and several problems in the Christian Dogmatics are highlighted, such as the fact that the authors’ anthropology fails to take holistic dualism seriously. Finally, it is argued that in some places, the authors ask important questions, but then provide answers to different questions without addressing the original issues.

The Significance of the Distribution of Self-designations in Acts

2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-49
Author(s):  
Paul Trebilco
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way ◽  
Christian History

Abstract An analysis of the distribution of self-designations in Acts reveals that Luke’s use of these self-designations is not random. Rather significant insight into Luke’s theology and into early Christian history can be gained by looking at the way these self-designations are distributed throughout Acts, when they are actually used, and whether they are used by Luke’s narrator or by actors in his story. The self-designations discussed here are ἀδελφοί, µαθηταί, ἐκκλησία, “the believers” and “the saints” or “the sanctified ones.”

scholarly journals Technological Drive, the Self and the Ethical

MANUSYA ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-49
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
Motivating Factor ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals ◽  
Dimensions Of Technology ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Human Condition

I want in this essay to change the way we approach the promise of technology. In bringing out the philosophical substance packed into the highly critical diagnostic portion of Virilio’s work, I focus on Virilio’s observations concerning the human psychological relation to technology. I argue that a form of resentment similar to that found in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals provides the motivating factor in the push for continual and increasingly rapid technological innovation: technological drive follows from fallen man’s desire to reconcile his mortality. Understanding this drive brings home the direness of the human condition that makes technological promise so attractive and technological resistance so difficult. Given this conundrum, we must articulate an ethic of technological modesty. An ethic of technological modesty encourages (1) the resistance of capricious urges for technological satisfaction and (2) the subjection of technologies to a rigorous phenomenological investigation that weighs their potential benefits and reductions, as well as the conditions that might precipitate and exacerbate these benefits or reductions. This ethical plan pushes Virilio’s phenomenology of the “accident” of technology, and comes in the phenomenological/pragmatic tradition of Hans Jonas’ imperative of responsibility and Don Ihde’s phenomenological investigation of the dimensions of technology that amplify and reduce natural human capacities.

scholarly journals Jesus “The Way” According to Origen and Marcellus: Confronting Two Patristic Traditions

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 452
Author(s):  
Samuel Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
The Core ◽  
Origen Of Alexandria ◽  
The Way

The article aims to examine and compare the evangelic title of Jesus the Way (John 14:6) in two Christian authors who belonged to two opposing theological traditions, namely, Origen of Alexandria and Marcellus of Ancyra. This comparison, based on original texts, aims not only to show the differences between these two patristic traditions, but rather to identify some common traits that belong to the core of Christian faith. Thus, Origen of Alexandria and Marcellus of Ancyra, two very dissimilar Christian authors, were of the same mind in confessing that only if the Son of God became fully human, could he be the Way for humankind towards the Father.

scholarly journals Saying no (to a story): personal identity and negativity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tereza Matějčková
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The Self ◽  
Birth Certificates ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe concept of narrativity and narrative identity has two birth certificates: it is linked to the phenomenological tradition—beginning with Arendt’s “political phenomenology” —and to the tradition of German Idealism gradually slipping into existentialism. In this article, the author focuses on the latter tradition that helped to pave the way of the concept of narrative self. Key among the thinkers of Classical German Idealism has been Hegel, often considered the philosophical storyteller. Yet the author argues that Hegel’s concept of narrativity is not exclusively applied to the self and has hardly any role in the constitution of consciousness. This is the reason why Hegel (rather than thinkers who place the core of personal identity into narrativity) has the means to formulate a more convincing concept of the self and personal identity. The author does not deny that narrativity is seminal, both for leading a life as a human being and as a concrete person; however, originally consciousness and self-hood are born out of negativity. One enacts one’s selfhood, once one realizes that one has to interrupt narrativity, step in, refuse to live by it, or just ordinarily rephrase it consciously and by this appropriate it.

scholarly journals The theory on “eide” according to Nicholas of Methone

Vox Patrum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 551-568
Author(s):  
Christos Terezis ◽  
Lydia Petridou
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Christian Realism ◽  
The Core ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Divine Mind ◽  
The Way

In this study, we are discussing the theory on “eide” and their relation to the “matter” according to Nicholas of Methone. This is a topic that shows the way in which God, as the supreme and only Principle, is connected to the natural world and human being. In this attempt of ours we move both historically and systemati­cally. Thus, we first point out the differences on this issue between the ancient Greek thought, which moves towards dualism, and Christianity, which accepts only monism; we then explain the monistic reconstruction of the ancient Greek ontology by the Neoplatonists. Nicholas of Methone’s views and the Christian readings of ontology constitute the core of our approaches, of which it is high­lighted that “eide” are the content of the divine Mind and that they are the good divine volitions. The question is also put in view of the unions and distinctions, since “eide” are a unified but internally differentiated whole in God. At the level of the sensible world, it is shown that “matter” is not considered independently from “eide”. The main conclusion that comes to the fore is that Nicholas of Methone makes a philosophical reading of the Christian theory on triune God’s energies, remaining consistent with Christian realism and rejecting the self-existent charac­ter of the “eide”.

Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route

Semiotica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (226) ◽  
pp. 49-71
Author(s):  
Javier Toscano
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
Semantic Category ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Know How ◽  
Underlying Theory ◽  
Navigational Map ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe way we perform identity in everyday situations nowadays is affected in very concrete ways by our interactions with technology. However, our conceptual understanding of such exchanges has been limited to a handful of concepts or narrative devices (i.e. a cyborg), which have proved their limits when facing extreme complexity. This paper develops a proposal to reexamine various possible assemblages between man and machine – at the level of the self-awareness and self-signifying of an individual vis à vis technological-based entities – by revisiting Greimas’s semiotic square, a tool from classical structural semiotics that could be readjusted to unfold what is at stake in that relationship, and under the semantic category of identity. The paper explains the constituent terms of Greimas’s elementary structure of meaning, unfolds the logic of his semiotic square, and develops some of its key underlying notions. Moreover, the limitations of the semiotic square are also surveyed. Instead of trying to pose a new paradigm, this paper wants to explore its heuristic possibilities and resist any claims of the underlying theory to produce fix typologies, semantic determinisms or stable discursive forms. In that sense, the scope of this essay is not to identify the whole array of cases in which identity is formed out of the contact between man and his machinical other, but to deliver a working scheme that may function as an initial, navigational map, a tool by which we can further explore the idea of how identity is affected by technology as a dynamic, performative process, therefore informing a semantic know-how and granting further access to yet unfamiliar fields of a post-human condition.

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