Toward a multifaith view of atonement

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-85
Author(s):  
Robert P. Sellers

The meaning of the death of Jesus on the cross has been interpreted differently from the first century until today. Of the many theories proposed throughout Christian history, the dominant understanding, especially among evangelical Protestants since the Reformation and perhaps dating from Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, has been the penal-substitutionary view of atonement. Christ died to pay the penalty for human sin, so humanity can receive forgiveness by trusting in the efficacy of Jesus’s death on its behalf. This explanation is an objective theory that is “Godward focused,” understanding the work of Christ as a divine plan to satisfy what God requires: expiation for human sin. Other competing theories, however, reject this idea and propose more subjective views that are “humanward focused.” This article considers the reality of different, imperfect perspectives about matters as complex as the interpretation of God. It connects the writer’s affirmation of the plurality of religious experience with his having lived a quarter century in the multifaith milieu of Java. It touches on specific opposing theories of atonement, endorsing as more useful in our interreligious world the subjective approaches to understanding the cross. It advocates an intriguing argument for the plurality of end goals, or “salvations,” among the world’s religions. Finally, it uses the less dominant models of martyr motif and the moral example theory to investigate how the concept of atonement might be understood in the context of four major world religions other than Christianity, suggesting that acknowledgment of the legitimacy of different approaches to the Divine is a distinctly “Christian” way to live in a diverse world.

Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
John Toye

This book provides a survey of different ways in which economic sociocultural and political aspects of human progress have been studied since the time of Adam Smith. Inevitably, over such a long time span, it has been necessary to concentrate on highlighting the most significant contributions, rather than attempting an exhaustive treatment. The aim has been to bring into focus an outline of the main long-term changes in the way that socioeconomic development has been envisaged. The argument presented is that the idea of socioeconomic development emerged with the creation of grand evolutionary sequences of social progress that were the products of Enlightenment and mid-Victorian thinkers. By the middle of the twentieth century, when interest in the accelerating development gave the topic a new impetus, its scope narrowed to a set of economically based strategies. After 1960, however, faith in such strategies began to wane, in the face of indifferent results and general faltering of confidence in economists’ boasts of scientific expertise. In the twenty-first century, development research is being pursued using a research method that generates disconnected results. As a result, it seems unlikely that any grand narrative will be created in the future and that neo-liberalism will be the last of this particular kind of socioeconomic theory.


Author(s):  
Laura Salah Nasrallah

Through case studies of archaeological materials from local contexts, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul illuminates the social, political, economic, and religious lives of those whom the apostle Paul addressed. Roman Ephesos, a likely setting for the household of Philemon, provides evidence of the slave trade. An inscription from Galatia seeks to restrain traveling Roman officials, illuminating how the travels of Paul, Cephas, and others may have disrupted communities. At Philippi, a donation list from a Silvanus cult provides evidence of abundant giving amid economic limitations, paralleling practices of local Christ followers. In Corinth, a landscape of grief includes monuments and bones, a context that illumines Corinthian practices of baptism on behalf of the dead and the provocative idea that one could live “as if not” mourning. Rome and the Letter to the Romans are the grounds to investigate ideas of time and race not only in the first century, when we find an Egyptian obelisk inserted as a timepiece into Augustus’s mausoleum complex, but also of Mussolini’s new Rome. Thessalonikē demonstrates how letters, legend, and cult are invented out of a love for Paul, after his death. The book articulates a method for bringing together biblical texts with archaeological remains in order to reconstruct the lives of the many adelphoi—brothers and sisters—whom Paul and his co-writers address. It is informed by feminist historiography and gains inspiration from thinkers like Claudia Rankine, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Katie Lofton.


Ramus ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gagarin

A growing area of contemporary legal scholarship is the field loosely described by the expression ‘law and literature’. One of the many points of intersection between law and literature is the study of legal writing, including the opinions of judges and jurists, as a form of literature. Scholars began to study the works of the Attic orators as literature as early as the first century BC, but their specific concern was with these texts as examples of Attic prose and their literary interest primarily concerned matters of rhetoric and prose style. Similarly, modern scholars who have continued this study of the orators have generally examined legal orations not as a separate genre but as another example of prose literature in the same category with history or epideictic oratory. But forensic oratory can also be studied as a form of literature sui generis, whose worth is determined by the special requirements of this genre. As background for such a study I propose to examine the earliest examples of legal oratory, as seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod.


Author(s):  
Sherene Nicholas Khouri

Was Jesus crucified on the cross? Did Jesus die by crucifixion? This topic generates so much emotion and conflict in Christian-Islamic dialogue as many theories have developed to prove one side of the equation. While several methods can answer Islamic objections against the biblical belief, the evidential Apologetics is the best method to provide evidence for the Christian claims. Evidential Apologetics is one of the methods that seeks to prove the truthfulness of the Christian worldview by showing historical and scientific evidences. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to use the evidential method to answer three major objections that Muslims raise against the crucifixion of Jesus: Jesus was never crucified, the swoon theory, and the substitute theory. The paper will conclude that there are surmounted historical and scientific evidences that support the event of Jesus’s crucifixion.


2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-136
Author(s):  
Felise Tavo

Images of the church are found scattered throughout the Apocalypse. These have thus been the focus of recent studies in the ecclesial notions of the seer of Patmos. But as this article illustrates, these studies vary to some extent in their principal focus while the methods of approach have been remarkably 'selective' in their treatment of the many church images of the book. As a way of bringing together these disparate methods and focus, this article discusses seven key thematic emphases in the recent studies of the seer's ecclesial notions since the 1950s, which could perhaps serve as 'rallying points' for further development of a more comprehensive portrait of the church in the Apocalypse: the 'cross-event' as underpinning; the eschatologi cal people of God; a community of equality; corporate in nature; non-addi tive in character; a community seeking repentance; and a trans-historical view of reality.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 123-146
Author(s):  
Benjamin K. Couillard ◽  
Christopher L. Foote ◽  
Kavish Gandhi ◽  
Ellen Meara ◽  
Jonathan Skinner

The twenty-first century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this paper, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent between 1992 and 2016. This was not simply because states like New York or California benefited from having a high fraction of college-educated residents who enjoyed the largest health gains during the last several decades. Nor was higher dispersion in mortality caused entirely by the increasing importance of “deaths of despair,” or by rising spatial income inequality during the same period. Instead, over time, state-level mortality has become increasingly correlated with state-level income; in 1992, income explained only 3 percent of mortality inequality, but by 2016, state-level income explained 58 percent. These mortality patterns are consistent with the view that high-income states in 1992 were better able to enact public health strategies and adopt behaviors that, over the next quarter-century, resulted in pronounced relative declines in mortality. The substantial longevity gains in high-income states led to greater cross-state inequality in mortality.


Author(s):  
Peter Schäfer

This chapter focuses on the Self-Glorification Hymn from Qumran, which is among the many writings of the community that had withdrawn from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea and dedicated itself to apocalyptic fantasies of the end of days. The Hymn was written in the late Hasmonaean or early Herodian period, which is, the second half of the first century BCE. In it, an unidentified hero boasts that he was elevated among and even above the angels in heaven. The chapter describes the two parallel fragments of the hymn that take the superior, angel-like status of its author yet further. It analyzes the line, “Who is like me among the divine beings?” which is a rhetorical question that evidently means, “Who else is like me among the angels? Is there anyone else who is as elevated as I am among the angels or above them?”


PMLA ◽  
1911 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-314
Author(s):  
F. M. Warren

The relation of Latin lyric poetry to the lyric poetry of the Romance peoples remains one of the interesting problems of medieval literature. It has already challenged the industry of generations of investigators with no definite result. And it may be doubted whether conclusions which are self-convincing will be reached in the immediate future. The chief hindrance to a satisfactory solution is presented, of course, by the incompleteness of relevant material. The examples of Latin lyrics which may be considered as expressive of natural emotion are few in number before the end of the eleventh century, and the poems of William IX are the first in Romance. There may be found here and there, to be sure, scattered hints of the existence of non-artistic poetry, whether in Latin or the vernacular, but the information so furnished by Latin writers is uncertain as well as meager. Widely different interpretations may be put on it. Contradictory theories find inconclusive support in it, further confusing an already perplexing problem. In view of all this doubt, and the difficulties with which the subject is still beset, it may not be unprofitable to go over the ground once more, and arrange the documents which allude to non-literary poetry, Latin or Romance, in their chronological order from the first century to the eleventh. While nothing new may be discovered from such a classification it will be useful to have at hand, grouped together, the texts from which the opposing factions draw their partisan arguments.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Starosielski

In Media Hot and Cold Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal communication and comfort. Although these new media promise to help mitigate the uneven effects of climate change, Starosielski shows how they can operate as a form of biopower by determining who has the ability to control their own thermal environment. In this way, thermal media can enact thermal violence in ways that reinforce racialized, colonial, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies. By outlining how the control of temperature reveals power relations, Starosielski offers a framework to better understand the dramatic transformations of hot and cold media in the twenty-first century.


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