Allegory and the Body as Icon: Evelyn Underhill and Barbara Brown Taylor

2021 ◽  
pp. 096673502110554
Author(s):  
Maxine Walker

When faith traditions confront postmodern uncertainties regarding historical liturgical practices, political and cultural ideologies, the self and sacred space, the assurance of truth claims, allegorical readings and interpretations of sites where divine presence is found are equally questioned. Can allegorical interpretations offer a valuable strategy in postmodern understandings for identifying how Divine presence is embodied? One possibility is to discover how two Anglican women embody their faith community’s via media and in turn these women may be read as an “open icon.” To provide contrasting views, Orthodox Icons are particularly noted for their allegorical certainties that identify and point with sharp clarification to Tradition and the Church’s sacramental understandings. An allegorical frame “closes” the Orthodox icon. In a postmodern view, allegory “opens” said frame to a vast horizontal landscape that discovers spaces, places, and persons in which the Holy Spirit works mysteriously and unexpectedly. Both Evelyn Underhill and Barbara Brown Taylor writing almost a century apart and each encountering their respective historical reactions to “modernism,” trace the margins of their faith along the Anglican understanding of the via media. In doing so, both suggest the notion of “open” icon—the body itself.

2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (1/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
N.H. Taylor

Luke-Acts was written during the period after the destruction of the second temple, when, for most Jews, hopes for future restoration were conceived largely in terms of rebuilding the temple and city of Jerusalem and resuming the cultic life associated therewith. Against this background Luke poses an alternative vision, in which the divine presence associated previously with the [foreign font omitted] is seen no longer as localised but as dispersed. The Holy Spirit manifested in the life and expansion of the Church transcends and supersedes the notion of sacred space associated with the Zion traditions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.


Author(s):  
Natalia Marandiuc

The question of what home means and how it relates to subjectivity has fresh urgency in light of pervasive contemporary migration, which ruptures the human self, and painful relational poverty, which characterizes much of modern life. Yet the Augustinian heritage that situates true home and right attachment outside this world has clouded theological conceptualizations of earthly belonging. This book engages this neglected topic and argues for the goodness of home, which it construes relationally rather than spatially. In dialogue with research in the neuroscience of attachment theory and contemporary constructions of the self, the book advances a theological argument for the function of love attachments as sources of subjectivity and enablers of human freedom. The book shows that paradoxically the depth of human belonging—thus, dependence—is directly proportional to the strength of human agency—hence, independence. Building on Søren Kierkegaard’s imagery alongside other sources, the book depicts human love as interwoven with the infinite streams of divine love, forming a sacramental site for God’s presence, and playing a constitutive role in the making of the self. The book portrays the self both as gifted from God in inchoate form and as engaged in continuous, albeit nonlinear becoming via experiences of human love. The Holy Spirit indwells the attachment space between human beings as a middle term preventing its implosion or dissolution and conferring a stability that befits the concept of home. The interstitial space between loving human persons subsists both anthropologically and pneumatologically and generates the self’s home.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Andrianus Nababan

AbstrackThe Christian religious education teacher is an educator who provides knowledge about Christianity based on the Bible, centered on Jesus Christ, and relied on the Holy Spirit. Christian Religious Education teachers must be able to offer their bodies in Romans 12:1-3. The understanding of offering the body include: 1)the Christian religious education teacher always i approaches the loving and generous God 2)give advice by encouraging, directing convey the truth of God's Words. 3). renewal of the mind by distinguishing which is good and pleasing to God. Thus, each Christian religious education teacher can understand that a true educator must surrender his/her body as a true offering according to will of God.Key word: Christian education teacher; Offering the body Romans 12:1-3.ABSTRAKGuru Pendidikan Agama Kristen merupakan seorang pendidik yang memberikan ilmu pengetahuan tentang agama Kristen yang berdasarkan Alkitab, berpusat pada Yesus Kristus, dan bergantung pada Roh Kudus kepada peserta didik dalam kegiatan belajarmengajar. Guru Pendidikan Agama Kristen harus mampu mempersembahkan tubuhnya dalam Roma 12:1-3 sebagai ibadah sejati. Pemahaman mempersembahkan tubuh yaitu 1)guru Pendidikan agama Kristen senantiasa menghampiri Allah yang penuh kasih dan kemurahan 2)memberikan nasihat dengan mendorong, mengarahkan dan berdasarkan kebenaran Firman Tuhan. 3)pembaharuan budi dengan membedakan mana yang baik dan yang berkenan kepada Allah. Demikian Guru Pendidikan Agama kristen mampu memahami mempersembahkan tubuh menyangkut kehendak Allah sebagai pendidik yang sejati.Kata Kunci: Guru Pendidikan Agama Kristen; Mempersembahkan tubuh.


2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-85
Author(s):  
Annette Weissenrieder

Insofar as Christianity can be said to have begun with the disappearance of a body, namely the absence of Jesus’ body in the grave, this disappearance occasioned not so much a disjuncture with Jesus’ preceding work as a new start, by way of a salvific turn, according to multiple accounts in the New Testament. It is through the absence of Jesus’ body and subsequent appearances of the risen Jesus that the messianic promise is fulfilled. Furthermore, the absence of Jesus’ body opens up space for transfigured bodies in multiple forms to fill the gap, each in its own way. Christian faith was thus marked, from the earliest time, by questions regarding the meaning, representation, and transformation of the body. In the Gospel of John, after Jesus is resurrected he blows (ἐμφυσάω) the holy spirit into his disciples. Here the infusion of the spirit evokes the framework of ancient embryology, in which spirit brings life. Ancient embryology illumines the recurrent passages in John referring to birth, being reborn, and children of God, especially 1:13–14 and 3:3–8.


Author(s):  
David W. Kling

The concluding chapter provides summary observations of the book’s themes that highlight the complex, multifaceted dimension of conversion throughout twenty centuries of Christian history. These include the convert’s cognizance of divine presence; the crucial importance of historical context (political, religious, institutional, and socioeconomic factors); continuity and discontinuity (how much of the new displaces the old in conversion?); nominal, incomplete, and “true” conversions; personal testimonies and narratives (the autobiographical impulse attests to the converted life); the role of gender; identity and the self; agency (are converts actors or are they being acted upon?); the mechanisms behind and the motivations for conversion; the body as a site of conversion; the role of music; conversion as event and process; coercive practices; and forms of communication in the converting process.


Africa ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-586 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Devisch

In Kinshasa thousands of prophetical churches of the Holy Spirit, particularly those in the Koongo area, fill in the ethical gap left, according to the people, by the marginalisation of traditional authority in the city, as well as the failure of civilisationist ‘white’ models, such as the collapse of public health and education sectors, and the dissolution of the State party. Confronted with economic collapse and miserable conditions in urban areas, these charismatic healing churches deconstruct the colonial and missionary heritage that ‘invented Africa’ in a white mirror, and the evolutionist utopia relating to modern progress. The dogmatic use that they make of biblical texts, their immoderate liturgy, and above all their ostentatious healing rituals parody and ridicule people's experience of post-colonial state constraints, the dichotomisation of the society operated by Christian conversion, and postcolonial mirrors opposing modernity and reactionary tradition, Christian values and pagan life. Healing churches deconstruct the daily seduction of the town folk by hedonistic ideals of capitalist consumption and Northern television channels which control the world. The Holy Spirit, as a substitute for the ancestral spirit, expresses itself in an heterodox manner and with multiple voices in the shape of glossolalia, dreams, and trance. During these very intense celebrations these communities, through the spirit, remobilise and, in particular, reinforce interpersonal links woven through the care of the body and from the mother within the matrifocal community or the matri-centered villagisation operating in the city. Here, in the daily quest for survival, people reassert their sense of criticism and community in the face of the fragments of state and tribal structures as well as their desire for moral integrity and sharing. And, above all, in this process of villagisation, healing churches recycle as symbolic capital the so-called forces of western imperialism, and particularly those which come from written material and electronics: the Bible, money, television, and satellite communication.


Author(s):  
Tom Greggs

This chapter examines Bonhoeffer’s account of the church and advocates that throughout Bonhoeffer’s corpus there remains a desire to explicate the reality of the church in terms of its structural being with and for the other. This structure exists both internally in terms of its members’ relation to each other, and externally as the church relates as a corporate body to the world. The chapter considers Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiological method; the visibility of the church; vicarious representation; the church as the body of Christ; the agency of the Holy Spirit; preaching, the sacraments, and the offices of the church; and the question of the church in a religionless age.


2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-43
Author(s):  
James Dunn
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  

AbstractJames Dunn responds gratefully to the commendatory critiques of Roger Stronstad, Janet Everts, Chris omas and Max Turner. Luke depicts the first coming of the Spirit into a life as both strikingly manifest and as life-giving; he does not envisage an earlier quiet coming. Paul understands the seal of the Spirit as the beginning of the process of salvation, individuals thus baptized in the Spirit and anointed into active ministry in the body. John likewise depicts the reception of the Spirit in John 7.39 and 20.22 as life-creating, the consequence of Christ's crucifixion-glorification. The area of agreement with Max Turner far exceeds the details of difference.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (288) ◽  
pp. 902
Author(s):  
Francisco Taborda

Iniciando o nº 1333, o Catecismo da Igreja Católica afirma que o pão e o vinho se tornam o corpo e o sangue de Cristo “pelas palavras de Cristo e pela invocação do Espírito Santo”. Esta afirmação constitui um progresso teológico e uma volta à grande tradição, superando a tese vigente na Igreja latina da eficácia exclusiva das palavras da instituição, identificadas como “palavras da consagração”. Esse progresso foi possibilitado pela redescoberta da unidade literária e teológica da anáfora ou oração eucarística que não permite isolar as “palavras da consagração” do contexto oracional em que se inserem. A concepção presente no citado texto do Catecismo volta à tradição conservada durante todo o primeiro milênio do cristianismo, cujos resquícios se podem encontrar inclusive nos inícios da Escolástica. Documentos ecumênicos recentes mostram que a importância da ação do Espírito Santo na eucaristia é patrimônio comum das Igrejas cristãs.Abstract: At the beginning of number 1333, the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ “by the words of Christ and the invocation of the Holy Spirit.” This statement is a theological progress and a return to the great tradition, surpassing the thesis prevailing in the Latin Church that affirms the exclusive efficiency of the words of the institution, identified as “words of consecration”. This progress was made possible by the rediscovery of the literary and theological unity of the anaphora or Eucharistic prayer which does not allow the extraction of the “words of consecration” from the clausal context into which they are inserted. The conception prevailing in the Catechism text quoted returns to the tradition maintained throughout the first millennium of Christianity, traces of which can be found even in the beginnings of Scholasticism. Recent ecumenical documents show that the importance of the action of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist is the common heritage of the Christian Churches.


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