scholarly journals The Theology of Hiddenness: J. L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness, and the Role of Theology

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Marek Dobrzeniecki ◽  
Derek King
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Divine Hiddenness ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church ◽  
Hiddenness Of God ◽  
The Church

The paper explores Pascal’s idea according to which the teachings of the Church assume the hiddenness of God, and, hence, there is nothing surprising in the fact of the occurrence of nonresistant nonbelief. In order to show it the paper invokes the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Church as the Body of Christ, and the Original Sin. The first one indicates that there could be greater than nonbelief obstacle in forming interpersonal bonds with God, namely the ontological chasm between him and human persons. The assumption of the human nature by the Son of God could be seen as a cure for this problem. The doctrine of the Church shows it as an end in itself, and in order for the Church to have meaning and to exist there has to be nonbelief in the world. Finally, the dogma of the Original Sin shows that there is no category of purely nonresistant nonbelief. The paper also addresses Schellenberg’s “accommodationist strategy” from the perspective of the Christian theology and in the last part it investigates what should be the influence of the fact of the hiddenness on theology’s take on the divine revelation.

Martin Luther and the Eucharist

1983 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stephenson
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Bodily Presence ◽  
The Church

Several years before the mode of Christ's eucharistic presence became a controverted issue which would presently provoke a lasting schism among the Churches of the Reformation, Luther could unaffectedly propound the traditional dogma of the bodily presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar as a necessary consequence of the evangelical quest for the sensus grammaticus of the words of institution. The same exegetical method which led to his reappropriation of the doctrine of the justification of the sinner ‘by grace, for Christ's sake, through faith’ obliged him to confess that ‘the bread is the body of Christ’. Already here, in the mordantly anti-Roman treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther has laid his finger on the model in terms of which he will understand the real presence to the end of his days: the consecrated host is the body of Christ, just as the assumed humanity of jesus Christ is the Son of God. The displacement of the scholastic theory of transubstantiation by the model of the incarnate person illustrates the Reformer's allegiance to the Chalcedonian Definition: ‘Luther is really replacing Aristotelian categories by those derived from Chalcedonian christology, to which he remained faithful: “unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably”.’ While the doctrine of the real presence moved from the periphery to the centre of Luther's theology and piety as the 1520s wore on, his conception of the modality of the eucharistic presence remained constant throughout.

scholarly journals Die karakter van die kerk in perspektief van huidige teologiese besinning

1990 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-208
Author(s):  
P. C. Potgieter
Keyword(s):  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
Ecclesiastical Law ◽  
The World ◽  
Theological Thought ◽  
The Church ◽  
Apostolic Community

The character of the church - a perspective on current theological thought The role of the church in society is currently much focused upon in theological thought. The author analyses various characteristics of the church with reference to views of well known theologians. As community of faith it is the body of Christ revealed very visibly in the world representing the kingdom of God. For that very reason the idea of a national church is unacceptable. The church is one, catholic and apostolic community, even particularly in its visible form. Though Scripture gives no clear guidelines on the structure of the church, there are many general biblical norms to be considered in ecclesiastical law and government.

Wolfhart Pannenberg

2018 ◽  
pp. 486-504
Author(s):  
Friedericke Nuessel
Keyword(s):  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Civil State ◽  
Wolfhart Pannenberg ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

This chapter describes the development of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s ecclesiology in his early work and explores his fully developed ecclesiology in the Systematic Theology of 1993. It analyses the fundamental role of the church to be a sign and foretaste of the kingdom of God. This involves a constitutive self-distinction of the church from any political order or civil state on the one hand and from the future kingdom of God on the other. Moreover, the chapter emphasizes the simultaneity of individual salvation and incorporation into the church as the body of Christ in Pannenberg, and demonstrates the ecclesiological task to overcome the divisions between churches in order to witness to the unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church.

Irenaeus and Origen

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian E. Daley, SJ
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material World ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
God's Word ◽  
Origen Of Alexandria ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Providence Of God ◽  
The Church

Irenaeus wrote his two extant works chiefly to distinguish right faith from the various contemporary forms of “Gnostic” Christianity, which challenged the goodness and relevance of the material world, the body, and human institutions, promising instead secret, deeper knowledge of salvation in Christ that was available only to an elite. In response, Irenaeus affirmed the unity and constant providence of God in history, the narrative and doctrinal unity of the Hebrew Bible and the chief Christian documents, the personal unity of Christ as Son of God and son of Mary, and the worldwide unity of the church and its tradition of teaching. Origen of Alexandria also focused his efforts on correcting Gnostic understandings. The role of Christ, as God’s Word made flesh, is the heart of human redemption, revealing in his own biblical “titles” his identity as mediator between the unknowable Father and a straying humanity.

Head and Members

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Canon Law ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines the role of the bishops of Rome, or popes, as ‘vicars of St Peter’, and also as ‘vicars of Christ’. St Paul taught that the Church was the body of Christ. If the Church was a body, then clearly, as John Alcock, bishop of Ely, declared in 1497, ‘in every realm of Christianity, the head thereof is Christ’. The chapter first considers what ordinary English people thought about popes and the papacy before discussing the issue of royal taxation of the clergy and the appointment of clergy to English benefices. It then explores lines of demarcation between common law and canon law, along with the arrest, imprisonment and death of a merchant named Richard Hunne, who was accused of heresy. It also looks at the issue of reforming the Church of England and people.

I The Nature and Mission of the Church: A Discussion of Vols. I and II of the Preparatory Studies

1949 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. F. Torrance
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
World Council Of Churches ◽  
The Road ◽  
The World ◽  
World Council ◽  
Actual Material ◽  
The Will ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church ◽  
The Church

The Universal Church in God's Design, and The Church's Witness to God's Design, the first two volumes written in preparation for the meeting of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam, are an ecumenical event in themselves. They form the most significant attempt at combined thinking about the nature and mission of the Church that has yet taken place. The stage is now set for a fresh and exhaustive inquiry behind the present divisions among the Churches into a Biblical and Christological doctrine of the Church which may yet knit into a theological unity the agreement of the Churches reached at Amsterdam. After all “the only valid argument for the union of the Churches is theological, a belief that unity is the will of God for His Church, and that the Church as the Body of Christ ought to represent on earth the mysterious unity of the Godhead” (Vol. II, p. 202). The purpose of this essay is not so much to review the actual material presented in these volumes as to face the questions they raise and, if possible, to point the discussion further along the road to that theological unity.

scholarly journals Świętość Kościoła w ujęciu św. Piotra Chryzologa

2018 ◽  
pp. 353-368
Author(s):  
Bogusław Kochaniewicz
Keyword(s):  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Patristic Literature ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Ontological Aspect

The article Holiness of the Church according to Sermons of St. Peter Chrysologus presents one aspect of the ecclesiology of the bishop of Ravenna. Among the most popular questions, which are evidenced in his theological reflection, it is necessary to evidence, that Church Fathers focus their attention on an ontological aspect of the Church’s holiness which finds its foundation in Christ. Frequent references to ideas of the Mystical Body of Christ or the Church as a spouse of Christ confirm our opinion. It is necessary to admit that these themes, like other questions, developed in Chrysologus’s sermons (the role of the sacrament or belief that there is no salvation outside the Church) are already known in the patristic literature. Therefore the ecclesiology of the bishop of Ravenna is not original. However, taking into consideration the pastoral dimension of his teaching, it is clear that the objective of his sermons was different than to present an ecclesiological treatise.The results of analytical researches allow to complete the picture of the doctrine of the Church by its unknown aspect, contained in the teaching of the bishop of Ravenna.

Pro-Nicene prosopology and the church in Augustine's preaching on John 3:13

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-264
Author(s):  
Adam Ployd
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Grammatical Subject ◽  
Central Tenet ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church ◽  
Complex Subject

AbstractJohn 3:13 presents a grammatical and theological problem for Augustine. If the only one who ascends to heaven is the one who descended, namely Christ, then what becomes of the Christian life of ascent? To unpack Augustine's solution to this problem, this article explores his use of John 3:13 in his anti-Donatist sermons of 406–7. Here Augustine uses the grammatical method of prosopological exegesis both to identify and to solve the problem of Christ's solo ascent. Prosopology asks of a text, ‘Who is speaking? To whom is he speaking? And about whom is he speaking?’ in order to parse the sometimes ambiguous personae within a dramatic scene. Through this method, Augustine affirms that Christ is indeed speaking about himself alone, but the reflexive subject of Christ includes the church who is his body. The Christian life of ascent to God requires that we become participants in the subject of Christ's ‘I’. Building on the work of ‘New Canon’ Augustine scholarship, I argue that this use of John 3:13 to espouse the unity of the church in the body of Christ is founded upon a pro-Nicene understanding of the revelatory and epistemological role of the Son. The ability of Christ fully to reveal the Father is a central tenet of Latin pro-Nicene refutations of homoian christologies, and this revelation of the Father's Word through Christ's incarnation is accomplished in our union with that Word through his body. Based on this pro-Nicene affirmation of epistemological salvation through Christ, Augustine then uses John 3:13 to condemn the Donatists for damning themselves by separating from the body of Christ. The oneness of the ecclesial body of Christ is predicated upon the oneness of Christ himself because it is into his complex subject that we are incorporated. Separation from that unity is separation from the singular grammatical subject who ascends as Christ to the Father. Thus, Augustine's grammatical practice of prosopological exegesis to solve the problem of John 3:13 connects the pro-Nicene affirmation of Christ's revelation of the Father to an anti-Donatist defence of the necessary unity of the church. This should encourage us to consider further the ways in which pro-Nicene principles help to shape Augustine's vision of the church.

scholarly journals THE THEOLOGICAL DILEMMA VIZ-A-VIS THE MORAL OPTIONS FOR RELEVANT AND PRACTICAL MINISTRY TODAY: LESSONS FOR THE ZIMBABWE COUNCIL OF CHURCHES

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sifiso Mpofu
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Practical Ministry ◽  
Christian Leaders ◽  
The Church

There are many misconceptions about the role of the church in society. This is because the church is neither a political institution nor a social organisation but a mystery of grace. The church can best be defined or understood in terms of its mission or its work. This article will explore the mission and work of the Christian church; specifically the church in Zimbabwe. One cannot talk about the Christian church without reflecting on Jesus Christ’s mission. The church is the body of Christ, the true representative of the broken body of Jesus Christ. Paradoxically, while church leaders say that they are concerned about the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed, they seem not to fight against harmful socio- economic and political structures that dehumanise many of God’s creation. The church, as God’s compass to direct humanity for the total good of all creation, should always advocate in favour of peace and social justice. Christian leaders have a moral and social responsibility in their proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ in an environment which is characterised by despondency, uncertainty and fear. This paper identifies moments of prophetic resistance to social evil. It is to be noted that such a prophetic dimension is an enduring reality of the life of an authentic church, despite the complex (and at times compromising) relationship between church and state. This paper proposes possibilities for a new paradigm shift in Christian ministry with a view to toward a rebirth of a socially conscious church within the established platform of Christian ministry.

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