scholarly journals Paul’s Preaching and Postmodern Skepticism

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
VERN S. POYTHRESS

Abstract: By focusing on Paul’s own descriptions of his preaching, and especially on 2 Corinthians 4:1–6, we can see several ways in which Paul’s own views provide answers to postmodern skepticism. Paul presupposes that God exists, the same God who is set forth in the Old Testament as the creator and sustainer of the world. In 2 Corinthians 4:1–6, Paul affirms that his message has divine authority, divine truthfulness, divine power to overcome resistance to its claims, and divine presence through the glory of Christ. Paul’s message also shows how, in the midst of the Roman Empire’s situation of multiple cultures and multiple languages, he preaches a gospel with universal claims, in “the open statement of the truth” (2 Cor 4:3).

Vox Patrum ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 379-397
Author(s):  
Ludmiła Lach-Bartlik

Although Apponius’ Expositio in Canticum Canticorum refers directly to one of the books of the Old Testament, by dint of the allegorical exegesis used by it’s author, we can find there many New Testament subjects and theological problems. It also contains knowledge about the Holy Trinity. In the article there were used quotations about the Holy Trinity (from books I-III), one can find either the very noun “Trinity” (Trinitas) or individual Persons in the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Spirit, yet having relations with each other. In the first part of the article there were analyzed attributes, which are used by Apponius to describe the nature of the Holy Trinity: inseparabilis, individua, coaeterna Trinitas. The speci­fied attributes of the Holy Trinity get to the core of the Christian dogma about God and combine with the faith and baptism. God is one, indivisible, acting with a one divine power, but eternally existing in three Persons. In the second part of the article, the relations occurring in the Trinity were presented. Apponius’ Trinitas is the three Persons in God: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The Persons in the Trinity are in two kinds of relations: occurring between the Persons of the Holy Trinity (the immanent Trinity) and going beyond the Trinity into the world and human beings (the economic Trinity). Apponius using the language of symbols, metaphors and analogies, reminds the fundamental truths about God. By descrip­tion of the attributes of the Holy Trinity he emphasizes the unity of God, and by the description of the relations – the trinity of the Persons.


2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.


Author(s):  
Paul Cefalu

The Afterword reviews the ways in which the features of Johannine devotion described throughout the book help to legitimate the revisionist argument that Reformed theology did not contribute to a decline in sacramental metaphysics or the disenchantment of the world. The chapter underscores the ways in which Johannine theology paradoxically testifies to divine presence through the Incarnation, despite the fact that Johannine theology does not uphold the materiality of the Eucharist and comparable rites. In addition, the chapter emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the mediated or qualified mysticism of the Johannine writings as against an ecstatic vision-mysticism. Because John’s high Christology assumes that only the Son can capably witness the beatific vision, earthbound penitents dwell in God only through the route of Christ.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003802292110146
Author(s):  
Ananta Kumar Giri

Our contemporary moment is a moment of crisis of epistemology as a part of the wider and deeper crisis of modernity and the human condition. The crisis of epistemology emerges from the limits of the epistemic as it is tied to epistemology of procedural certainty and closure. The crisis of epistemology also reflects the limits of epistemology closed within the Euro-American universe of discourse. It is in this context that the present essay discusses Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. It also discusses some of the limits of de Sousa Santos’ alternatives especially his lack of cultivation of the ontological in his exploration of epistemological alternatives beyond the Eurocentric canons. It then explores the pathways of ontological epistemology of participation which brings epistemic and ontological works and meditations together in transformative and cross-cultural ways. This helps us in going beyond both the limits of the primacy of epistemology in modernity as well as Eurocentrism. It also explores pathways of a new hermeneutics which involves walking and meditating across multiple topoi of cultures and traditions of thinking and reflections which is called multi- topial hermeneutics in this study. This involves foot-walking and foot-meditative interpretation across multiple cultures and traditions of the world which help us go beyond ethnocentrism and eurocentrism and cultivate conversations and realisations across borders what the essay calls planetary realisations.


Author(s):  
Cenk Demiroglu ◽  
Aslı Beşirli ◽  
Yasin Ozkanca ◽  
Selime Çelik

AbstractDepression is a widespread mental health problem around the world with a significant burden on economies. Its early diagnosis and treatment are critical to reduce the costs and even save lives. One key aspect to achieve that goal is to use technology and monitor depression remotely and relatively inexpensively using automated agents. There has been numerous efforts to automatically assess depression levels using audiovisual features as well as text-analysis of conversational speech transcriptions. However, difficulty in data collection and the limited amounts of data available for research present challenges that are hampering the success of the algorithms. One of the two novel contributions in this paper is to exploit databases from multiple languages for acoustic feature selection. Since a large number of features can be extracted from speech, given the small amounts of training data available, effective data selection is critical for success. Our proposed multi-lingual method was effective at selecting better features than the baseline algorithms, which significantly improved the depression assessment accuracy. The second contribution of the paper is to extract text-based features for depression assessment and use a novel algorithm to fuse the text- and speech-based classifiers which further boosted the performance.


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ndikho Mtshiselwa ◽  
Lerato Mokoena

The Old Testament projects not only a Deity that created the world and human beings but also one that is violent and male. The debate on the depiction of the God of Israel that is violent and male is far from being exhausted in Old Testament studies. Thus, the main question posed in this article is: If re-read as ‘Humans created God in their image’, would Genesis 1:27 account for the portrayal of a Deity that is male and violent? Feuerbach’s idea of anthropomorphic projectionism and Guthrie’s view of religion as anthropomorphism come to mind here. This article therefore examines, firstly, human conceptualisation of a divine being within the framework of the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism. Because many a theologian and philosopher would deny that God is a being at all, we further investigate whether the God of Israel was a theological and social construction during the history of ancient Israel. In the end, we conclude, based on the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism, that the idea that the God of Israel was a theological and social construct accounts for the depiction of a Deity that is male and violent in the Old Testament.


1952 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-361
Author(s):  
Harold Knight

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the significance underlying the concept of miracle in the world of Old Testament thought and theology, in the hope that the results attained may shed fresh light upon something which touches the very centre of religious life and is a frequent cause of genuine doubt and perplexity for modern man. Perhaps the word miracle itself is ambiguous in this connexion, for it has gathered around itself a penumbra of associations derived from its use in our modern scientifically determined modes of thought and speech. Broadly speaking the background which it implies is that of nature conceived as an independent system presupposing fixed laws or if, with the more modern scientific outlook we reject the notion of materialistic determinism and mechanism, then, at any rate, we must substitute for ‘laws’ the tendency for uniform patterns and processes to emerge. Against such large uniformities, miracle, in the modern sense, stands out somewhat sharply as an exception, mysterious and apparently inexplicable, repugnant in its arbitrariness to the spirit of pure science. Such presuppositions do not exist in the Old Testament World of ideas where we are confronted by a type of thought which is through and through theological rather than philosophical and scientific. The corner-stone of the Old Testament system of ideas is the primacy of God as self-existent Creator whose creative activity is unceasing, upholding and interpenetrating by His watchful redeeming care all that is.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Renz

Theists claim that God can make a causal difference in the world. That is, theists believe that God is causally efficacious, has power. Discussion of divine power has centered on understanding better the metaphysics of creation and sustenance, special intervention, governance, and providing an account of omnipotence consistent with other divine attributes, such as omnibenevolence. But little discussion has centered on what, deep down ontologically, God’s power is. I show that a number of prominent accounts of power fail to model what divine power could be, and then develop an account based on teleological and primitivist accounts of power.


This book considers the global responses Woolf’s work has inspired and her worldwide impact. The 23 chapters address the ways Woolf is received by writers, publishers, academics, reading audiences, and students in countries around the world; how she is translated into multiple languages; and how her life is transformed into global contemporary biofiction. The 24 authors hail from regions around the world: West and East Europe, the Middle East/North Africa, North and South America, East Asia and the Pacific Islands. They write about Woolf’s reception in Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Russia, Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, the United States, China, Japan and Australia. The Edinburgh Companion is dialogic and comparative, incorporating both transnational and local tendencies insofar as they epitomise Woolf’s global reception and legacy. It contests the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ binary, offering new models for Woolf global studies and promoting cross-cultural understandings.


2020 ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Karl Kraus

This chapter investigates the extent to which the struggle against the anti-German Spirit is German in origin. Kraus's “Prayer to the Sun of Gibeon,” misinterpreted when it appeared in 1916, highlights the absurdity of a world of power politics in which the pan-German present uncannily converged with an Old Testament narrative fraught with atrocities. The reflection “On the Sinai Front” of 1917 pointed to the concurrence of two ethnicities. This was expressed by Schopenhauer's definition of a nation that “worships a God who promises it the lands of its neighbours.” During the World War, the Old Testament and modern German ideologies of being “chosen peoples” had already reached a point of convergence—of alignment before the event.


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