Theology in the twentieth century

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Williams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Academic Theology

This chapter discusses theology in the twentieth century, which was largely dominated by a set of issues that were generated ultimately by the diffusion of the critical approach to the Bible. The survey presented in the chapter determines that the ‘dogmatic’ or ‘systematic’ theology in England and Wales has both benefitted and suffered from its slightly tangential relation to mainstream academic theology.

Martin Luther and Systematic Theology

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Hinlicky
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Dialectical Theology ◽  
God's Word ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
Academic Theology ◽  
Insight Into

A meta-argument is needed today to go forward in theology with Luther. For speaking of God, even in sophisticated ways, is a dangerous business that can lead astray. Theology is not in the Reformer’s mind an unambiguous good. But neither is silence an option, if God has spoken. If God has spoken, one is summoned, indeed, empowered to speak in response. In some distinction from the dialectical theology of the 20th century, which oscillates between the Word of God and the word of man, Luther employed a dialectic of the Word and the Spirit to organize theology. And if in the power of the Spirit one speaks in response to God’s Word about God, one must also speak with others about speech about God that accords with God’s speech. This discourse straddles the community of faith and the academy. Thus three orders of theological discourse—speech in God’s name, the church’s confession, and academic theology—can be sorted in order to facilitate Luther’s challenge to theology as a dangerous business fraught with peril. It must do so in a way that both retrieves his insight into the dialectic of Word and Spirit and also guards against Luther’s own failures, especially in academic theology, when invective supplanted dialogue. Within the Trinitarian sequence of Word and Spirit, the performance of God’s gospel word, so that it is experienced by the alienated sinner as the event of God surpassing the wrath of his love to establish the mercy of his love, constitutes the primary theology for Luther. This is discovered in the biblical matrix of Christian faith where the Spirit births every believer. Thus the primary theology of the Bible, taken as gospel speech in God’s name, gives “true” knowledge of God “in Christ crucified”; this is known and acknowledged in secondary theological speech, including Luther’s own doctrinal production. But the articulate recognition of these two orders is the critical work of an academic theologian. Luther is in principle critically dogmatic, and where he falls short of this standard, he can and may be corrected by his own academic standards. The case depends on (1) the Trinitarian interpretation of the dialectic of Word and Spirit as primary and secondary orders of theological knowledge, respectively, that are conscience-binding, church-uniting and context-independent, and (2) the differentiation of the former from the academic task in hermeneutics and critical thinking that is context-dependent and subject to nothing other than reason and persuasion.

The Bible in the Twentieth-Century Anglophone World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark P. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
Anglophone World

This chapter looks at the tensions between biblical interpretation and the political, social, and cultural context of dissenting Protestant churches in the twentieth century. It notes that even a fundamental category, such as the ‘inspiration’ of Scripture, shifted across time as the nature of public debates, social and economic structures, and Western definitions of public knowledge shifted. The chapter progresses by looking at a number of examples of key figures (R. J. Campbell, Harry Emerson Fosdick, H. G. Guinness, R. A. Torrey, and R. G. McIntyre among them) who interpreted the Bible for public comment, and their relative positions as the century progressed. Popularization of biblical interpretation along the lines of old, new, and contemporary dissent, is explored through the careers of three near contemporaries: Charles Bradley ‘Chuck’ Templeton (b. 1915, Toronto, Canada), William Franklin ‘Billy’ Graham, Jr (b. 1918, North Carolina), and Oral Roberts (b. 1918, Oklahoma).

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

Racializing Mercy: Capital Punishment and Race in Twentieth-Century England and Wales

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 883-910
Author(s):  
Lizzie Seal ◽  
Alexa Neale
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
Unequal Access ◽  
To Receive

Fifty-seven men of color were sentenced to death by the courts of England and Wales in the twentieth century and were less likely to receive mercy than white contemporaries. Though shocking, the data is perhaps unsurprising considering institutional racism and unequal access to justice widely highlighted by criminologists since the 1970s. We find discourses of racial difference were frequently mobilized tactically in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and Wales: to support arguments for mercy and attempt to save prisoners from the gallows. Scholars have identified historically and culturally contingent narratives traditionally deployed to speak to notions of lesser culpability. These mercy narratives reveal contemporary ideals and attitudes to gender or class. This article is original in identifying strategic mercy narratives told in twentieth-century England and Wales that called on contemporary tropes about defendants' race. The narratives and cases we explore suggest contemporary racism in the criminal justice system of England and Wales has a longer history than previously acknowledged.

The Question of God’s Perfection

2021 ◽  
pp. 014610792110306
Author(s):  
Cornell Collin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Biblical Theology ◽  
The State ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Present Essay

Is God perfect? The recent volume entitled The Question of God’s Perfection stages a conversation on that topic between mostly Jewish philosophers, theologians, and scholars of rabbinic literature. Although it is neither a work of biblical theology nor a contribution to the theological interpretation of scripture, The Question of God’s Perfection yields stimulating results for these other, intersecting projects. After briefly describing the volume’s central question and contents, the present essay situates the volume’s offerings within the state of the biblical-theological and theological-interpretive fields. In its next section, it considers—and compares— The Question of God’s Perfection with one twentieth-century theological antecedent, the Dutch theologian K.H. Miskotte. In closing, it poses questions for ongoing discussion. The Question of God’s Perfection: Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud, edited by Yoram Hazony & Dru Johnson. Philosophy of Religion – World Religions 8. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019. ISBN 9789004387959

scholarly journals The Son as a Torn Veil: The Mysteries of Jesus According to J. Ratzinger-Benedict XVI

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 621-635
Author(s):  
Jerzy Szymik
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Benedict Xvi ◽  
Vague Concept ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Academic Theology

J. Ratzinger-Benedict XVI relates theological cognition to following Jesus and going in His footsteps. He emphasizes the inseparable, mutual, servant-like relationship between academic theology and Christian praxis, Christological hermeneutics with the existential basis of faith. Intellectual and spiritual understanding of the mystery of Jesus depends on intimacy with Him and grows on this path: only the Son can show the Father because he knows Him in a way that defines his existence as the Son. The eternal inter-Trinitarian conversation with the Father – the prayer of the Son, His sonship-obedience – finds its corporal expression in history, and the humanity of Jesus, whose culmination is the cross, remains His prayer. The earthly life, and finally the Passover of Jesus, introduces into the human, vague concept of God the experience of the loving Father, thus making the course of history definitively meaningful and fulfilling, and the faith legitimate. Ratzinger defends Christology as a conceptual understanding of the truth of the Gospel, the depth and integrity of which Christology guards and to which it refers. Disregarding in faith the cognitive achievements and heritage of systematic theology leads to depriving faith of its most important contents, without which it starts to look in the dark for justifications which are subjective as well as fuzzy.

The Evangelical Discovery of History

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 330-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bebbington
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Churches Of Christ ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Church

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.

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