Tertampiknya Injil-injil Gnostik

Until now, challenges on the validity of the Bible based on the use of the Gnostic Gospels are still rampant, especially by anti-orthodox Christians and liberals. For this reason, this study attempts to answer the question of how the historical description of the Gnostic Gospels was dismissed in the century of its appearance, so that it did not enter the New Testament canon. Through a qualitative-descriptive research method, it was found that the answer to the rejection of the Gnostic Gospels as part of the canon was due to: 1). there is a significant time gap between the appearance of the Gnostic Gospels and the canonical ones, 2). its distribution was secret, and was not common among the early Christian congregations. 3). his teachings that contradict the teachings of the canonical gospels about the life of the Lord Jesus and the way of human salvation, 4). several important figures of the second to third centuries such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clemens, Origens, and Esuibius firmly rejected the Gnostic Gospels to enter the canon. The result of this research certainly confirms the Christian belief in the acknowledgment of the validity of the New Testament canon.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Medieval Europe

This chapter discusses the interaction between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in medieval Europe. It considers the importance of Augustine’s doctrine of Jews as ‘witnesses’ to Christian truth in the formation of the medieval image of the ‘hermeneutical Jew’. Jews, who lived primarily in the Islamic world in the first millennium, began to migrate into Christian lands in greater numbers from the eleventh century. As Christian ideas about Judaism evolved in the twelfth century, culminating in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Jewish authors responded with detailed critiques of Christian belief. The simultaneous Christian engagement with Muslim sources led to a triangular encounter, especially significant in the Iberian Peninsula, between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers, reflected in numerous dialogues and polemics about prophecy and history. Beginning in the thirteenth century, mendicant friars, including converts, played a greater role in engagement with Islam and Judaism, taking on important roles as translators and inquisitors.

Keats Amid the Alien Corn

This chapter begins, from a religious reference in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, to explore Keats’s experience of home and belonging. It develops a close reading of the Ode, by developing comparison with Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, and through discussion of related texts including works by Hazlitt, Malthus, and Burke. Keats’s own lack of Christian belief, and general absence of functional biblical reference in the poetry, is contrasted with his use of Anglican-derived imagery throughout the Odes. His unusual reference to the Book of Ruth in the Nightingale Ode is considered in light of the biographical reality of his restless short life, in which Keats enjoyed no settled personal home after childhood. These issues are related to the theme of immortality through the art of poetry.

Zaprzedać duszę diabłu – reprodukowalność mitu we frazematyce z polskiego obszaru gwarowego i języka potocznego w kontekście kultury tradycyjnej

Selling One’s Soul to the Devil – Reproducibility of the Mythical Motif in Phrasematics of the Polish Colloquial Language in the Context of Traditional Culture The author of the article discussed reproducibility of the mythical motif of “Adam’s pact with the devil” in Polish traditional culture and in dialectal and colloquial phrasematics. The adoption of the concept of “language narrativeness” in the description of a small piece of reality such as the act of selling one’s soul to the devil, makes it possible to present this piece in a form of a structured image within the frames of a great narrative about the world (based on the Christian belief concerning the soul) which contains small narratives (referring to myths and folk demonology included in stereotypical text motifs) and micro-narratives that are hidden in lexis and broadly understood phrasematics and that reflect a whole range of interpretations and evaluations related to a person’s pact with a demonic being.

The take-up of Rawls’ theory of the good in philosophy of education

Personal well-being is a central concept in philosophical discussions of education and its aims. Although the work of general philosophers like Nussbaum, Griffin, Raz and Sen on the topic has been influential here, there has been next-to-no interest among philosophers of education in John Rawls’s work on ‘the good’ – in great contrast to interest in his work on ‘the right’, and despite the key place that his theory of the good has in his Theory of Justice (TJ), Chapter 7. This paper explores a likely reason for this lack of interest. This is connected with Rawls’s 1942 undergraduate thesis on the meaning of sin and faith. While there are many continuities between this – eg. to do with communitarianism and equality – and the theory of the right in TJ, there are none in the area of the good, since the thesis rejected the notion for theological reasons. In writing TJ, therefore, having long abandoned his Christian belief, Rawls had a rich background of earlier work on the right which he was able to work up into a powerful argument, while in the area of the good he had to start from scratch. The result, drawing on Josiah Royce’s ideas about plans of life, is disappointing and open to fairly obvious objections. In the light of this, it is not surprising that Rawls’s views on the good have had so little influence in philosophy of education.

Randomness and Providence in Christian Thought

The problem of randomness and providence is not new. Rather, there is a long history of sophisticated thought in response to this problem, which can be called upon to address the problem in its modern scientific variant. After an overview of Christian belief, I consider the concept of divine providence, concentrating on relevant pieces of Christian scripture and passages from the Church Fathers. Next, I cover, in historical fashion, how Christians have grappled with the question of randomness in relation to God’s providence. Finally, I propose my own way of thinking about randomness and providence.

Great Christian Jurists in the Low Countries

What impact has Christianity had on law and policies in the Lowlands from the eleventh century through the end of the twentieth century? Taking the gradual 'secularization' of European legal culture as a framework, this volume explores the lives and times of twenty legal scholars and professionals to study the historical impact of the Christian faith on legal and political life in the Low Countries. The process whereby Christian belief systems gradually lost their impact on the regulation of secular affairs passed through several stages, not in the least the Protestant Reformation, which led to the separation of the Low Countries in a Protestant North and a Catholic South in the first place. The contributions take up general issues such as the relationship between justice and mercy, Christianity and politics as well as more technical topics of state-church law, criminal law and social policy.

Remembering John Polkinghorne: a vision of one world, and one culture

A personal recollection of gratitude reports on the way that the writings of John Polkinghorne inspired and guided the author’s own thinking in science and theology since meeting him as a graduate student. Themes of both agreement and disagreement are selected from the many to be found in Polkinghorne’s corpus. Closer attention is paid to two of his books, Science and Christian Belief and Faith, Science and Understanding. A running theme is the creative tension of a ‘bottom-up thinker’, one of whose salient and influential arguments was that of ‘top-down causation’. Although there is disagreement over Polkinghorne’s exegesis of divine character in Job, thinking the argument through did bear fruit.

Are there de jure objections to Mādhvic belief?

Recently, Erik Baldwin and Tyler McNabb have brought Madhva's epistemological framework into active dialogue with Alvin Plantinga's religious epistemology and have argued that individuals within Madhva's tradition cannot make full use of Plantinga's epistemology, according to which, Christian belief resists de jure objections and can also have warrant. While I do not contest this specific claim, I demonstrate that an analysis of Madhva's epistemological framework reveals that this framework has its own resources through which it can resist de jure objections. I address various objections to the rationality of Mādhvic belief and conclude that there are no de jure objections to Mādhvic belief that are independent of de facto objections.

“You Say I am a King”

In modern parlance, it is only the guilty who confess. Yet we read in one of the New Testament letters, I Timothy, that Jesus “testified to the good confession in the time of Pontius Pilate”. What is an innocent man—or, in Christian belief, the most innocent man in human history—doing making a confession to a brutal official like Pontius Pilate? It is of immense historical interest that one of the preeminent legal theorists of early modern Europe, Hugo Grotius, commented on this verse in I Timothy in his fabulously learned twelve-volume commentary, Annotations on the Old and New Testament. This chapter shows how Grotius’ biblical exegesis, and his poetic composition Christ Suffering, illuminate the Christian idea of Pilate’s innocence.