Perspectives on church and mission: The missional church and metaphors for the church

The most important issues for the missional church should be to establish the relation between mission and the church. The methodology used is to listen to voices concerning relevant issues in the missional church. Many important aspects of the missional church are discussed to give an overview of contemporary challenges. Metaphors for the church, such as people of God, body of Christ, temple of God, bride of Christ and witness of God give many essential guidelines for how the church should engage the world. By evaluating these metaphors, new suggestions can be made. It is concluded that the church should always be the church of the living Christ, living new lives in this world with the eye on the world to come.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The relation of the Church and mission is of great importance. In the discipline of Missiology current ideas about the missional church call for new interpretations. Only by thoroughly interacting with the metaphors of the church can the missional church be understood in a new way.

Reality of presence in virtually mediated sacramentality: Has sacramental theology sustained us?

The global pandemic has impacted the liturgical life of the church by forcing worshiping communities to turn to online liturgies in lieu of gathering together as the body of Christ in one place and time. But the ongoing theological reflection has been particularly concerned with sacramental liturgy online. How can incarnate matter-filled ecclesial sacraments be celebrated without being “in-person”? This article suggests that the ritual and sacramental effects of the pandemic brought an already-existing lack of catechesis on sacramental theology to the surface by exploring two connected conversations: on the one hand, eucharistic theology and the meaning of “real presence” in a time of Internet religion, and on the other hand, the effects of the insidious inculturation of consumerism and commodification highlighted in the “liturgy on demand” world of online ritual and ritual online.

Pneumatologi Lukas: Karya Roh Kudus dan Implikasinya untuk Orang Percaya Era Postmodern

Lukas memberikan porsi tertinggi terkait dengan tema Roh Kudus. ­ Oleh karena itu, pembahasan mengenai pneumatology. Lukas harus diarahkan kepada apa yang sudah, sedang, dan akan dikerjakan atas gereja dan seluruh orang percaya yang adalah tubuh Kristus. Hasil dari karya itu akan berdampak kepada kehidupan jemaat yang bertumbuh secara kualitas dan kuantitas. Namun dewasa ini, Roh Kudus banyak dipandang sebagai kuasa dari luar yang membuat pelayanan seseorang berhasil. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengungkap kembali karya Roh Kudus dalam hidup orang percaya sebagai pribadi dan tubuh Kristus. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah kualitatif deskriptif. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa pneumatologi Lukas mengarahkan setiap orang percaya masa kini dapat memanifestasikan karya dan kasih Roh Kudus bagi setiap orang. Dengan mengerjakan ini, maka relativitas dunia dalam memahami kasih Tuhan dapat terlihat jelas dalam cara hidup orang percaya yang menjaga harmonisasi seluruh ciptaan.Luke gives the highest portion related to the theme of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the person who begins, works, and ends God's work in this world. The results of this work will impact the congregation's life, which grows both in quality and quantity. Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit is widely seen as an external power that makes one's ministry successful. The purpose of this research is to reveal the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers as the person and body of Christ again. The research method used is descriptive qualitative. The results show that Luke's pneumatology directs every believer today to manifest the work and love of the Holy Spirit for everyone. By doing this, the relativity of the world in understanding God's love can see in the way of life of believers who maintain the harmonization of all creation.

Sacramental Ecclesiology: Adopting Augustine’s Totus Christus for Evangelical Ecclesiology

After the 16th-century reformation, the church was faced with the situation of ecclesiological plurality, both differences in traditions and church divisions into many denominations, in­cluding evangelical churches. Despite the fact that the evangelical movement was founded with the primary objective of spreading the gospel, it is devoid of coherence in ecclesiology. Based on Augustine’s idea of totus Christus, this research presents a con­structive ecclesiology proposal for evangelical churches. Drawing primarily on Augustine’s notion of totus Christus, and by showing that this idea is central to his theological construction, the author proposes the importance of revisiting the doctrine of totus Christus to create an ecclesiology that links to sacramentology and soteriology. The contribution of this research is to show that the doctrine of totus Christus is more organic and sacramental so that it can become the foundation and aspiration for evangelical churches united as the body of Christ to participate in His redemptive works for the salvation of the world.

Legal Roots of Christian Anthropology

Purpose of the article is to reconstruct the legal sources of Christian anthropology. Theoretical basis. The methodological basis of the article is the understanding of the fundamental foundations of Christian anthropology in the context of Roman legal understanding. Originality. From the point of view of the Christian religion, man is a dual being: his body is part of the material world, but his soul is not from this world, he is born directly from God. The transcendent origin of the soul gives it the right to communicate with God, but this right can be realized only with the help of the Church, which is seen as the "bride of the Lamb" and the mystical "body of Christ". Interpretations of the essence of church organization correlate with the principles of organization of the Roman community. The principle of universal priesthood correlates with the idea of "post-Tarquinian democracy", recognizing the people of Rome as the supreme bearer of the empire of Jupiter; catholicity – with the idea of the senate as a meeting of the most deserving leaders of the community; apostolic succession – with the institution of republican magistrates, who even though received their power from the community, but through "consultations with the gods" (auspices). In essence, Christian dogmatism is Roman law applied to the Middle Eastern religion; the Bible was interpreted as a legal document, and theologians acted as lawyers. Conclusions. In the ancient Churches (Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, etc.) the ideal of Roman law was realized as the right of impersonal law, standing outside and above the individual. The latter has no ontological value, it is a "servant of God", but the union of men into the mystical "body of Christ" makes the latter empowered to represent God on earth and to act on his behalf. The Renaissance paved the way for the Reformation, in which a powerful "Greek" ("philosophical") lobby declared itself. Despite the fact that many leaders of the Reformation had a personal dislike for philosophy, they were spontaneous philosophers, believing themselves entitled to interpret the will of God independently, regardless of the authority of the councils. They were strict rationalists who only changed the object of their reason: if the ancient Greeks tried to comprehend the world rationally, the Protestants set themselves the goal of rationally comprehending the Book. Ultimately, the main question of Christian theology is the question of man’s attitude to God, and the differences between the anthropological systems within Christianity are the options for answering this question.

Representation

Chapter 6 presents the motif of representation: the idea that the eucharistic bread and wine are symbols (or signs, figures, antitypes, etc.) of the body and blood of Christ. Using a definition of symbol as a blend involving a “material anchor” (Edwin Hutchins), the author argues that “The bread is the symbol of the body of Christ” is not, as some Swiss Reformers believed, a literal equivalent for the figurative “The bread is the body of Christ.” Rather, it is a prompt for a more complex (“Y-squared”) blending network. In this blend a vital relation of Representation is created between bread and the body of Christ. The Representation relation can coexist with Identity, Change, and other vital relations. Thus, the identity and representation motifs are not mutually exclusive but complementary.

"En fullkomlig man"

“The Complete Man”: Body and Society in Viktor Rydberg The article treats the place of the body in the cultural criticism of Viktor Rydberg, not only as a central theme but also as an image with the potential to figuratively describe societal and even cosmic relationships. Rydberg’s ideal of the symmetrical and athletic body is seen in the perspective of his dependence on German neo-humanism and the gymnastic movement. The ideal of bodily symmetry figures as an image of universal man who defies the division of labor, while the deformed body inversely figures as an image of the lack of wholeness in a stratified bourgeois society. This is further elucidated by an analysis of Rydberg’s view of Darwinism and his fear of degeneration. In the final section, special attention is given to Rydberg’s broodings on the “Future of the White Race”. In this text, the body is a figure of the collectivity (the body politic) and its diseases signify political and moral crisis, while the remedy for this state of affairs lies in recognizing the unity of the living, the dead and the unborn in the body of Christ.