Philosophical cosmology and religious polemic: The “worship of creation” in the writings of Philo of Alexandria and the Wisdom of Solomon

This article treats Hellenistic Jewish literature that ridicules the alleged worship of the elements, the heavens, the heavenly bodies, or other “parts” of the cosmos, especially as developed in the writings of Philo of Alexandria and Ps-Solomon. It is argued that such claims constitute a distinctive sub-type of religious polemic that draws on and adapts from Platonic and Stoic traditions of cosmology. Such polemics are most clearly developed in Philo’s treatises and in chapter 13 of the Wisdom of Solomon, but they also appear in more abbreviated form in the fragments of Philo of Byblos and Aristobulus. I suggest that these traditions of invective may bear on the interpretation of Rom 1:19–23, but only in an indirect way.

ʿĪsā b. Hišām’s Shiism and Religious Polemic in the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamaḏānī (d. 398/1008)

This study reads the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamaḏānī (d. 398/1008) against the background of the sectarian milieu of the fourth/tenth century. It begins with a thorough review of the preceding scholarship on al-Hamaḏānī’s sectarian allegiances, and it confirms the contention that Hamaḏānī was a Sunni by conviction. It then proposes that the names and attributes of the narrator of al-Hamaḏānī’s Maqāmāt, ʿ Īsā b. Hišām, reflect an attempt by al-Hamaḏānī to satirize Shii values and practices. It then considers references to Shiism in six of al-Hamaḏānī’s maqāmāt: the Ḥulwāniyya, Māristāniyya, Iṣfahāniyya, Maḍiriyya, Aḏarbayjāniyya, and Kūfiyya, along with several other references to Shiism in the collection. The study further proposes a possible connection between the portrayal of ʿĪsā b. Hišām and the famed Twelver scholar Ibn Bābawayh al-Qummī (d. 381/991).

“Beyde borghers, beyde leken, en van al de rest ghelijck, buyten geus en catholijck”. Het beeld van omgangsoecumeniciteit in de Roomsche reijs en Extractum katholicum van Joannes Stalpart van der Wiele

The research presented in this article demonstrates the application of the imagological method to an analysis of the portrayal of interconfessional relations in 17th-century Dutch religious polemic literature by a Roman Catholic author, the priest Joannes Stalpart van der Wiele. The aim of this research is above all to identify how informal contacts between Catholics and non-Catholics were depicted in a literary discourse. The analysis focuses on Stalpart’s two texts, Roomsche reijs (Journey to Rome) and Extractum katholicum (Catholic extract), to identify images which may be classified as showing “interconfessional conviviality” and omgangsoecumene, twin concepts postulated by Willem Frijhoff. By pointing to the existence of themes related to religious toleration in the work of Stalpart van der Wiele, an author not associated with such ideas, a change of emphasis in the image of his oeuvre may be achieved.

Augustine’s Use of Principium in De trinitate 1-7

In his trinitarian theology, Augustine’s use of the term principium undergoes a change which has implications for his political theology. In De trinitate 1-7, the application of this concept to the Father first reflects an earlier usage, which follows a Neoplatonic idea of the divine ἀρχή of the One. However, reflection on scripture and religious polemic force a development, and he gradually abandons the term. While he does not abandon the theological idea of the Father’s special principium, the relations among the divine persons demand a consideration of the principium of the Son in common with the Father, an idea familiar to the debates on filioque. This Augustinian development is like what Erik Peterson identifies in the Cappadocians: a trinitarian theological development which threatens the monarchical political theology that would otherwise appeal to Christian Neoplatonist thinking.

TAFSIR AYAT ALAHKAM ABIL FADHOL ALSENORY: SEBUAH MODEL TAFSIR ANALISIS KRITIS

This study tries to trace and find out the interpretation model of the tafsir Alahkam written by Abil Fadhol Alsenory, as an earlier tafsir of the pesantren in Indonesia. Based on the historical approach, philology, and analysis of critical discourse, by describing the socio-political context, as well as the author's response to the socio-religious conditions at the time, the results indicate that there are one primer script and two manuscript copies of his students. The primer script was written directly by Abil Fadhol, while the manuscript was a copy of the students' writing from Abil Fadhol's explanation during his teaching moment. All of the three texts show that there are two social conditions as its background, namely 'restriction' policy of the New Order regime with NU, and the debate over religious polemic between traditionalists (NU) and modernists in Indonesia in the second half of the 20th century. From this, it was revealed that Abil Fadhol's interpretation model was very critical but contextual and applicable to its surrounding social conditions.

Intra-Confessional Polemics in the Reformation

Although religious polemic is typically understood and studied as a phenomenon of mutual antagonism across the confessions—Protestant against Catholic and Catholic against Protestant—the growth of the early modern polemic traditions was the product of heated internal controversy. In a series of theses intended to point to rhetorical aspects of conflicts within the Lutheran and Catholic confessions, this paper brings forward features of polemical writings from the disputes between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists in the wake of the Augsburg Interim of 1548 and those between and among Jesuits and Jansenists in the seventeenth century. Early modern religious thought, I suggest, cannot be understood without attention to the fissures within the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions.

Metaphoric Odours

The association of smelling with intimate, instinctual, knowledge and the ascription of moral value meant that political and religious polemic made great use of attacks on bad odour or celebrations of the liberty to stink. Case studies of the Sacheverell affair and resistance to Walpolean corruption offer two examples of this. The smell of corruption could be found out by liberty-loving noses. But the liberty of citizens to make what smells they please and not have the government stick their noses in their business became a useful trope during the 1790s. Incense, on the other hand, became a handy metaphor for flattery, manners, and forms of gendered identity. Despite attacks on censing, sweet smells were still celebrated in the Protestant sensorium—as natural theological texts showed. Both political and religious invocations of scent testified to an increasing recognition of the subjectivity of smelling and worries about sensory privacy and publicity.

Colonizing Christianity

This book employs postcolonial critique to analyze the transformations of Greek and Latin religious identity in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. Through close readings of texts from the period of Latin occupation, the book argues that the experience of colonization splintered the Greek community over how best to respond to the Latin other while illuminating the mechanisms by which Western Christians authorized and exploited the Christian East. The experience of colonial subjugation opened permanent fissures within the Orthodox community, which struggled to develop a consistent response to aggressive demands for submission to the Roman Church. This internal fracturing has done more lasting damage to the modern Orthodox Church than any material act perpetrated by the crusaders. Ultimately, the statements of Greek and Latin religious polemic that emerged in the context of the Fourth Crusade should be interpreted as having been produced in a colonial setting and, as such, reveal more about the political, economic, and cultural uncertainty of communities in conflict than they offer genuine theological insight.