Kajian Apologetis Terhadap Kontroversi Kemanusiaan Dan Ketidakbersalahaan Yesus Kristus

The context of understanding the humanity and innocence of Jesus gave rise a theological controversy. The reason is, the all-perfect God who became human in Jesus Christ is difficult to maintain because He is a limited figure and is considered to have made mistakes. For example Jesus' ignorance regarding the person who touched His robe (Mark 5:30-32 and Luke 8 :45), Jesus' ignorance of what will happen in the last days (Mark 13:27-32), Jesus' mistake in calling Zechariah son of Berechiah (Matthew 23:35; 2 Chronicles 24:20) and the wrong behavior of Jesus who was angry in the Temple (Matthew 21:12-16; Luke 19:45-46; John 2:15-16). The purpose of this study is to provide a biblical description in an apologetic frame as a form of a refutation of these assumptions. This study uses a qualitative method with an apologetic approach. An understanding of the person of Jesus needs to be seen comprehensively with the context that binds it. The assumptions about Jesus' guilt and ignorance are not substantially based on a comprehensive and credible interpretation.

Jewish Conversion in Europe and Constantinople

This chapter examines Broughton’s engagements with early modern Jewish communities which, like the rest of his interactions, were fraught with polemic, tension, and controversy. It starts with Broughton’s excitement at receiving a letter from an Abraham Reuben of Constantinople, whom Broughton believed to be a learned and authoritative Rabbi; whom Broughton’s enemies believed to be a convenient fiction of his own making; and who was in fact a minor poet with no religious authority. Despite the rumours of its forgery, Reuben’s letter pushed Broughton into a spree of missionary activity, leading to the first Hebrew printings in Amsterdam (1605–1606), and a public debate with David Farar, a Portuguese converso physician who had settled in the Netherlands. Beyond the confusions and miscommunications of these events, this chapter examines the broader impact they had on Broughton’s scholarship. Specifically, it argues that Broughton’s obsession with Jewish conversion deeply informed the approach he took to theological controversy and scholarship, by orientating him towards unusually historical and philological methods that were radically stripped of doctrinal and dogmatic concerns.

Theological Controversy in England and Geneva

This chapter shows how Broughton’s historical and philological approach to scholarship as encouraged by his obsession with Jewish conversion played out in a major controversy of the sixteenth century: the meaning of Christ’s descent into hell. It argues that Broughton’s approach was revealingly different from the two major parties in the debate, the English Bishops and the Genevan divines, who were more concerned with the soteriological implications of Christ’s descent than any philological or historical questions. This, combined with Broughton’s ill-judged attempts to promote his work in Geneva, Zürich, and Basel alienated him from his coreligionists and left him extremely vulnerable to exploitation for confessional purposes—as a keen group of Jesuit onlookers were only too happy to discover. Thus, despite the fact that prominent scholars believed that Broughton’s work on the descent was correct on an intellectual level, his arguments were attacked and maligned. In studying this controversy, this chapter develops key themes of earlier chapters, including the problems caused by the appropriation of Broughton’s work by Catholic scholars; the ways in which controversy was generated from seemingly anodyne historical scholarship; and the serious consequences faced by those who, like Broughton, did not fully understand how deeply confessional identity and erudition were intertwined in this period.

Grace and Conformity

The Reformed Conformity that flourished within the Early Stuart English Church was a rich and distinctive theological tradition that has never before been studied in its own right. While scholars have observed how Reformed Conformists clashed with Laudians and Puritans alike, no sustained study of their teaching on grace and their attitude to the Church has yet been undertaken, despite the acknowledged centrality of these topics to Early Stuart theological controversy. This ground-breaking monograph recovers this essential strand of Early Stuart Christian identity. It examines and analyses the teaching and writings of ten prominent theologians, all of whom made significant contributions to the debates that arose within the Church of England during the reigns of James I and Charles I and all of whom combined their loyalty to orthodox Reformed teaching on grace and salvation, with a commitment to the established polity of the English Church. The study makes the case for the coherence of their theological vision by underlining the connections that these Reformed Conformists made between their teaching on grace and their approach to Church order and liturgy. By engaging with a robust and influential theological tradition that was neither Puritan nor Laudian, this monograph significantly enriches our account of the Early Stuart Church, as well as contributing to the ongoing scholarly reappraisal of the wider Reformed tradition. It builds on the resurgence of academic interest in British soteriological discussion, and uses that discussion, as previous studies have not, to gain valuable new insights into Early Stuart ecclesiology.

Spinoza in His Time: The 17th-Century Religious Context

In one of the last paragraphs of his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), Spinoza extolls the harmony between people of a diversity of faiths, maintained by the magistracy of Amsterdam. However, he also seems apprehensive about the possibility of the return of chaos, such as during the Arminian Controversies in the Dutch Republic in the 1610s and the English Civil War in the 1640s and 1650s. The so-called Wolzogen affair in 1668 probably rattled him. Spinoza’s fears would, however, prove groundless. Theological controversy in the public church was often fierce and bitter, but did not threaten the integrity of the State after 1619. Political and ecclesiastical authorities supported discussions and debate in which a new theological consensus could be hammered out. From the examples of Petrus de Witte’s Wederlegginge der Sociniaensche Dwaelingen and Romeyn de Hooghe’s Hieroglyphica, I will argue that such freedom was not limited to the universities, under the aegis of academic freedom, but that Spinoza’s call for free research and open debate was in fact everyday reality.

Calculators in Divinity: Henry Savile and Thomas Bradwardine

This essay discusses the immediate context and form of the publication of Henry Savile’s edition of Thomas Bradwardine’s De causa Dei (1618). It sets out the political and theological significance of the work in relation to publications of the King’s Printers, the Synod of Dort, and the activities of Archbishop Abbot. It moves on to consider how the edition was made, resituating it in Oxford intellectual life of the early 1610s and in the broader world of theological controversy, and identifying some of those who conceived and assisted with the work. It considers which manuscripts were used in making the edition.

The energy of deification and the person of Jesus Christ in St Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas’s defence of human perfection and deification through the dogmatic distinction between divine essence and divine energy sparked a theological controversy that continues into the present day. One of the charges laid against Palamas is that he introduces divine energies as another mediator between humanity and God, effectively replacing the mediation of Christ in the process. This chapter argues that such a charge is fundamentally flawed and reflects a deep misunderstanding of Palamas’s theology. Through a close reading of his seminal Triads and other texts, it is shown that Palamas’s approach to human knowledge and experience of God (which culminates in deification), far from sidelining the person of Christ, places him at its heart; without the Incarnate Christ, no access to human perfection is conceivable for Palamas.

The Literature of Early Western Monasticism

The Latin literature of early monasticism was created within much tighter personal networks than that of the East, but these networks spanned considerable geographical distances. The use of a single language for both the composition of ascetic literature and the translation of many important Greek writings further strengthened the unifying role of the literary corpus. Latin monasticism was particularly marked by theological controversy (Priscillianist, Origenist, Pelagian), and came to be dominated theologically by Augustine of Hippo. Augustine also played a key role in developing the genre of the monastic rule (regula), which would become normative in Western monastic practice, as evident in the regulae of Gaul and Italy that became the foundations for medieval monasticism.

Thomas Hobbes’s Theological and Political Anthropology and the Essential Mutations of the Perception of the Laws of Nature and Natural Rights in Seventeenth-Century England

The overall goal of the article is to reexamine Hobbes’s concern to respond to the challenges of the republican perspective on the relationship between the liberty of subjects and the political power. If, according to Skinner, republican theorists appealed to sources of classical antiquity, I argue that Hobbes chooses to offer a blend of classical and theological ideas in order to generate a “science” of the political life within the confines of a postlapsarian world dominated by passion and the fear of death. If the image of God is maintained in the Hobbesian politics, it is because Hobbes needed a model of imitation of a stability that the individuals dominated by passions failed too often to have. Hobbes also needed a model of omnipotence and providence to be imitated by the sovereign. This complex relationship between the theological heritage of the past and the novelties inaugurated in political thought by Hobbes’s accent on human passions triggers a series of changes in Hobbes’s understanding of the law of nature and natural right. The article brings to discussion Hobbes’s indebtedness to Lactantius in reading Lucretius’s materialism, Augustine’s model of God as a Creator and the theological controversy between intellectualism and voluntarism when formulating his own anthropological perspective on “natural” and “civil” law and right.