Rereading Historical Theology PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Rereading Historical Theology PDF full book. Access full book title Rereading Historical Theology by Margaret R. Miles. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Margaret R. Miles
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725243989
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Get Book Here
Book Description
Augustine of Hippo is arguably the most influential author in the history of Christian thought and institutions. Yet he has been revered by some reviewers and vilified by others. Contemporary critical approaches to historical authors can illuminate features of Augustine's thought and activities that are not noticed when reviewers' attention is either exclusively sympathetic or intransigently critical. Anyone who seeks to present an Augustine who has relevance for the twenty-first century must somehow hold together delight in the beauty of his prose and the profundity of his thought with dismay over some of the intentions and effects of his teachings. The essays in this book endeavor to read Augustine simultaneously critically and appreciatively. Miles places his thought in the context of his classical heritage and notices how pervasive in later Christian authors are the themes that informed Augustine's thought. Understanding his writings as a passionate effort to describe a metaphysical universe that accounts for the endlessly fascinating mystery of embodied life makes many of Augustine's proposals accessible, useful, and delightful in the context of contemporary quandaries and issues. His conclusions are less important than his method: In Augustine, knowledge and life mutually illuminate, energize, and critique each other, exemplifying the practice of a fully human life. Exploring some of his most persistent themes, these essays seek to show how Augustine's theology works.
Author: Margaret R. Miles
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725243989
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Get Book Here
Book Description
Augustine of Hippo is arguably the most influential author in the history of Christian thought and institutions. Yet he has been revered by some reviewers and vilified by others. Contemporary critical approaches to historical authors can illuminate features of Augustine's thought and activities that are not noticed when reviewers' attention is either exclusively sympathetic or intransigently critical. Anyone who seeks to present an Augustine who has relevance for the twenty-first century must somehow hold together delight in the beauty of his prose and the profundity of his thought with dismay over some of the intentions and effects of his teachings. The essays in this book endeavor to read Augustine simultaneously critically and appreciatively. Miles places his thought in the context of his classical heritage and notices how pervasive in later Christian authors are the themes that informed Augustine's thought. Understanding his writings as a passionate effort to describe a metaphysical universe that accounts for the endlessly fascinating mystery of embodied life makes many of Augustine's proposals accessible, useful, and delightful in the context of contemporary quandaries and issues. His conclusions are less important than his method: In Augustine, knowledge and life mutually illuminate, energize, and critique each other, exemplifying the practice of a fully human life. Exploring some of his most persistent themes, these essays seek to show how Augustine's theology works.
Author: Christoper A. Beeley
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813219914
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book, the newest volume in the CUA Studies in Early Christianity, presents original works by leading patristics scholars on a wide range of theological, historical, and cultural topics
Author: Jeremy M. Schott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire. Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.
Author: Elizabeth A. Clark
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204328
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 573
Get Book Here
Book Description
Through their teaching of early Christian history and theology, Elizabeth A. Clark contends, Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary functioned as America's closest equivalents to graduate schools in the humanities during the nineteenth century. These four Protestant institutions, founded to train clergy, later became the cradles for the nonsectarian study of religion at secular colleges and universities. Clark, one of the world's most eminent scholars of early Christianity, explores this development in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. Based on voluminous archival materials, the book charts how American theologians traveled to Europe to study in Germany and confronted intellectual currents that were invigorating but potentially threatening to their faith. The Union and Yale professors in particular struggled to tame German biblical and philosophical criticism to fit American evangelical convictions. German models that encouraged a positive view of early and medieval Christianity collided with Protestant assumptions that the church had declined grievously between the Apostolic and Reformation eras. Trying to reconcile these views, the Americans came to offer some counterbalance to traditional Protestant hostility both to contemporary Roman Catholicism and to those historical periods that had been perceived as Catholic, especially the patristic era.
Author: Patricia Cox Miller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204689
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.
Author: Stanley Kent Stowers
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300070682
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Get Book Here
Book Description
Paul's Letter to the Romans is one of the most influential writings of Christian theology. In this reinterpretation, the author provides a new reading that places Romans within the sociocultural, historical and rhetorical contexts of Paul's world.
Author: Andrew S. Jacobs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206517
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the first full-length study of the circumcision of Jesus, Andrew S. Jacobs turns to an unexpected symbol—the stereotypical mark of the Jewish covenant on the body of the Christian savior—to explore how and why we think about difference and identity in early Christianity. Jacobs explores the subject of Christ's circumcision in texts dating from the first through seventh centuries of the Common Era. Using a diverse toolkit of approaches, including the psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and poststructuralist, he posits that while seeming to desire fixed borders and a clear distinction between self (Christian) and other (Jew, pagan, and heretic), early Christians consistently blurred and destabilized their own religious boundaries. He further argues that in this doubled approach to others, Christians mimicked the imperial discourse of the Roman Empire, which exerted its power through the management, not the erasure, of difference. For Jacobs, the circumcision of Christ vividly illustrates a deep-seated Christian duality: the fear of and longing for an other, at once reviled and internalized. From his earliest appearance in the Gospel of Luke to the full-blown Feast of the Divine Circumcision in the medieval period, Christ circumcised represents a new way of imagining Christians and their creation of a new religious culture.
Author: Daniel Boyarin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203844
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Get Book Here
Book Description
The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish.In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border—and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.
Author: Benjamin H. Dunning
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204352
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Get Book Here
Book Description
The first Christians operated with a hierarchical model of sexual difference common to the ancient Mediterranean, with women considered to be lesser versions of men. Yet sexual difference was not completely stable as a conceptual category across the spectrum of formative Christian thinking. Rather, early Christians found ways to exercise theological creativity and to think differently from one another as they probed the enigma of sexually differentiated bodies. In Specters of Paul, Benjamin H. Dunning explores this variety in second- and third-century Christian thought with particular attention to the ways the legacy of the apostle Paul fueled, shaped, and also constrained approaches to the issue. Paul articulates his vision of what it means to be human primarily by situating human beings between two poles: creation (Adam) and resurrection (Christ). But within this framework, where does one place the figure of Eve—and the difference that her female body represents? Dunning demonstrates that this dilemma impacted a range of Christian thinkers in the centuries immediately following the apostle, including Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian of Carthage, and authors from the Nag Hammadi corpus. While each of these thinkers attempts to give the difference of the feminine a coherent place within a Pauline typological framework, Dunning shows that they all fail to deliver fully on the coherence that they promise. Instead, sexual difference haunts the Pauline discourse of identity and sameness as the difference that can be neither fully assimilated nor fully ejected—a conclusion with important implications not only for early Christian history but also for feminist and queer philosophy and theology.
Author: Ersilia Francesca
Publisher: Georg Olms Verlag
ISBN: 3487148854
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ziel dieses Band ist, verschiedene Themen der ibaditischen Religion von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart zu untersuchen. Der Ibadismus entstand in der frühen islamischen Epoche und spielte eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Entwicklung der islamischen Rechts- und Glaubenslehre. Bis heute hat er einen großen Einfluss auf den Mittleren Osten und Nordafrika. Trotz seiner langen Tradition ist der Ibadismus und vor allem die ibaditische Glaubenslehre noch immer wenig bekannt und vielfach auch verkannt. Da bis jetzt nur wenige bedeutende umfangreiche Arbeiten zur Ibaditischen Glaubenslehre in europäischen Sprachen vorliegen, versucht dieser Band Abhilfe zu schaffen, indem er die charakteristische theologische Lehre dieser einflussreichen islamischen Strömung einem breiten Publikum bekannt macht und sich sowohl an Fachleute als auch an Laien wendet. Anhand vieler Beispiele aus verschiedenen Epochen und Quellen und mit einem interdisziplinären Ansatz behandeln die Autoren Fragen zu Dogma und Bekenntnis, Glaubensverständnis, theologischen Kontroversen, Neubewertung theologischer Quellen und zum ibaditischen „Modernismus“ im Oman und Nordafrika des vergangenen Jahrhunderts. Mittelalterliche ibaditische Quellen sind ausschlaggebend, um die frühe Entwicklung der Bewegung und die Dispute über Lehre und Politik zu verstehen, die die ibaditische Glaubenslehre vom sunnitischen Islam unterscheiden. Auf der anderen Seite unterstreicht der vorliegende Band auch, dass es wichtig ist, die ibaditischen Quellen aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in den Blick zu nehmen, als die ibaditische Reformbewegung begann, sich um eine Annäherung zwischen dem Islam und der Moderne zu bemühen. The aim of this volume is to explore different issues of Ibadi theology from the early beginnings until the present day. Ibadi Islam emerged in the early Islamic period and played a pivotal role in the development of Islamic law and theology. Today, it continues to be an influential force in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa. Despite its antiquity, Ibadi Islam – and particularly Ibadi theology – remains little known and has often been misunderstood. Up to now only few prominent book-length works devoted to Ibadi theology in European language; this volume aims at redressing this gap by introducing the distinctive theological teachings of this influential Islamic school to a broad public, specialists and non-specialists alike. Dealing with a series of cases, from different periods and different sources and using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors address questions such as dogma and creed, conception of faith, theological controversies, reassessment of theological sources, the Ibadi “modernism” in last century Oman and North Africa. Medieval Ibadi sources are crucial to understand the early development of the movement and the doctrinal and political disputes which differentiate Ibadi doctrine from Sunni Islam, on the other hand the volume emphasize the importance of also focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries Ibadi sources, when the Ibadi reform movement started looking for reconciliation between Islam and modernity.
