76 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Authority, Obedience, and the Holiness of God: The New Testament Sense of the Kingdom
Exousia, which is the [delete] Greek scriptural word for ‘Authority’ illustrates for us the remarkable range of paradoxes contained in this Greek semantical term, for it was also the customary word in Hellenistic texts for legal permission, and thus freedom from constraint. The ancient Greeks used the word ExousÃa to connote the freedom to do a thing, as distinct from the issue of the ability or capacity (dynamis) to do it. ExousÃa is thus the authority needful to do a thing. Dynamis is the power or skill to be able to do it. In classical literature referring to the acts of kings or gods the two things were often presumed to be one; but not so in ordinary civic life. In Late Antiquity the Roman law codes deduced from this an important cultural distinction that still massively impinges our Christian legal and civic construct: that between auctoritas and potestas; which we today might translate as the difference between executive power (such as that exercised by the Emperor) and moral authority (such as that claimed by the senate). There is here a sense growing, and it comes more to the fore in Late Antiquity as a result of the widespread dissemination of Stoic ethical reflections on human culture, that ‘might is not always right.
Recommended from our members
Did Augustine’s Christology Depend on Theodore of Mopsuestia?
There has been considerable controversy over Augustine’s Christology throughout this century, concerning the attribution of sources, and whether he ought to be characterized as Antiochene or Alexandrian in his general approach - that is, whether he prefers a dynamic grace-centred model of the Christological union, such as that of Theodore and Nestorius, or whether he envisages a more substantial root of the union such as that argued by the language of hypostatic union of Cyril and Chalcedon. This article will review some aspects of that issue and attempt to elaborate a perspective from which to approach his Christology. It is not intended here to expose the whole complex range of Augustine’s doctrine of Christ; it will be enough to point out significant areas of its development. Several excellent studies have already treated this dimension,’ although Augustine’s far-ranging complexity on this subject, as on most, makes the issue a wonderful research ground for further work. Even the casual reader of Augustine on this subject realizes just how much his emphasis on the redemptive humility of Christ provided the spur and context of Barth’s monumental Christology. Moreover, Augustine’s special emphasis on an ecclesiological Christology (the lotus Christus approach in which he joins in a symbiosis his thoughts on the person of Christ and the destiny of the saints of Christ who are his body) makes him stand apart in the lists of the patristic giants, a brilliant interpreter of the later Pauline Christology
Recommended from our members
The Non-Cyprianic Scripture Texts in Lactantius' Divine Institutes
The state of the textual tradition regarding the Lactantian citations of scripture is in need of radical revision
Recommended from our members
Moses and the Mystery of Christ in Cyril of Alexandria's Exegesis, Part II
MOSES AND THE MYSTERY OF CHRIST IN ST. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA’S EXEGESIS* PART II
Having set out his unrepentant Alexandrian hermeneutical principles generically in this way, Cyril advances into the precise exegesis of the nativity of Moses ( Exodus ch. 5 ) working from consistently Christocentric bases. The story of the birth is prefixed in the biblical text by the desperate state of Israel, forced to work like slaves under harsh overlords. This, for Cyril 32 , signifies the state of humanity at the time of Christ, when all the nations of the earth were labouring under the worst dominion of demons. The children of Israel, are a type of humanity under the tyranny of sin. The Pharaoh is the evil Prince of this world (Satan), whose overseers (localised demons) keep the people enslaved, and at a time when misery could hardly increase, the evil king devises a plan for the blotting out of male Israelite children
Recommended from our members
Seeking learning, and the grace of insightfulness: the issue of wisdom in Orthodox tradition
I wish to talk today about Wisdom, in a two-fold sense: both in its sacred aspect, as spoken about often in the Old Testament and taken to a new and high pitch in the Christian Evangelical and Patristic tradition, and wisdom in the more common and contemporary understanding of that term; wisdom, that is, as an element of culture (a sacred term, certainly, that would almost count even as an enduring religious value in a radically secularized age), one that distinguishes the wise from the merely clever
Recommended from our members
"Perceiving Light from Light in Light" (Oration 31.2): The Trinitarian Theology of St. Gregory the Theologian
At the end of the fourth century, the work of saint Athanasios had moved the great debate in Christianity concerning the nature of God towards a new context. A greater degree of agreement about the nature and divine status of the Son could now be presumed after the reconciliation between the homoousians and the homoiousians. Events such as the Synod of Alexandria of 362 show that there was a movement to clarify the terminology of the argument in the cause of this reconciliation. The residual body of Arians were consequently becoming more sharply distinguished, and their theological systems stood out in harder relief, as might be witnessed in the rationalist method of Eunomios or Aetios. Athanasios' theology, after the Council of Nicaea, had initiated a growing body of opinion among the hierarchs that the generic meaning of the Logos as homoousios with the Father, in the sense of having the same generic quality (or even being of "the same stuff"), was a crudely materialist concept inapplicable to a wholly spiritual and simple nature, and that by contrast the true meaning of the homoousion was not merely generic identity, or even "likeness of being" as the Origenistic homoiousians liked to say (following their teacher's much earlier objections to the application of qualitative epithets to God), but rather very identity of being
Recommended from our members
Recent Biblical Hermeneutics in Patristic Perspective: The Tradition of Orthodoxy
The twentieth century witnessed a veritable explosion in scholarly interest in hermeneutical issues. As in the aftermath of other kinds of explosions, the resulting field (especially in regard to biblical analysis) is not tidy, but presents to the interested eye many possibilities of "new-build." In terms of any subsequent analysis of the intellectual life of twentieth century Christianity, I suspect that this hermeneutical ferment will probably present, to the eye of later Church historians, one of the most distinctive aspects of the period, and one of the chief (often unrecognized) issues behind the current flux of Church life in America and Western Europe. As the twentieth century progressed this overwhelming interest in hermeneutics was manifested first in how such considerations elucidated literary analysis of texts (how patterns of analysis could be systematically applied to narratives), then how they illumined historiographical problems raised by texts, and finally the focus turned in more narrowly to what became almost an obsession with the philosophy of hermeneutics itself. It was hermeneutical issues, at base, that gave rise to postmodernism's easy passage from analysis of textual motive to philosophical critique of the claims made about "objective meanings" in terms of the post-Enlightenment historical-critical method, and of the possibility of reconstructing "authorial intention." The New Hermeneutic of Gadamer, derived from Heidegger, which suggested a "fusion of horizons" between the historical and subjective-existential perspective, fell prey to the general criticism of Heidegger by Derrida: that it was based upon a "metaphysic" of its own devising. From the 1970s the demise of the hermeneutical movement set in ineluctably. This has, perhaps, not been observed by many religious studies departments (even in the early decades of the twenty-first century) who came to discover the whole area much later than academic philosophy and literature departments, and often embraced it (ironically) with more credulity than their predecessors, as a perceived weapon against skepticism posing as "objectivity" in the study of religions. The snake had begun with its own tail, and it could only have been a slight surprise when it was time for the head to disappear. By the later decades of the twentieth century, not only conservative voices were being heard protesting against the Historical-Critical school of biblical analysis, for several of its chief protagonists were publicly wondering about the utility of the whole enterprise, and had seriously begun to question whether biblical criticism had departed from any residual concern to relate to ecclesiastical tradition or the preaching of the faith as a result of its presuppositions
- …