Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-bja10047
C. L. de Wet
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-03001000
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-bja10049
Robert D. Heaton
Scholarship on the New Testament canon regularly relies on criterial and reception-historical methodologies to antedate the Christian scriptural collection well before its first advocacy as a “rule” of scripture in the 39th Festal Letter of Athanasius of Alexandria (367 CE). Pushing back against these narratives and associated tendencies, this article prefers a functional or forensic approach to the institution of a twenty-seven-book New Testament and highlights evidence demonstrating how the Athanasian episcopal canon was amplified, amended, and accepted in the Christian East and West in the decades following its promulgation. Against suggestions that the canon existed as early as the second century, this handling of data on the New Testament, a scriptural instrument set forth with authoritative and exclusionary intentions, fits the guidelines of creative discourse and historical redescription so as to credit Athanasius, in the fourth century, as the inventor of the canon regnant into the present day. Among other foci, tracing the fortunes of a subcanonical category of books shows the potential for new histories of familiar canonical evidence that may ensue, especially those that plumb the possibility of dissent to the Athanasian scriptural boundaries or augment our awareness of the place and value of such an established standard within institutional, monastic, academic, imperial, and even so-called heretical contexts in and beyond the fourth century.
关于新约正典的学术研究通常依赖于标准和接受历史的方法，早于基督教的圣经集，早于它在亚历山大的亚他那修(Athanasius of Alexandria，公元367年)的第39封节日信中首次被倡导为圣经的“规则”。为了反驳这些叙述和相关的倾向，本文更倾向于用一种功能性或法医学的方法来研究27卷《新约》的制度，并强调证据，证明亚他那修的圣公会正典在其颁布后的几十年里是如何在东西方基督教中被放大、修改和接受的。与正典早在二世纪就存在的说法相反，这种对新约(一种带有权威和排他意图的圣经工具)数据的处理符合创造性话语和历史重新描述的指导方针，从而将四世纪的亚他那修(Athanasius)视为正典统治的发明者，直到今天。在其他焦点中，追踪一种次正典类别书籍的命运显示了可能随之而来的熟悉的正典证据的新历史的潜力，特别是那些探索对亚他那西亚圣经边界持不同意见的可能性，或者增强我们对这种既定标准在制度，修道院，学术，帝国甚至所谓异端背景中的地位和价值的认识。
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-bja10052
Thomas W. Martin
This exploratory essay examines the cultural assumptions at the intersection of our multi-sensory lived experience in contemporary urban built environments, the impact of that experience on our imaginative world for our assumptions about a normative urban environment – what I call a moral imaginary – , how imagination guides urban construction, and the Christian West’s most normative utopian vision of urbanity, the New Jerusalem. This exploration takes place within an eclectic amalgam of theory focused on environmental ethics. The overall goal, using ecological hermeneutics, is to retrieve the voice of the Earth from beneath the streets of gold. Can the New Jerusalem be imagined as a city that offers salvation to the Earth?
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-bja10053
P. Craffert
This article contains a critical reflection of the neuroscientific research of Benjamin Libet which claims that free will does not exist and that it is your brain and not you that takes decisions. The Libetian style research on free will is characterised by a conceptual reduction of free will, a perpetuation of dualistic thinking and the ontological emaciation of free will as a mechanistic action instead of as a complex process. The underlying philosophical and metaphysical assumptions of Libetian research is critically analysed with the verdict that it is not about free will and that it does not in any way addresses the complex nature of free will in humans. Viewed against an alternative neuroscientific perspective on free will, three astonishing features of these studies are highlighted in conclusion.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-bja10048
Johannes van Oort
When reading through Augustine’s Confessions, one notices a striking variety of descriptions of God. The aim of this paper is to discern and – as far as possible – to interpret these various descriptions. Our main focus will be on pivotal texts from Books 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7. They document how much Manichaean views played a part in Augustine’s quest, and how closely this quest was linked to his ideas about evil. Briefly stated, Augustine’s search went from anthropomorphic-spatial thinking about God to corporeal/material-spatial and even panentheistic ideas and then (mainly under the inspiration of Neoplatonic philosophy, i.e., in all likelihood Plotinus’s Enneads) to a strictly spiritual and non-spatial understanding. But in all this, Manichaean ways of thought and even concepts remained present until the end. A final conclusion draws out the significance of this study for conceptualising the formation of God/gods in the Christian tradition as well as in other religious formations.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-bja10050
David L. Eastman
In 2019, Cambridge University Press published an edited volume entitled Under Caesar’s Sword, the product of a three-year study on contemporary Christian responses to persecution in various parts of the world. As part of the overall findings, the project directors noted three primary methods of response: (1) Survival strategies (trying to avoid the attention of the persecutors); (2) Association strategies (building relationships beyond their own communities in order to create a broader network of potential support); and (3) Confrontation strategies (directly challenging the persecutors through various means including martyrdom, which Christians accept as an act of resistance). These categories provide a useful heuristic tool for reevaluating the discourse in some early Christian texts, including the apocryphal acts of the apostles and other texts related to martyrdom. This article employs the insights from Under Caesar’s Sword to explore examples of all three strategies from the earliest Christian centuries. However, not all strategies were equally appreciated in that time. Because suffering came to be so closely linked to Christian identity, survival strategies were sometimes critiqued as evidence of a lack of faith.
2019年，剑桥大学出版社(Cambridge University Press)出版了一本名为《凯撒之剑下》(Under Caesar’s Sword)的编辑卷，这是一项为期三年的研究成果，研究了当代基督徒对世界各地迫害的反应。作为总体调查结果的一部分，项目主管指出了三种主要的应对方法:(1)生存策略(试图避免迫害者的注意);(2)协会策略(建立超出自己社区的关系，以创建更广泛的潜在支持网络);(3)对抗策略(通过包括殉道在内的各种方式直接挑战迫害者，基督徒接受这是一种抵抗行为)。这些类别为重新评估一些早期基督教文本中的话语提供了有用的启发式工具，包括使徒的伪经行为和其他与殉道有关的文本。本文采用《凯撒之剑下》的见解来探索基督教早期的三种策略的例子。然而，当时并非所有的战略都受到同样的赞赏。因为苦难与基督徒身份紧密相连，生存策略有时被批评为缺乏信仰的证据。
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-03001001
Gerhard van den Heever
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/15743012-bja10051
F. Hale
Peter Dickinson’s acclaimed English novel of 1979, Tulku, is primarily an exploration of the Tibetan Buddhist custom of discerning in children reincarnations of deceased spiritual leaders who are subsequently trained to assume positions of responsibility. This fascinating work also examines other dimensions of contemplative monastic Buddhism in a remote Himalayan setting, chiefly in a lamasery. On a broader scale, Dickinson addresses such themes as the supposedly peaceful nature of the national religion in question, relations between that faith and Christianity, the possibility of finding merit in religions other than one’s own, and the role of illusion in religious belief and practice. In the present article these matters are considered against the backdrop of evolving Western images of and attitudes towards Tibet generally, its form of Buddhism in particular, and the problematic practice of discovering reincarnated tulkus.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.1163/15743012-bja10044
Philipp Öhlmann, I. Swart
Achieving ecologically sustainable societies necessitates fundamental social and cultural transformations. Religion has the potential to foster the required paradigm shifts in mindsets, behaviour and policy. Moreover, in many religious communities there is increasing engagement with questions of environment, climate change and ecological sustainability. This has led to an increasing corpus of literature engaging with the nexus between religion, environment, development and sustainability. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of recent ecological trends in religious traditions as well as the literature on religion and sustainable development and on religion and ecology. While an ecological turn is evident in many religious communities and has been well documented in the literature, it emerges that more research is necessary on the way that this phenomenon manifests in environmental action at individual and institutional levels.
{"title":"Religion and Environment","authors":"Philipp Öhlmann, I. Swart","doi":"10.1163/15743012-bja10044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15743012-bja10044","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Achieving ecologically sustainable societies necessitates fundamental social and cultural transformations. Religion has the potential to foster the required paradigm shifts in mindsets, behaviour and policy. Moreover, in many religious communities there is increasing engagement with questions of environment, climate change and ecological sustainability. This has led to an increasing corpus of literature engaging with the nexus between religion, environment, development and sustainability. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of recent ecological trends in religious traditions as well as the literature on religion and sustainable development and on religion and ecology. While an ecological turn is evident in many religious communities and has been well documented in the literature, it emerges that more research is necessary on the way that this phenomenon manifests in environmental action at individual and institutional levels.","PeriodicalId":41841,"journal":{"name":"Religion and Theology-A Journal of Contemporary Religious Discourse","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76543126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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