Utilizing a text-centered, literary-rhetorical, and audience-oriented method, it demonstrates new chiastic structures for the entire letter that progressively encourage the audience to resist deceit and conduct themselves according to all the wisdom at their disposal as holy ones in Christ.
Twelve centuries before Christ, Colossae was a large and important city; twelve centuries after Christ it had completely disappeared, save only for a few unexcavated ruins. At the time Paul wrote to the Colossians, the city was far into its decline, and considered the least important community to which the apostle had any correspondence. Nevertheless, the Epistle to the Colossians is the most important of all the apostle's letters in defense of the deity of Christ and the sufficiency of.
It is 7x10 inches and has blank pages. As mentioned in the preface to volume 1, from late July through the middle of November, Brother Lee visited the Far East. From the beginning of the year until the middle of July, Brother Lee ministered in Anaheim, California. He then visited Berkeley, California, on a weekend and.
God is the Creator of all and cares deeply for all that he has made. His vision for creation is seen through a world teeming with life where eternity is breathed into and through all creation. Jesus teaches that humans must live with a spirit of generosity and restraint; however, a spirit of meanness and greed dominates human culture and leaves nearly 1. It is not surprising that this phrase occurs in connection with the sending of the Spirit.
Some texts of the Syrian Orthodox Baptismal service, which is usually attributed to Severus , contain the epiclesis Have mercy on us, O God the Father almighty, and send upon us and upon this water that is being consecrated, from your dwelling that is prepared, from your infinite womb, the Paraclete, your Holy Spirit, the establisher, lord and life-giver.
Actually, a similar picture was found in connection with the Word in the apologists Justin, Tatian, Athenagorus and Theophilus of Antioch. And while the unspeakable part of Him is Father, the part that has sympathy with us is Mother. By his loving the father became of woman's nature, a great proof of which is He whom He begat from himself; and the fruit that is born of love is love.
Anselm provides a fine example. However, after a well known flowering in Julian of Norwich, it seems to die out in Western Christianity. This happens at about the time when devotion for Mary the Mother of God was burgeoning. I am suggesting that the example of the early theologians is one we might usefully recover as we seek to speak of the ineffable God.
This double imaging of the invisible God has resulted in a tendency to imagine God as male. There are however also signs within the New Testament talk of God as Father which may assist us in resisting this tendency.
Evidently the fact of Jesus' maleness is an unquestioned 26 Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, But what is its theological significance. What characteristics of the human Jesus have significance as theological descriptors? For example, one would not, presumably, claim that the son asarkos has certain genetic characteristics such as eye colour or body shape as individual essence.. Such characteristics are clearly accident not essential. God does not have dark curly hair, any more than a long white beard!
If his gender applies to the Godhead, why is his ethnic inheritance not determinative of God? If his eye colour, or any other aspect of his genetic makeup are not descriptive of God, then on what grounds could his gender be so understood? Surely it is evident that all such particular genetically determined characteristics of Jesus imply nothing about the nature of God.
Equally, since we are to call him father, the intra-trinitarian Father-son relation cannot be meant. What Rutler must mean is that Fatherhood is an analogy or metaphor of Godhead.
The Old Testament is very sparing in its use of father imagery to speak of God. It prefers language like shepherd, kinsman-redeemer, rock and other pictures which had less dangerous echoes in polytheistic systems of thought. Interestingly, undetermined parental imagery as in Hos ff. Jer is found. Explicitly motherly language is also found in several places , most notably Isaiah 40ff Is ; ff. At times the writers seem deliberately to balance motherly and fatherly pictures.
The New Testament, from the gospels onward, seems to contrast with this reticence. An uncritical reading of this change may attribute it to Jesus' teaching. Its accidental properties, by contrast, are those that it just happens to have but might well have lacked.
The property being a horse is thus essential to Secretariat. Zalta ed. I suspect that to truly argue for an exclusively male priesthood one must argue that maleness or at least masculinity is an essential characteristic of the Son. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note, however, that Myers and others stopped short of this. Indeed German scholarship of the middle of the last century represented the father-language of the New Testament as a unique contribution of Jesus, unlike both his Jewish forebears and his Early Church followers.
Jeremias was aware of a striking feature of the Gospels' father-talk for God on the lips of Jesus. The further removed from the historical Jesus the more likely a writer is to talk about God as father. Indeed, with the exception of Matthew's special material and John, the figures are not strikingly greater than we might expect in sections of the Old Testament. Later traditions, however, remember his usage as much more frequent, to the extent that in the New Testament as a whole, Father becomes a name for God, and one which is especially associated with Jesus as Son.
In drawing attention to this development, one is led to wonder why the tradition increasingly remembered Jesus to have used this language. The role that Proverbs, ben Sira, etc. However, it should caution us from making too much of the origin of this language in Jesus.
To assume this would be a piece of inadmissible naivety. We know that this usage was common in the earliest church. A motherly father in Jesus parables It is also interesting to examine how God is pictured as father in Jesus' words. Authority and discipline especially with respect to sons was a strong and frequent overtone of father- language in the ancient world. Pilch neatly summarises the cultural stereotypes of the biblical world, Clearly, the father is viewed as severe, stern and authoritarian; the mother is viewed as loving and compassionate.
Children respect and fear the father but love the mother affectionately even after they are married. Here fathers are responsible for feeding their children Luke and perhaps the best loved parable describing God by any image is the story of the two sons Luke ff.
This parable operates, and has captured the imaginations of generations of Gospel readers precisely because the father acts like a stereotypical mother! Ricoeur and an aniconic Father The commandment not to image God protects the divine from the human tendency to reduce things to our level.
The biblical God refuses such imaging. In the Old Testament even verbal images are often used of God with care. For example in Isaiah f. Such use of language enables a form of imaging which resists the idolatrous tendency inherent in imagining the ineffable. In a world of gods and goddesses who either give birth or impregnate, parental pictures are potentially idolatrous. Thus, when parenthood is invoked to describe God the usage may not specify which parent is intended e. Hos ff.
These usages are supple and flexible linguistic responses to the need to speak of God, while acknowledging that whatever we say is inevitably inadequate. Yet in the great mosaics of age-old Christian churches, the goal is not for viewers to construct the image, as in a puzzle, but to appreciate it.
So too with this mosaic of atonement doctrine. While no one model is set above or against the others, the book notes particular ways in which the "pieces"--the feet, heart, head, and hands--mutually support one another to form a more holistic vision of Christ's work. Bringing together international scholars from across a range of linked disciplines to examine the concept of the person in the Greek Christian East, Personhood in the Byzantine Christian Tradition stretches in its scope from the New Testament to contemporary debates surrounding personhood in Eastern Orthodoxy.
Attention is paid to a number of pertinent areas that have not hitherto received the scholarly attention they deserve, such as Byzantine hymnography and iconology, the work of early miaphysite thinkers, as well as the relevance of late Byzantine figures to the discussion. Similarly, certain long-standing debates surrounding the question are revisited or reframed, whether regarding the concept of the person in Maximus the Confessor, or with contributions that bring patristic and modern Orthodox theology into dialogue with a variety of contemporary currents in philosophy, moral psychology, and political science.
In opening up new avenues of inquiry, or revisiting old avenues in new ways, this volume brings forward an important and on-going discussion regarding concepts of personhood in the Byzantine Christian tradition and beyond, and provides a key stimulus for further work in this field. The Trinity is a speaking God: three divine persons who share the same essence and commune with each other in love and glory.
How does this truth shape the way we view the world and our place in it? The Speaking Trinity and His Worded World explores these questions by presenting all of life through the lens of language. Understood as communion behavior, language has its roots in God himself. Because of this biblical fact, we live in a place that always and everywhere reveals the trinitarian God whose speech upholds it.
We live in a worded world, a world that was spoken and speaks of God. Thus, language is far more than a means of human communication; it is at the center of who God is, who we are, and what our world is like. Join the author as he walks through redemptive history and points out not only how all things can be perceived through the lens of language, but what this means for us practically in our use of language.
The contemporary church exhibits an elasticity and diversity of doctrine that at times sits oddly with biblical foundations. The presuppositions that God is and that God has spoken too often give place to the assumed priority of the explanatory competence of human reason. In that, the theology of the church is captive to the thought forms of an Enlightenment rationalism on one hand, or the looseness of postmodernist assumptions of individual autonomy on the other.
In those respects, theological argument proceeds from man to God, and not--as in its biblically revealed contours--from God to man.
The Divine Purchase calls the church back to a clear commitment to the gospel of redemption. The kernel of the gospel resides in the apostolic statement that Christ "purchased the church with his own blood. The concept of the 'person' is a crucial yet elusive component in the development of Western thought. Few concepts are as replete with definitional difficulty.
Equally important is the application of a proper definition to all major Christian doctrinal commonplaces. This work, recognizing the insufficiency of modern theology to offer a cogent concept of 'person', proposes a thorough historical and theological evaluation of Trinitarian personhood presented in three critical paradigm-shifts by which one can measure the development of the idea of true personhood presented.
The three watershed eras of discernment of divine personhood presented are seen here as first, the Cappadocian position of the mutual indwelling perichoresis of the divine persons is contrasted with Augustine's view of the place of relations in defining divine persons.
Second, the ideas of Richard of St. Victor whose caritas consummata and its relational implications met the nemesis of the Thomistic category of 'subsistent relations'. If the personhood of God is in essence Being-in-Another then Christianity must apply that ontology to all sectors of reality to be fully Christian. Author : Robert J. Ubuntu is a dynamic and celebrated concept in Africa. In the great Sutu-nguni family of Southern Africa, being humane is regarded as the supreme virtue.
The essence of this philosophy of life, called ubuntu or botho, is human relatedness and dignity. The Shona from Zimbabwe articulate it as: I am because we are; I exist because the community exists. This volume offers twenty-two such reflections on practicing ubuntu as it relates to justice, personhood, and human dignity, both in Southern Africa, as well as in a wider international context.
It highlights the potential of ubuntu for enriching our understanding of justice, personhood, and human dignity in a globalizing world.
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