Search Results (145)

In his passion, Jesus Christ was a victim of the intentional violent acts of others, which were highly likely to have been traumatic for him and those around him. In the Eucharist, traumatizing acts and events are represented through symbolism, narrative and action. Although the body is a common doctrinal and eucharistic trope, particularly in Paul, the flesh, which is prominent in Johannine imagery, is a more distinctively Christian symbol as well as being more generative for a eucharistic theology of the victim. In the eucharistic elements of separated bread and wine, Christ the priest is presented as also the paradigmatic victim. His shed blood, which was not reassimilated into his flesh at his resurrection, indicates an abiding earthly humanity in solidarity with other victims. For traumatized victims, where space in the Eucharist is provided for the acknowledgement of suffering and other negativity, participation in it may be a pathway of transformation. Traumatized victims might themselves continue this priestly transformation in the world, bearing, like Christ, the sins and woundedness of others and contributing to Christian witness, instruction and healing. Full article

The relationship between Scripture and the Liturgy remains one of the most extensively debated subjects in theological discourse. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, a divided Christendom witnessed the rise of a dichotomy between Scripture and Liturgy, as well as between the Word and the Sacrament. This dichotomy, however, is absent from the patristic thought, which perceives the unity and complementarity between Scripture and Liturgy, owing to their shared belonging to the one life of the Church—broadly defined as Tradition—and to the way they are understood and experienced as interconnected modes through which the singular Mystery of Jesus Christ is communicated to the faithful. The present study aims to demonstrate this unity by drawing on a substantial body of patristic writings, highlighting the fact that the life of the Church is one and is lived both as the rule of faith and the rule of prayer, and that through it, one and the same Christ communicates Himself to the faithful both through the Word and through the Holy Sacraments. For the Church Fathers, the Christian faith is not an abstract doctrine about Christ, but a real and personal encounter and communion with Him in the life of the Church. This patristic approach may offer a starting point for contemporary Christianity in addressing the current liturgical crisis and in rethinking and renewing future ecumenical dialogue. Such renewal presupposes a movement beyond secular formalism and nominalism, which have fostered excessive conceptualization and an antithetical view of Scripture and Liturgy, Word and Sacrament. Full article

This article argues that truth can be disclosed and found in incarnation and eucharistic repetition in a proportion between things and mind. Truth as a Christian concept is explored in the Gospel of John, and more specifically in the interaction between Jesus and Pilate, where Pilate at Jesus’ trial asks the question: ‘What is truth?’ The work of biblical commentators is examined in relation to truth in John’s Gospel. The importance of the Word made flesh and its eucharistic repetition is seen as central to truth. This is expanded using the concept of non-identical repetition, as discussed by several scholars, including David Ford and Catherine Pickstock, arguing that Jesus Christ in his incarnate form and in eucharistic repetition calls attention to truth as the proportion between things and mind. The implications of an ontological approach, as opposed to an epistemological approach are drawn in relation to eucharistic theology, with reference to signs (things of this world) and reflective processes (mind) in such a way that where there is a proportion between things and mind, truth is disclosed and found in incarnation and eucharistic repetition. Full article

Religious beliefs influence many behaviors and perspectives relevant to well-being and mental health. In Christianity, beliefs about how one attains salvation may be particularly relevant to psychology, but limited scholarship has considered cognitive aspects of religiosity. This study developed and evaluated a new measure of Beliefs about Salvation (BAS) that assesses affirmations of salvation (a) by God’s grace alone and (b) by God’s grace after human repentance/ordinances, as understood by different Christian denominations. We examined the association of the BAS with three measures of mental health and six measures of influences on religiosity. In a sample of 1556 predominantly members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Protestant Christians, which traditionally hold distinct views about the roles of divine grace and human works/ordinances necessary for salvation, the BAS data demonstrated evidence of reliability and validity in exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with two subscales, faith and works. Neither BAS subscale was significantly associated with the other variables measured in this study, except for religious legalism, which was negatively correlated with faith and positively correlated with works. Additional analyses indicated that six measures of influences on religiosity were moderately associated with one another and tended to be more strongly associated with mental health than religious involvement, with spiritual transcendence being the most strongly correlated with well-being. Psychological research can benefit from evaluating multiple aspects of religiosity, including inquiry about the psychological influence of specific religious beliefs. Full article

The fourth-century historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, lived during the anti-Christian persecutions of the Roman emperor Maximinus Daia and believed fervently that Jesus Christ would imminently return to alleviate the suffering of God’s people. When Constantine the Great became emperor and converted to Christianity, the bishop’s disposition towards the ‘last things’ or end times, known as eschatology, suddenly changed to a belief that God’s kingdom had already been inaugurated in this emperor’s reign. In this way, Eusebius conflated Church and Empire into a single organism governed by the emperor on behalf of Christ. This article demonstrates that this disposition in fact emerged from the bishop’s problematic Christology. Heretofore, the concept of the Logos had been applied to Son of God as creator of the world and who assumed human nature as Jesus. However, Eusebius’ disposition towards the Logos was subordinationist and dissociative, thus paving the way for him to depict the emperor as an agent of, and inhabited by, the Logos in the eschatological working out of earthly affairs from the vantage point of the city of Rome. Eusebius therefore essentially replaced Christ’s eschatological agency in the usurpation of the Church by the eternal city that was ultimately recapitulated within Constantine himself, even after the latter had died. Full article

The definitive demonstration of effective leadership is the ability to communicate with purpose in such a way that gives life to ideas and accomplishes organizational objectives. God’s message of grace to humanity was the Word, his Son Jesus Christ. God’s mode of communication is an example to us. As “The Word became flesh”—a living reality testifying of God’s grace—so must our communication have purpose and fulfillment. Because of its emphasis on building relationships through the communication process, leader–member exchange (LMX) theory provides a valid framework that describes how God demonstrated leadership and facilitated reconciliation with humanity through the Word. An exegetical analysis of John 1:1–18 considering LMX theory offered seven principles of effective communication. Full article

This article studies the Histoire critique de Jésus Christ (1770), anonymously published by the German-French atheist Paul d’Holbach, who edited, expanded, and radicalized an anonymous clandestine manuscript concerning the life of Jesus and the beginnings of his religious movement. The article analyzes how d’Holbach’s book mocks the figure of Christ, portraying the new faith as a fraudulent enterprise full of false miracles and human weaknesses. In a work where irony, humor, and ridicule are constantly used as narrative strategies, the demonological world provides opportunities for displaying multiple corrosive arguments against Christianity. After reviewing d’Holbach’s philosophical position against the existence of demons, the article studies how the devils’ role in Christian theodicy, the notion of demonic possession, and Christ’s exorcisms are ridiculed in Histoire critique as examples of irrationality, fraud, and superstition. In addition, the article will point to a contemporary debate influencing d’Holbach’s views on what he saw as the connected territories of demonology, credulity, and religious fanaticism: the controversy surrounding the 18th century convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard. This heterodox religious movement, characterized by belief in a holy man and miraculous cures, proved invaluable to d’Holbach, who maliciously compared this episode to the beginnings of the Christian movement. Full article

This article investigates the period of the origin of Christianity, namely that of the first century, the phase in which the emerging “Christianity” was being formed. It is a phase that has been much studied from many angles. The angle adopted in this article approaches the topic from a mediological framework. It relates to the Toronto School and the theses of Marshall McLuhan, for whom a medium is not only a communication channel but constructs the message and determines a way of reasoning. In this sense, the question arises as to how much, in the period of the birth of the new religion, the “media”, here understood as “environments”, had an influence: orality, writing, images, and spectacular performances cooperated in the construction of a multimedia religion that also drew from this richness a specific strength with which to impose itself over time. In particular, the following will be examined: the oral message of the “Rabbi” of Nazareth; the invention of the epistles of Paul of Tarsus; the conception of the Gospels as a written narration of the salvific event, capable of transforming the figure of Jesus into Christ; and the Apocalypse of John as the Christianization of a traditional genre. Full article

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian pacifist who believed Jesus Christ taught nonviolence, yet Bonhoeffer was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. How did Bonhoeffer justify to himself his participation in the plot? This essay makes the argument that Bonhoeffer, influenced by Soren Kierkegaard, distinguishes between ethics and acts of faith, suggesting the possibility that Bonhoeffer believed he was responding in faithful obedience to the direct call of God to participate in the plot despite the fact that this conflicted with the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. Full article

There is a widespread belief today, primarily among the agnostics and atheists, and even among the not so active believers, that all forms of religious belief, including Christian Catholicism, should remain outside the political realm, limited to private spirituality. This paper thematises, in the context of “positive laicity”, the way the Catholic Church changed its understanding of politics after the Second Vatican Council, regarding the involvement of believers, as serving the common good in a plural society. Using conciliar and post-conciliar documents as sources for reflection and argumentation, this paper outlines eight theological and anthropological assumptions regarding Catholic involvement in politics within the context of the 21st century, adapting the (post-)conciliar thought to the conditions of today’s globalised world. For Christians to do well in this responsible assignment, the starting point is Jesus Christ, both in the historical and in the cosmic project of God’s world in the making, expressed in the Old Testament as the arrival of God’s Kingdom. This article is methodologically limited, as the title states, to recognise and briefly sketch the content of a few basic theological–anthropological assumptions of Christian participation in politics, without going into the history of the issue, as well as to the authors who dealt with it in various aspects. In conclusion, we notice that the manner of religious action in politics described in this way presupposes that the believer has already left the state of infancy within his ecclesial community and is ready to make decisions within the political community based on his faith, competences and conscience, without clerical tutelage and obstruction. Full article

It is often said that Jacques Maritain, having disavowed his earlier right-wing political views, became a foremost enthusiast for liberalism among the Catholic cognoscenti of the mid-20th century. In this paper, I suggest that there is another reading of Maritain, one found in the thought of T.S. Eliot, whose political thought was, by his own insistence, inspired by his study of Maritain. In Eliot’s reception and use of Maritain, the modern age has not put an end to the traditional Christian teaching that Jesus Christ’s authority must be acknowledged not only by private individuals but by all temporal, political powers. Rather, the complexities of the modern age have brought to the fore the priority of personal holiness—and by extension, the holiness of the Christian community—in establishing a Christian social order over any causal power of legislative or executive acts by political leaders. In developing my case, I indicate that Eliot emphasises the categorically embodied character of the Christian life, and I highlight that the corollary of this observation is that Christian integralists and secular liberals may be falling into precisely the same error, namely the privileging of abstract schemas over existential spiritual and moral transformation. Full article

A major plank in the Evangelical apologetics platform (especially for the Jewish witness) has always been the predictive prophecy about Jesus in the Hebrew Bible. The number of these prophecies or “predictions” varies widely among Conservative–Evangelical sources. A brief survey of claims about the number of Christ-related Old Testament (OT) prophecies ranges from 50–400+. Regardless, the assertion of direct, intentional Old Testament prophetic pronouncement about Jesus has been a non-negotiable mainstay of Evangelical thought and theology since its beginning. However, today, those who align with the Evangelical movement in general, would disagree on technical grounds with the traditional way that Messianic prophecy has been explained hermeneutically or exegetically. Progressive Evangelicals, however, generally are concerned with the interpretation or exegesis of biblical passages in their grammatical–historical–cultural contexts. The focus is on texts rather than traditions. An irony is that traditional and untraditional Evangelicals who favor contextual exegesis in principle are still very divided when it comes to explaining how the NT used the OT, especially in relation to Messianic prophetic texts. This article describes the problem and illustrates it with examples of how some older and newer Evangelicals disagree when commenting on OT Messianic prophetic passages. Full article

While most Christians might imagine the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as a single event, for the author of Ephesians, the resurrection is a continuing event of cosmic proportions. In a very real way, the Epistle to the Ephesians is an extended reflection on the ongoing multidimensional cosmic consequences and transformations that result from the death of Jesus and his resurrection, whose impact not only affects the macrocosm in which Christ sits triumphantly at the right hand of God, “far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion” (Eph 1: 20–22), but also the microcosm of the Church, “his body, the fullness of the one who fills the universe in every way” (1: 23), transforming those who compose the smallest microcosm, the baptized who form a Christian household and who, gathered at table to share Eucharist (5: 17–6: 9), are “seated with Christ in the heavenly places” (2: 6), already participating in the eternal Messianic banquet. This is to say that, for this author, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the catalyst for an ongoing and ever more evolving “new creation” of humanity and, indeed, the entire cosmos, with “Christification”—the full maturation into the divine “Christ nature” (Eph 4: 13, 15–16) as the telos or goal for the whole universe (Eph 1: 10). Full article

The centrality of disruption as a graced moment of awakening social imagination to a new dawn where human flourishing becomes a possibility ought to be the focus of the church’s praxes of sacramental rituals. In fact, Christianity is itself a religion of disruption. The God–human reality that manifests itself in Jesus Christ is itself a graced disruption. God chooses to disrupt the familiar world of fallenness and thus offers God-self as a mediating gift that reorients creation to a new way of being that transcends the familiar orientation towards sin. Disruption, as an existential phenomenon, is not alien to the human condition. In fact, all aspects of human life are saturated with disruption. In fact, grace is itself God’s disruptive intervention in human history. Since creation embodies the goodness of God, creation can be said to be a sacramental symbol of disruption. In a social world where racism and other structures of marginality operate, victims of such marginalities embody in their existence the disruptive grace that can transform such a society. Black bodies are loci for encountering the disruptive grace intended to end the vice of racism. They also serve as the loci for the church to imagine a new way of being a sacrament of disruption in the world because of their existential proximity to the historical realities defining the life of Jesus Christ as a victim of the hegemony of empire. This work shows how black bodies can help foster a new imagination of the human in our contemporary world where systems of marginalization continue to shape human life in general. It attempts to address the following question: how can one conceive of black bodies in a world defined by systems of erasure that directly affect black persons and their embodied agencies? To do this effectively, this work appropriates a constructive theological approach that grounds itself in an interdisciplinary discourse with the intent to argue that to speak of the human person is to instantiate a polyphony of insights: insights that appeal to an ethical consciousness that is defined by altruism. Full article

The Shroud of Turin attracts consistently the interest of both the scientific community and the general public, as many believe that it is the burial cloth of Christ. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of the relevant scientific research addressing two key questions: (i) how were the image of the human body and the bloodstains formed on the Shroud? (ii) What is the age of the Shroud? The answer to the first question remains a mystery, and the article explores the most promising hypotheses. Consequently, the scientific community should have another opportunity in the near future, similar to that of the 1978 STURP campaign, to study the object. The 1989 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud, which addressed the second question and suggested that the linen cloth dates to the 14th century AD, is discussed in light of hypotheses and experimental studies that have raised concerns and objections about the Shroud’s possible medieval origin. It is concluded that the evidence from the significant reports published to date, which challenge the radiocarbon dating, is insufficient to overturn its finding. However, extracting new samples from different parts of the object to perform a second series of radiocarbon dating measurements is suggested. Full article