God, Creation, Salvation and Modern Science

1987 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-103
Author(s):  
Harold P. Nebelsick

AbstractThe purpose of the following paper is to show that, rather than being antithetical to the faith as based on the Old and New Testaments, natural science arose in the West in relationship to and, to a certain extent, as a consequence of the biblical theology that was integral to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The biblical understanding, emphasized by the reformers served to promote both a mind-set that was compatible with the development of science and a milieu in which science was enabled to evolve. The thesis is not new. As will be noted in the body of the paper, similar claims have been put forth long since by such persons as Günter Howe, Herbert Butterfield, Reijer Hooykaas and Thomas Torrance. In a real sense the thought of these scholars was anticipated by certain of the ideas propagated by Francis Bacon already at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The revival of interest in the ancient world that was the hallmark of the Renaissance served to resuscitate interest in both the writings of the ancient classical world and in the venerable sources of Christian thought as well. The rediscovery of the doctrines emphasized by the biblical documents that led to the Protestant Reformation eventually served to lead to a reorientation of the Christian mind regarding the created world. A new appreciation of the primacy of the grace of God in the biblical understanding of creation, providence, and salvation brought with it a deeper appreciation of the freedom of God in his relation with the creation, on the one hand, and of the freedom of the world in its creaturely differentiation from the Creator, on the other.

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.


Author(s):  
Randall C. Zachman

Karl Barth seeks to restore the Gospel to the centre of Protestant theology by orienting dogmatic theology to the witness of the prophetic and apostolic authors of Scripture and to the theology of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Barth especially endorses Luther’s claim that the proclamation of the living and free Word of God in Jesus Christ lies at the heart of the commission laid on the church, and that the task of theology is to test the truth of that proclamation. However, Barth becomes increasingly critical of Luther and Calvin when they distinguish God revealed in Jesus Christ from God in Godself and when they distinguish a Word of God in Scripture—be it a Word of the Creator or the Word as Law—that is distinct from the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. Barth also disagrees with Luther and Calvin regarding the sacraments, insisting at the end of his career that Jesus Christ is the one and only sacrament of God.


Author(s):  
Emily Anne Parker

The polis, the philosophical concept according to which there is one complete human form, is to blame for political and ecological crises. The polis as a philosophical tradition shares the current complex shape of climate change. A certain perfect body figures the denial of matter of the polis. The book presents a philosophy of elemental difference, an affirmation of the singularities of location, movement, living, aging, dying, valuing, in which humans partake. Elemental difference in the polis can be appreciated in the fact that empirical bodily nonidentity can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Empirical bodily nonidentity is a feature of the original articulation of the polis as a philosophical concept in the work of Aristotle. Sylvia Wynter has argued that the very idea of empirical bodily nonidentity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy. She calls this biocentrism. This book argues that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it.


1965 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
J. N. Bakhuizen Van Den Brink

In the two ninth-century treatises on the Eucharist written by Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus two opinions are expressed which seem to be in complete contradiction with each other. Both, however, are founded in the liturgy of the Church and spring from the same orthodox root. Their doctrines, therefore, do not differ from each other in every detail of the argumentation. The one may be characterised as the realistic-metabolic doctrine, the other as the symbolic doctrine. J. R. Geiselmann in his penetrating studies of the eucharistic doctrine in the early Middle Ages prefers to distinguish between three tendencies: (1) the metabolism of St Ambrose and the Gallican liturgies; (2) the realism of the Roman liturgy; (3) the dynamism of St Augustine’s more spiritual doctrine. The most diverse answers were inspired by closer inquiries into the realisation of the sacrament, i.e. the question firstly how the conversion of the elements should be understood and, secondly, how the relation should be seen between the consecrated elements and the body of Christ ascended to heaven. In these answers the terminology used is not always the same, so that a reliable interpretation offers great difficulties.


1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Kargon

“The Office of the sense shall be the only judge of the experiment, and … the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”Francis Bacon, The Great InstaurationThe first history of the Royal Society of London, published in 1667, and the most recent full study of that scientific organization published three centuries later, agree on one important point: that Sir Francis Bacon was the intellectual progenitor of the body, that in the denigrating words of a contemporary critic the Society was “Bacon-faced.” The author of the former, Thomas Sprat, termed Bacon the “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise,” and in “whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments that can be produced for the defence of Experimental Philosophy.” The author of the latter, Margery Purver, agrees that “Bacon was the great formative influence on the Society's concept of science.”Yet it must be conceded at once that Bacon's legacy was ambiguous. While the early Royal Society indeed was Bacon-faced, “it saw many faces of Bacon.” The period after the founding of the Society, the 1660's and 1670's, was one of contending philosophies and of a continuing effort to fashion clearer notions of what an experimental philosophy was to be like and what role experience was to play in scientific argument. Two of the more important and influential members of the Society who were actively engaged in this pursuit were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; these men were, and saw themselves, as disciples of the Lord Chancellor. It is my intention here to illustrate the differing approaches to the Baconian legacy of Boyle and of Hooke by focusing attention upon an interesting analogy, used by both, which may aid us in interpreting the conception of experiment in the works of these two founders of the experimental philosophy.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-133
Author(s):  
Liz Oakley-Brown

This essay suggests that, as plays produced in the wake of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the Protestant Reformation, two early Shakespearean comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590–91) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1594–95), engage with multilingualism’s and translation’s impact on early modern English identities in striking ways. While these late-sixteenth-century texts are products of a cultural mind-set grappling with the vicissitudes of Englishness via the dramatization of deftly layered social strata and linguistic differences, ultimately, I argue that they simultaneously anticipate cultural accord. — Keywords: Shakespearean comedy; the Reformation; identity politics in Elizabethan England; social exclusion; friendship We only ever speak one language […] — (yes, but) — We never speak only one language… (Jacques Derrida 1998: 10)


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Zoran Avramović

Abstract Spirit and body of the man living in the world of modern technology are discussed in the paper. The entire life of modern man is under the pressure of rapid and far‐reaching changes in economy, organisation, education, self‐image. The relations between the spirit and the body on the one side and illness and health, money, media, narcissism, morality and national identity on the other side are studied in the article. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between the world of modern science and technology and the quality of life focusing on the mind and body. The fact emphazised in the conclusion is that the nature of Western ‐ European civilization has been changing with predominant turning to the SELF, to the absolute interest of an invidual in terms of materialism. The result of this civilizational turn is jeopardizing the spirit and the body of modern man.


2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. C. Ambrose

This paper develops a detailed reading of Deleuze's philosophical study of Bacon's triptychs in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. It examines his claims regarding their apparent non-narrative status, and explores the capacity of the triptychs to embody and express a spiritual sensation of the eternity of time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-381
Author(s):  
Margot Gayle Backus ◽  
Spurgeon Thompson

As virtually all Europe's major socialist parties re-aligned with their own national governments with the outbreak of World War I, Irish socialist and trade unionist James Connolly found himself internationally isolated by his vociferous opposition to the war. Within Ireland, however, Connolly's energetic and relentless calls to interrupt the imperial transportation and communications networks on which the ‘carnival of murder’ in Europe relied had the converse effect, drawing him into alignment with certain strains of Irish nationalism. Connolly and other socialist republican stalwarts like Helena Molony and Michael Mallin made common cause with advanced Irish nationalism, the one other constituency unamenable to fighting for England under any circumstances. This centripetal gathering together of two minority constituencies – both intrinsically opposed, if not to the war itself, certainly to Irish Party leader John Redmond's offering up of the Irish Volunteers as British cannon fodder – accounts for the “remarkably diverse” social and ideological character of the small executive body responsible for the planning of the Easter Rising: the Irish Republican Brotherhood's military council. In effect, the ideological composition of the body that planned the Easter Rising was shaped by the war's systematic diversion of all individuals and ideologies that could be co-opted by British imperialism through any possible argument or material inducement. Although the majority of those who participated in the Rising did not share Connolly's anti-war, pro-socialist agenda, the Easter 1916 Uprising can nonetheless be understood as, among other things, a near letter-perfect instantiation of Connolly's most steadfast principle: that it was the responsibility of every European socialist to throw onto the gears of the imperialist war machine every wrench on which they could lay their hands.


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