Paul's Idea of the "New Man" and Transhumanism

The article is devoted to the analysis of “psychological” argument for the existence of God of Viktor Nesmelov, professor of Kazan Theological Academy, represented in his fundamental work “Science of Man”. The main interpretations of this argument, formulated both contemporaries of Nesmelov (Nikolay Berdiaev, bishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky)) and modern researchers of his legacy (priest D. Lushnikov, bishop K. Goryanov) are considered. The basic prerequisites and origins of Nesmelov’s anthropological doctrine are analyzed. The main of them were V. Snegiryov’s psychological doctrine and anthropological ideas of St. Gregory of Nyssa. The main ideas of Nesmelov’s Christian anthropology, related directly to his formulation of “the idea of God” (the doctrine of consciousness and self-consciousness of man; idea of man as the “main riddle” of the universe; idea of the fundamental “duality” of human nature; doctrine of Theosis and God-manhood, doctrine of sin and universal salvation (apokatastasis), etc.) are revealed. Besides that, Nesmelov’s criticism of the main existing arguments for the existence of God (ontological, cosmological, teleological, psychological, etc.) is analyzed. The main conclusion based on the analysis of Nesmelov’s anthropological system is made: his argument for the existence of God represents rather a methodological program for creating such argument in the future. The base of this argument should be made of not only by an “ abstract knowledge”, but the “living worldview” and the “living unity of God and man”.

. The paper analyzes the civilizational sources of European legal culture. The relevance of the subject matter can be explained by the complex dynamics of the European cultural tradition that is currently undergoing a transformation. The involvement of various cultural flows in the genesis of the legal essence of Europe complicates the understanding of the modern cultural identity of European law. An important motive for the study was to clarify the place of the Slavic historical tradition of law in the European cultural space. The genesis of the European legal tradition is considered on the basis of the features of the Greco-Roman civilization. The Authors have characterized the features and spiritual (religious) sources of further development of European law, namely: Christianity and Islam. The study also highlights typological legal correlations. It explains the features of the European legal mentality and concludes that a special type of European legal consciousness was formed in the Middle Ages. It combines religious, mental, state-secular and folk elements. The authors draw a conclusion on heterogeneity of the civilizational elements of the European legal culture, the inclusion of various civilizational flows in it — Greco-Roman, Christian (Western and Eastern churches), Muslim and Jewish.The paper outlines the contours of the split of European legal consciousness in the Middle Ages based on the rupture of the Western and Eastern churches; explains the legal meaning of some elements of doctrinal practice. It provides a civilizational characteristic of the Slavic legal culture, its anti-rationalism and a special type of procedural thinking. It shows the significance of Muslim culture in the development of the European legal tradition; reveals the historical features of the judicial-customary type of European legal civilization. Based on the historical analysis of the formation of the European legal tradition, the authors summarize modern trends in the new integration of European legal identity.

This article examines practical theological hermeneutics through the lens of Catholic spirituality. Key to understanding the movement from description to analysis to revised praxis is the ways in which interpretive communities understand the connections between divine reality and human reality. In light of this, the article explores the relationship between epistemology and pneumatology found within Christian tradition by proposing an approach to practical theological hermeneutics rooted in the Ignatian practice of spiritual discernment. By doing so, this article seeks to contribute the potential contours of a distinctive Roman Catholic contribution to practical theology, and in a broader sense, show how the practice of discernment presents studies and methods in practical theology with a way of understanding connections among practical wisdom, habitus, research, and theological interpretation.

Spirituality is the dynamic motion of total life driven by the Holy Spirit that flows from the depths of the heart of oneself, lead him/her to the true actions and bring to the meaning of life. This definition emerged and formed from the experiences oneself in every moment of his/her lives. Spirituality is always associated with every aspect of life in which he/she lives and works, in situations of joy and sorrow, with what and whom he/she interacts and communicates. Came to realize that the reality of the experience of life and the struggle to form a person's quality of life and character make him/her having a deep spirituality. Life will be more meaningful when people are aware and recognize that every event and experience the life through the intervention of God in everything around. We can feel the power of God (the Divine) presents and works in every word and action, in every step of the way of our life. Touched, awared and moved by God, the writer realizes that there is a process and a dynamic relation between human reality and divine reality in an indigenious people spirituality. As we have to know that the indigenious people have a spirituality. They see spirituality as a way of life in which all people are free to be themselves and practice life according to their norms. Therefore, this article is a reflection and understanding of the writer about spirituality of indigenious people, especially Batak Toba tribe in North Sumatera.

The Second World War is often seen as a victory for democracy, but at the same time represents the final bankruptcy of those humanistic ideas that seemed so deeply rooted in European tradition. The idea of a European community of democratic civil institutions is based on the fact that the Second World War was the peak — or rather the ‘point zero’ — in the history of mutual destruction. Never in the history of Europe had so many Europeans been killed, never had so many civilians become the victims of war and totalitarian regimes. And by 1945, a very large part of Europe, from London to the Ural, from Northern Germany to Athens and Naples, was literally in ruins, leaving the smell of death hanging over the former cities, their inhabitants being thrown back to a kind of pre-historic existence. One can get a pretty good impression of this situation by reading Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s anthology Europa in Trummern (1990), which gathers accounts of the state of Europe from 1944 to 1948, written by journalists and authors most of whom had not themselves been affected by the destructions, and who therefore looked upon the ruins from the perspective of an outsider. Whether reporting from a small Dutch Town like Nijmengen or from the city of Warsaw, they tried to imagine the life and appearance of these cities with their historic centres and proud inhabitants before they had been turned into rubble and lunar landscapes.

This essay explores the experience of suffering in order to see to what extent it can be understood within the context of the human condition without diverting the reality of suffering or denying the meaning of human existence and divine reality. Particular attention is given to describing and interpreting what I call the transcendent dimensions of suffering with the intent of showing that in the experience of suffereing persons come up against the limits of what can be accounted for in ordinary terms and point towards transcendent reality. In religious faith the transcendent dimensions of suffering may be understood to come together with other transcendent dimensions of experience in a more distinctive or focused encounter with transcendent reality. The conception of God that is suggested by the transcendent dimensions of suffering, however, differs from the model of God in western theism as an absolutely transcendent, all powerful, immutable and impassible being.

IN CLOSING the introductory chapter of Problem of Knowledge, Professor Douglas C. Macintosh called attention to the correspondence between the problem of knowledge in general and of religious knowledge in particular and suggested that the knowledge value of religious experience would prove to be the most interesting part of epistemology.' A few years ago his original plan came to fruition in the companion volume, Problem of Religious Knowledge. In the Preface he writes: The philosophical position represented by both volumes and by what I have written in the intervening quarter-century may be described as idealism with respect to ideals and realism in relation to reality.2 epistemological counterpart of this philosophy is the contention that can have some direct experience, from which we can gain some verified knowledge3 of physical, human, and divine realities which exist independently of our knowledge of them. These epistemological claims become the basis for the im-

This article explores, through some historical vignettes, the question of whether there are necessary connections between the Christian worldview and religious aggression, whether in the form of brutal extermination of the religious others or more subtly of interpretive violence on their cultural traditions. The Hindu ‘pluralistic’ attitude towards the religions is often put forward as a paradigm of an open-minded acceptance of their diversity. However, varieties of Hindu ‘pluralism’ turn out, on closer inspection, to be based on specific criteria about the nature of human and divine reality, and collapse, in fact, to forms of ‘exclusivism’ which propose a certain event or experience as the paradigm through which human existence is to be interpreted. The crucial debate, then, is not so much between Christian ‘exclusivism’ versus Hindu ‘pluralism’ as over the basis for viewing religious diversity as encompassed by the divine purpose for humanity.

Chapter 7 considers prophetic ecstasy as a transformative religious experience. Debates about the existence and nature of prophetic ecstasy in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament owe partly to prior assumptions about the characteristics of biblical prophecy and Israelite religion and partly to the phenomenological complexity and diverse forms of religious ecstasy. Modern debates are matched by polemics, conflicting assessments, and questions within the biblical texts. But ecstasy is not a marginal feature of biblical prophecy. It enabled a prophet to bridge human and divine realities through the temporary alteration of mind and body. Biblical evidence for induction techniques such as fasting, meditation, music, or rhythmic movement is slender. Prophetic ecstasy was frequently interpreted as a form of spirit possession that could produce visions or supernatural transport. Prophetic ecstasy had the power to make the deity present, reveal hidden realities, and reshape structures of power.

Reviewed by: The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David William Arnal The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, by Thomas L. Thompson. New York: Basic Books, 2005/London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. 414 pp. $35.00. Thomas L. Thompson's Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, is an openly revisionist effort to re-think the biblical narratives as metaphoric or parabolic intellectual exercises, which reflect on virtue, personal piety, and the individual's relationship to the divine by means of decidedly [End Page 176] non-historical presentations of characters such as the Patriarchs, David, Job, or Jesus. Of particular note is the royal imagery that permeates these presentations, and that serves as the guiding framework within which a whole host of individual motifs (piety, humility, the orderliness of creation, the gulf between the human and transcendent, war as holy war, and so on) find their place. When we look at biblical texts, therefore, in terms of atomized source analysis, or to provide information about history or historical figures, we are misreading them. They represent, rather, a conversation—scribal and deeply intellectual—among themselves, with the core images and ideals of Ancient Near Eastern piety and its royal ideologies. The biblical texts, including the gospels, are, in short, fundamentally exegetical rather than historical. This basic argument is applied throughout the book to a host of biblical themes, which are explored in sometimes-extravagant detail in terms of their place within the larger complex of Ancient Near Eastern royal ideologies (and the theological corollaries thereof ). Among such themes are humility, poverty, holy war, destruction and re-creation, cosmic order, resurrection, and the Messiah. In each case, Thompson explores these themes intertextually within the bible, and in terms of comparison with analogous or identical themes elsewhere in Ancient Near Eastern literature, and argues that such motifs have been misunderstood in mainstream biblical scholarship, misinterpreted too literally or historically, rather than as the intertextual and exegetical metaphors they really are. An excellent example of this treatment is Thompson's impressive handling of apocalypticism in the New Testament. Rather than viewing apocalyptic motifs in the New Testament gospels as oral testimonies to the actual teaching of the historical Jesus, or, conversely, as secondary accretions added because of later anticipations of Jesus' return, Thompson sees apocalyptic motifs as intrinsic and inseparable aspects of a much larger complex of motifs, a complex both older and broader than the New Testament (or the Hebrew Bible, for that matter) and its specific context. The actual point of reference of, e.g., Jesus' proclamation of the coming Son of Man is not popular expectation of a literal apocalypse. Rather, the whole presentation is part of a larger literary tradition of the contrast between human and divine realities, with specific reference to the interpretation of this motif as it appears in Isaiah. The apocalypse is an intertextual image of human and worldly distance from the divine, not an actual popular expectation. The book, and the argument it proposes, have some significant weaknesses. Like many scholarly mavericks, Thompson overstates his case and underestimates the scholarship he criticizes. Particularly the opening sections of the book are filled with gross misrepresentations of gospel scholarship. Thompson criticizes source analysis of the synoptic gospels, and in particular [End Page 177] the Q hypothesis, on the grounds that it atomizes texts in terms of thematic differences; in fact, the basis for synoptic source criticism is literary patterns of detailed agreement and disagreement in sequence and wording, and so Thompson's criticism is directed at a straw man. He is clearly unfamiliar with, or has badly misunderstood, the work he targets here. This is particularly unfortunate in light of the ammunition such scholarship could provide him. Recent scholarship on Q, for example, has stressed its scribal character, its nature as a school product, its intellectual and textual-exegetical orientation, and its point of reference to a literary rather than actual world—all points that would mesh nicely with Thompson's basic argument and approach. Thompson also entirely neglects the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, a profoundly unfortunate omission in light of Smith's important work on the...

Summary. The purpose of the article is to apprehend the trends of modern civilization and the man’s place through the artistic and figurative philosophy of Peter Bruegel the Elder. Thus, we reflect on the modern spiritual crisis: anthropological, moral, religious. Methodology. The main method for this type of research was the methodological potential of phenomenology and existentialism. In particular, we are talking about the significance for us of the situation that Bruegel offers. What matters is not so much a historical generalization of a particular event, but primarily being wrapped up in it. We have also used historical, critical (estimating) and interpretive methods. Scientific novelty. Creativity of Peter Bruegel the Elder is first and foremost translated in philosophical thinking that was ahead of time for many centuries and gives impetus to self-knowledge and comprehension of the main idea of history – the Idea of Man. Peter Bruegel formulated the idea of apocalyptic world: the tragedy and absurdity of earthly life, the impossibility of stability and prosperity in it. Unfortunately, as Bruegel showed us, humanity continues to remain blind in relation to the higher Divine Truths, only on the basis of which it is possible to remain a Man and to be in harmony with oneself and the Universe. Conclusions. In the existential involvement of the painting of the Dutch artist, we saw common features between his era and modern age – the crisis of spiritual order, anthropological catastrophe. Secondly, in the sense of Bruegel’s understanding of the universe and man, there is the idea of Divine Providence. His egregious works do not suppress with hopelessness but «purify» and «enlighten» the viewer. It is invisible energy that awakens the spiritual and religious feeling of the man. And even though history returns in its ironically-tragic hypostasis, it is quite clear that the only aspiration can be the desire «not to feed» it with human lives.

period between 1960 and 1970 represents an era of important and extraordinary cultural change in United States. Longstanding issues of relationship of ethnic vernacular to mainstream, and that of American mainstream to European high art, came into focus in these years in a particularly contentious yet artistically fruitful manner. If one recalls artists such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy, it is clear that jazz musicians were never before so technically proficient on their instruments or in their mastery of European traditions. On other hand, these artists consciously intended to foreground non-European musical influences as well as Afrocentric and folkloristic elements of jazz. At same time, poets and theorists of Black Arts Movement (including Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Askia Muhammad Toure) were making a very popular case for an aesthetic conceived as openly oppositional to both European and white American culture. roots of Black Arts Movement are easily traced to Harlem Renaissance of 1920s. That earlier movement first attempt by American artists to produce work consciously grounded in their folk heritage and to utilize that work for social advancement of race. For Larry Neal, Harlem Renaissance was essentially a failure. It did not address itself to mythology and lifestyles of black community (78). This statement seems puzzling today, but its meaning crystal clear in 1968 and pointed to a political philosophy underlying aesthetic discriminations. Whereas leaders of Harlem Renaissance hoped to prove cultural worthiness of Americans byy demonstrating their aptitude for cultivation, development, and progress in terms understood by white American society, leaders of Black Arts Movement hoped to celebrate a kind of proletarian and vaguely African culture. Like Zora Neale Hurston's appreciation of folk, Black Arts Movement sought to identify a certain intrinsic beauty and vitality in American authenticity. This view particularly affected way that Black Arts Movement writers dealt with jazz. In an important essay titled Jazz and White Critic (1963), Amiri Baraka declared: In jazz criticism, no reliance on European tradition or theory will help at all. Negro music, like Negro himself, is strictly an American phenomenon, and we have got to set up standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing or commentary about it. (186) By 1966, Baraka had framed message much more concisely: The music you hear (?) is an invention of Black lives (Black Music 176). What at stake, of course, a cultural hierarchy explicit in American society. As a visiting student once expressed it, They love your music - but they don't love you. Black Arts Movement asked, basically, what's love got to do with it? In area of music, prevailing cultural hierarchy assigns value to European symphonic tradition at expense of indigenous American musical conventions. Compared to jazz, classical music has been assigned a higher cultural value which - of course - has very little to do with music per se. In 1948 Sidney Finkelstein noted that the man who listens to jazz, whether New Orleans or bebop, is hearing as unstandardized a set of musical scales and combinations of scales as is he who listens to Copeland or Ives. Finkelstein logically concluded that the artificial distinction between 'classical' and 'popular' has been forced upon our times by circumstance that production of both ... has become a matter for financial investment instead of art (9). There is, however, a definite political rationale involved that touches on aesthetic questions. …

Louis Martyn is well-known for his “apocalyptic” interpretation of Paul. This interpretation emphasizes divine priority and agency in God’s liberation of humanity, through Christ and the Spirit, from enslaving cosmic powers Sin and Death, the στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, the Mosaic law. Martyn’s emphasis on divine priority makes the theological aspect of Paul’s letters front, center, and determinative. In this essay, I embrace and deepen Martyn’s theological insight by examining the Trinitarian and Christological ground of Paul’s theology in Gal 4:1–11. By analyzing several theological “moments” in the movement of that text, I clarify two distinct but not separate aspects of apocalyptic discontinuity: (1) discontinuity as the fundamental and absolute distinction between divine and creaturely being, revealed when God at the appointed time sends forth his Son, “born of a woman”; (2) discontinuity as the apocalyptic-messianic “invasion” of the enslaved world (“born under law”), conflict with the powers, and liberation of humanity in the crucifixion/resurrection of Christ. By distinguishing these two forms of apocalyptic discontinuity, I show that in Paul “apocalyptic” is not originally and essentially “invasion” but the peaceable union of divine and human reality in the incarnation. “Invasion” rightly characterizes the entry of this union into an enslaved cosmos, as God liberates humanity for participation in the triune divine life.

It is often said that Christian mystics and contemplatives deemphasize reason, especially during advanced stages of spiritual growth such as union with God. St John of the Cross insists that to be united with God in this life through faith, we must empty our intellect of all comprehensions of God in a dark night of unknowing. According to Zwi Werblowsky, John's teaching on faith means the annihilation of the intellect. Werblowsky distinguishes between cognitive and anti–cognitive mysticism, and calls John's mysticism anti–cognitive. According to Werblowsky, cognitive mysticism values distinct, detailed knowledge from divine sources about divine or human realities, while anti–cognitive mysticism rejects such supernatural knowledge as an obstacle to union with God.

Notwithstanding the difference in historical periods of creativity, in the treatises of some of the most famous thinkers both in Islamic culture and in the Christian world, ideas and understandings of the image are found as a notion that does not exhaust the perception of God, but is relevant to the pursuit of God's knowledge. The brief historical distance between the emergence of the Pseudo-Dionysian treatises and those of Islamic philosophy allows us to make a comparison between the two religious worldviews. The two monotheistic concepts of the manifestations of God in the visible world have common foundations in the Geek philosophy and the views of the Neoplatonists. The rich and tangled language in the Pseudo-Dionysian treatises reveals the two-sided process of the interrelation between the divine and human realities. In the texts of the Muslim thinker Muhammad al- Ghazālī, the image of the contemplative man's ascension to the Almighty and indescribable God is also revealed. This article attempts to compare the patterns of thought through which these two philosophers, with different religious beliefs, express their understanding of the image of God and the path of contemplative rising to Him. The image of the One, from where the entire immanent world originates, occupies the first place for both wise men. But while for the Muslim philosopher the manifestations of God in the world are a direct realization of His gentle mind, the Christian thinker focuses on the image of the incarnation of God in the person of Christ.