Philosophical Perspectives in the “Festal Homilies”

Confrontational Apologetics versus Grace-filled Persuasion Too often Christian apologetics has been conducted in a confrontational manner that alienates people and undermines apologetic effectiveness. Christian apologists must be attentive to both their message and how they communicate it. Grace-filled persuasion can flourish as Christian apologists recognize the growing contemporary suspicion of aggressive styles of behavior. The apologetic enterprise involves ideas, but it is also profoundly relational. The great challenge before Christian apologists is to speak and live in ways that combine uncompromising faithfulness to revealed truth with a generous spirit of loving service and civility. Grace-filled persuasion always trumps smash-mouth apologetics.

This paper compares J. W. Montgomery’s evidentialist approach to apologetics to Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositional approach. My position is that Van Til’s system is only theistic; it may support the existence of ‘God,’ but it does not prove the existence of the Christian God. In fact, Van Til’s method could just as easily be used by a Muslim apologist to assert the validity of Islam. This is because Van Til refuses to allow objective evidence to have any place in Christian apologetics. Because of this, he offers the non-theist no way of judging between the truth claims of Christianity and other religions. In fact, the most powerful weapon in the Christian apologist’s arsenal, the resurrection of Christ, cannot be used in an effective manner. This is in direct contradiction to the New Testament itself, where the resurrection is often used evidentially to validate the Christian faith.

This book presents an intellectual history of Anglo-American Protestant Christian apologetics from the seventeenth-century Puritans to twenty-first-century American evangelicals. The book draws on evidence from the works of leading Christian apologists and college courses in Christian evidences to argue that defenses of faith and reason provided an important bridge between the Enlightenment and a biblically based Protestant Christian faith in the early years of the American republic, and it then examines how that synthesis was reshaped in response to new developments in science and biblical criticism. The book examines how liberal Protestant Christian apologists reshaped their arguments for Christian faith in the early twentieth century and the effect that these arguments had on American religious culture. The book concludes with an examination of the fragmentation of Christian apologetics after the 1960s and a reflection of the place of Christian apologetics in American life today.

The beginnings of constitutional culture arose in Armenian reality in the pre-Christian period. They acquired a more systemic and fundamental character after the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, taking the form of value approaches underlying the canonical constitutions adopted by the National-Church Councils. In Armenian reality, constitutional culture had its own path of independent development, conditioned by specific realities, specific manifestations of our identity and culture of coexistence. Armenian historiography contains numerous references to the circumstances of the convocation of national church councils, with the main emphasis on the presentation of documentary material, the assessment of their role and significance, the analysis of the historical period and a number of other circumstances. Some attention was also paid to the general legal analysis of the rules adopted by these assemblies. However, we consider it a major gap that the constitutional role of national church assemblies has not received due attention from legal scholars. The fact is that, first of all, it was these assemblies that became the basis for the formation of Armenian constitutional culture.

Curiosity is central to children's development, particularly in science learning. This longitudinal study examines how epistemic curiosity, overall and its subtypes I-type and D-type, predicts scientific reasoning and science (physics) knowledge at the start (Grade 1) and end (Grades 3-4) of primary school, beyond prior knowledge and cognitive abilities. Parents of 122 children (mean age 6.12 years) completed an 11-item curiosity questionnaire. Scientific reasoning and science knowledge were assessed with standardized inventories and a 25-item physics test. Overall curiosity predicted early reasoning, whereas I-type curiosity predicted later science knowledge. These findings highlight that curiosity has distinct faces and phases: I-type and D-type operate differently at different developmental time points. Fostering both types supports multiple aspects of science competence.

Reviewed by: Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity Michael Bland Simmons Jeremy M. Schott . Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008 Pp. 254. As this reviewer has already noted (HTR 102 [2009]: 170 n. 2), this is one of the best books published in recent decades which analyze the works of Porphyry of Tyre and their place in the period just before the reign of Constantine. Schott analyzes how Porphyry and the Christian writers Lactantius, Eusebius, and Constantine employed their respective polemical arguments based on their search [End Page 466] for a "universal philosophy" that transcended ethnic and cultural particularity. The underlying principle for pagan polemics and Christian apologetics was the need of the Roman Empire to control the various ethnic groups that inhabited its provinces: "Ethnography and universal history sought a comprehension of diversity homologous to the imperial desire for control of diverse territories and peoples" (166). In Chapter One, Schott shows how Greek philosophers (e.g., Posidonius, Plutarch, Numenius) sought to "distill a universal philosophy that transcended ethnic and cultural specificity" (11). Early Christian apologists (Justin, Tatian) rediscovered the "ur-theology" of Paul which posited the one Creator of the universe. This enabled them to abandon the errors of polytheism and claim to possess the only universal philosophy which transcended cultural particularity. The chapter ends with an analysis of Celsus's definition of Christian exclusivity as rebellion against ancestral religious customs. Chapter Two deals with Porphyry of Tyre. Schott argues that Porphyry's polemical methodology was centered in "a philosophy that transcended cultural and ethnic particularity" (54). The Philosophy from Oracles and Against the Christians reveal a polemical argument which was developed in conjunction with imperial power and identity politics, with the former aimed at offering a "universal philosophy" and attacking the Christians' rival claims to a universal truth. Chapter Three is devoted to Lactantius's Divine Institutes. Lactantius employed Hermes, contemporary oracles of Apollo, and the Sibylline oracles, and Schott concludes that the Christian Cicero understood history as "a grand history of religions" (96), and thus the traditional pagan cults had a demonic origin. Porphyry failed to recognize the universal validity of Christianity. Lactantius perceived the success of Constantine's reign as being due to the simultaneous acknowledgement that Christianity was the vera religio and the cults of the gentes were falsae religiones. Chapter Four focuses on how Constantine's Oration to the Saints and imperial letters employed Christian apologetics to create an "ideology of Christian imperialism" (113) based on a Christian paideia revealed for all people which further served as a unifying force transcending the erroneous traditions of specific peoples. Included in the latter were Greek philosophers like Porphyry who failed to find the universal philosophy because they were too attached to the error of traditional ancestral customs. Chapter Five contains so much that is commendable, not the least of which is the inclusion by Schott of the often ignored and very significant Theophany of Eusebius, though the Praeparatio and Demonstratio are the main focus. Eusebius wrote them in response to Porphyry's attack upon Christian identity and argued that the anti-Christian writer contradicted himself and failed to acknowledge that the Christian religion is the "true universal philosophy" (140). In the works written after Constantine emerged as the church's benefactor (e.g., Theophany), Eusebius changed his understanding of the interrelationship between empire and church. He now perceived the imperial conquest of peoples and Christian evangelism as "two prongs in the same offensive against native error and barbarism" (157). An epilogue shows how the subjugation by Christian European colonialism [End Page 467] of native cultures in the early modern period might have developed from the interrelationship between Roman imperialism and Christian apologetics of the fourth century c.e. Both served as markers of cultural identity and were based on imperial powers. An appendix very convincingly elaborates upon the evidence addressed in earlier chapters of a close connection between Porphyry's anti-Christian works and the policies of the Diocletianic persecution, as well as the identification of Lactantius's unnamed philosopher (div. inst. 5.2) with Porphyry...

In this paper, the author offers the reader ways for the business practitioner to participate in Christian apologetics. Apologetics is defined. The purpose and tasks of apologetics is described. The author makes a case for the importance of Christian apologetics and introduces several tactics that offer potential for the Christian apologist. A table describes the potential opportunities to develop Christian apologetics for the context of business and economics. The article concludes with an introduction to the limitations of apologetics in the context of business and a call for further research in the application of Christian apologetics in business.

In this paper, I argue that the pragmeme 'defending a thesis' characterises Christian apologetics and that the various pragmatic acts performed are instantiations of this generalised situation type. Linguistic efforts have not really dealt with Christian apologetics generally, and specifically from a pragmatic perspective. This is the gap this paper hopes to fill. Furthermore, in the literature on pragmeme there is no study that focuses on the issue of 'defending a thesis'. For data, ten purposively selected texts from five prominent and contemporary Christian apologists were studied and representative excerpts were analysed using insights from the theory of pragmeme/pragmatic acts. The study concludes that the various individual practs-arguing, substantiating, disclaiming, authenticating, challenging, defending-in Christian apologetics are instantiations of the pragmeme 'defending a thesis'.

This book considers the history of British literary scholar, author and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis’s fame from the 1940s through the present and compares his contrasting patterns of reception in Britain and America. Lewis was both an esteemed literary figure and a divisive personality among his colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, who recognized his penchant for projecting a persona. It took the outbreak of the Second World War and invitations from Christian leaders to draw Lewis into crafting popular Christian apologetics. Yet Lewis’s reasons for writing books that were accessible to a broad audience, including his children’s books, were rooted in a literary theory informed by his early reading life in Edwardian Belfast and his objections to literary modernism. The reception of Lewis’s popular works in America was shaped by the fact that American readers did not appreciate Lewis’s literary and cultural context. His posthumous fame, furthermore, should be accredited in part to factors independent of the qualities of his work: e.g. the publishing history of his books, the rise of visual media, the history of evangelicalism, and the manipulation of his legacy by the C. S. Lewis Estate. The evolution of rival portraits of Lewis as a Christian apologist and a children’s author is equally part of this story. Lewis’s platform as a contrarian Christian resisting modernity and his reactions to the intellectual, social, and religious changes of his day made the critical difference to his disparate transatlantic receptions.

Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition: Evidence of the Influence of Apologetic Interests on the Text of the Canonical Gospels, by Wayne C. Kannaday. SBL TextCritical Studies 5. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature; Leiden: Brill, 2004. Pp. xiii + 274. $130,00/$39.95. ISBN 9004130853/1589831012. That the early Christians were engaged textual wars with pagan critics is by now well known. What has scarcely been explored, until now, is the degree to which early Christian scribes participated these wars the process of reproducing-copyingearly Christian texts. This study succeeds filling this gap. Kannaday's study, a revision of his doctoral dissertation under the of Bart D. Ehrman, is a compelling one: he argues, quite conclusively to my mind, scribes engaged the work of transmitting the canonical Gospels did indeed, some cases, modify their exemplars under the influence of apologetic (p. 57). To build his case for apologetics (p. 139), Kannaday focuses his attention on the textual traditions of the NT Gospels and proceeds successive chapters to show how the precise arguments made by pagan critics and Christian apologists can be found variant readings throughout the Gospels. The opening chapter introduces the various subfields that will be united the volume: the field of NT textual criticism and the field of early Christian apologetics. Specialists either of these fields will find little here, but including this material (which may well be a remnant of its once-dissertation status) allows the volume to reach a much broader audience. Kannaday offers brief introductions to the works of pagan critics (e.g., Pliny, Tacitus, Seutonius, Lucian, Apuleius, Marcus Cornelius Pronto, Celsus, Porphyry) and early Christian apologists (e.g., Quadratus, Aristides, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Melito, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, and Minucius Felix). Particularly helpful this first chapter is Kannaday's overview of the directions taken the field of NT textual criticism: while the seeds of this new direction were sown a century ago by the works of J. Rendel Harris and others, Kannaday is right to highlight how the work of his mentor, Bart Ehrman, (and others) has sought to redirect the focus away from establishing the original text of the NT and toward exploring how the transmission of the NT intersected with the historical dynamics of the second, third, and fourth centuries. Chapter 2 (Antiquity, Harmony, and Factual Consistency) brings the reader to the evidence itself. In a pattern that will repeat itself for the next three chapters, Kannaday begins by highlighting a particular theme the controversies between Christians and their pagan opponents and then demonstrates how the theme is apparent the textual traditions themselves. Here the subject is the pagan attacks on the apparent novelty (i.e., newness) of Christianity and their criticisms of the inconsistencies Christian Scriptures. Kannaday shows how Christian apologists and scribes worked to prove the antiquity of the Christian faith and modified the Scriptures so as to make them more consistent. Many of the variants Kannaday treats here and elsewhere, of course, have been studied by other NT textual critics, but Kannaday offers plausible, and often highly compelling, explanations for the cause of the variants. For example, his lengthy treatment of a variant at Mark 1:2 (Does the text read in Isaiah the prophet or in the prophets?), Kannaday suggests that, although scribes may simply have wished to omit errors-and hence preferred the more general reading in the prophets since what follows is not simply a prophetic passage from Isaiah-there may well have been an additional motivation at work: it is reasonable to posit apologetic interests as the momentum behind this scribal alteration. Certainly the effect of the change served apologetic interests, as the correction buttressed a vulnerable spot the text that had already been exploited by an antagonist [i. …

Schmidt is usually associated with the theory of primitive monotheism, diffusionism, and the concept of cultural circles.His impressive attempt to do both Christian apologetics and empirical science in the field of ethnology and religious studies generated a broad discussion concerning the limits of science, the role of presuppositions in scientific knowledge, the problem of evolution, etc.The article examines the Russian contribution to that discussion.First of all, it presents Schmidt's main ideas that became a topic of discussion in Russian science, then main historical antecedents of their perception, and the initial, prerevolutionary reactions on them.Afterwards the author's attention concentrates on the main tendencies in the discussion concerning Schmidt in the period extending from the 1920s to the 2000s.[Wilhelm Schmidt, primeval monotheism, militant atheism, ethnology, religious studies in the USSR]

The article is devoted to the study of the features of the formation and develop­ment of the magical and mystical traditions in Russian culture, from the era of Ancient Rus’ to the present. In the culture of Ancient Russia the dominant was the magical consciousness, generated by the belief in the man’s ability to influ­ence the material world with the help of certain rituals. The penetration of mysti­cism in the form of Orthodox hesychasm as the doctrine of the “deification” of man began with the adoption of Christianity. Hesychasm becomes the moral core of Russian culture thanks to the efforts of the holy ascetics, who affirm the values of love and national unity. Mysticism, being a set of practices aimed at re­structuring consciousness, requires hard work and efforts from a person. The do­mestic mystical tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries was supplanted by West­ern European mysticism, occultism and magic. Magic is always practical, utilitarian and aimed at achieving specific human needs. The consciousness of a modern person remains basically magical.

The most detailed description of the “Balkan” period is found in the novel by D. Tanasoglo “Uzun Kervan”. In other genres (poetry), the poeticized image of the Balkans as the historical homeland of the Gagauz is presented to a greater extent. The main events of the “Balkan” period in the history of the Gagauzians, reflected in fiction, are: the adoption of Christianity by the Oghuz / Uzes – the ancestors of the Gagauzians, relations with the local population of the Balkans, the struggle against the Ottoman Turks, and the creation of a fictional Gagauz state called Uzi Eyalet. The authors also draw attention to the way in which changes occur in the traditional everyday culture of ancestors of the Gagauz as a result of changing economic-cultural type, and religion. In the Gagauz environment of creative people, there is a unity in the perception of the historical past associated with the presence of the ancestors of the Gagauz people in the Balkans. As a rule (with a few exceptions), the past broadcast by Gagauz writers is largely mythologized: and the writers themselves play a significant role in the process of constructing ethnicity.

In the article, the author describes the features of Christian culture, which, in his opinion, represents the spiritual face of the era. It is stated that the Church in Kyivan Rus as a social creation contributed to the national unification and formation of Rus statehood, and on the basis of the unity of the Orthodox faith, national consciousness also increased. The author of the article emphasizes that with the adoption of Christianity, Rus became a full participant in the world historical process and the cultural Byzantine tradition. In particular, international trade and diplomatic relations developed more actively, and the national consciousness of young Rus was formed. The author summarizes the historiographical references and literary monuments of the 11th century. First of all, he examines the chronicle of Nestor the Chronicler, a monk of the Kyiv-Pechersk monastery, Instruction of Volodymyr Monomakh. A wide range of socio-political, religious and philosophical issues of the then society is defined. He reconstructs the school system of education of the then era and shows that the spread of Christianity contributed to the spread of education in the territory of Rus-Ukraine. The author believes that the historical experience of the achievements of the Christian life of Kyivan Rus will certainly serve the development of social and religious relations at the present stage, and the creation of a single local Orthodox Church is one of the most important national goals of Ukraine. The study of state-Church relations is impossible without taking into account the peculiarities of secular and confessional scientific circles, because they form an idea of understanding the problem within the Church and the state. Only the totality of this and other knowledge can form an idea of modern models of state-Church relations, determine ways of improvement, approve democracy, and so on. The article notes that there are very few domestic scientists who study Ukrainian religious and philosophical opinion in Ukraine. Keywords: Kyivan Rus, Christianity, cultural and spiritual life, Church, education system.

The relationship between scores on scientific knowledge and scientific reasoning among 67 elementary school students in Grades 6 to 8 was investigated. Scientific knowledge was assessed by an objective test of life science knowledge consisting of 40 multiple-choice items. Scientific reasoning was assessed by a test of life science reasoning skills consisting of 10 essay items. Both scientific knowledge and scientific reasoning increased across grades and were significantly correlated. However, when controlling for scientific knowledge, grade differences in scientific reasoning were nonsignificant, but differences in scientific reasoning between boys and girls were significant, with girls scoring higher than boys.