Biblical Morality Research Articles

Between Realism and Idealization. Contemporary Controversies Surrounding the Ways of Fulfilling the Didactic Functions of Images of Saints from a Theological and Moral Perspective

The purpose of this article is to provoke discussion on the worship of images depicting saints. However, it is not about defending this worship, since this issue has already been definitively settled by the Church. Instead, the article concerns a new problem – the controversies that arose in connection with some modern depictions of saints, mainly in painting. The mildest of these controversies involve paintings, often made on the basis of surviving photographs, showing saints during their ordinary everyday activities, e.g. while working or resting. A much sharper polarization of opinions occurs when the painting reveals the ethos of the saint with all realism, that is including also their imperfections, and even sin. Can such a saint be an object of veneration which, after all, inherently entails following them as role models? Is such veneration not an acceptance and promotion of flaws that contradict biblical morality? Can such images serve a didactic function? Instead, wouldn’t a certain idealization be advisable – the portrayal of a saint as someone perfect, excluding their flaws and weaknesses? The author takes a position on these controversies by formulating criteria for “good” images based on the theological and moral principles of their worship and an analysis of their functions.

What Does Morality Have to Do with It? What Haidt and Moral Foundation Theory Reveals about White Evangelical Christian Women Who Advocate for Politician Donald J. Trump

This qualitative research offers an explanatory framework to identify potential moral motives evangelical Christian women demonstrate when championing Donald J. Trump, who defies biblical morality. Through focus groups and in-depth semi-structured interviews and utilizing Haidt’s Moral Foundation Theory (MFT), which hypothesizes that conservatives rely on all five of his moral value pairings in their moral implementation. This study juxtaposes whether MFT pairing references are applied when evangelical white Christian women expound on their admiration for the politician, Donald J. Trump. The findings from this study suggest that MFT verbiage accounts for a considerable amount of moral rationale from the participants, who consider their religious faith to be first and foremost in their lives when discussing politics and their political viewpoints. Their discussions and answers touch on all five of Haidt’s moral value pairings. These conservative Christian women’s long-established sanctified realm of religion, family, and the sovereign state hold firm in today’s political debate.

An Imaginative Tale from the Father of C. S. Lewis

“The Story of a Half Sovereign” resembles traditional work of the late nineteenth century. It possesses a trace of its ancestors in echoes of Dickens, as well as some similarities to the genuine issues featured in the Irish courts during Albert’s tenure as solicitor. However, beyond its significance as a simple story, “The Story of a Half Sovereign” serves to demonstrate the political and spiritual climate in which Warren and Jack developed. Their father’s insistence on personal integrity and biblical morality, his early frustrations with privilege among the ruling class, and his conviction to perform his Christian duty were not lost on Albert’s sons.

„KO KAŽE DA U SVETLOST?“ „ISTOČNICE“ LjUBOMIRA SIMOVIĆA

The complexity of observing a collection of poems is reflected in its structure and thematic richness. The sources by Ljubomir Simović, reveal a specific experience of the world and man in circumstances that are recognizable and close to everyone who has experienced conflict, repression and dissatisfaction in their social or personal history. The different layers that rest on biblical morality and mytho- logical tools in this collection of poems are revealed through two different, but not necessarily conflicting principles: the Principle of the Female and the Principle of the Male. In the context of twentieth-century Serbian poetry, this collection, published in 1983, will be ideologically close to the works of authors who treat the themes of the Kosovo myth, social movement and transformation from the Middle Ages to the present, and understand human destiny through a certain destiny of national identity. The diversity in the forms used by the author as well as the semantic potential of the collection will make Istočnice a very challenging and provocative text for interpreta- tion both today and through many years to come.

СТАВЛЕННЯ ЦЕРКВИ АДВЕНТИСТІВ СЬОМОГО ДНЯ В УКРАЇНІ ДО ПОЛІТИЧНОЇ ДІЯЛЬНОСТІ: АНАЛІЗ ПУБЛІКАЦІЙ

Проаналізовано низку публікацій в засобах масової інформації з метою визначення ставлення Церкви Адвентистів сьомого дня до політичної активності вірян-адвентистів. Визначено, що Церква Адвентистів сьомого дня є позаполітикою, однак деякі віряни проявляють зацікавленість до теми «політика» за допомогою дискусійних публікацій: чи допустимо адвентистам займатися політичною діяльністю, на яких умовах, за яких обставин тощо. Досліджено, що за бажанням адвентисти активно беруть участь у політичних виборах при цьому не агітуючи інших віддавати свій голос за того чи іншого кандидата. Встановлено, що незважаючи на низьку зацікавленість українських адвентистів у політичній активності, члени Церкви Адвентистів сьомого дня не ігнорують політичні питання чи повністю відсторонюються від цієї сфери суспільної діяльності. Досліджено, що низка адвентистських публікацій містить розгорнуті роздуми про політичні питання у вигляді концепцій, які демонструють чіткі пріоритети Церкви щодо цього питання. Ці пріоритети окреслено наступним чином: політика є гарною справою тоді, коли є інструментом добра, однак адвентисту слід в першу чергу бути громадянином «нового Єрусалиму», а потім громадянином земної країни та учасником політичних процесів. Крім того встановлено ключову позицію адвентистів в сфері політичної діяльності: «Церква як народ Божий не повинна розраховувати на будь-яке союзництво в політичній сфері», задля отримання статусу державної релігії. Однак, аналіз публікацій Церкви Адвентистів сьомого дня показав, що біблійна мораль та закон Божий адвентистами визнаються вищими, ніж чиясь окрема політична позиція. Тому, Церква Адвентистів сьомого дня є організацією, яка виступає проти насилля, беззаконня та людиноненависницької політики. Саме, тому адвентисти переважно займають нішу виключно в соціальній, філантропічній та гуманітарній сферах, намагаючись цим компенсувати свою не високу активність в політичній діяльності.

Kyiv in the Global Biblical World: Reflections of KTA Professors From the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

The focus of this article is the global and European experience of the reception, assimilation, and social application of the Bible, reproduced in the works of a number of prominent Kyiv Theological Academy (KTA) representatives from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The analysis specifically covers the works of professors Stefan Solskyi, Kharysym Orda, Nikolai Drozdov, Afanasii Bulgakov, Mykola Makkaveiskyi, Vasylii Pevnytskyi, Arsenii Tsarevskyi, Volodymyr Rybinskyi, Dmytro Bohdashevskyi, and Aleksandr Glagolev. The author uses the metaphor of the Biblical world to describe the historically developed spiritual and cultural component of the European world, for which the Bible played the role of a normative and symbolic core. Affiliation with the Biblical world — as a way of broad social application of the Bible and assimilation of the norms and public behaviors sanctioned by this text — was and still is a stable symbolic marker as well as a cultural and ideological factor of integration with European civilization. The historical panorama of the reception of Biblical knowledge and the inculturation of Biblical morality by Christianized nations, reproduced in the writings of Kyiv academics, is presented as a field of centuries-old intercultural contacts and active inter-confessional interaction, and as an important ideological and moral factor of the socio-political integration and development of civil society. The issues addressed by Biblical studies in Europe and the rest of the world and considerations and solutions prompted by these issues proved to be fruitful for both the academic research and public practices in which academics of the Kyiv Theological Academy were engaged. The past and modern foreign experience related to the inculturation of the Bible was interpreted by the Kyiv researchers in the local context, more specifically, in the modernization attempts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, the reflection of European and worldwide experience, though not fully implemented, was productive and was a potential factor that could have contributed to the European modernization of Kyiv cultural and religious life of the time and its integration into the global Biblical World.

The narrative and moral discourse regarding marriage in Tobit

Tobit was written around the third century B.C. It is considered canonical by the Catholics and the Orthodox believers, but not by Protestants and the Jews. The story is not historical but fictional, with a very dynamic narrative, containing numerous lessons in the spirit of the OT, particularly those relating to Deuteronomy theology. The central theme of the book is marriage and the ideal marriage is portrayed in terms of physical purity, struggling against lust, faithfulness, monogamy, and the permanence of the marriage covenant. It is pointed out in many places that love, fondness, and consideration are necessary for a successful marriage. Another important condition is the endogamy of marriage, so that the spouses would be able to keep and practice their faith more easily. And finally, prayer as the expression of trust in God is posited as the foundation of a marriage whose purpose transcends the erotic and procreative functions and emphasis is also placed on the importance of consecration. So in a fun way, Tobit offers a moral lesson which ties in with Biblical morality.

Personalismo y trascendencia en el actuar moral y social. Estudio del tema a la luz de los documentos del Concilio Vaticano II.

The author’s intention is to draw attention to the biblical morality and personalism of Vatican II. Granted that there are other valid criteria on which to base the objectivity in morality, he wishes to highlight the importance of the dignity of the human person and council’s reference to Christ as the fundamental criteria in the teaching of Vatican II. Objectivity, immutability, and transcendence rest on Christ, the centre of history, and on the dignity of the human person. He points out that other valid perspectives are possible but Vatican II opted for this for several reasons. The reference to Christ expresses the necessary recourse to God and is in the line of the scholastic formula: a Deo, ad Deum, secundum Deum. Revelation brings with it mysteries, truths and norms which claim a response of faith and love, a homage of the intelligence and will that is in keeping with session VI of Trent. The Second Vatican Council considers historic nature in a unique divine vocation. It reaffirms the gratuity of the supernatural but does not use the hypothesis of natura pura. Recourse to the dignity of the human person allows the Council to address itself to all men, since this dignity is based on creation and on the one vocation to salvation. The centre of this dignity is the moral conscience which should act respecting the objective norms of morality. The ideal presented by the Council asks for a moral effort parting from the data provided by faith and from a personalist philosophy. It is not true that personalism necessarily leads to subjectivism. The council has shown it. The person is an objective reality and the path from personalism to the transcendence is consistent with the lines of the fourth way of St Thomas: the participated transcendence of the person is based on the absolute transcendence of God. The Church dialogues with the world conscious that in Christ it possesses the full truth about man, about all men since all are called to salvation. This is what makes it possible for the Church to cooperate with the world, to discover the positive side of progress and at the same time it allows and obliges both the Church and christians to have a critical function. Although granting that christians and non-christians should consider themselves invited to cooperate in common action, it is necessary to note the existence of serious conflicts, ever more frequent in a pluralist society. Human progress is not the same as the Kingdom of God. Sometimes one opposes the other and on this account the christian should adopt a critical attitude with respect to attempted developments contrary to human dignity in view of his commitment to the faith and to the dignity of the human person.

Faustus Face to Face with Damnation: Another Morality Model

This article employs close textual analysis to propose as a source for the final despairing soliloquy of the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy _Doctor Faustus_ (1592) the analogous despair of the protagonist of the neo-Latin tragedy _Mercator seu Judicium_ (1540) by the German Protestant polemecist Thomas Kirchmeyer (alias Naogeorgus). In addition, the French translation of this work by Jean Crespin, as _Le Marchant converti_ (1558), appears to have influenced the anonymous revisers of Marlowe's original tragedy (the so-called A-text), who supplied the scene (in the B-text) with a more spectacular theatrical dimension, including a gaping hell-mouth. Finally, comparison is also made with the soliloquy of the penitent Usurer in the fantastic biblical morality play, _A Looking Glass for London and England_, by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene (1589-90), which also owes a debt to Kirchmeyer. The fact that the Usurer is finally saved by the gift of divine mercy, as also is Kirchmeyer's Mercator, intertextually throws into relief the damnation of Faustus and highlights Marlowe's problematic evocation of the question of pre-destination.

The Metal Scene and The Bible: Meaning, Accuracy, and Silence

This article examines the question “how should we understand the use of the Bible in the metal scene?” In the first part, we explore the example of Black Sabbath against the backdrop of the use of the Bible in the band's contemporary society. We argue that the Bible had a particular role in the genesis of Heavy Metal through an–admittedly hazy–understanding of biblical morality shared between metal bands and their audiences. In the second part, we make a more controversial claim. Given that the shared cultural biblical understanding has changed, the metal scene is self-consciously inauthentic, and the metal “scene” qua “metal scene” is authentically inauthentic, we argue that where the Bible is used in metal, its meaning is distorted and even silenced.

The Politics of Paradox: Leo Strauss’s Biblical Debt to Spinoza (and Kierkegaard)

The political philosopher Leo Strauss is famous for contending that any synthesis of reason and revelation is impossible, since they are irreconcilable antagonists. Yet he is also famous for praising the secular regime of liberal democracy as the best regime for all human beings, even though he is well aware that modern philosophers such as Spinoza thought this regime must make use of biblical morality to promote good citizenship. Is democracy, then, both religious and secular? Strauss thought that Spinoza was contradictory in teaching that reason and revelation should be separated from each other while also insisting that a secular democratic politics still requires the biblical morality of charity (love thy neighbor as thyself). The paradox that liberal democracy is both religious and secular, which is central to Spinoza, was dismissed by Strauss as a Machiavellian subterfuge or the cynical attempt to use religion for political purposes. In order to adhere to his dualistic separation of reason and revelation, Strauss turned to ancient Greek political philosophy, particularly the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, as the true ground of liberal democracy since this classical tradition was never exposed to biblical revelation. Yet, the illiberal and hierarchical implications of Greek political thought, which clash with Strauss’s modern views on human individuality and dignity, ultimately take him back to the biblically based philosophies of Spinoza and Kierkegaard, who teach the paradox that the Bible is the true foundation of human freedom.

Rajski owoc i podstawy biblijnej moralności

Autor ukazuje związki między trójdzielnym modelem antropologicznym a trójdzielnym schematem biblijnej moralności. Interpretuje w tym świetle opis owocu z drzewa poznania dobra i zła. Znaczącym odniesieniem jest biblijna nauka o trojakiej pożądliwości, której czytelnym odbiciem są rady ewangeliczne.

Freedom of Religion and Law Schools: Trinity Western University

Discusses the recent controversy over whether a Christian Law School in Canada should be allowed to require students and faculty to agree to adhere to Biblical morality in their behaviour; and whether this should preclude graduates from being admitted as lawyers.

«Biblia y moral». Los criterios de interpretación en el documento de la Pontificia Comisión Bíblica (2008)

El presente trabajo es un estudio sobre los criterios de interpretación de los textos bíblicos propuestos por el documento de la Pontificia Comisión Bíblica, “Biblia y moral. Raíces bíblicas del comportamiento cristiano” (2008). El documento parte del concepto clave de “moral revelada”, entendiendo por tal la iniciativa salvífica de Dios que suscita la respuesta religiosa y ética del ser humano. Queda preservada de este modo la originalidad de la moral bíblica, la cual, sin menoscabo de su continuidad con la moral natural, integra esta última en el contexto dialogal de la Alianza. A partir de este cuadro de referencia, el documento formula criterios de discernimiento moral capaces de orientar al intérprete en la tarea de elaboración, a la luz de los textos bíblicos, de normas concretas de conducta. Ello permite superar la tendencia a buscar en los textos bíblicos indicaciones normativas prescindiendo del contexto literario y de sentido en el que están insertas.

The End of the World in Medieval English Religious Drama

This paper focuses on treatments and prophesies of the last things in late medieval English religious drama. It looks at how the end of the York, Coventry, and Towneley Plays illustrate the multi-media revival of lay catechesis that followed the Council of Constance, while reaching back to the major works of fourteenth-century vernacular theology such of The Prick of Conscience, to express in new and imaginative ways the concatenation of the end of one life and the end of all, of general and particular judgement. The scene is set by reference to the York pageant of Doomsday in the context both of its wider material environment as found in contemporary local stained glass, wills and texts, and of civic patronage. The argument goes on to challenge the traditional divide between biblical cycles and morality plays to show how in a number of instances, plays depicting scriptural history were infiltrated by characters—Christ's torturers in the lost Passion Play from New Romney, the Worms of Conscience in the lost Judgement pageant from Coventry, and the devil Tutivillus in the Towneley Judicium—whose reference points lie as much in tropological allegory as in the narratives of the Bible and apocrypha, and draw on the liturgy of the Church and on sacramental theology to make explicit the old aphorism that Christ is recrucified daily. The paper ends with an exploration of the pageant of The Raising of Lazarus, eccentrically located following the Judicium in the Towneley manuscript. In it Lazarus, the moment he has risen, delivers a long speech on life beyond the grave that eclipses the preceding brief narrative of his death and resurrection, confronting the audience with a visual echo—or anticipation—of the dead rising up on the last day. The thrust of all civic dramatic presentations of the end of the world blend in various imaginative ways biblical and apocryphal narrative material with moral allegory, commentary on contemporary social abuses, and personal catechesis, as all the dramatists, following the pressure for renewal of the lay devotional agenda in the period of their production, provoke their audiences into a state of spiritual anxiety in which the apocalyptic vision is personal, participatory, and probably imminent.

Teaching the Bible in the schools of the Labor and the Kibbutz Movements, 1921–1953

How the challenge of teaching the Bible was met by educators who were members of the Kibbutz and Labor movements during the years before the establishment of the Israeli State is the subject of the following essay. Years ago, Jacobus Schoneveld, (1976), recently followed by Asher Shkedi (2004) proposed dividing educators of the Labor and Kibbutz movements into three types: those who wished to stress “national reconstruction,” those directed toward teaching a “universal humanism” and those seeking to awaken “moral dialogue” and achieve “personal growth.” In fact, such clear-cut lines of demarcation did not exist. The goals were these, but approaches themselves were always mixed. One distinguishes educational goals better by a more simple division into the questions of what is to be taught (religious versus Secular materials) and through which ancillary disciplines. Doing so has the virtue of highlighting how these educators were animated by their quest after how best to teach Biblical morality with the aim of “shaping” the student or achieving “emulation,” especially by generating a “dialogue” between the pupil and the biblical text, leading to “personal growth.” These emphases tell us much about the pre-State educational mentality and pedagogical ideals.

Book Review: Biblical Morality: Moral Perspectives in Old Testament Narratives

Book Review: Biblical Morality: Moral Perspectives in Old Testament Narratives

The Native Roots of Early English Reformation Theology

The rapid spread of Lutherʼs theology following the events at Wittenberg is one that is historically well attested. However, in this essay Ian Stackhouse questions the impact that the Reformation in Europe in these early years has upon England. Although Luther and Zwingli undoubtedly have their place in English Reformation historiography, the point being made here is that early English Reformation theology owes as much to the enduring strength of a native brand of heresay dating back to Wycliffe and the Lollards. Promoting a biblical morality coupled with a mild iconoclasticism it is Lollardy that surfaces as much as anything else on the English scene. According to the writer this holds true both at the popular level and the academic level. In particular he focuses on the works of William Tyndale and presents him in the final analysis as more a disciple of Wycliffe than Luther.

Might and Right after the Cold War: Can Foreign Policy Be Moral?

The post-Cold War debate over America's role in world affairs has raised old questions about 'morality in foreign policy' in a new form. Should 'the national interest' be our only value in world politics or is the concept itself an exercise in moral reasoning? How do we avoid cynicism and utopianism in thinking about the relationship between traditional American moral values and U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s? Alberto Coll, James Finn, Richard Land, Luis Lugo, George Weigel, and Nicholas Wolterstorff grapple with this new debate from the common ground of biblical morality and provide fresh and provocative insights.

Late 19th-Century Texas Sensationalism: Hypocrisy or Biblical Morality?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMarvin OlaskyMarvin Olasky teaches journalism history at the University of Texas at Austin.