Christian Ideas Research Articles

The Christian interpretations on the nature of heaven’s mandate in late Ming and early Qing dynasties

This paper aims to examine in detail the Christian interpretations on the Confucian concept of the nature of the heaven’s mandate [天命之性] during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties from historical and textual perspective. Neo-Confucians of the Song Dynasty interpret the nature of the heaven’s mandate as human nature, believing that heaven endowed humans with reason, known as the heavenly principle [天理]. In the late Ming period, Christian missionaries such as Jesuits in China used Confucian classics to convey Christian thoughts, interpreting the heaven’s mandate as God’s mandate and the nature of the heaven’s mandate as the spirituality bestowed by God, which is equated with the soul. They also used the nature of the heaven’s mandate as a criterion for determining the authenticity of a teaching (religion[教]), asserting that Christianity is the true teaching (religion). Thus, Christianity in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties provides a new interpretation on the nature of the heaven’s mandate and promotes the integration of Christian and Confucian thoughts through this interpretation.Contribution: The paper provides a detailed review of the history of Christian interpretations on the nature of the heaven’s mandate during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Currently, there is limited scholarly research on the theological thoughts of Christianity during this period. This study not only enhances the understanding of the new interpretations by Christianity but also aids in comprehending the theological ideas of Christianity during the late Ming and early Qing periods. By reinterpreting Confucian classics, Christianity endowed them with new meanings, offering valuable references for the localisation of Christian theology and the study of cross-cultural exchange.

Misunderstanding Equality, Power, and Vulnerability: Elevating the Individual over Cohesion in Hierarchy as a Value

Abstract This article explores dominant ideas of value at play in a critical incident experienced by international mission candidates on a team placement, in an Anglican community of the United Kingdom. The ethnographic analysis will compare different perspectives on how misunderstanding cultural values and social relations as theological obligations can lead to suffering. Thus, the study shows how qualitative differences in cultural values and social relations determine contrary ways of understanding theological conceptualizations of equality as a Christian idea in contact zones of international mission communities. The analysis challenges two Christian assumptions: firstly, that extending equal value to people before God is universally understood in the same way, and secondly, that individual well-being is inherently superior to ensuring social cohesion, exemplified by Korean hierarchy. Although people realize hierarchy and individualism the world over, the nuances of meaning dominating their relations to other values determine why and how people experience suffering.

The Textual Demiurge: Social Status and the Academic Discourse of Early Christian Forgery

AbstractThis article reconsiders the classed and gendered construction of the Author in the Roman Mediterranean, a construction that generates the intertwined notions of authorship and authenticity. Modern scholarly conversations about authorship and pseudepigraphy in the Roman Mediterranean often proceed from the uninterrogated assumptions that (a) ancient texts (including early Christian texts) were the monographic products of solitary authors and (b) everyone in antiquity, regardless of gender or class, had access to the status of being an ‘Author’. While conversations about (in)authentic textual production extend beyond the works that become part of the New Testament, these twin assumptions form the basis for modern debates about ‘forgery’ in New Testament literature. This article challenges both assumptions by first surveying the role of uncredited collaboration in Roman literary culture and then analysing ancient Christian discourses surrounding (a) illicit textual meddling and (b) inappropriate textual ascription. These two discursive categories reveal how the categories of class and gender are entangled with early Christian ideas of the Author. Ancient discourses of authenticity and authorship were not simply about who produced texts but about policing which acts of textual production count as ‘authoring’.

The Female Body, Christianity, and Colonial Modernity: Representation of Foot-bound Women in Alicia Little’s Travelogues

ABSTRACT This article explores Alicia Little’s presentation of foot-bound women in her travelogues and periodical essays. Her exploration of the anti-footbinding movement saw the dissemination of Western feminist ideas in China. However, as the article demonstrates, this cross-cultural exchange was a dominantly Western feminist movement compromised by an enlightenment project based on the notion of modern womanhood or colonial modernity. To understand the background, the article gives an overview of the history of footbinding, followed by the representation of foot-bound women in Little’s travelogues to unpack the idea of modern womanhood. Her presentation of Christianity offers important clues to understanding her writings on the anti-footbinding movement. This article also explores how Little presents her feminist and Christian ideas of modern womanhood, that are at odds with the traditional Chinese womanhood. In contextualizing Little’s role in the anti-footbinding movement, this paper reveals the complicated dynamics between Western feminism, the patriarchal Chinese society, and foot-bound women.

The Reliant (2019) and the rhetoric of necropolitical Christianity

ABSTRACT This essay examines the manufactured controversy over the independent Christian film The Reliant (2019), a film advertised as a pro-gun action-adventure. Despite receiving virtually no attention from the political left, the filmmakers’ engaged in a public relations campaign to spotlight the putative opposition to the film as evidence of a broader effort by secular progressives to persecute Christian ideas and values. In this essay, we argue that such manufactured controversies are a rhetorical strategy of contemporary Christian nationalists to construct progressive secularism as a mortal threat to the survival of Christianity. Analyzing the promotional materials and staged events surrounding this film, we illustrate how Christian nationalism increasingly relies on contrived public controversies and faux outrage against its products, policies, and discourses to craft a warped impression that Christians face violent enmity and persecution at every turn. We advance the concept of necropolitical Christianity to name how Christian nationalists mimic forms of state sovereignty premised on the right to kill or maim in the name of collective self-defense. We conclude that manufactured enmity conjures a violent Other who despises and persecutes conservative Christians to bolster the case for more radical measures to ensure the defense and survival of the Christian nation.

Bonnie Bennett and the beyond: An exploration of one representation of the afterlife in The Vampire Diaries

The contemporary vampire story is an apt place to explore immortality, the afterlife and other dimensions in general. Additionally, there are numerous parallels between the vampire story and the Christian story. The vampire’s ‘maker’, for example, can be compared to God, also known as ‘maker’, and a vampire’s immortality offers a relevant parallel to the Christian idea of immortality in the afterlife. The CW network series The Vampire Diaries (2009–17) houses various narratives offering such comparisons, especially with regards to alternative dimensions (‘worlds’) that can potentially be construed as commentary on the afterlife. Interestingly, though, I believe that the most compelling narrative in this regard involves the witch Bonnie Bennett and not an actual vampire. Also interestingly, Bonnie often seems to hold more power than the vampires, even though she is not necessarily immortal (she is, however, considered a supernatural being). She perpetually saves her friends throughout the series, regularly willing to sacrifice her life for theirs and actually dies in Season 4 in effort to bring Jeremy Gilbert back to life. She embodies the New Testament verse in the book of John that states, ‘[g]reater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’. Despite that she is dead, she lives in a concurrent dimension, and only Jeremy is aware of her and can hear her. She is with him in the present. I posit that the storyline pertaining to Bonnie’s character and her death in Seasons 4 and 5 in particular offers a possible and even compelling read on the biblical description of heaven and the afterlife – and God on the whole – per Judeo-Christian scripture and scriptural interpretation.

Two in one: contradictory Christology without gluts?

The central thesis of JC Beall’s paraconsistent Christology is that Christ, being human and divine, is a contradictory being, and a rational Christology can accept it, since logic nowadays does not exclude the possibility of true contradictions. In this paper, I move from Beall’s theory and I present an alternative view. I quote seven statements of the so-called ‘Athanasian Creed’ which synthesizes the results of conciliar Christology. The aim of the Creed is to combat monophysitism by stressing the duplicity and unity of Christ: two (incompatible) natures inseparably joined in only one person. I note that the two-in-one principle, so intended, may be seen as an ancestor of what has been called ‘conjunctive paraconsistency’, whereby there could be true contradictions but contradictories cannot be separately true. I specifically oppose this view to Beall’s idea of Christ’s human divinity (or divine humanity) as a glut, showing that in the conjunctive account, true contradictions do not require any overlapping or joint ascription of truth and falsity.

POLITICAL CRITICISM OF SECULARISM AS THE MAIN LINE OF WESTERN MODERNITY IN THE JOURNALISM OF A.I. SOLZHENITSYN

This article raises questions related to the political interpretation of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. It is demonstrated that Solzhenitsyn’s work in this aspect can be described as a political and philosophical legitimation of the project of “conservative modernity”. The main plot dominant in Solzhenitsyn’s reflections is the political and philosophical criticism of Western secularism and its political consequences. Secularism is described by Solzhenitsyn as a “perversion” of the Christian idea, in this respect Bolshevism and Western liberalism are equated with each other, embodying the radical features of the Western modernist project. The main question that worries Solzhenitsyn: how is modernity possible, in which the basic Christian principles and rules are preserved and developed? The solution to this issue is connected with the political implementation of this project - the construction of a conservative version of democracy, in which the observance of human rights and the construction of a rule of law state is based on Christian, not secular values.

Religion Between the Parody of Faith and the Epiphany of Grace in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

ABSTRACT The metaphysical inquiry of Blood Meridian is structured in two moments, both involving a reflection on religion. On the one hand, the persistence of violence in the novel can be interpreted as the continuous denial of the Christian idea of “salvation through faith.” Faith, in this book, offers neither salvation for those who suffer nor punishment for evil, as it is immediately stated that “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing.” On the other hand, although the Christian God seemingly disappears from the phenomenal world, the search for a higher instance does not completely vanish from the novel. In fact, fleeting divine occurrences frequently appear throughout the novel in various transient epiphanies of grace. After grace vanishes, we can detect in the last chapters of Blood Meridian an abysmal melancholy—an expression of frustrated attempts to transcend human existence. Although this dark path traveled by the kid in Blood Meridian has led critics to call the book a Gnostic parable, these two possibilities of McCarthy’s metaphysical reflection seem to be closely related to Catholic motifs and ideology.

Своеобразие политической проблематики в трагедии Ж. Ротру «Ифигения в Авлиде» (1640)

The article examines J. Rotrou’s play “Iphigenie in Aulis” (1640), which ends the early period of the playwright’s tragic work and, along with Corneille’s “Horace” staged in the same year, marks a new stage in the development of French classic tragedy. In “Iphigenie” one can clearly see the consolidation of the poetological principles of the “correct” tragedy (organization of action in accordance with the rule of “three unities”, stylistic and linguistic homogeneity, construction of a discursive and rhetorical structure in relation to the main ideological and semantic – essentially political – contradiction). The analysis of “Iphigenie” allows us to observe one of the main distinctive features of Rothrou’s mature dramatic writing: the semantic complication of the conflict of duty and feelings (along with the meanings of political power) up to its insolubility. Rotrou deepens the contradiction between the idea of heroism, state interest – and the personal truth of a person whose suffering is caused by the requirement of public benefit. In this historically determined clash as direct moral and physical violence, without convincing justification, as a social phenomenon catastrophically provocative, the playwright discovers a new principle of tragedy. The transitional nature of “Iphigenie” between the early and late tragedies of Rotrou is revealed in the dependence traced in the text of the play on the mythological model that levels out the semantic contradiction, as well as on the Christian idea of divine justice and the providential nature of events.

The Origins of the Christian Idea of Trinity: Answering Jewish Charges of Heresy; Exhorting Pagans against Polytheism; Countering False Gnostics

In this essay I explain that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was first developed as a response to Jewish claims of Christian apostasy and polytheism. At the beginning of Christianity, most of its converts were observant Jews. The Jewish authorities took steps to reclaim their lost sheep and to stem the flow of departures. Their primary intellectual ammunition in that effort was the claim that the Christians were polytheists, because they claimed to believe in two Gods–the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. The Christians’ apostasy was manifest by simple referring to the Mosaic commandment that righteous Israel should have only one God. This Jewish accusation of polytheism also neatly answered the inflammatory Christian charge that the Jews had crucified God and raised significant doubt about their claims of a special resurrection. The doctrine of the Trinity answered all those criticisms. God and Jesus Christ together were the one true God. But the nature of that oneness took some time to work out, and it is within a process of contending with pagan philosophical arguments and intra-Christian heretical positions, that a Christian doctrine of the Trinity begins to congeal. The work of Ante-Nicene Fathers—Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Novatian, and others—whose voices we allow to be heard below—contain a trajectory of ideas that explain how the tri-unity is expressed in the momentous Creeds of Nicaea (AD 325) and Constantinople (381).

The Monastic Cell as Utopian Niche: The Contribution of Religious Niches to Socio-Ecological Transformation

ABSTRACT This article explores the extent to which Christian traditions, especially the monastic way of life, possess a transformative potential toward a socio-ecological society. Christian ideas are not unbroken utopias, but they possess an eschatological proviso based on God’s otherness. Neither is monastic life a prefiguration of the Kingdom of God, nor do Christians or the Church prefigure a heavenly society, but Christian action and religious communities can be regarded as forms of refigurative practice, which can fail again and again without losing hope. This article describes the relationship between niche and transformation, between monastic cell and utopia, as such a refigurative practice.

On the Origins of the Young Men’s Catholic Association as a Response to the Protestant Recreation Ethic in the United States, 1854–1909

In 1854 Reverend Bernard J. McQuaid set forth the outline behind his ideals for a young men’s Catholic association. Similar to the existing Protestant-rooted Young Men’s Christian Association which had arrived in the United States three years prior, McQuaid’s ambitions could be seen as one of many concurrent attempts to embrace the idea of Muscular Christianity and general reform movements of the late nineteenth century. However, to do so, would do an injustice to the ground-breaking, innovative, and controversial, methods embraced by McQuaid. He was one of the first in the Unted States to propose that sports and games of chance were not ‘evil’. Though his association eventually faltered under the weight of his lofty ambitions, he remains an underappreciated figure in the world of sport history. The Young Men’s Catholic Association offered a legitimate challenge to the often unwelcome Protestant morality of the YMCA in urban immigrant communities in the late nineteenth century United States. This paper argues that McQuaid’s recreation aims in Rochester developed as a reaction against the YMCA. McQuaid’s association, the Young Men’s Catholic Association, presented itself to the city’s immigrant, Catholic, working-class population as an alternative to the Protestant-inspired, ‘cult of strenuosity’.

Эгоизм как проявление антиподобия человека Богу

The relevance of the topic is due to the fact that in modern culture, contrary to centuriesold tradition, the concept of “egoism” often has a neutral or even positive meaning. There is a substitution of concepts when individualism, or hedonism, is called egoism. The purpose of the article is to give a stricter definition of the concept of “egoism”. For this purpose, the tasks of comparative analysis of the meanings of single-order concepts bearing synonymy (“I want”, “egoism”, “individualism”, “self-will”, “narcissism”), as well as antonymous (“altruism”, “love”, “self-sacrifice”, “obedience”, “conciliarity”) meanings are solved. The authors proceed from Christian ideas that are most adequate to the national culture. The theoretical and methodological basis was the ideas of Russian (primarily religious) philosophy: the concepts of conciliarity, love, God-humanity, solidarity as the driving force of evolution. Methods of comparative analysis and content-semantic interpretation were used. The material for the study was the texts of Holy Scripture, as well as works of literature and art, which provided illustrative material to substantiate the formulated provisions. It is concluded that in the modern era of the triumph of individualism, growing egoistic intentions lead to the emergence of egoism, which turns a person into an antipode Creator.

„DUBLjE DNO DUŠI NO STRADANjU“

The novel Nebo, tako duboko by Vesna Kapor belongs to a type of lit- erature that in a certain way resists the contemporary novelistic tendencies to deal with external traits of the characters and their relationships with the world ‒ the novel deals with internal character traits, i.e. human soul, as well as with the concept of the meaning of life. After losing their only child, the parents’ souls are torn between maintaining a kind of illu- sion that physical death is not final, and, on the other hand, questions about the shortness of human existence on Earth. It seems that two main features or two dimensions of this poetic novel ‒ lyrical and metaphysical ‒ arise from these two directions. The character (a lament) and the theme of the novel (the death of a young, close person and the absence of time distance) are delicate and require the mastery of narration and stylistic expression, which gives the novel a lyrical dimension. It is also possible to analyse the novel from the point of view of metaphysics, which is manifested through at least three phenomena: the phenomenon of time (given to man on Earth), the phenomenon of the secrets of the other world (can a man change the course of his destiny?) and the phenomenon of storytelling (as a way of resisting the transience of life and inevitability of death). These phenomena are deeply rooted in Christian idea of Love for another, as well as in a universal idea of the power of the story which can overcome even death itself, that is, to preserve the memory of life through storytelling.

Two-faced Janus of early French romanticism: Pierre Simon Ballanche as an esthetician and writer

The subject of the study is the fundamental philosophical and aesthetic problems in the aesthetics of Pierre Simon Ballanche, who stood at the origins of French romanticism. Two layers of his creativity - explicit and implicit - have been identified and analyzed. It is shown that his ideas about the art of romanticism are verbalized in a strict academic style. The implicit layer, is associated with Ballanche’s artistic prose. It includes philosophical and aesthetic poems, testifying the originality of his aesthetic position. Unlike most French romantics, who distance themselves from ancient culture as pagan in favor of Christianity and medieval art, Ballanche, in his talented paraphrases of mythological stories, romanticizes Antiquity, finding in it the beginnings of future Christian ideas of sublime love, mercy, sacrifice, beauty and goodness. The main conclusion of the study is the conclusion that art, according to Ballanche, plays a leading civilizational role in the cosmogonic-historical process. The core of Ballanche's implicit philosophical aesthetics is revealed - the original concept of palingenesis, interpreted by the author as a radical degeneration of the world for the sake of its future revival; it is precisely this stage of cultural and historical development that, in his opinion, marks romanticism. The author's special contribution lies in introducing into domestic scientific circulation, translated into Russian for the first time and analyzed the philosophical and aesthetic poems “Antigone”, “The Man with No Name”, “The Experience of Social Palingenesis. Orpheus".

The Importance of Thai Christian Art: An Analysis of Three Artists and Their Impact on Society

In this article, three differing approaches to faith representation will be presented. Sawai Chinnawong uses a traditional Thai art form, while Arnan Moontrakorn utilizes an amalgamated approach to Thai and Modern art. Jompol Puatawee, while using Thai imagery in his contemporary art style, does not reference traditional symbols. The artists featured, while all representing their Christian faith, do not use obvious Christian symbolism. As this article shows, Thai Christians can accept Thai traditional art as a useful medium for presenting Christian ideas, and these works of art are understood to have a Christian message.

Power Circuits: Asymmetries of Global Christianity

Abstract This article examines the idea of global Christianity in scholarship and the postcolonial and present imperial conditions that underlie it. Through an analysis of the fields of World Christianity and the anthropology of Christianity, it considers how Western Christian histories and power dynamics have impacted Christian traditions of the Global South and seriously considers the pervasive logics of geopolitical power that transform local contexts–not only altering how such communities and traditions are written about, but also impacting the traditions, practices, and people themselves. Thinking with Coptic Orthodox Christians between Egypt and the United States and Born-Again Christians in Uganda, this article examines how global power inequalities in the circuits of ideas, forms of life, and theopolitics are integral to thinking about the idea of global Christianity and its variations in scholarship.

В.Я. Брюсов, Н.Ф. Федоров и деятели Федоровианы 1900–1920-х годов: вопрос о смысле и целях искусства. Статья первая. О чем спорили Брюсов и Федоров в доме Ю.П. Бартенева

The article is the first part of the study of the problem of spiritual and creative dialogue between the founder of Russian symbolism V.Y. Bryusov and the philosopher of common cause N.F. Fedorov. In the works of Russian and foreign researchers, this dialogue was studied by V.Y. Bryusov, in terms of the poet's interest in cosmic themes, in the context of his theory of scientific poetry. In this study, the focus is on the question of the meaning and purpose of art. For the first time, with the involvement of new, including archival sources, the reaction of N.F. Fedorov to the meeting with V.Ya. Bryusov, held on April 20, 1900 in the house of Yu.P. Bartenev, is considered, it is shown how the ideological dispute that arose during this meeting was reflected in the late work of the philosopher. The content of the dispute and the interrelation of its two themes – the possibility/impossibility of overcoming death and the attitude to the ideas of F. Nietzsche are revealed. Fragments of articles and notes written by N.F. Fedorov, in which his dispute with V.Y. Bryusov is mentioned, are analyzed. N.F. Fedorov's perception of decadence is reconstructed, the philosophical complex of which, as well as the ideas of the new religious consciousness, the philosopher associated with the spiritual crisis of the fin de siècle era, contrasting them with the idea of active Christianity, man's cooperation with God in history. It is shown how N.F. Fedorov's liturgical aesthetics is formed in the polemic with Nietzschean aesthetics and decadence aesthetics, in the center of which is the image of art as an extra-temple liturgy. The relation of N.F. Fedorov to the current of symbolism, to which he opposed the religious understanding of the symbol, is considered.

New/Old Idea of Man in Urban Religious Communities of a New Type

The purpose of the article is to establish the specificities of the formation of ideas about a person within the framework of the activities of the new urban religious communities of the Kama region, namely the Intercession Monastery and the Family of God. These communities combine features of folk religiosity, new religious movements, and the so-called historical sects. Such eclecticism makes it impossible to apply to the communities the established research apparatus for new religious movements (NRMs), formed by Western (B. Wilson, D. Stone, A. Barker) and Russian (L. N. Mitrokhin, E. A. Balagushkin, I. Kanterov and others) researchers and substantiates the need for this study conducted from both a different perspective and involving new research methodology. Both communities act as a closed community, which is expressed in the territorial and communication isolation of the residents of the communal estate, the practice of internal labor duties, and the idea of the group as a family. The study is based on interviews and correspondence with former members of both communities, analysis of materials from a closed group on a social network, and recordings of classes conducted by one of the group leaders. The theoretical basis of the work was K. Dobellard’s concept of the so-called patchwork religiosity, characteristic of an individual’s attitude towards religion in modern culture. The image of a person in both communities is constructed at two levels: through making changes to the traditional Christian idea of a person and at the level of religious and near-religious activities. It has been shown that innovations related to faith include the idea of a special status of community members compared to other people, as well as provisions about their special role in the struggle to save the world. The religious activities of the groups involve conducting adjusted Christian rituals (baptism, wedding), elements of mystical experience (mental struggle with evil and enemies in the Intercession Monastery), training seminars and sermons justifying the special role of followers of the teaching in society. Social interaction within communities is built on a strict selection of monks, leader control over the behavior of group members, a system of specific penalties, including ignoring offenders, public repentance, burial alive and expulsion from the brotherhood. The study concludes that the so-called new religious movements are in reality examples of traditional religious sects observed in Russia over the centuries. Their values, behavior, and the image of the person are archaic, however they also include additional external elements of secular culture.