Christian Intellectuals Research Articles

‘The True and Scientific Religion’

Abstract A scientific worldview is taken to be a dominant factor of European secularity but peculiarly absent in Africa. Taking cues from the multiple secularities and global religious history approaches, the article uses global entanglements as a critical analytical tool to investigate the formation of our present, shared conditions, without essentializing cultural European/African differences. The core question is: Why, how and under which circumstances do people adapt global regimes of secularity, in this case particularly: global debates on religion and science? The article analyzes three lecture-transcripts, delivered by the West African intellectual John Augustus Abayomi Cole and printed in the West African newspaper Lagos Standard. In the context of Christian intellectuals in late nineteenth century West Africa, these lectures discussed African religion as congruent with science. This argument was possible through Abayomi Cole’s adaptation of esotericism, specifically its claim to true religion and science. Thereby, Abayomi Cole tried to negotiate independence from European missionary oversight.

“A Native of Poland Professing the Arts in London”: The Unconventional Jewish Life and Thought of Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767–1838)

Abstract This essay offers a new reconstruction of the fascinating life and works of Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767–1838), a Jewish engraver and biblical scholar who emigrated from Belarus via Copenhagen and Berlin to London. While Bennett’s intellectual path might appear similar to several other notable Polish Jewish immigrants to Western Europe, he is quite distinctive for his remarkable coadunation of art and thought, for his unusual focus on biblical studies, for opening social and intellectual connections with some of the most famous and accomplished Christian intellectuals of London, and for his self-determination and drive to complete his life-long ambition of serving Western civilization by rewriting and correcting the entire standard edition of the English Old Testament, a task of translation, he fervently believed, that could only be fulfilled by a learned Jewish Hebraist like himself.

In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past by Victoria Leonard (review)

Reviewed by: In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past by Victoria Leonard Jamie Wood Victoria Leonard In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past New York: Routledge, 2022 Pp. xxii + 199. $136.00; £120.00. Having worked on another of the less celebrated historians of late antiquity, Isidore of Seville, I have much sympathy with Victoria Leonard's approach to the Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans, written by the priest Orosius. Challenging what has until recently been the fairly widespread scholarly condemnation of the universal historian's abilities, Leonard deftly demonstrates that he was in fact an original author who deployed historical production to intervene actively in the religious changes of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Of course, such shifts did not occur in a vacuum, and Orosius's intervention was at least in part intended to help members of his Christian audience make sense of their religion's place within the late Roman politico-military complex. Rather than judging Orosius in terms of his failure to live up to the standard of classical historiography (or its late antique standard-bearers) or on the basis of Augustine's apparent unease with elements of the Seven Books of Histories, Leonard seeks to understand the author on his own terms. In this sense, the book builds on recent work by Peter van Nuffelen (Orosius and the Rhetoric of History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]), which demonstrated how Orosius's "Christian" vision of history was grounded in a thoroughly ancient [End Page 257] education. Without denying his classical formation, Leonard's historiographical analysis seeks to contextualize Orosius in relation to the efforts of Christian intellectuals in the decades around 400 in order to comprehend what Christian imperial rule meant for their faith and, more specifically, in order to respond to the charge that Christianity had brought about the fall of Rome (9). This campaign reached its zenith, in the Latin West at least, with Augustine's City of God, the intellectual heft of which did much to overshadow Orosius's work, if not the enthusiasm of medieval copyists (over 275 manuscripts of the Seven Books of Histories survive) (2). After an introduction that surveys previous historiography and articulates the monograph's rehabilitative intent, Leonard proceeds to unpack Orosius's approach to writing history (Chapter One), beginning with the important question: "What is the Historiae?" This is particularly pertinent because the text does not fit neatly into any pre-existing historiographical genre, whether ancient (e.g., classical history) or more recent (e.g., late antique epitome). Nor does Orosius provide a programmatic statement of intent at the beginning of the work or reveal much about himself that can enable us to figure out what he was trying do to. This is not to say that the Spanish priest was an unreflective practitioner of the historian's craft, for the vast scope of his work meant that he had to make a series of decisions about dating and what to include and exclude and, on occasion, make explicit reference to the method that he was applying. Indeed, Leonard argues that Orosius's style throughout is "self-conscious" (36) and that he deliberately wove together various literary genres in a work of historiographical innovation that offers a politicized vision of his "Christanized historical model" (38). The following three chapters demonstrate quite convincingly how Orosius put this project into practice, from his vision of a Christian ordering of universal time (Chapter Two), his presentation of imperial power (Chapter Three), and his filtering of military affairs through a Christianizing lens (Chapter Four). Chapter Two shows brilliantly how chronology is not neutral. Orosius arranged his text according to a range of different temporal criteria and deployed a variety of dating mechanisms to thoroughly Christianize past time, his organization of the work around the Incarnation quite reasonably being posited as a precursor to the b.c/a.d. scheme (69). Chapter Three shows how, contrary to previous analyses that have focused on Orosius's emphasis on the synchronism between Augustus and Christ, his vision of the relationship between empire and Christianity was more complicated, ambiguous even. Rather than a universalizing vision of cooperation...

Jared Secord, Christian intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 2020, 202 pp.

Book Review

Everyday Life in extremis

Everyday Life <i>in extremis</i>

‘Rabbinising’ in sixteenth-century polemics

‘Rabbi’ is the title of Jewish scholars and teachers. Yet, in the sixteenth century, the word was sometimes employed in Christian discourse, when Christian scholars referred to their Christian peers as rabbis. How could non-Jews be called rabbis? This article explores the meaning of the term ‘rabbi’ in sixteenth-century intra-Christian polemics and discourse. It shows how the image of the ‘rabbi’, a figure of (negative) intellectual authority, penetrated the speech of Christian intellectuals and polemicists. It suggests that this ‘rabbinic’ figure was not necessarily Jewish. Although ‘rabbi’ is a Jewish term – the incarnation of Jewish intellectual life – the term also denotes Jesus as well as his opponents, the Pharisees. Thus, polemical ‘rabbinising’ of Christian scholars potentially involved very different images of scholarly authority.

Christian Intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen by Jared Secord

Christian Intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen by Jared Secord

Christian Intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen. By Jared Secord

In this valuable and stimulating work, Jared Secord argues that Christianity was not the most important consideration when a Christian intellectual interacted with non-Christians, particularly imperial authority. He writes that ‘they depicted themselves as full participants in the intellectual culture of the Roman Empire and were judged on this basis’ (p. 2). He draws support for this from both Christian and non-Christian figures. As Romans appropriated Greek culture, ‘in the first century bce, Greeks and Romans imagined a future that was based on Greece restored to its classical past, with Romans as its leaders, who proved to be much more Greek in their ancestry than had previously been believed’ (p. 19). This was possible due to a concept passed to the Romans through their Greek education, eugenia. The idea that a thinker was subject to the benefits and limitations of their intellectual ancestry, much as was a statesman, meant that the ‘lineage’ of an intellectual dictated their networking success in Roman society (pp. 11–19). The Greek perspective that the Asiatic world was barbarous and in need of taming became a mission passed to the Romans, and celebrated by writers such as Dionysius and emperors such as Hadrian. This drove Christian intellectuals to define themselves in terms of their Greekness, as attempted by Justin Martyr and attained by Clement, Julius Africanus, and Origen, or in terms of their rejection of Greekness, as in Tatian, less successfully. Although Tatian famously rejected the received rules of the game and insisted his thought was superior by virtue of his avoidance of Greek philosophy, Secord points out that in so doing, several aspects of his rejection betray rather Greek assumptions.

Lewis Ayres and H. Clifton Ward, The Rise of the Early Christian Intellectual

Lewis Ayres and H. Clifton Ward, The Rise of the Early Christian Intellectual

Proclaiming the Divine Logos to the Man of the Future

This paper studies the cooperation of theology in the new evangelization in societies of ancient Christian tradition which are suffering an advanced process of secularization. It begins with Spain, where a recent debate on the influence of Christian intellectuals on social life suggests the ineffectiveness of ecclesiastical resources in transmitting the rich Catholic doctrinal heritage. Then the author deals with the idiosyncrasy of contemporary man, which lies near the one of the immediate future’s man: an uprooted subject who does not believe that life has any meaning, is deeply marked by emotivism and attaches little significance to truth. The theology of tomorrow cannot feed this emotivism but must be proactive in its own way. The proclamation of the Gospel is not different from the exposition of the Church’s doctrine. To detach evangelization from the teaching of Christian doctrine cannot help the encounter with Christ. In order to succeed in transmitting this doctrine by making it suggestive, theologians should work together with experts in communication.

Nächstenliebe in the Age of Nationalism: Reclaiming a Jewish Emotion between the Fin-de-Siècle and the First World War

Abstract This article asks why the concept of ‘Nächstenliebe’ or ‘love of neighbour’ became a source of contestation between Jewish and Christian intellectuals between the fin-de-siècle and the First World War. For some Christian intellectuals, highlighting differences between an apparently more expansive Christian love of neighbour and an allegedly narrower Jewish conception could provide a novel means of questioning how fully Jews could belong as members of German society. As the article shows, Jewish intellectuals did not simply seek to counter those definitions that claimed a moral superiority for Christian Nächstenliebe, however. Some went further and argued that Jewish ideas of neighbourly love were actually the more cosmopolitan, in contrast to Christian conceptions that had become increasingly self-serving and sectarian. In some instances, these Jewish intellectuals used such arguments about love of neighbour to make the case for Zionism. The article then investigates how the First World War affected these ideas about Nächstenliebe. It suggests that the war furthered the ‘negative integration’ of German society in ways that left little room for love between diverse kinds of German.

The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs

Reviewed by: The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs Gerald P. Boersma The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 256 pp. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is a remarkable and unconventional book. The volume focuses on Christian intellectual life in the year that saw the major reversal of fortunes in the Second World War. At this point the victory of the Allied forces was increasingly recognized as sure. This is the context in which Alan Jacobs tells the story of how prominent Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic envisioned the cultural reconstruction of Western civilization after the war. The subtitle of the book, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, articulates this common postwar aspiration. The five central dramatis personae that Jacobs casts for his drama are (1) Jacques Maritain, the influential Thomist theologian and personalist philosopher whose presence looms large in twentieth-century Catholic political and ecclesial life, (2) T. S. Eliot, arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century, whose writing on literature, education, and cultural life offer a traditionalist Anglican voice to the project of Christian humanism, (3) C. S. Lewis, the tireless Christian apologist who became the public voice of evangelical Anglican Christianity during the war and remained so until his death in 1963, (4) W. H. Auden, the English poet who during the war settled in America and whose jarring poetry is a scathing denunciation of postwar bourgeois sentiment, and (5) Simone Weil, who, in her short and anguished life, produced aphoristic, staccato-like philosophy—the amalgam of both her mysticism and political activism. Alongside these central figures, Jacobs invites many other contemporaneous acclaimed "Christian humanists" to make a brief appearance on stage. Already during the last two years of the war, the political and military leaders, captains of industry, jurists, and engineers of the allied forces began preparations for the reconstruction of life after the war. Jacobs's drama focuses on a series of thinkers less concerned with practical postwar considerations than "with a renewal of Christian thought and practice, especially in the schools of the Western world" (xii). These Christian humanists shared the conviction that a sufficient degree of responsibility for the horrors of the previous decade lay at the feet of an educational system indifferent to a Christian vision of the human person. An authentically human education was vital, therefore, to reconstruct a civilization from the ashes of totalitarian violence. At the outset, Jacobs narrates the history of two intellectual societies, each on one side of the Atlantic, founded to debate the relation between faith and the social order. The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, established in 1940 at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York [End Page 658] by its president Louis Finkelstein, gave formal expression to a concern, harbored by many educators, that positivism (in the sciences) and pragmatism (in the world beyond the laboratory) were morally vacuous, endemic to American education, and woefully ill-equipped to educate a democratic citizenry at war with a totalitarian regime. The conviction that eternal realities—justice, truth, goodness, and beauty—can be known and rationally defended was more important to America's war effort than the state of her munitions and battalions. On the other side of the Atlantic a similar gathering met in London, convened by J. H. Oldham; they gave themselves the name "Oldham's Moot." This conversation, which ran from 1938 to 1947, included cultural avatars such as T. S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim, Alec Vidler, Christopher Dawson, Walter Moberly, and John Middleton Murry. The question of the definition of "culture" and, more particularly, the place of Christian faith in such culture animated the discussions at Oldham's Moot. Jacques Maritain played a decisive role in advancing a particular Catholic version of "Christian humanism." Catholic humanism was envisioned as a response to the humanism first advanced in the Renaissance and culminating in its vicious expression in the Enlightenment. For Maritain, the tale of modern humanism is a narrative of decline, in which an anthropocentric, stunted humanism took root, displacing authentic humanism...

Traductores bilingües latino-árabes andalusíes: textos y contextos

The interestingt task carried out by the bilingual Andalusi Latin-Arabic translators helped to build a literary heritage of enormous importance for the Christians of al-Andalus. The high level of Arabization exhibited by these texts informs us about how Christian intellectuals participated in the knowledge coming from the East, but also allowed them to transfer part of their Latin legacy to the new language of the Andalusi State, the Arabic language. Although the number of surviving texts is certainly scarce, however the quality of these texts allows us not only to assume that there were more texts, but also to know the cultural level of these translators and to obtain relevant information about various aspects of the Andalusi Arabized Christian communities.

Manguni and Christian Nationalism (in) Minahasa

This article describes the process and meaning of the reconstruction of Manguni, as the sacred bird in the old Minahasa religion which became a symbol of Gereja Masehi Injili in Minahasa (GMIM) in the context of colonialism. In particular, that thing to be discussed is the reconstruction of meaning, from Manguni as a mythological belief to Manguni as an ecclesiastical symbolic motive that carries a message of nationalism. Since the early of 20th century, the historical context and discourse of the Minahasa Christian intellectuals have been the subject of research to trace the development of Christian nationalism (in) Minahasa. In the context of GMIM, the interesting things are constituted as the dialogues and debates in colonial church forums, namely the Indische Kerk delivered by Christian leaders. This articles shows that, as a reaction to colonialism whic has changed many things predominantly in Christan Minahasa society, nationalism has grown and developed uniquely through discourse of community elites and church leaders. The expression of nationalism is through political and ecclesiastical path, which both of them use the legacy of religious tradition as tool of negotiation, namely the symbol of the institution with the motive of Manguni bird.

“From Moses to Moses”: Late Medieval Jewish and Christian Interpretation of Moses’s Prophecy

The paper examines how the figure of the biblical Moses was philosophically interpreted in medieval Jewish and Christian writings. It highlights a turning point in a new concept of prophecy and scriptural authority and suggests that this transformation was made complicated for both Jewish and Christian intellectuals by the appearance of Moses Maimonides, who was most influential in promoting the Muslim model of philosophic interpretation of prophecy, and at the same time confusingly emerged as a living manifestation of semi-biblical authority. Against Jewish exclusivist interpretation of Mosaic law as the leading polemical argument to encounter competing revelations, the first part of my paper points out a mechanism of “Jewish successionism”, i.e., the re-interpretation of the biblical Moses as an instrument for rationalizing normative paradigmatic shift. The second, main part of the paper turns to the Latin translation of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, placing it in the midst of a crucial western Latin turn into a new phase of engagement with Old Testament concept of prophecy. A short comparison between some prominent twelfth century figures and later Scholastic thought demonstrates the central role of the new Arab Aristotelianism in general, and that of Maimonides in particular. Maimonides reception among the schoolman will culminate in the writings of Meister Eckhart, exposing the full potentiality of the double appearance of the Egyptian (Rabbi) Moses.

Going ‘part of the way together’: Christian intellectuals, modernity and the secular in 1930s and 1940s Britain

ABSTRACT This article considers how a British Christian intellectual group perceived the crises of the 1930s and 1940s as an epochal transformation and sought to restore ‘true’ freedom to a society dominated by ‘materialism’ and the loss of ‘community’. It sought to make Christianity relevant in new, ‘modern’ circumstances, asserting the transcendent elements of Christianity while condemning many Christians’ refusal to accept ‘secular’ knowledge and the ‘autonomy of the secular’ in some spheres of life. Its members were convinced that it would be possible to go at least ‘part of the way together’ with non-Christians in building a better modernity.

Introduction: Christian modernities in Britain and Ireland in the twentieth century

ABSTRACT This introductory article contextualises relevant historiography and explores definitions of ‘modernity’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘secularisation’. The twentieth century posed distinct challenges to efforts to relate faith to the social order: accelerating industrialisation, urbanisation and functional differentiation as well as the growing impact of technology and predominance of science. The subjective perspectives of Church leaders and lay Christian intellectuals as they sought to understand and respond to these conditions are historically important. This issue explores these themes in Britain and Ireland, taking into account a range of Christian reactions to transforming societies, stressing how Christians developed innovative strategies for meeting new challenges.

This is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1937–49. By John Carter Wood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. xii + 304 pp. $120.00 hardcover.

This is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1937–49. By John Carter Wood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. xii + 304 pp. $120.00 hardcover. - Volume 89 Issue 2

On the Rhetoric of Ruins and Restorations: Conflict over Cult Sites in Late Antiquity

This article discusses competing interpretations of and rhetoric concerning cult sites in late antiquity. It highlights concerns by Christian and Greco-Roman intellectuals over their ruins and restorations, and locates those concerns within larger metanarratives of the past that are utilised to “prove” the superiority of one tradition over the other. Applying theories of “cultural memory” and “memory politics,” it notes the inherent instability of cultural artifacts and the necessity to constantly “fix” an audience’s perception and interpretation of said artifacts. In this study, the artifacts in question are the temple of Apollo in Daphne and the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, while the agents who attempted to fix the memory of these sites through either appeal to their ruins or to their attempted restorations are, respectively, John Chrysostom and the emperor Julian. They each exploited the tools at their disposal in this polemical battle, variously turning to powerful rhetorical appeal to the senses, authoritative and text-like interpretation of the sites’ states for their audiences, and even attempts at altering the sites’ physical spaces when possible. The significance of the contest over these two cult sites lies in the convergence of Chrysostom and Julian upon them, illustrating not only substantial agreement about the nature and terms of a competition they each perceived between rival traditions, but perhaps more importantly, the stark polarisation of both figures and the resistance which each met from their respective constituencies—resistance which itself helps to explain the zeal with which they enacted their programmes.

Что Афины Иерусалиму? Раннее христианство и Вторая софистика

The article deals with the early Christian literature of the 2nd–3d centuries in the context of the Second Sophistic. Famous sophists and Christian intellectuals were contemporaries, and they were educated by the same teachers. The focus of the article is on such themes as the claims of apologists for the status of ambassadors to the Roman emperors, the desire to demonstrate their education and include Christianity in the mainstream of development of ancient culture, an appeal to Greek history. When Christians tried to prove the truth of their views on the world and the deity and to demonstrate the superiority of their culture and their own tradition, they often used ideas and methods borrowed from the arsenal of Second sophistic.