Consciousness Of Sin Research Articles

Cristianismo versus cristiandad.


 
 
 Ésta es una meditación fenomenológica encaminada a mostrar por qué, al asu- mir que la finalidad de la filosofía era propiciar que el individuo se convirtiera en contemporáneo de Cristo, Kierkegaard contrajo la tarea de reintroducir el cristianismo en la cristiandad. En la primera sección del artículo se mostrará que la fe es una verdad subjetiva. En la segunda, la meditación tendrá por motivo fundamental la relación entre cristianismo y verdad. Después, en la tercera parte, se hará patente que la búsqueda de la salvación surge de la consciencia del pecado. En la cuarta, se explicará que, para Kierkegaard, la tarea del pensador cristiano es la escritura de discursos edificantes.
 
 

Socrates, Nicodemus, and Zacchaeus: Kierkegaard and Halík on conversion and offense

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Tomáš Halík’s Patience With God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us in light of Kierkegaard’s insistence upon conversion. Against forms of Christianity which would understand conversion as issuing, of necessity, from a rigorous thinking-through of objective proofs or of the ends of human desire, Kierkegaard insists upon a conversion that passes through offense at the God-man’s scandalous invitation. Though Halík approvingly cites Kierkegaard’s insistence upon a faith worked out in fear and trembling, and, like Kierkegaard, sees contemporaneity with Christ as possible only because of Jesus’ own experience of God-forsakenness, deep differences remain – especially with regard to the necessity of consciousness of sin. This paper will thus consider whether Halík’s ‘patience’ dulls the passion of faith and obscures the decisiveness of the moment, and whether Halík’s portrayal of Christian responsibility as solidarity leads not to Zacchaeus or to Socrates, but to Nicodemus.

THE HOLY & WHOLLY OTHER: KIERKEGAARD ON THE ALTERITY OF GOD

In response to prevailing perceptions, I contend that Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55) conceives of the wholly otherness of God via his dialectical category of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine, initially through the self's consciousness of sin and ultimately through the self's acceptance of the gift of forgiveness. Therefore, I claim that while the common designation of Kierkegaard's God as ‘Wholly Other’ may initially evoke the alterity of sin; it is not ultimately sufficient to describe the divine alterity which Kierkegaard regards as more faithfully manifest in the ‘impossible possibility’ of forgiveness. Through this reading, I finally suggest that the ‘Wholly Other’ is not ultimately representative of God in Kierkegaard's writings and might be more faithfully supplemented by the appellation of the Holy Other.

Kierkegaard as Physician of the Soul: On Self-forgiveness and Despair

Despair (sickness of the spirit) and divine forgiveness are decisive psychological and theological themes essential to both Søren Kierkegaard's relational vision of ‘the self before God’ and his own personal struggles with guilt and the consciousness of sin. Reading Kierkegaard as both a physician and a patient of this struggle, therefore, this article examines The Sickness unto Death (1849) as an attempt to resolve the sinful ‘self’ by integrating a psychological perspective on despair with a theology of the forgiveness of sins. It is suggested that by presenting this integrative notion of self-knowledge through the ‘higher’ Christian pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard is indicting his own resistances to accepting divine forgiveness and thereby operating—via a ‘higher’ pastoral identity—as a physician to his own soul. By diagnosing the unconscious psychological and theological relationships between sin/forgiveness, offense, and human impossibility/divine possibility, Kierkegaard finally reveals faith—as a self-surrendering recognition of acceptance before the Holy Other—to be the key to unlocking the enigma of the self in despair.

Gudbilledlighed og syndefald: Aspekter af Grundtvigs og Kierkegaards menneskesyn på baggrund af Irenæus

Gudbilledlighed og syndefald: Aspekter af Grundtvigs og Kierkegaards menneskesyn på baggrund af Irenæus

Die eigentliche Sünde ist allen Menschen unbekannt. überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Sünde und SÜndenerkenntnis

In modem everyday language the word sin seems to be outdated. On the other hand, experiences of self-fragmentation and self-alienation are very well-known in modern literature and modern culture in general. The radical theoretical and practical problem caused by those experiences is: how can a self-alienated person know about his or her self-alienation? In his article the author argues that protestant hamartiology since the Reformation has focussed exactly on this problem and therefore has developed important arguments to deal with this puzzling basic problem of any theory of sin. While M. Luther has analyzed the noetic structure of sin in a principal way, Kant and Schleiermacher tried to develop Luther's theology of sin by referring consequently to the subject's consciousness of sin. From K. Barth's point of view, the phenomenon of sin seems to destroy the foundation of religious consciousness itself. Nevertheless, the onto-christological solution of Barth cannot prevent that the modern fundamental experience returns in a theological costume: >I - is somebody else. The paradoxes of modem protestant theories of sin seem to point to the paradox of sin itself. They also demonstrate the principle limits of theoretical reflections in theology and their permanent necessity.

On The Story‐Telling Imperative That We Have In Mind

The psychotherapeutic nature of the relatedness of literature and religion is part and parcel of the story‐telling imperative that we have in mind. There is not a shred of evidence that a historical character Jesus lived, to give an example, and Christianity is based on narrative fiction of high literary and cathartic quality. On the other hand Christianity is concerned with the narration of things that actually take place in human life. The human animal is subject to biologically and socially determined programs that collide head‐on with the morality of secular and religious traditions. Hence guilt of sin takes place in human life, and consciousness of sin is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith.

Hawthorne's Tragicomic Mode of Moral Allegory

Recommending The Scarlet Letter to readership of American Men of Letters Series, Henry James felt obliged to acknowledge a lapse in taste. Discussing seen in sky by Dimmesdale and Boston townspeople, James permitted himself a pained murmur: We feel that Hawthorne goes far, and is in danger of crossing line that separates sublime from its immediate neighbor. When Hawthorne goes on to make what James judges to be too much ... of intimation that Hester's badge has a scorching property, younger novelist sighs, We are tempted to say that this is moral tragedy, but physical comedy. Overall, James fears, Hawthorne displays a culpable lack of literary discretion (Beatty et al. 290). One hundred years after James, though commentators have come to accept that there are important comic overtones in work, assumption with which critics still feel safest remains that Hawthorne is, in summary of Hennig Cohen, A 'morbid' and 'gloomy' writer, with a predominantly view (184). Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill use word somber (177). Confirmations of this premise are ubiquitous in critics. With reference to The Scarlet Letter, to give just one example, (in spite of modern reader's inclination to laugh when Dimmesdale opens his coat to display whatever it is underneath), Richard Hauck never doubts that Dimmesdale's future is tragic (238). And in general, Jesse Bier expresses consensus when he magisterially dismisses Anthony Trollope's conjecture that the sinner's consciousness of sin in The Scarlet Letter made tragedy verge on burlesque as not a fruitful line of inquiry (374-75).2 One index to profound investment of Hawthorne criticism in its conception of Hawthorne's Tragic Vision is commentators' agitation with a deliberately farcical sketch like Mrs. Bullfrog.3 Cohen, for example, finds Mrs. Bullfrog's account of a silly man's marital entrapment by a disguised crone cynical and a little gross (96), while in accents of personal betrayal Neal Frank Doubleday calls sketch an

Sex education in medieval Christianity

Abstract The Western Medieval Christian Church adopted an attitude toward sex which reflected the intellectual hostility to bodily pleasures developed by the neo‐Pythagoreans and neo‐Platonists. To inculcate this attitude in the population, most of whom could not understand its theoretical justifications and who were also illiterate, the early medieval Church developed an elaborate penitential system. Sexual behavior was monitored through confessions, and appropriate penalties were administered. Through this negative or punishment‐oriented technique, a consciousness of sin concerning sex was developed. A more positive approach to the same goal was also accomplished by the examples of two kinds of saints; the transvestites and the prostitutes. The oral traditions surrounding these saints emphasized the superiority of the male and the sinfulness of sex.

The Consciousness of Sin in I John

The Consciousness of Sin in I John

Guilt and Purification in Ancient Egypt*)

The sense of sin and guilt is a human feeling. Nobody escapes from realizing occasionally that he is sinning, by speaking, by performing acts, by nourishing thoughts which are bad. Thereby he incurs guilt. Yet his sense of sin and guilt can vary in strength. In some people, in certain periods and among the adherents of certain religions it is very strong, whilst it is nearly absent in other people and in other periods. Immediately after the Second World War psychiatrists were engaged for a long time in analysing feelings of guilt. No wonder: during that war many people had been forced to perform horrible acts which had violated their conscience. Christianity has always stressed the sense of sin and guilt in order to make man humble and to make him understand the significance of God's forgiveness. The other religions of the world have also nurtured in their followers the sense of their shortcomings. Even among illiterate people the consciousness of sin is not absent. This is proved by the extensive and interesting studies which the late Professor Pettazzoni, the first president of the I.A.H.R. devoted to the confession of sins, especially with illiterate people. 1) Thus, there is every reason to investigate the part played by the sense of sin and guilt in the religions of antiquity, in particular in Ancient Egypt. The first step is to conduct a linguistic inquiry into the Egyptian words which are used to indicate sin and guilt. It appears that the Egyptian language has at its disposal about ten words which can be translated by sin 2) and possesses about six words expressing the idea of guilt. 3) On closer observation it is found that both groups

Discipleship and Belief in Jesus as Lord from Jesus to the Hellenistic Church

The Church to which we are permitted to proclaim the Gospel is no longer the Palestinian Church of the time of Jesus, for whom the real goal of life was to pass safely through the judgement of God. Neither is the Church any longer that of the time of Luther, weighed down by its consciousness of sin and the medieval fear of judgement. Today the message of forgiveness of sins answers a question which, to a large extent, has disappeared from the consciousness of modern man. The modern world is, however, similar in many ways to the Hellenistic world into which the Christian message entered with the proclamation of Paul. The unity of heaven and earth, as it had been perceived in the classic period, is destroyed for the Hellenistic man. The world for him is controlled by powers and forces to which he has been handed over helpless. Ananke or Heimarmene (Fate or Destiny) determines everything and the action of the individual is incapable of altering their established course. The ever-repeated movement of the heavenly bodies, once conceived as the expression of divine harmony, awakens now the concept of a giant machine which mercilessly completes its revolution, deaf to the cries of men. Of course, the Stoic seeks to flee back into the old harmony between God and the world and for that reason declares the whole world to be his polis. But even he knows that everything in this polis is determined by the great powers, their mighty armies, and their modern weapons and no longer by his individual decision. Thus the desires and longings of the Hellenistic man are concentrated upon liberation from the demonic powers of this world and upon participation in the upper, godly world.

The Baptism of Our Lord—A Study of St. Mark 1.9–11

Both the construction ('And it came to pass… that Jesus came’) and the expression ‘in those days’ have a distinctly OT flavour (cf. e.g. Exod. 2.11). As neither is frequent in Mark, we might perhaps venture the suggestion that either consciously or unconsciously he is giving to his narrative a special touch of solemnity at the point at which he introduces Jesus for the first time.That Jesus was baptised by John1 can scarcely be doubted. The fact that the submission of Jesus to a baptism of repentance caused the early Church embarrassment, as may be seen in Matt. 3.14 f and in the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Gospel according to the Hebrews (see Huck, Synopsis, 9th edit., p. 12), makes it extremely unlikely that the Church would ever have invented the incident.2To the question why He submitted to baptism various answers have been given. Some have suggested that it was because He was conscious of sin and felt the need to repent3; but this seems to be ruled out by what Dr Taylor has called ‘the entire absence of the consciousness of sin in His personality, as it is revealed in the Gospels’.4 Others have suggested that Jesus was simply availing Himself of John's baptism ‘as a means of expressing the will to live a pure life’5 or that He submitted to it merely in order to show His personal approval of the Baptist's movement.

The Rise of Monasticism in the Church of Africa

An important development in the life of the church of Africa during the last decade of the fourth century and the first quarter of the fifth century was the rise of monasticism, first instituted, inspired, and directed by Saint Augustine. A lively consciousness of sin and the comparison of his sensual life with the career of several exponents of monachism had resulted at the time of his conversion in a strong ascetic reaction to his former mode of thought and life. In succeeding years the saintly bishop lost none of the ardor for asceticism which marked his conversion, largely because his active imagination continued to dwell on his earlier life and to magnify his former sins and shortcomings out of all proportion, so that he was ever driven to make atonement by “newness of life.” Divorcing himself entirely from his former career, Saint Augustine with some of his friends returned to his birthplace, Thagaste in Numidia, and there he founded on his own lands the first African monastery, and endowed it with that portion of his patrimony which he had not yet given to other charities. For three years he dwelt there “with those who had also consecrated themselves to God, in fastings and prayers and good works, meditating day and night in the law of the Lord.” Soon after he had been ordained priest under compulsion at Hippo in 391, Saint Augustine founded there a second monastery for men on property provided by the aged Bishop Valerius.