Grace Of God Research Articles

Immense, Unfathomed, Unconfined: The Grace of God in Creation, Church, and Community—Essays in Honour of Norman Young

‘What difference does it make if we believe in God as creator? How does it affect the way people live in the world in the present and face the future?’ (15). The editor of this collection frames the book with these two questions by Norman Young, asked and answered over fifty years in his teaching, research, and ordained life. The collection published here derives from a 2010 Melbourne Conference celebrating Professor Young's work, and is deeply affectionate in tone. The essays are grouped in sections which loosely reflect the ‘Wesleyan’ quadrilateral: the editor builds a picture of the nature and work of grace in Scripture, Christian theological tradition, Methodist tradition, and a variety of experience-related areas. A sense of urgency runs through the collection: Norman Young's questions challenge a global Church in his view out of step with its own history (as with emphasis on individualistic piety or prosperity teaching), or with the dilemmas posed by ethnic conflict, the abuse of the earth, and popular cultures. This collection shows mature scholars grappling with the work of God's grace in full awareness of the tragedies and joys of the new millennium in an international Methodist theological voice.The book is edited with a refreshingly light hand, and makes no attempt to bring the contributions into explicit dialogue. Nonetheless the editing guides the reader into critical conversation with and between contributors' themes. How will the paradox of self-emptying love and ultimate power in Charles Wesley's hymns speak to Christian understanding of the earth as a ‘first sacrament’? (Geoffrey Wainwright juxtaposed with Theodore Runyon) How does the claim for the pre-colonial experience of Christ by first peoples, made in the Preamble of the Uniting Church constitution, relate to the Wesleys' thinking on intra-faith love? (Wes Campbell juxtaposed with Tim Macquiban) We have in this collection a glimpse of the internal intellectual economy of a global Methodist diaspora as it considers the implications of incarnation, atonement, and eschatological hope. This makes the collection a useful reference point for present emphases in North/Western hemisphere and South/Eastern hemisphere English-speaking Methodist theology.By way of answer to the editor's initial questions, the collection offers a rich anatomy of grace and its action: grace is the way God enters the world, in summary. Contributions keep evidence of their origin as spoken papers, as in the wry humour of the reflection on ‘grace and grumbling’ in the late section ‘the life of grace’. This collection is clearly aimed at theologically aware practitioners as much as the academy. The reader is well advised to read the final essay first, in which Professor Young offers a reflective theological autobiography: as he has it, the grace of God is ‘manifest supremely in the incarnation’ and ‘helps me to face the reality of the present with hope for the future’ (365, 366). This gives the entry point to understanding the nature and action of grace reported in the twenty-five essays that precede it. Because grace is as it is, the reality of God's grace for Young will always lead to a cruciform ethics characterized by gratitude, and many of the essays develop this theme.This collection is weighted toward the Australian contributors, with notable North American and European voices, but it would be interesting to see how a wider Methodist diaspora would critically engage the themes in this account of grace. In Young's voice, grace is the call on our lives that comes not just from a ‘desire to flee the wrath to come’ as John Wesley might have had it. Our responsible living has its first motive in gratitude and blessing, not fear, and the dominant account of atonement Young offers is reconciliation. To reword the editor's first questions only slightly, ‘How should we live, given that God entered the world in this particular way, embodied in this particular man's life, death and resurrection?’ It is a worthwhile effort to join the collection's contributors to reflect on the meaning of the incarnation and atonement in English-speaking Methodist tradition at this particular moment of global urgency in the early twenty-first century. Has our tradition enough to say to a world with exponentially increasing population, broken by war, economic collapse, and environmental uncertainty? The resounding voice of this collection is yes.

Maintenance

Maintenance William Gilson (bio) I have spent the last twenty-one years working here. Many so-called important people are buried in this cemetery. Two that are in fact important to me are my wife and my daughter. Jack is my helper. Even he has remarked that Riverside is beautiful, and if any place can cut through Jack’s alcoholic buildup then it must have some force. As Greta would have said, Jack is thick, at least when he’s on the booze, which is almost all the time. But he can get lively and even accurate. I was in Korea, in the war, and I lived through it, which every day still amazes me. It was complete chance. You’re talking about tolerances of a thirty-second of an inch or less, flying steel. Or rounds aimed right at you from an accurate rifle, missing. Greta would say I was kept alive by the grace of God, but about that I choose not to speculate. And the fact is that Greta and Marti did not make it through, at least so far as I have made it through. They are underground, and I am sitting here looking at retirement. You notice I did not say they are in heaven. Heaven is a claim I have never seen backed up, but I can back up as a fact that they are underground. So I am a man on his own, have been for eleven years. I guess I am used to it. My purpose just now is to go over in a more logical way what I would go over anyway, and do in fact go over every day. Owen Larsford, the big boss, president of the Riverside Cemetery Association, has asked me to set down some basics as to how I run the cemetery, considering I’ve run it for fifteen years and worked in it six before that, so the new man, when they take him on, will have guidelines. Owen said it is a testament to the type of job I have done. I figure I will have to go over this again, as I am not used to such a presentation, which needs to be logical. Let’s get to the practical aspects. The method of burying a body. Not many people know how it’s done. I mean in the details. Why should they? Who is interested? There is not much to it, really; you are basically putting the person underground and leaving things neat on top. I get here every morning at twenty minutes to seven. I drive in through that [End Page 11] gateway that was built in 1853, and it is barely wide enough for a car, and one morning Jack, coming in at around eight thirty, late, hit the gate itself and one of the granite posts, and you’d be surprised how little damage was done to the granite, and even the gate was not bent by much. That was the morning Jack fell into the pond and I fired him. But he did not stay fired. To replace him, I hired a man named Lou Pagrista, who was strongly recommended by Owen Larsford. I needed someone right away, but I should have listened to my own doubts. Lou turned out to be one of those people who cannot shut up, even for a few minutes. Someone such as you might find yourself having to ride for a long distance with in a vehicle, and he talks on in such a way that you’re about ready to open your door and fall out just so you don’t have to hear another word. That’s what Lou Pagrista was like, and I fired him, and I re-hired Jack. Jack can be a problem, but I can handle him, and I like him, and on the day he came back he smelled strongly of alcohol but I was glad to see him. And he got right onto the backhoe and dug a grave with no problem. Marti died of the chicken pox, but it wasn’t the chicken pox. It was the wrong medicine. And that was the...

The Changing of a Macro System: Finding a Social Role for African American Elderly Males

President Obama on Sunday May 19, 2013 summoned the graduates of historically black Morehouse College to “transform the way we think about manhood,” urging the young men to avoid the temptation to make excuses and to take responsibility for their families and their communities. Delivering a commencement address at the all-male private liberal arts college in Atlanta, Obama spoke in deeply personal terms about the “special obligation” he feels as a black man to help those left behind. “There but for the grace of God, I might be in their shoes,” Obama said. “I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family and that motivates me.

TROSKA KOŚCIOŁA O LOS STWORZENIA Kryzys ekologiczny i zadania chrześcijan

To the 10th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Busan, Republic of Korea (30 October to 8 November 2013) we owe two particularly important documents which are relevant to the problem of ecological crisis and endangered human environment. They are: the convergence text The Church: Towards a Common Vision and Unity Statement. The first one is a result of many years’ work of the Commission Faith and Order. In both documents one can see a profound preoccupation of Christian Churches about the integrity of the whole creation of God. As creation has been misused, Christians are not allowed to remain indifferent to this fact. We truly live today “in the tension between the profoundest hope and the deepest despair”. To this urgent issue the author devotes his reflections in the following points: the divine plan for the universe; our faults concerning the divine gift of life; God wants reconciliation for the whole of creation; continuation of some earlier initiatives undertaken by the WCC to protect the creation; towards a new sensibility to the fate of the creation; the nature itself teaches us humility. God is the ultimate future of all his creatures. “The New Testament ends with the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, transformed by the grace of God (cf. Rev. 21:1–22:5). This new cosmos is promised for the end of history but is already present in an anticipatory way even now…” (Towards a Common Vision, par. 69).

Two Ideas of Human Nature: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Thomas à Kempis

One of the questions that many people contemplate in their lifetime is the idea of human nature. In this essay I will seek to examine and compare the idea of human nature in the minds of Christian humanists during the Renaissance to that of late Medieval Christian mystics. The Oration on the Dignity of Man, written by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Pico) provides an insight into the mind of a Renaissance humanist, while The Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas à Kempis illustrates the thought process that was characteristic of a late Medieval Christian mystic. Pico believed that humans are a great miracle and it is within their nature and capabilities to become something great in the world, something just below the level of God.[1] à Kempis held the belief that human nature, like the idea found in Genesis, was corrupted by the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. It can be found in his writings that he believed that human nature is something that is detrimental to the individual and should be controlled by calling on the grace of God.[2] The different points of view found in the writing of Pico and à Kempis can be traced to the sources of their inspiration. In writing The Imitation of Christ, à Kempis drew his inspiration only from the Bible. Pico, like many other Renaissance humanists, looked for truth about human nature not only in the Bible but also by studying other classical works such as the ancient Greeks and Arabs. [1] Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). [2] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Chicago: Moody Press, 1958).

Pastoral Care of the Faithful in Situations of Manifest Lack of Proper Moral Disposition: The Need for a New Canonical-Pastoral Paradigm After Evangelii Gaudium

On the basis of the suggestions of Evangelii gaudium, we propose a new model canonical and pastoral to the faithful who are in moral or spiritual periphery or, with expression of the Ecclesia de Eucharistia, in “situations of a manifest lack of proper moral disposition.” In addition to proposing the use of this new terminology, so as not to fix attention almost exclusively on the divorced and remarried faithful and the question of their admission to the sacraments, it highlights the need to change the approach of pastors and Christian communities, so that go to meet the need – which results in a “real right” – of these faithful to receive pastoral care appropriate to their circumstances and dispositions. A pastoral approach that does not merely point out the things they can’t do, but to help them in a personalized way and with the necessary gradualness, to rediscover the joy of a life guided by the Gospel, to achieve the necessary dispositions to participate in the sacraments and – comforted by the grace of God – to become, they too, missionary disciples. It is proposed, in closing, a model of accompaniment inspired by the “eight thesis” for the pastoral care

How is Forgiveness Possible? Toward an Orthodox and Ascetic Answer

Debates regarding the relationship between justice and mercy, which generally includes forgiveness, have long occupied a central place in Christian theological discussion. Beginning with the teaching of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles, among others, Christians sought to articulate their perspective in contradistinction to the norms of other various Jewish perspectives at the time, both within and without the Church (cf. Matthew 9:13, 12:7). Further complications have historically centered upon the theological question of the doctrine of the atonement. Yet another significant strand has to do with social ethics and criminal justice. Jordan J. Ballor, for example, outlines four schools of thought regarding the relationship between retributive justice, restorative justice, and forgiveness: complementary reformists, instrumentalist reformists, separatist radicals, and abolitionist radicals. Beyond all of these questions and distinctions, however, is the deeply pressing, personal and existential dilemma: how does one forgive?This essay, in a very limited manner, brings together social science research and the Orthodox ascetic tradition on justice, mercy, love, and forgiveness in effort to answer this question. Drawing from St. John Cassian, St. John Climacus, and St. Nicolas Cabasilas inter alia, I outline a three-tiered schema that ties together (1) sin, the antinatural, fear of punishment, and slavery; (2) justice, natural law, expectation of reward, and stewardship; and (3) mercy, the supranatural, love, and sonship. On the one hand, preliminary concrete findings of social science research are used to augment, confirm, and complicate this theoretical schema, while, on the other hand, the schema is used as an evaluative tool for the data. Understanding asceticism as the cultivation of virtue through various practices of self-denial in cooperation with divine grace, I conclude by suggesting that forgiveness, as an ascetic act, requires a flowering of the grace of God through personal discipline and situational prudence, sketching a picture of what this could look like and suggesting areas for further research.

Evolution, the Origin of Human Persons, and Original Sin: Physical Continuity with an Ontological Leap

Evolution, the Origin of Human Persons, and Original Sin: Physical Continuity with an Ontological Leap

The Role of Obedience in Child Faith Formation: Insights from the Teachings and Practices of John Wesley

This article explores Wesley's directive to “break the will” of the child in order to achieve obedience, which he saw as the foundation for faith formation, and offers implications of this directive for Christian education today. Wesley saw children as capable of experiencing the full grace of God and possessing the ability to grow in grace. Wesley also realized that a child's natural tendency was to seek his or her own way and please self. Wesley urged parents and ministers to break the will of the child and move the child from seeking after selfish desires to obedience. He suggested that obedience to the parent must first be achieved before a child could learn obedience to God and called for Christian education that resulted in obedience to be consistent, personal, mild, loving, and Spirit-led.

Liturgia w katechezie

Ciągle aktualne jest poszukiwanie odpowiedzi na pytanie: Jak uczyć uczniów religii, aby doprowadzić ich do odpowiedniego udziału w liturgii? Aby wypełnić to zadanie, należy katechizowanych nakarmić słowem Bożym i łaską Boga. Przestrzenią głoszenia słowa Bożego i obdarzania łaską Boga jest zarówno katecheza, jak i liturgia – każda z nich, we właściwym sobie zakresie. Pomiędzy liturgią a katechezą zachodzą wzajemne relacje. Liturgia domaga się katechezy, a katecheza domaga się liturgii. Aby młodych ludzi poprzez katechezę skutecznie przybliżyć do Mszy świętej, należy ukazywać im Eucharystię w sposób zachęcający. W realizacji tego zadania należy kierować się mądrością Kościoła: „Prawo kierowania sprawami liturgii należy wyłącznie do władzy kościelnej […] Dlatego nikomu innemu, chociażby nawet był kapłanem, nie wolno na własną rękę niczego dodawać, ujmować lub zmieniać w liturgii” (konst. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 22, § 1–3). Te wskazania mają swoje zastosowanie zwłaszcza w przygotowaniu katechizowanych do sakramentów: pierwszej Komunii świętej, bierzmowania i spowiedzi świętej. Jednak, aby został w pełni osiągnięty cel doprowadzenia katechizowanych do dojrzałego udziału w liturgii, należy zadbać także o formację katechetów. Oni jako przekaziciele nauki Chrystusa, powinni odznaczać się odpowiednimi cechami. „Najszlachetniejsze bowiem przymioty ludzkie i chrześcijańskie katechety bardziej gwarantują owocność katechezy aniżeli wyszukane metody” (Dyrektorium ogólne o katechizacji, 71).

Tiny Colored Lights

Tiny Colored Lights

Accidental Nuclear War and Russell’s “Early Warning”

84 Reviews c:\users\kenneth\documents\type3401\rj 3401 193 red.docx 2014-05-14 8:54 PM ACCIDENTAL NUCLEAR WAR AND RUSSELL’S “EARLY WARNING” Ray Perkins, Jr. Philosophy / Plymouth State U. Plymouth, nh 03264–1600, usa perkrk@earthlink.net Eric Schlosser. Command and Control: NuclearWeapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety. NewYork: Penguin P.; London: Allen Lane, 2013. Pp. xxiii + 632. isbn: 978-1594202278. us$36; cdn$38; £25. ric Schlosser has given us a very important and much needed look at the history of us nuclear weapons safety. The book is well researched and, despite its subtitle, is more than a history of nuclear weapons safety. In the course of developing his thesis that nuclear weapons have been—and continue to be—a shockingly dangerous part of the post-wwii world, we get not only a tutorial on nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but a fascinating and eyeopening account of the dynamic of the nuclear arms race, replete with interservice rivalries, ideological fanaticism, and the struggle for civilian control. It was this dynamic which gave us obscenely bloated nuclear arsenals and a military leadership that too often favoured weapons reliability over safety. The story is cogently covered in the course of recounting in considerable detail what has to be one of the most frightening of us nuclear weapons accidents (and there were hundreds1 )—viz. the 18 September 1980 accident in 1 A Sandia Laboratory study found at least 1,200 “serious” accidents involving nuclear weapons between 1950 and 1968. The most serious are called “broken arrows” in Defense Department parlance. These include unauthorized launch, release of a b= Reviews 85 c:\users\kenneth\documents\type3401\rj 3401 193 red.docx 2014-05-14 8:54 PM Damascus, Arkansas involving a Titan ii icbm with a nine-megaton warhead .2 During a check for a possible fuel system leak, a mechanic near the top of the missile (in a hardened silo beneath ground) dropped a nine-pound wrench socket which fell 70 feet and punctured the fuel tank; eight hours later, despite efforts to contain highly flammable fuel vapours, the missile exploded covering the complex in a huge fireball and toxic gases. The warhead, the largest in the us arsenal at the time, was catapulted 1,000 feet into the air and landed a quarter mile away, largely intact. By good luck (and the grace of God?)3 , there was no thermonuclear detonation—especially fortuitous since the warhead had long been identified by its designer (Sandia Laboratory) as one of the least safe in the us arsenal, i.e. one of the most likely to detonate in “abnormal environments” (such as intense heat). Sandia had petitioned the Pentagon for more than a decade to retire or retrofit the warhead (p. 334). The Damascus incident concerns, directly or indirectly, most of the book. But the story is told rivetingly with many detours into weapons history, technical information and a cast of interviewees connected with the nuclear military -industrial complex at various levels. One of Schlosser’s most important characters, and from whom he gets much of his information, is Bob Peurifoy, a longtime nuclear weapons engineer and vice-president at Sandia who waged a heroic thirty-year campaign against Pentagon resistance to nuclear weapons safety. With the help of the Freedom of Information Act and recently declassi fied material, Schlosser provides the reader with literally scores of examples of terrifying nuclear accidents, including events that could easily have led to weapon, fire, explosion, release of radioactivity or full-scale detonation. dod reported only a small percentage of accidents until 1959, after which they reported about 130 per year (p. 327). Most of Schlosser’s data on nuclear accidents—and he cites dozens of examples throughout his book—come from the declassification of dod material since the end of the Cold War and skillful use of the Freedom of Information Act. There has long been some information regarding nuclear mishaps accessible to careful readers of the us press—to be sure only a tiny percentage, but enough to justify public concern. Bertrand Russell’s was a voice that sounded early warnings based upon information that...

There but for the grace of God

AbstractIn response (to the case of David Sellu), many clinicians are likely to adopt a considerably more defensive approach to their practice of medicine and surgery. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons.

Personal Ethics of the New Covenant: How Does the Spirit Change Us?

This essay explores recent discussion – primarily with Volker Rabens’s The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul – of how exactly the Holy Spirit effects ethical transformation in the new covenant’s members. The essay is broken into three parts. Part one will briefly establish the prophesied new covenant centre of the NT. From this part two will consider the biblical anthropological matrix for ethical transformation in the domain of the believer’s heart. Finally, part three will take up the NT writers’ account of the Spirit poured into the believer’s heart with an eye to the specific means the Spirit uses on the heart to effect ethical transformation. The Spirit as the minister of the grace of God in new relationship, as opposed to a sacramentally infused substance, will confirm Rabens’s thesis as a good expression of Paul’s teaching, and also the teaching of the greater corpus of Scripture.

The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Spain

The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Religious Impact of a Poverty Immersion Experience on College Students

An increasing number of universities have initiated activities and assignments to foster empathic and altruistic behavior in students. This study is a report of an outcomes assessment of a poverty immersion experience in a Christian urban ministries course. Following Firmin's (2006) protocol, we used a qualitative methodology that included three waves of interviews with 23 undergraduate students. Analyses of the data suggested that students underwent both affective and behavioral changes as a result of their experience. Affectively, students reported deepening their appreciation for the grace of God in their lives and changed perceptions of homeless people as children of God deserving of dignity and for whom they should care and provide assistance. Behaviorally, students reported the intent to teach other Christians about the spiritual lessons learned, to make urban ministries a long-term part of their individual ministries to others, and to make a tangible difference in the lives of people less fortunate than themselves. The poverty immersion experience utilized by this particular professor seems to have helped students have a deeper experience than they would have had with a more traditional service-learning model.

Penciptaan Setan untuk Kebaikan Manusia

<p>In Arabic Satan means an enemy, one who is distant, misled, burnt, disowned from the grace of God and displaced from His mercy. He is so distant that he cannot any longer hear and know the truth. He is so arrogant that he became the victim of his own attitude. In the Qur’an the word Satan is always mentioned in its concrete from (ma’rifah) which means that the existence and threat of the Satan is true and real. This also means that Satan is created solely to mischief man on his earthly life and mislead him from the grace of God. Different views however have been expressed to the extent that the creation of the Satan may also be understood as an indication of God’s mercy upon His creation especially human being. If it is not because of Satan, human being would not be able to distinguish between good and vice. And it is exactly because of Satan that human being –upon his success to avoid his deceive- may be raised to the higher status as human being. This paper is concerned with this controversy and with the logical implication that emerges thereof. It is ultimately about tracing the Qur’anic and prophetic notion of what Satan is, and what it means to be human.</p>

“Seeing the error of my ways”. Revisiting Paul’s paradigmatic, self-critical remarks in 1 Corinthians 15:8-10

In the ancient Mediterranean world any public admission of weakness reflected badly on one’s personal status and honour, as well as the public reputation of one’s group. However, in 1 Corinthians 15:8-10 Paul openly admits about being in error in the past regarding the true identity of Christ. Within the larger cultural framework of meaning, the apostle’s graphic confession redefines his prior existence as a form of physical pollution. His open admittance of error also introduces a fresh understanding of God who freely extends grace to the morally impure. Paul serves as the paradigm of the active presence of God’s grace, which ontologically transformed his religious status, as well as his understanding of Christ. In this new relationship, based solely on the grace of God, fitting responses by all grateful recipients entail public confessions of previous error and incessant hard work for the sake of Christ.

Manifesting the grace of God to those with HIV or AIDS

�The most terrible poverty is loneliness and feeling unloved� (Mother Teresa). Swaziland is in the unenviable position of having the highest HIV infection rate in the world, with an adult prevalence rate of 42%. This is a national crisis which, in the Swaziland context, has led to feelings of severe hopelessness and rejection and which needs to be addressed through a multidisciplinary approach. The church is in the unique position to demonstrate the love and grace of God in the midst of this pandemic. A small congregation of the Swaziland Reformed Church situated in the southern Shiselweni district of the country decided to take up this challenge. This article showed what the effects could be when the church becomes a vessel of love and grace within the community.

Wiara jako poszukiwanie Boga w świetle nauczania św. Augustyna

For St. Augustine the act of faith, that exists in the mind of a believer, is an intentional phenomenon with a content related to the unseen, and eventually, to God. Since human mind cannot see the object of faith, it can be unveiled only through visible signs. Their role is played in biblical Revelation by wordly goods and mundane matters, which are used by God to show Himself. In an inner expe­rience this role is played by the triad of memory, contemplation and love, thanks to which a person can remember about God, know Him, and love Him. However, God does not evince himself fully neither in external signs nor in the rational soul, created in His own image and likeness. Therefore, faith brings out the quest for God, in which the main power that kindles a desire to see God is love. Thus, faith is a desire for an encounter, that begins thanks to the grace of God. And God, who is guided by love, calls human to the close relationship with himself. Accordingly, faith consists in human’s belief in the love of God, given without any credit.