Theological Disputes Research Articles

The Elusiveness of Protestantism: The Last Expatriations for “Apostasy” from the Church of Sweden (1858) in a European Perspective*

By studying the responses to the last expulsion for “apostasy” from the Swedish National Church in 1858, this article examines how an international Protestant identity was constructed in mid‐nineteenth‐century Europe. It is the argument of this study that a comprehensive identity — including both evangelicals and theological progressives — could be built around the notion of religious liberty. The advocacy of religious freedom became a line of demarcation that separated this group from the Roman Catholic Church, as well as from those Protestants that were firmly attached to an exclusivist position. In order to manufacture this unity, strategies that had been used to fortify the Catholic–Protestant divide were now also used to establish distinctions between different forms of Protestant belief. It is the argument of this article that this unity definitely broke with the theological disputes of the 1860s.

The Circumcision of Jesus Christ

We study the controversies manifested in religious writings, art, sculpture and music as well as the theological disputes surrounding the circumcision of Jesus Christ. Data are derived from relevant historical and theological articles. Jesus Christ was circumcised as a Jew on the 8th day after his birth. Until 1960 the Catholic church celebrated the day as Circumcision Day. In medieval times the holy foreskin was worshipped in many European churches. Christianity never condoned the ritual of circumcision and established the sacrament of baptism in its place.

From the Collection

In 1851, Sarah Williams received a friendship quilt on the occasion of her wedding to Samuel Emlen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sarah, Samuel, and their families were Quakers, or members of the Religious Society of Friends. The pieced silk quilt was signed by ninety‐one of Sarah’s friends and family members, illustrating a young nineteenth‐century Quaker woman’s family circle and social networks. It also shows the effects of the Orthodox‐Hicksite split on Quaker women’s social networks over twenty years after that theological dispute divided the Quaker community.

Editing the "Cloisters Cross"

Despite considerable scholarship devoted to the "Cloisters Cross," both its provenance and iconography are still debated. This article surveys publications that postdate The "Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning" that relate to issues concerning the cross. The role of antisemitism in the production of the cross's program has drawn the most attention. Applying recent approaches to the problem that argue for close attention to the specifics of individual incidents of social violence by Christians against Jews to the situation at Bury St. Edmunds exposes methodological weaknesses in the theory that the cross was designed as an instrument of conversion for the Jews there. Recent scholarship by historians of theology is also relevant to an understanding of the cross. Not only does this clarify points of theological dispute between Christians within monastic and cathedral schools and between Christian and Jewish scholars concerning the nature of Christ, but it also documents the increased emphasis on the penitential aspect of Eucharistic theology and its effect on liturgical performance. In addition, the scholarly theory that fears of judgment at the anticipated but unfulfilled promise of the Second Coming intensified these same twelfth-century theological discussions offers promising new insights into our understanding of the "Cloisters Cross."

The Renaissance Project of Knowing: Lorenzo Valla and Salvatore Camporeale's Contributions to the Querelle Between Rhetoric and Philosophy

The Journal of the History of Ideas has published two symposia devoted to examinations of Lorenzo Valla's place in Renaissance intellectual history, both of which sought to situate Valla in his appropriate contemporary context and to assess his contributions to developing tools of rhetorical analysis and textual criticism in the fifteenth century. In the first JHI debate published in 1989, Salvatore Camporeale's foundational reexamination of Valla's views on language, rhetoric, and theology was frequently cited; and his assessment served as a fulcrum in the disparate interpretations offered by John Monfasani and by Richard Waswo and Sarah Gravelle.1 In the second forum published in 1996, Camporeale was invited to contribute an essay on Valla's famous critique of the false Donation of Constantine; therein the Roman humanist had appealed for Christian renewal inspired by an early Christianity, unburdened by medieval ontological discourse, and seeking to subvert the imperial (Constantinian) model of the church that had dominated since the fourth century.2More than half a century later in the early sixteenth century, reformminded intellectuals such as Erasmus, More, Luther, and Melanchthon picked up Valla's pleas and used his insights and textual criticism to buttress their own calls for ecclesiastical reform, challenging the claims to authority of the Roman church. But despite the popularity among the reformers of Valla's two most noted and provocative texts, his rhetorical and philological refutation of the Donation of Constantine and his annotations for a new translation of the New Testament from Greek, his legacy gradually faded from prominence after the sixteenth century. By then when the Protestants' split from Rome had become an accepted reality, and their battle to achieve a place in a divided Christian world won, the reformers' use of Valla's arguments no longer seemed so controversial. For its part, Catholic discourse in the Tridentine era had reverted to reassertions of papal hierarchy along the Constantinian model. Valla's other contributions to understanding rhetorical hermeneutics and philosophy gradually receded, especially from Anglophone intellectual consciousness and in some quarters even from the metanarratives of intellectual history.3 His legacy frequently goes unacknowledged in reconstructions of antecedents to modern intellectual history and philosophy despite the late twentieth century's lingering love affair with philosophies of language and the stress on contextualization pioneered by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, which share many of the same concerns Valla had plumbed for his day.4 The present group of essays attempts to address that lacuna in various ways, by revisiting Valla's contributions to the philosophy of language, by casting his story forward to understand the nature of his legacy beyond the Renaissance and Reformation, and by exploring why his and other Renaissance humanists' contributions to the project of human knowledge have been minimized or overlooked in more recent times. It is the contention of all the contributors that Valla, and to wit Camporeale's Valla, richly deserves our attention and that his overlooked legacy endures.Beginning in the 1970s Salvatore Camporeale, the leading modern Valla specialist, wrote and lectured widely to highlight the Roman humanist's place in the history of thought and to discuss him in an idiom reflective of modern sensitivities to issues of rhetoric, philosophy, language, and historical context.5 Camporeale's massive tome, Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972) has only slowly made its fortune beyond Italy and Europe. The book, densely written and daunting for its close philological examination of variant texts and datings, has been more often consulted than read outside the select circle of Valla devotees, this despite Eugenio Garin's clearly stated appreciation in his presentation of the volume. Garin lauded the depth and precision of Camporeale's scholarship and the lucidity with which he brought into focus the rich fabric of fifteenth-century theological disputes that engaged Valla and that invested his understanding of language and philology. …

Christus Nesciens? Was Christ Ignorant of the Day of Judgment? Arian and Orthodox Interpretation of Mark 13:32 in the Ancient Latin West

As is now widely recognized, the Scriptures and their interpretation did not serve as mere embroidery upon a larger theological dispute during the “Arian controversy.”All dates in this essay are C.E. In the past two decades, scholars have identified many difficulties with the term “Arian Controversy”; thus the quotation marks. In 1988, R. P. C. Hanson (The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988] xvii) stigmatized the term as a “serious misnomer.” Michael H. Barnes and Daniel H. Williams (Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993] xiv) have nicely summarized the findings of recent scholarship: “Perhaps the most central finding in the last fifteen years … has been to show how peripheral the person of Arius was to the actual debates which occupied the Church for most of the [fourth] century.” I use the terms “Arian” and “Arianism” in this study, in the absence of a better term, as a shorthand way of referring to the Latin theological opponents of the Nicene party. In fact, the relationship between theological discourse and the Scriptures is rather the reverse of the one often assumed. The Scriptures were themselves the source of the dispute, and not fodder for the proof-texting of predetermined theological positions. Theological discourse was, in fact, the fruit of reflection and argument over key scriptural passages. It may well be true that the controversy stemmed from dispute over the meaning of only a dozen or so such texts. Alois Grillmeier is on the mark when he observes, “However much the whole of scripture continued to be read, theological polemics, precisely in trinitarian and christological discussion, restricted themselves to a certain number of important or disputed scriptural texts.”Christ in Christian Tradition: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965) 7. But this is very different from suggesting that the Scriptures functioned merely as proof-texts to what was central—namely, philosophically informed theological argument. These scriptural texts were the initial and abiding source of the dispute. As Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh have observed, “the picture of Arius as a logician and dialectician” has been so “firmly entrenched in all our minds that it has been easy to overlook the degree to which appeal to the Scriptures was fundamental for Arius” and, it might be added, the later Arians.Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 3. Following Athanasius too closely, some modern scholars have argued that it was only the Arian side that so interpreted the Scriptures. See T. E. Pollard, “The Exegesis of Scripture and the Arian Controversy,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 41/2 (1959) 414–29, at 416: “That the Arians were extreme literalists is borne out by Athanasius's criticism of them. He criticizes them, however, not because they interpret the Scriptures literally, but because they isolate carefully selected texts from their context and interpret them literally without any regard for their context of for the general teaching of Scripture.” But the pro-Nicenes were no less capable than their counterparts of reading the text of Scripture in this decontextualized fashion. Indeed, it could be argued that the Arians were generally on much stronger ground when exegeting the Bible. Hanson, too, is on the mark when he states that “the dispute was about the interpretation of the Bible” and that the philosophical language used by Athanasius was “all devoted to what was ultimately a Scriptural argument.”Search, 8, 422. Examining both unmediated, genuine Arian sources as well as hostile orthodox testimony, I will analyze in this essay the extensive dispute in the “Arian controversy” over Mark 13:32, where Jesus appears to acknowledge unambiguously his ignorance of the time of the day of judgment. While both sides agreed that this text was central to the controversy, they disagreed radically on its meaning. Their differences in interpretation, I argue, are rooted in quite different theories of salvation.

Condé’s Trials of the Spirit

In his second edition of the Essay Human on Understanding (1694), John Locke added a section on personal identity caused numerous theological disputes. In what, Locke asked, lies a human a person? He concluded sameness of person is indifferent to sameness of It did not matter, he argued, what the frontispiece was, the shape or structure, for person is a forensic term, and its continuity over time lies in consciousness. Edward Stillingfleet, then Bishop of Worcester, wrote a series of letters condemning Locke's doctrine regarding personality and personal since he argued, was inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the My idea of personal identity, Locke replied, makes the same body not to be necessary to making the same person, either here or after death; and even in this life the particles of the bodies of the same persons change every moment, and there is no such identity in the body as in the person. Can matter think? If God can add thought to persons, then He can also super-add the thinking principle to inert matter. What would call Locke's thought is a limb argument, his obsession with considering consciousness could as easily be in our little finger as in our mind, helps us to test the connection between the set of practices in the Caribbean associated with the sacred, literal, and metaphorical and what we might call the uses of ritual--not exactly the underside of the sacred, but its haunting. How did rituals of belief redefine matter and spirit, persons and property in the Americas? Locke describes the self as that conscious thinking thing, substance made up of (whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, matters not). And here's his example. If you allow a piece of body, the little finger, for example, to depart from the whole, carrying consciousness with it, it is evident the little finger would be the person; and then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body. What kind of metamorphoses would this supposition inspire in the Colonies? If a piece of body could carry mind along with it, then we are dealing with a world in which the meaning of mind and matter, once rendered in codes of law, would be reconfigured as the logic of punishment. The stories Conde tells are tied up with such a haunting: whether spiritual or material ... matters not. The vestigial remnants of bodies return to confound the legal categories of persons and property. Her refutation of transcendence, her emphasis on the materiality attaches itself to as well as to body, ordains in the least expected of places the convertibility of the heavenly and the earthly domain. The legal idiom of possession, especially in the case of human chattels could be passed around, damaged, or consumed encouraged novel transactions between physical organisms and animated spirits. This marking of perishables, consumed by use, says something unique about the sober intelligence of ritual. What does the obsession with matter, the disavowal of innate ideas--in contrast with the Cartesian doctrine the soul always thinks--have, you might ask, to do with Conde's work? What would belief be like if were as absolute, as real as a fist to the stomach? If were as natural, as concretely held as the sense of touch? What, then, are the exigencies of spiritual work? Doesn't spirit itself have to be redefined, or rather held in suspension as St. Paul exacts in 2 Corinthians: I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven--whether in the body or out of the body do not know. It seems to me the study of Caribbean literature has been blunted by a too-general approach to the nature of divinity, religious sentiment, and embodiment. How are we to delimit the difference between body and spirit? What is the nature of what--in Haitian ritual, especially--came to be nothing less than a militant consecration? …

Connecting Links: The British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900-1914

Charles D. Cashdollar, the author of The Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (1989), turns in this book to social history. He tells the story of religious life from the inside and from the perspective of the laity. By “reformed congregations” he means local bodies in several denominations sharing the theological heritage of John Calvin, including English and American Congregationalists and Presbyterians, the Church of Scotland, and some dissenting Scottish denominations. Cashdollar's sample is not statistically representative but is still broad, comprising 150 congregations. Because his broader narrative is about how congregational life changed under the influence of industrialization and urbanization, churches from rural areas, the American South, and the Scottish Highlands are underrepresented in his sample. Also underrepresented are poor or laboring-class people, except as objects of these congregations' ubiquitous mission and social service projects; these church folk were overwhelmingly middle class. Cashdollar's narrative centers on generalizations applicable across denominations and across the Atlantic. Foremost among these is the change from “piety to fellowship.” In 1830, for instance, the word “social” described the midweek prayer meeting; “by 1900, a church social implied tea and sandwiches, strawberries and ice cream.” Other themes involved in this shift to sociability were a growing expectation of luxury and elegance in architecture, furnishings, music, and the like, a demand for comfort and convenience, and an effort to make worship a worthy competitor in a growing consumer culture of entertainment. Accompanying trends included greater emphasis on privacy, a quest for efficiency and standardized business methods in church administration, and growing professionalization. Women's quests for usefulness and recognition in church life, another of Cashdollar's narrative themes, interacted paradoxically with professionalization, as it removed many women's opportunities for leadership as volunteers or church employees even as formal rights for women in church and society were expanding. Cashdollar's survey of congregational life manages to be both systematic and engaging, providing an impressive weight of evidence for his generalizations without burying the reader in a surfeit of detail. Especially useful is the foil provided by coverage of the established Scottish Kirk and its parish system. American readers might readily take for granted the idea of churches as voluntary associations; the Kirk provides instructive contrasts that highlight the many differences that the voluntary system made in church life on both sides of the Atlantic. There is, however, a missing link in Cashdollar's story. He presents congregations as “spiritual homes” intent on maintaining inner harmony and thus remaining almost entirely untouched by the famous nineteenth-century theological disputes over Darwinism, higher criticism, and fundamentalism. If Cashdollar's earlier work was intellectual history “from the top down,” and this present book is social history “from the bottom up,” where, we may ask, is the history “from the middle outward” that tells us of the differences that theological change made for the “spiritual homes” of congregations and, more important perhaps, the differences church families made in the battles of the theologians?

The Force of Ancient Manners: Federalist Politics and the Unitarian Controversy Revisited

As 1804 drew to a close, Massachusetts Federalists could be forgiven for thinking that it had been a very bad year, the latest among many. The country again stood on the verge of war with England, while Bonapartist forces swept across Europe. Closer to home, buoyed by the immense popularity of the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson had been elected by a wide margin to a second term as president. Even the Bay State had cast its electoral votes for the Republican ticket; of all New England, only Connecticut had remained steadfastly in the Federalist camp. In the Senate, Massachusetts found herself represented by independent-minded John Quincy Adams. A year earlier, Adams had defeated staunch Federalist Timothy Pickering just in time to make himself the sole New England Federalist to vote in favor of implementing the acquisition of Louisiana, thereby rendering Massachusetts complicit in her own subjugation by the slaveholding Virginia interest. More dispiriting, Alexander Hamilton lay dead on the field of honor, shot by Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States, losing Federalist candidate for governor of New York-and, it was rumored, the man who would have delivered his state into the Northern Confederation when the High Federalists led New England out of an increasingly untenable union. To heap insult on injury, as the year reached its dismal end, Harvard College, the institutional center of Massachusetts Federalist political culture, found itself under siege from within. Since the August 1803 death of Professor David Tappan, the university had faced a vacancy in the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, the oldest endowed university chair in the United States.2 Then, in late September 1804, Harvard President Joseph Willard died as well. The year-and-a-half-long struggle to fill these vacancies exposed a fissure in New England Federalism, a rift that played itself out as theological liberals and trinitarian Calvinists struggled for control of the university. Politicians and clergy who had previously worked together to combat the twin evils of democracy and infidelity now ranged themselves on opposite sides of the religious question, with the dominant High Federalists casting their considerable weight on the side of the liberal clergy, making possible their ultimate victory. In doing so, they revealed a great deal about the peculiar social and political synthesis that distinguished the Massachusetts Federalists from other wings of the party and about the forces that led to their defeat in public life. The conventional view of the Harvard dispute has focused on the revolutionary (albeit, to the outsider, somewhat parochial) changes that followed in its wake, treating the affair as the first skirmish in what is known to historians of American religion as the Unitarian controversy.' The initial phase of that ostensible revolution came with the February 1805 election of Unitarian Henry Ware as Hollis Professor; it was completed a year later, in March 1806, with the election of theologically liberal Professor Samuel Webber as university president. Both Ware and Webber replaced traditional Calvinists in their respective posts. Little more than twenty-five years later, the Massachusetts Standing Order had collapsed and the state's Congregational churches had split into two separate denominations, with trinitarian Congregationalists on one side and Unitarians on the other. Most discussions of the Harvard controversy have focused almost entirely on the appointment of Ware to the Hollis Professorship; these accounts treat the choice of the university president as an afterthought in what was primarily a theological dispute between those who believed in the orthodox Calvinist doctrine of the trinity and those who did not. More than thirty years ago, Conrad Wright challenged one aspect of this dominant interpretation with an elegant reconstruction of the complex sequence of events that led up to Ware's election. Wright demonstrated that the Harvard Corporation, which bore initial responsibility for the choice of the Hollis professor, engaged in a good deal of give-and-take and that its fellows were willing to compromise, even offering to link the appointments of professor and president in order to secure ideological balance in the university administration. …

Konfliktfelder und Konfliktparteien im Prozeß der lutherischen und reformierten Konfessionalisierung - das Fürstentum Anhalt und die Hochstifte Halberstadt und Magdeburg im 16. Jahrhundert

Article Konfliktfelder und Konfliktparteien im Prozeß der lutherischen und reformierten Konfessionalisierung - das Fürstentum Anhalt und die Hochstifte Halberstadt und Magdeburg im 16. Jahrhundert was published on December 1, 2001 in the journal Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History (volume 92, issue jg).

Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism.

Citizens of Zion: Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism. By Ellen Eslinger. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xxi, 306. Figures, maps, table. $38.00.) In this reassessment of camp meeting revivalism, Ellen Eslinger seeks to turn on their heads two commonly held assumptions regarding Kentucky-- style religion. Although Turner-minded historians have long posited that camp meetings were fundamentally products of frontier conditions, Eslinger argues that Kentucky was already a well-developed rural society by the time of the famous Cane Ridge encampment in Logan County in August 1801. And although scholars have more recently suggested that the basic ingredients of camp meetings were as old as Christianity itself, Eslinger believes that this innovative form of revivalism was instead a response to agrarian capitalist development. At a time when the organic, cohesive, cooperative ideal of age-old tradition was being supplanted by a new liberal, plural, and competitive reality, camp meetings, Eslinger writes, embodied a compelling if fleeting communal experience and a reaction to a frightening moral crisis. Although initially the religious outcome of the particular social of early Kentucky, encampments for the revival of religion were soon adopted throughout the Republic. Paraphrasing Durkheim, Eslinger argues that camp meetings thus served as an integrative force among new settlers struggling with the anxieties attendant on rapid socio-economic and political change (xiv-xvii). Ultimately, the first camp meetings had little to do with the exigencies of frontier life--in themselves too absorbing to permit much religious development--and everything to do with Americans' desire for collective experience in the face of liberal capitalist expansion. Citizens of is divided into three parts. In Part 1, Settlement, Eslinger describes the early years of white-Indian conflict in Kentucky as Virginians and other easterners laid claim to the Revolution's western legacy: vast new lands beyond the Appalachians. She recounts the grueling conditions at the various stations where most white settlers lived out their first years in the territory. In Part 2, Development, Eslinger describes in extraordinary detail the formation of early Kentucky society, from family farming and the building of mills, warehouses, dams, and small towns, to land speculation and the varying prospects for freeholdership, conflicts between cohees (Scottish or Scots-Irish settlers) and tuckahoes (English settlers), the establishment of judicial and political structures, the emergence of political leadership, the quest for statehood, and incorporation of Kentucky into the larger national military and political scene. Together with chapter 6, treating the arrival of and theological disputes among the major denominations--Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists--these chapters make up nearly two-thirds of the book's text. Finally, in Part 3 of her study, The Great Revival, Eslinger concludes with a close examination of the beginnings of the Second Great Awakening in Kentucky and, most specifically, the Cane Ridge meeting. Focusing chiefly on the involvement of ministers--ever the most articulate and published cohort among religious adherents--Eslinger describes the first encampments organized by James McGready, Barton Stone, and other Presbyterians familiar with eastern evangelical preaching. In the final pages, Eslinger concludes that the first camp meetings possessed political dimensions as well, closely resembling the republican social ideals of the new nation and with the power to transform the first Kentucky campers into new citizens of Zion (241). Throughout, Eslinger focuses consistently on social context and writes with great stylistic lucidity. She persuasively demonstrates the extraordinary speed with which Kentucky moved from killing fields to tobacco fields and the extent to which the territory and then state had advanced well beyond the frontier stage of development by the time of the first Presbyterian encampments. …

Defining the Limits of Britishness: The “New” British History and the Meaning of the Revolution Settlement in Ireland for Ulster's Presbyterians

Irish historian A. T. Q. Stewart has aptly described the world inhabited by eighteenth-century Ulster Scots as one of “hidden” significance. Compared to the rise of the Ascendancy and the repression of Catholics under the penal code, the story of Ulster's Presbyterians figures as interesting, albeit less significant, marginalia. While a few studies detail the handicaps the group suffered in the years after the Williamite Settlement, their eighteenth-century experience has mainly attracted church historians interested in theological disputes, social historians charting the rise of the linen industry, and students of the '98 Rebellion exploring the ways in which a latent Presbyterian radicalism contributed to the formation of the United Irish movement. Explaining who the Ulster Scots were or how they defined themselves has not attracted much scholarly attention, an unsurprising failure given that historians have designated the eighteenth century in Ireland as the period of “penal era and golden age.”This article argues that a new, more fully integrated approach to the study of Ireland and Britain offers possibilities for recovering the history of the Ulster Scots. Nearly twenty-five years after J. G. A. Pocock issued his “plea” for a “new British history” that would incorporate the experiences of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland within a single narrative by exploring the ways in which each “interacted so as to modify the condition of one another's existence,” scholars have finally responded. The new British history, with its focus on the development of a British state system, seeks to explore, according to a chief proponent, John Morrill, the ways in which “the political and constitutional relationship between the communities of the two islands were transformed” and the processes through which they gained “a new sense of their own identities as national communities.”

Scripture politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century

Scripture Politics examines the central role played by Ulster Presbyterians in the birth of Irish republicanism. Drawing on recent trends in British and American historiography, as well as a wide range of Irish primary sources, Ian McBride charts the development of Presbyterian politics between the War of American Independence and the rebellion of 1798. McBride begins by tracing the emergence of a radical sub-culture in the north of Ireland, showing how traditions of religious dissent underpinned oppositional politics. He goes on to explore the impact of American independence in Ulster, and shows how the mobilization of the Volunteers and the reform agitation of the 1780s anticipated the ideology and organization of the United Irish movement. He describes how, in the wake of the French Revolution, Ulster Presbyterians sought to create a new Irish nation in their own image, and reveals the confessional allegiances which shaped the 1798 rebellion. Above all, this innovative and original book uncovers the close relationship between theological disputes and political theory, recreating a distinctive intellectual tradition whose contribution to republican thought has often been misunderstood. _

Understanding Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland

Anti-Catholicism is part of the dynamics of Northern Ireland's conflict and is critical to the self-defining identity of certain Protestants. However, anti-Catholicism is as much a sociological process as a theological dispute about doctrine. It was given a Scriptural underpinning in the history of Protestant-Catholic relations in Ireland, and wider British-Irish relations, in order to reinforce social divisions between the religious communities and to offer a deterministic belief system to justify them. This article examines the socio-economic and political processes that have led to theology being used in social closure and stratification. It describes the various forms of contemporary anti-Catholicism, and highlights two further sociological features of the process, the common-sense reasoning process which reproduces it and how, in its language, it operates as a `discursive formation'.

Universalism and the Greater Good

Gordon Knight recently challenged my assumption, which I made for the purpose of organizing and classifying certain theological disputes, that a specific set of three propositions is logically inconsistent (or necessarily false). In this brief rejoinder, I explain Knight’s objection and show why it rests upon a misunderstanding. In a previous article I assumed, for the purpose of organizing and classifying certain theological disputes, that the following set of propositions, call it set A, is logically inconsistent: (1) It is God's redemptive purpose for the world (and therefore his will) to reconcile all sinners to himself; (2) It is within God's power to achieve his redemptive purpose for the world; (2) Some sinners will never be reconciled to God, and God will therefore either consign them to a place of eternal punishment, from which there will be no hope of escape, or put them out of existence altogether. In calling set A logically inconsistent, I did not mean to imply, of course, that it contains a formal contradiction; I meant to imply only that the conjunction of (1), (2), and (3) is necessarily false, or metaphysically impossible, or not possible in Plantinga=s broadly logical sense. If that is true, then at least one of these propositions is false and we can therefore classify theologians according to which of the three propositions they finally reject. Nor is it usually very difficult, I suggested, to identify which proposition a given theologian rejects. According to Gordon Knight, however, it is a mistake to regard set A as necessarily false. In a recent response to my article, Knight makes two assumptions for which he provides no argument: first, that something like a conflict of desires is possible for God, and second, that God=s redemptive purpose for the world (logically) could come into conflict with some other overriding purpose. From the perspective of these assumptions, he then diagnoses my Aerror@ as

Entre el tiempo y la etemidad: la idea de la eviternidad en el pensamiento de Raimundo Lulio

The subject of this article is Lulrs concept of eviernity which mediates between the eternity of God and the temporality of man. The first paragraph points out the salient importance of this topic in the work of Ramon Lull, particulary in his outstanding enciclopedia Arbor scientiae. After a glance backward at the previous history of the Lullian idea (second paragraph), the third paragraph sets forth that with his notion of eviternity Lull does not associate the special time of angels; unlike other medieval theologians for him eviternity is an escathological concept which signifies the measurement of the duration of a life in damnation or salvation. The article concludes with a view at a contemporary theological dispute about the usability of "aevum" as a term of the doctrine of eternal life.

On Holisms: Insular, Inclusivist, and Postmodern

Nancey Murphy's offer to take us “beyond liberalism and fundamentalism” is an exciting one: Who wants to be caught in the clutches of a fruitless theological dispute? She argues that the key to our escape is “Anglo‐American postmodernity.” I analyze what Murphy means by this term and why it may turn out to be a more precarious escape route than one might think. Holism or “post‐foundationalism” is indeed inescapable for science/religion discussions today, but an inclusivist holism is preferable to Murphy's insular holism

Hick and Loughlin on Disputes and Frameworks

It was Wittgenstein who said that in order to ‘combat’ a point of view, one first has to establish whether that point of view is within or without one’s own framework. That is to say, one has to establish whether the ‘combat’ is to be a dispute within a framework or between frameworks. For Wittgenstein, that was of the utmost importance if one was to avoid falling into confusion. This is because whereas disputes within a framework proceed by means of reasoned arguments which are held fast and validated by that common surrounding framework, disputes between frameworks do not proceed within a common milieu, and so the common validity of reasoned arguments subsides. Thus, a dispute between frameworks has to proceed by means of quite different methods, that is, methods of persuasion and charm.This insight has a particular significance when one considers some of the developments that have been taking place in theology in recent years. For the last three centuries or so, theological discourse was conducted within a framework that was, at once, both ‘theological’ and ‘scientific.’ As Amos Funkenstein has argued, it was a framework ‘in which theological concerns were expressed in terms of secular knowledge, and scientific concerns were expressed in theological terms. Theology and other sciences became almost one.’ Virtually all theological disputes in those centuries were located within that framework, and consequently, they were conducted by means of reasoned arguments.

Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States by Charles H. Lippy

BOOK REVIEWS575 then shrank down to the vicinity of its presidios, and its Indian support vanished . It was undergirded at last, as it had been at the beginning, by private funds and Crown troops and subsidies from abroad. When the general history of Spanish Florida is written,Amy Bushnell should be its author. Until then, this work will abundantly inform the reader about a neglected century and its Franciscan missions in the provinces of Florida. Eugene Lyon Flagler College Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States. By Charles H. Lippy. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. 1994. Pp. x, 284. $65.00; $19.95 paperback.) This book is an ambitious attempt to trace the history of "popular" religion among the American people from the colonial period to the present. Much attention is given to European settlers in America, but pages are also devoted to native peoples and African Americans. For individuals whose understanding of American religion may lie solely on texts that tell the story of religion in America from the perspective of religious institutions, this book could be a revelation . Lippy sees "popular religiosity" as "that inchoate, unorganized, and highly syncretistic sense of the supernatural" (p. 17), and believes that the search for this sensibility about the supernatural has been "a constant in American culture " (p. 17). Lippy points out this supernatural element in a number of unrelated religious examples throughout the book, suggesting to the reader that the groups and individuals he uses as evidence all share a similar understanding or characterization of the supernatural in their lives. Indeed, the interest in the supernatural may be very significant and a common element within popular religiosity , but the specific apprehension and expression of the supernatural may vary quite considerably from one example of personal religiosity to the next. Religious lives are too complex to reduce the personal religious understanding and experience of all individuals and communities of individuals to a few simple , detectable characteristics. As much as I admire and enthusiastically commend Lippy's attempt to construct a history ofAmerican popular religion, I was troubled by his method for writing this history. Lippy sees popular religion and its history as a companion or complement ofinstitutional religion and its history. But popular religion is so much more; it is the religious history of the American people! I was hoping that Lippy would offer a more radical or creative approach to this history in his book. As for his overall linear approach to this material (from the Great Awakening and Revolution to Antebellum America, Nineteenth Century, the two WorldWars, etc.), I have always felt that the important lesson that the study of popular religion teaches scholars is that histories based on such linear schemes can be a fiction. Linear narratives ofAmerican religion are not neces- 576book reviews sarily helpful in uncovering, understanding, or interpreting how people actually lived their religious lives. As a part of his linear design, Lippy uses major events as the foundation for his history such as wars, theological disputes, ecclesiastical or governmental decisions. He offers a history of popular religion as peoples ' religious reactions to institutional norms, dogmas, decisions, functionaries, hierarchical individuals within institutions. Popular religion, therefore, is not valued as an important history in and of itself, but as the residual history of believers living in relation to their religious institutions. A history of popular religion must give attention to the way that peoples' religion complements, but is also quite different from, these social and religious structures and institutions so that this work may yield a richer, fuller, and more complete history ofAmerican religiosity. The challenge presented to the author is how he can convince his readers that he is actually able to construct a reliable history ofAmerican personal religion , especially when there are no ethnographic accounts to be used as sources of historical information, and comparatively few historical studies. Such a history is difficult to chronicle because it involves an examination of data which have not yet been collected. It is not that such religion did or does not exist, but that the scholarly process of distilling such a religious history is still seeking recognition and support. Lippy does make use...

Fissures in Late-Nineteenth-Century English Nonconformity: A Case Study in One Congregation

Recent study of English Nonconformity in the nineteenth century has focused upon issues in the integration of a small culture of Dissent into the larger Anglican-dominated culture, issues such as politics, education, and advancement in the general society. Little attention, by contrast, has been given to theological questions or developments. As a result, the impact of some major shifts in theological thinking within denominational traditions has not been carefully pursued; more seriously, such changes have been frequently characterized as illustrations of theological decline. Greater perspective, however, would be gained by locating instances of theological contention and setting them in the larger framework of cultural and religious change. The following exploration of a theological dispute in one Nonconformist congregation is such an attempt.