Christian Victory Research Articles

Russian Historiography Between East and West: Some Afterthoughts in 2002

465 Ab Imperio, 1/2002 Seymour BECKER RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: SOME AFTERTHOUGHTS IN 2002 The theme of East vs. West, Asia vs. Europe, is a very old one in European history, with roots in Greco-Roman civilization, Europe’s parent. The Greeks invented the words Asia and Europe for the lands on the opposing shores of the line of bodies of water from theAegean Sea in the south to the Don River in the north. A cultural connotation was added to the words by the fifth century B.C.E., when the Greek city-states clashed with the Persian Empire. The notion of a sharp cultural difference was strengthened when Rome’s imperial expansion brought her face to face with the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Near East, and then the Neo-Persian (Sassanian) Empire. During these centuries, and for many more to come, the termsAsia and Orient applied only to the westernmost portions of the continent – those best known to the Greeks, Romans, and their heirs – as distinct from the much less known India and the more-mythical-than-real Far East. During its formative period in the Early Middle Ages, Latin Christendom , later known as European or Western civilization, was in the process of differentiating itself from its eastern neighbor and sibling, Orthodox Christendom. By the time this process reached completion in the mutual distrust of the twelfth century, much of Orthodox Christendom had been conquered by Islam, and the rest would soon follow. By the late fourteenth 466 S. Becker, Russian Historiography Between East and West... century, Latin Christendom’s only adjoining civilization was, and would long remain, Islam. A partial exception was the Russian lands, a peripheral part of Orthodox Christendom, which from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century was under the control ofAsian steppe nomads, themselves converted to Islam during this period. There is no evidence that Russians in the Kievan and udel’nyi periods perceived their encounters with their nomadic neighbors as part of an agelong struggle between East and West, Asia and Europe. In the sixteenth century Moscow presented itself as the successor to Constantinople, the Christian capital, and its conquest of Kazan as a Christian victory over Islam. Schismatic Europe was left out of this picture, and the struggle of religions was not yet seen as one between civilizations. Only from Peter’s time on did Russia place her earlier confrontation with the steppe nomads, along with her contemporary encounters with neighbors across the breadth of the Asian continent, in the context of a struggle between East and West. This was the inevitable result of Russia’s having joined the European state system and begun the process of Westernization, in the cultural as well as other spheres. Educated Russians fully subscribed to European notions of East and West. This deeply rooted dichotomous view of the world had survived the discovery of the trans-Atlantic “New World,” whose political, demographic, and cultural integration into Europe had begun in the sixteenth century. Russians, however, were fully aware that their country’s inclusion in the West was recent and in many ways not fully accepted by the latter. The intelligentsia’s efforts at coping with this problem are the subject of my 1991 article, which follows this introduction. Russia’s role between East and West was an important theme for the most widely read nineteenth-century historians – the authors of multi-volume histories of Russia and of school textbooks. These historians are only touched on in the following article; they are treated more fully in an earlier article of mine.1 However much they differed among themselves on other subjects, they were of one mind on Russia’s relationship to Asia. In the first half of the century, N. M. Karamzin and his successors (I. K. Kaidanov, N. A. Polevoi, M. P. Pogodin, N. G. Ustrialov, and A. O. Ishimova) depicted Russia’s Christian neighbors in Europe as motivated in their dealings with Russia by fear, suspicion, envy, and greed. (One may say that they treated Russia not too differently from the way in which they 1 The Muslim East in Nineteenth-Century Russian Popular Historiography // Central Asian Survey. 1986. Vol. 5, No...

Confronting Political Religion with Divine Religion: Christian Strategies of Re-Evangelization in the 1930s

Western Christianity is currently engaged in a debate on religious pluralism, postmodernity and re-evangelization. This paper argues that the contours of this debate were already visible between the two world wars when Nazism (the ‘new Mohammedism’ as some Christian observers termed it) tried to take over the place Christianity was vacating. The defeat of this ‘political religion’ does not mean the victory of Christianity.

The consummation of the kingdom of God. Reflections on the final victory of Christ as portrayed in Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 raise the question whether eschatology should be focused on Christ, or should rather be viewed theocentrically. A study of the mediatory reign of Christ clearly favours the notion of an intermediate kingdom, during which He will subjugate and destroy the “powers” and the enemies of the kingdom. Having achieved the final victory over death itself, the need for an intermediate rule of Christ no longer exists. However, the office of Mediator is unquestionably linked to Christ’s humanity. This again brings to the fore the question whether Christ will retain his human nature after the consummation of his kingdom. Although it remains an open question in Reformed theology whether Christ will relinquish his human nature at the end of this dispensation, it is argued that in the next dispensation He will no longer serve in the office of Mediator, but that He will reign as the Lamb of God in the stature of the eternal Son of God.

No Sympathy for the Devil: Narratives about Evil

Christian religious experiences usually take place within the context of a religious group or community. Some of these experiences play a central role in propagating and sustaining group identity and belief. In many Pentecostal and charismatic communities, the most conspicuous experiences of this kind are those orchestrated by the devil, including 'demon possession' and 'supernatural assault'. Often, these encounters are thought to be part of an ongoing 'spiritual war' between the forces of good and evil. Christian victory in this war clarifies and strengthens community identity. Employing an ethnographic approach, this article examines the importance of storytelling in relation to this process. Through an analysis of three oral stories, it is suggested that storytelling is the means through which experiences of evil are interpreted and understood and that it is the essential way in which these experiences are communicated by members of a community to one another.

LOVE AMONG THE RUINS: THE CATACOMBS, THE CLOSET, AND THE VICTORIAN “EARLY CHRISTIAN” NOVEL

Catacomb, n., a subterranean place for the burial of the dead, consisting of galleries or passageways with recesses excavated in their sides for tombs.The Oxford English DictionarySilence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.Michel Foucault, The History of SexualityWe often assume (rightly) that homosexuality must be hidden, that it has to be found.Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?I. Ruining the Religious NovelBY TITLING THIS ESSAY “Love Among the Ruins,” I mean at once to be literal, figurative, and allusive in the framing of my topic: literal, in that I will be examining the place of love — specifically, erotic love — within the Roman catacombs or equivalent sites of Christian sanctuary; figurative, in that the representations of love that I will be discussing occur within the context of “literary ruins” — that is, within a relatively obscure nineteenth-century English narrative sub-genre, the Victorian “Early Christian” novel1; and, finally, allusive, in that I deliberately invoke the first poem of Robert Browning’s 1855 collection of dramatic monologues, Men and Women, for more than mere rhetorical effect. In fact, “Love Among the Ruins” condenses a number of the key concerns that I want to address in this essay, for the poem offers an important critique of classical culture not only as a site of pagan aesthetic production and human vainglory, but, relatedly, of homosocial and, perhaps, homoerotic bonds and the sterility presumed to inhere therein — a critique highly visible in Victorian Early Christian fiction. Indeed, I would argue, Browning’s text implicitly participates in the discursive construction of an important, if ultimately unstable, dichotomy that Victorian novels set in the catacombs and written roughly around the same time as “Love Among the Ruins” powerfully reinforce: namely, the traditional opposition between classicism and Christianity, an opposition at least one facet of which is rooted in competing attitudes toward the erotic.

The Promise of Converting Poets in Robert Browning's "Cleon"

Cleon" portrays a disillusioned writer whose achievements and renown do not allay his sense of mortality or his spiritual disappointment. Dour Cleon thinks that "the soul craves all" (l. 241) but it meets resistance from a dying body, and that his artistic success is hollow because "vulgar souls" (l. 25) cannot appreciate either his sensibility or his work. 2 Robert Browning revisited these issues often throughout his career, but "'Cleon' is important as an ars poetica partly because it combines the problems of the Victorian artist with the difficulties of the Victorian Christian." 3 When the poem appeared in Men and Women (1855), Browning had not achieved the stature of his fictional persona; he was still reforming his Christian faith along with a poetics that allowed self-effacement and that linked his creed of divine love with human relationships and artistic resources. Notwithstanding the poem's epigraph, "As certain also of your own poets have said," from Acts 17.28, only a few critics have emphasized, besides Cleon's theological boundaries, the "artist-gifts" (l. 275) that both dignify and frustrate a proud, yet despondent, Greek artist living in Christianity's first century. [End Page 249] Cleon's fame (which, besides "hearing," and "closing," his name denotes) apparently includes him among "the Makers-see on the alert," who can "Impart the gift of seeing to the rest" (Sordello, 3.928, 868). Nevertheless, he cannot be a "true poet" in Browning's moral-aesthetic program without grasping God's "loving hand" and trusting that God "needs you [true poet], / Just saves your light to spend" ("Popularity," ll. 7, 9-10). Browning knows poets' personal as well as artistic pain and what they have said: for instance, when Milton considers how his light is spent, or when Keats has fears that he may cease to be. Cleon, misinterpreting "the rest," gifts, and his place, despairs of reaching spiritual tranquillity. His bigotry, conditioned by his sense of an ending, precludes his conversion to a new faith. Reading more than gospel, however, concerns Browning; his "poetry is heuristic rather than didactic." 4 Browning's contemporaries from the British Isles whose faith was shaken by Higher Criticism from the East could relate to Cleon's defensive Hellenism in "the sprinkled isles" (l. 1) of the Sporades. 5 "Cleon" suggests that readers who embrace "life's adaptabilities" (l. 218) surpass even (some) poets in loving their unfinished work. "Cleon" tests whether Browning ever "findeth scholars" (l. 350) worthy of his allusive, stereophonic craft, whose minds are not put to rest--even by Christianity--but rather are prepared for the enduring challenges of cultural and literary revisionism.

“Where Theologians Fear to Tread”

This essay appeals to the practice of Baroque musical ornamentation as an analogy to the place of reflection on angels and demons in Christian theology. In ways left to the discretion of the performer, this reflection functions to enhance the main theological melody of God, Christ, human salvation, and, in particular, eschatology. Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth are the text cases for this thesis. While Edwards' treatment of angels and Satan mutes his eschatology of glory by drawing attention to the humility and suffering of Christ, Barth's treatment underscores the sovereignty of God and Christ's victory over sin.

Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death by Richard Marius

Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death. By Richard Marius. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. xvii, 542. $35.00.) In a book that takes Luther's life and thought down to the time of the Bondage of the Will (1525), the late Professor Marius makes three claims. First, citing the works of Alberto Tenenti and others, contends that the fear of death was widespread in Luther's era not because European men and women dreaded appearing before God in judgment, but because they dreaded that, contrary to the teachings of religion, death might really mean annihilation, extinction of consciousness. Second, Luther's dogmatic assertions can best be understood as an anodyne (p. 28) a dread of death-as-annihilation that was, Luther-scholars to the contrary, his deepest and darkest fear. Third, the Ref ormation that sprang from Luther's dogma was a catastrophe in the history of western civilization: for more than a century after Luther's death, Europe was strewn with corpses of people who would have lived normal if had never lived at all (pp. xii, 485). The book's chief claim to originality the idea that deeply feared death-as-annihilation, but Marius offers little in the way of textual evidence. He does have in his favor the emphasis of Luther's own explanation of how decided to become a monk when passing through a storm near Erfurt in 1505: Suddenly surrounded by terror and the agony of death, I felt constrained to make my vow (p. 44). But other arguments presented here are less convincing. In Luther's comment on the discussion of Christ's victory over death and sin in chapter 6 of the Epistle to the Romans, in the 1515 Lectures on Romans, Marius finds it significant that does not use the word hell in describing eternal death-but neither did St. Paul in the passage to which refers. Elsewhere suggests that Luther's idea that sin lives and remains forever in the death of the damned is akin to the Augustinian idea that sin itself deprivation, that it nonbeing. If sin nonbeing, the penalty sin also be nonbeing, that is, (p. 107). The key phrase here could also be.' The same sleight of hand applied to Luther's comment, on hearing of Erasmus' death, that Erasmus had lived and died as an Epicurean, and that he went into hell. Since Epicurus taught that death dissolves the soul altogether, one may conclude that Luther saw annihilation not as a promise of peace but as the truest hell, a hopelessness reaching back from the final state of the damned to be present in this world always in the consciousness of the living (pp. …

How Muscular was Victorian Christianity? Thomas Hughes and the Cult of Christian Manliness Reconsidered

Despite the enduring popularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1857, the reputation of its author, Thomas Hughes, has suffered from the general reaction against Victorian values which characterized the first part of the twentieth century. Even as late as 1965, out of sympathy both with Hughes’s Christian beliefs and with his moral didacticism, Kenneth Allsop could dismiss him as a writer ‘fluctuating between a facetious smugness and a creepy piety’. However, in recent years scholars such as George Worth and Norman Vance have provided us with a more sensitive and nuanced picture of his thought, and one which severely qualifies the traditional image of Hughes as an exponent of a muscular Christianity which exalted an anti-intellectual credo of schoolboy athleticism and adult male toughness perfectly attuned to the ethos of high Victorian imperialism. This paper examines some of the ambiguities which are to be found in Hughes’s attempts to encapsulate and transcend the ideals of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour within the specifically Christian context from which they arose, and in so doing cast some light on the way in which Victorian Christianity both contributed to, and was influenced by, the construction and maintenance of gender roles for both men and women.

Monophysite Christology in an Oracle of Apollo

In the so-calledTubingen Theosophy there is an oracle attributed to Apollo, in which the Greek god complains of his defeat brought about by the divine power of Christ. The aim of the present essay is to demonstrate that these verses are the first part of a longer oracular text, recorded in only two other manuscripts. This longer version of the oracle contains in the second part clear monophysite tenets concerning the person and miracles of Christ, and was part of the original text of theTheosophy. It was conceived as a direct apologetic response to an authentic pagan oracle of Apollo, mentioned and commented on by Porphyry in his anti-Christian treatiseOn the Philosophy from Oracles, which denied the divine nature of Christ and approved his condemnation to death. The Christian oracle of Apollo is a forgery written around 500 CE by a monophysite theologian with classical learning—who is mot probably to be identified with Severus of Antiocch—in order to strengthen the idea of the definitive victory of Christianity over the old Greek cults.

The use of ancient spolia in Byzantine monuments: The archaeological and literary evidence

In Byzantium incorporation of spolia in new architectural compositions was often a means to convey a specific political message, such as the appropriation of the Roman past and the legitimacy of the new empire, or to create new aesthetic values, radically different from those of the orderly discipline of the classical art. Convenience in recycling earlier building material in new constructions was also an important consideration. In numerous cases a Christian reinterpretation of antique sculptures built in churches can be discerned: they often symbolized the defeated paganism and the victory of Christianity. Although supersitious, beliefs were directly related with the pagan monuments, spolia reworked with crosses were presented as being Christianized and as symbolizing that the antique culture in all its manifestations had played a role in preparing the world for Christ's advent and had not been excluded from salvation.

The birth of liberal guilt in the English novel: Charles Dickens to H.G. Wells

The author of this study explores the concept of guilt as it first developed in British political and literary culture between the late-Romantic period and World War I. Disturbed by the twin spectacle of urban poverty at home and imperialism abroad, major novelists - including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster and H.G. Wells - offered a host of characters who reflect distinct moral responses and sensibilities. Motivated by the belief that evil is a product of social and economic disparities rather than individual depravity, these characters exhibit guilty consciences in which the guilt is unlike that envisioned by Victorian Christianity. The author asserts that, at the same time, they are premodern, and as such do not possess our therapeutic culture's notion of guilt as neurosis or pathology. Liberal guilt declined in the Edwardian period - as exemplified in Wells' postmodern Tono-Bungay. But Born contends that it is a key aspect of the liberal imagination expounded by Lionel Trilling and that it offers correctives to the simplistic individual moral economy of Christianity, the authoriatarian modernisms that followed the Edwardian era and even the strains of nationalism that define the present day.

The sacra infantia in Medieval Hagiography

In his De civitate Dei, Augustine stated that anyone who wants to lead a good and Christian life must necessarily have lived in sin in his life up to then. It is quite conceivable that Augustine had his own course of life in mind when writing these words; he never made a secret of his own sinful youth, as is clear from the Confessiones. None the less, his statement is expressed in the form of a general rule.Many medieval saints’ lives seem to accord with Augustine’s statement. The saint repents after a life of sin and henceforth leads a model Christian life until the day of his death. Thus the eventual victory of Christianity over the forces of evil was demonstrated.However, there are also many vitae that follow a different pattern. The saint is sometimes supposed to have been perfect in every respect from childhood onward. He was born a saint rather than becoming one through a process of ‘spiritual maturation’. Stories about such precocious saints have not escaped notice in modern scholarship. Following E. R. Curtius, the phrase puer senex is sometimes used to denote the topos; in hagiography, expressions such as as quasi senex and cor gerens senile are used.

Edward Norman. <italic>The Victorian Christian Socialists</italic>. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. 201. $34.50

Journal Article Edward Norman. The Victorian Christian Socialists. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. 201. $34.50 Get access Norman Edward. The Victorian Christian Socialists. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1987. Pp. 201. $34.50. Peter D'A. Jones Peter D'A. Jones University of Illinois, Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 94, Issue 3, June 1989, Pages 769–770, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/94.3.769 Published: 01 June 1989

The Victorian Christian Socialists

The Victorian Christian Socialists

Late Modern

Late Modern

Medieval Ideas of Apocalyptic Mission and the Early Franciscans in Mexico

On June 18, 1539, at Tlaxcala, New Spain, Indians recently converted to Christianity performed a pageant written and directed by the Franciscan missionaries. The play titled “The Conquest of Jerusalem” featured the final siege of the Holy City led by combined armies from Spain and New Spain aided by forces from France and Hungary. The drama unfolds with the army from New Spain, protected by angels and St. Hippolytus, showing the most valor. Huddled to one side of the battlefield are the Pope and his court offering prayers for a Christian victory. After several attacks, each of which ends in a miracle saving the Christian armies, the Moslems capitulate and convert to the true faith. In the final scene, the Pope causes all the new converts to be baptized after which the Sultan and his soldiers bow before Charles V and proclaim him to be “God's Captain” for all the earth. The pageant commemorated the Truce of Nice concluded on June 17, 1538, between Charles V and Francis I at the urging and coordination of Pope Paul III who wanted to free Charles V to attack the Turks and capture Jerusalem. Celebrating the Truce of Nice was a natural choice for the friars because it reflected commonly held theories of apocalypticism. The pageant exhibited salient themes of the apocalyptic conversion of non-believers and infidels, the recapture of Jerusalem, and the recognition of a “last world ruler.” Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía), who recorded the pageant, prefaced the drama by praying that this prophesied victory would soon happen and he assigned an unprecedented role to the peoples of the New World in the victory.

Book Review: The Victorian Christian Socialists

Book Review: The Victorian Christian Socialists

The Victorian Christian Socialists. By Edward Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 201 pp. $34.50

Journal Article The Victorian Christian Socialists. By Edward Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 201 pp. $34.50 Get access Trygve R. Tholfsen Trygve R. Tholfsen Teachers College, Columbia UniversityNew York, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 30, Issue 3, Autumn 1988, Page 609, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/30.3.609 Published: 01 October 1988

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Victorian Christian Socialists. By EDWARD NORMAN. Pp. v+201. Cambridge University Press. 1987. £17.50/$34.50. JOHN KENT JOHN KENT Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 39, Issue 1, April 1988, Pages 329–331, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/39.1.329 Published: 01 April 1988