Vision Of Salvation Research Articles

Visions of Salvation: Chinese Christian Posters in an Age of Revolution, written by Daryl R. Ireland

Visions of Salvation: Chinese Christian Posters in an Age of Revolution, written by Daryl R. Ireland

Book review: Daryl R. Ireland, Visions of Salvation: Chinese Christian Posters in an Age of Revolution

Book review: Daryl R. Ireland, <i>Visions of Salvation: Chinese Christian Posters in an Age of Revolution</i>

LuLaRich

LuLaRich

Secularization and the Jōruri Plays

Abstract This paper aims to show, primarily through analysis of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century jōruri 浄瑠璃 plays, the radical changes in the vision of salvation shared among ordinary people, focusing especially on Jōruri monogatari 浄瑠璃物語, Sonezaki shinjū 曽根崎心中 and Kinpira jōruri 金平浄瑠璃, and highlights how such changes are related to contemporary social processes of secularization. José Casanova famously claimed that the classical concept of secularization as the decline of religious belief is not adequate for the task of understanding general historical processes. Nevertheless, an equivalent to this process of religious decline is an important phenomenon in early modern Japan. In this secularization process, Japanese people of the early modern period sought more secular visions of salvation. Strong, persistent attention to kokoro 心 (mind or spirit), regarded as the means of realizing secular values such as wealth or happiness, was an expression of these concerns. Analyzing jōruri plays reveals how the increasing power of the centralized state, defeating religious powers one by one, became the key to changing people’s visions of salvation and thus, of secularization processes.

An Invitation to Suffer: Evangelicals and Sports Ministry in the U.S.

When American evangelicals sought to use the tools of sport for religious outreach in the mid-twentieth century, they began to wonder if the essential features of sport—competition and hierarchy—conflicted with their approach to salvation. For most evangelical Christians, salvation is an option for every human and each person must make an individual decision to accept or reject the salvific power of Jesus Christ. This is a worldview that relies heavily on separating believers from non-believers, but, importantly, the means of distinction is individual choice. There is not a competitive aspect to this framework; salvation is theoretically available for all. This article traces sports ministry’s struggle over time to unite the competitive world of sport with their vision of salvation. By illuminating different approaches to the ethical challenge of uniting evangelicalism and sport, we can see that sports ministry is a field of complexity that invites believers to grapple with intense theological dilemmas without offering easy solutions. I argue that the struggle to reconcile sport and evangelical theology can be meaningful religious work. I will show that the kinds of suffering that athletic competition entails can align with the evangelical theodicy that God uses suffering to communicate with humans. It may be this feature of sport, the opportunity to experience meaningful suffering, that continues to motivate evangelicals to attempt to unite their religion with sport.

The Old Man in Purgatory: The Indian Part in Yeats's Vision of Salvation

This essay examines Yeats's Purgatory via A Vision, in an attempt to understand his view of salvation in particular relation to Indian philosophy. Read from a Christian perspective, Purgatory may be a work far from purgation, as T. S. Eliot once complained. I wish to show in this essay that Purgatory indeed places emphasis on purgation by a negative example, if in a different way from the Catholic one. Yeats denies the linear eschatology of Christian theology as well as its doctrine of salvation in eternal heaven. In A Vision, Yeats explains his view of the afterlife of the soul, which involves purgation through ‘the Dreaming Back’. The special treatment of the Old Man renders Purgatory a meta-purgatorial play that mirrors the Dreaming Back of his mother's spirit in the Old Man's, intensifying the theme of purgation. Purgatory effectively dramatizes the inability to forgive and cast out remorse: the impossibility of nishikam karma, or selfless action, to borrow Sanskrit terms, which is essential for Yeatsian salvation. Finally, I would also emphasize Yeats's deviation from the Hindu wisdom, which makes Yeats's vision uniquely his own.

Difference &amp; Modernity of Lee YounTaek’s Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Works in Hamlet and MunJeInGan YeonSan

Lee YoonTaek can be regarded as the representative playwright and director of Korea in adapting Shakespeare’s works with Korean traditional style. He, in his plays and performances, has tried to restore traditional theatre by connecting Shakespeare works with Gut and traditional entertainments. Lee YounTaek has supported Oh TaeSuk’s theatrical movement of “Korean Racial Theatre” by announcing that Korean theatre should restore the ‘Korean-ness’ in producing performances on the stage. This ‘Korean-ness’ means the original emotion, rhythm and movement of Koreans on the theatrical performance. This means his positive attitude of agreement, inheritance and cooperation for Oh TaeSuk’s theatrical movement. Lee YounTaek has continued to experiment in adapting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his own style of direction by means of ‘Gut.’ He introduces supernatural ‘inspiration’ of Gut in several scenes to cure madness or psychological instability, which can create the uniqueness of his theatrical world. And he tries to overcome the nihilistic result of the last scene in Shakespeare’s original works in which most of major characters should die without any vision of salvation. Instead, Lee lets Hamlet rise to heaven by tearing white textile ritually, the symbol of death, after his death as the scapegoat for the purgation of the world. The audience can feel successful exorcisement of skillful Gut by watching Hamlet’s role as a Korean shaman(Mudang) in the last scene. Lee endeavors to use his dialectical method in connecting the tradition and the modern, the Oriental and the Western, and Shakespeare and the traditional Gut. By doing so, Lee is able to produce the synthesis from the mixture of two different elements in his performance of MunJeInGan YeonSan. He inserts a lot of motifs of Shakespeare works such as Hamlet and Macbeth. Different from Hamlet, MunJeInGan YeonSan is composed of historical anecdotes of King YeonSan which reminds us of similar motifs of Hamlet and Macbeth. YeonSan, by using Guts, tries to solve his mother’s regrets by which she could not leave for the world of death. Accordingly, the audience can enjoy opposite elements simultaneously, which can create the synthesis in theatrical effects dialectically. Also, Lee describes YeonSan as extremely decadent character who searches for murder and sexuality to the limit without any vision of salvation. YeonSan’s nihilistic attitude in contrast with Hamlet’s positive one, can be said to create modernity by showing destructive ending in spite of its major structure of traditional Gut.

"You Will Be Children of the Most High": An Inquiry into Luke's Narrative Account of Theosis

ABSTRACT Motivated by Luke's insistence on the ascension of Jesus, this essay investigates the potential for reading Luke–Acts as a witness to a particular vision of salvation as theosis. The argument begins with the introduction of Jesus in the annunciation as "Son of the Most High" and moves to Jesus' provocative teaching in Luke 6:35–36 that those who practice enemy love and radical generosity will be called "sons of the Most High" precisely because the Father practices enemy love and radical generosity. It culminates with the ascended Jesus' enactment of the practices of enemy love and radical generosity in an encounter with his enemy Saul of Tarsus. The essay identifies Acts 9 as a primary exemplar of theosis as a Spirit-enabled, ecclesial, nonviolent, full-bodied participation in the body, life, and ongoing history of the ascended Lord Jesus. According to the narrative logic of Acts 9, Saul is incorporated into the ascended Lord Jesus and into the church through the power of the Spirit and in baptism. Saul's theosis becomes evident throughout Acts in his Spirit-effected transformation from a life of violence to a life marked by practices of enemy love and generosity. Luke–Acts supports a version of theosis that is both counter-imperial—with its insistence on enemy love and power for the sake of blessing—and fully Trinitarian. It is the Spirit who incorporates humans into the life and ongoing history of Jesus, thus joining them to the life of God and the God-like pattern of life described in Luke–Acts.

"You Will Be Children of the Most High": An Inquiry into Luke's Narrative Account of Theosis

ABSTRACT Motivated by Luke's insistence on the ascension of Jesus, this essay investigates the potential for reading Luke–Acts as a witness to a particular vision of salvation as theosis. The argument begins with the introduction of Jesus in the annunciation as "Son of the Most High" and moves to Jesus' provocative teaching in Luke 6:35–36 that those who practice enemy love and radical generosity will be called "sons of the Most High" precisely because the Father practices enemy love and radical generosity. It culminates with the ascended Jesus' enactment of the practices of enemy love and radical generosity in an encounter with his enemy Saul of Tarsus. The essay identifies Acts 9 as a primary exemplar of theosis as a Spirit-enabled, ecclesial, nonviolent, full-bodied participation in the body, life, and ongoing history of the ascended Lord Jesus. According to the narrative logic of Acts 9, Saul is incorporated into the ascended Lord Jesus and into the church through the power of the Spirit and in baptism. Saul's theosis becomes evident throughout Acts in his Spirit-effected transformation from a life of violence to a life marked by practices of enemy love and generosity. Luke–Acts supports a version of theosis that is both counter-imperial—with its insistence on enemy love and power for the sake of blessing—and fully Trinitarian. It is the Spirit who incorporates humans into the life and ongoing history of Jesus, thus joining them to the life of God and the God-like pattern of life described in Luke–Acts.

Witness and Unity in 21st-Century World Christianity

Christianity has recently undergone historic demographic and cultural shifts: it has expanded significantly in the global south while declining in the west. In an age of World Christianity, these changes bring diversity and competition, and renewed Christian witness. The global context for the faith reveals unavoidable tensions between missional expansion and the call to be one in Christ Jesus. Amid plurality and rapid changes in identity, Christians are challenged to re-appropriate the classic marks of the church – one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Engagement with all four marks, reframed for the contemporary situation, will help to maintain the creative tension between mission and unity, to connect Christians across geography and generations, and to forge a common vision of salvation in an interconnected world.

“You Cannot Serve God and Mammon”: Economic Relations and Human Flourishing in Luke

Abstract: Economics is essentially a matter of value, and capitalism is a system of value creation in which the individual is valued at the expense of the community and the cosmos. In contrast to this, Luke tells the story of Jesus as a vision of salvation that is covenantal and communal, encompassing every dimension of life, including the economic. God and mammon represent two antithetical wellsprings of value and desire that orient intentions and actions in different directions. Mammon represents the realm of self‐justification, self‐reliance, self‐aggrandizement, and in our own disenchanted world the “buffered” and disengaged self, while God represents the domain of human flourishing characterized by interdependence and sharing.

The Krajina Serbs and the Role of Baron Mihajlo Mikašinović in Austro-Hungarian Military Service as a Possible Historical Framework for Miloš Crnjanski’s Novel Migrations

The Krajina Serbs and the Role of Baron Mihajlo Mikašinović in Austro-Hungarian Military Service as a Possible Historical Framework for Miloš Crnjanski’s Novel Migrations* Branko Mikasinovich, Ph.D., Voice of America Two literary works, Miloš Crnjanski’s novel Migrations and Dr. Djuro Zatezalo’s biography Baron Mihajlo Mikašinović of Schlangenfeld (Mihajlo barun Mikašinović od Zmijskog polja),1 provide an insight into the context of the mid-18th-century lives of the Serbs in Austria-Hungary and the many-sided aspects of their suffering. The key dimension of this struggle in both books is found in Serbian military campaigns during Austro-Hungarian rule. As a literary concept, “struggle” is often encountered in family and professional relations, encouraging the idea of “migration” or an “escape” as an ultimate effort in achieving change and happiness. In this brief study, the author will examine how writer Crnjanski and biographer Zatezalo deal with these issues. Acclaimed as one of the best 20th-century Serbian novels, Crnjanski’s masterpiece Migrations2 has a symbolic, genuine, universal, and timeless message, and migration itself is, as the English artist and author John Berger once said, “the quintessential experience of our time.”3 Migration has changed human history on a grand scale, with populations mixing and co-existing and, in the process, changing our habitat and civilization. Crnjanski wrote Migrations in 1929, as if predicting what was to come by reiterating what was in the past, because human history is, for him, an endless cycle of migrations. Crnjanski’s narrative deals with the destiny of two Serbian brothers, Vuk and Arandjel Isaković, who represent two different personalities and outlooks on life. [End Page 197] Vuk is, like the main subject of Zatezalo’s biography, a patriot and a person ready to sacrifice himself for his people and his faith. Both he and Mihajlo are caught at the crossroads of two empires, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman. Vuk dreams of returning to a Serbia free from Ottoman domination, while Mihajlo fights in Krajina for Serbian rights and survival and wants to stay where he is. Krajina is his fatherland and homeland, while Vuk imagines if he cannot return to a free Serbia, a New Serbia, he would rather migrate to a remote Russia, where he will be able to retain his Orthodox faith and identity. For Vuk, Russia is a vision of salvation, contrary to Austria-Hungary, where his faith and nationality are in constant jeopardy. Vuk’s brother Arandjel represents another view: he is a merchant who belongs to a new civic class, who does not long to return to Serbia and wishes to remain a successful businessman in Austria-Hungary. He is attached to an enlightened Europe, a progressive and civilized continent. Arandjel takes amiss military force and everything based on traditional life and faith. The two brothers are faced with a choice: to stay, which Arandjel is inclined to do, and lose their faith and identity, or leave for a promised land—Russia—which Vuk believes to be the only place that can substitute for Serbia. Baron Mikašinović found himself in a similar situation as the two protagonists in Crnjanski’s novel. He is a historic, authentic person, depicted in Zatezalo’s biography as an educated and accomplished Krajina Serb who is representative of the Serbian elite of his time. Mihajlo spoke several languages and was dedicated to his military calling, serving superbly Empress Maria Theresa, but at the same time, doing whatever he could to protect and help his Serbian people. Mikašinović, like Vuk Isaković, lived in the mid-18th century and participated in wars waged by Austria-Hungary throughout Europe. Born into a well-to-do family of nobility (whose title was introduced at the Croatian parliament in 1658, in the Sabor article 18), Mihajlo was educated at the military academy in Vienna, and upon completing his education, he joined the Austro-Hungarian armed forces. During his career, he ascended to the ranks of General and Baron. Mihajlo was the first Serb ever to be awarded the noble title of Baron without rejecting his Orthodox faith and becoming a Catholic. Empress Maria Theresa bestowed this honor on him...

‘‘Wear the Armor of Your Shame!’’: Debating Veiling and the Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage

In the early third century, Tertullian (approx. 150—220 C.E.) penned On the Veiling of Virgins to cajole unveiled virgin women to cover their heads. While scholars have read the treatise primarily as evidence of his misogyny or his attempt to establish a male ecclesiology, this article examines it as evidence of a debate between Tertullian and virgin women in Carthage over the nature of a woman’s flesh and the possibility of its transformation. Employing Judith Butler’s conception of performativity, I consider how Tertullian connects veiling to his conception of the salvation of the flesh, and why he perceives the virgins’ unveiling a visible contestation (or, in Butler’s terms, a performative undoing) of that vision. For Tertullian, the flesh is both corruptible and shameful and only transformed through Christ’s death and resurrection. Across his writings, women’s flesh serves as evidence of the degradation of the human condition. The notion that women’s flesh indicates sordidness also underlies his complaint against the virgins who ‘‘expose’’ their heads. In On the Veiling of Virgins, Tertullian employs a host of cultural discourses—most especially the notion that a woman’s head indicates her genitalia, and materialistic conceptions of vision that cast the gaze as erotic and intrusive—in order to establish veiling as the outward sign of a Christian woman’s shame. Ultimately, however, connecting his vision of salvation to the performance of veiling, he reveals why unveiling threatens this link. When virgins refuse to veil, they suggest that their flesh does not signal shame, but instead reveals their exalted spiritual status.

Constructing a Vision of Salvation: Chantries and the Social Dimension of Religious Experience in the Medieval Parish Church

For several years, studies of popular religion within pre-Reformation England have tended to emphasize that religious practice within the medieval parish church had become increasingly privatized and exclusive, as a result of the foundation of so-called ‘private’ chantry chapels. In many cases, these works have neglected the wider role of the chantry in shared religious experience at parish level, a deficit that has only recently been challenged by historians. This paper sets out to consider how the structural analysis of surviving above-ground evidence for former chantry chapels can uncover a wider context for chantry foundation in the medieval parish church. This paper based on recent research in the south and west of England discusses how the analysis of church space, light and, particularly, vision enables the reconstruction of aspects of chantry chapel foundation and can illustrate their wider social dimension. It examines the nature of the architectural feature known as the ‘squint’ and discusses how it can help in the analysis of former ritual topography and shed light on the level of private and communal piety. Furthermore, this paper shows how the use of archaeological approaches can illuminate aspects of medieval religious practice only hinted at in historical documents.

Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (review)

Jonathan Edwards and the Bible. By Robert E. Brown. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2002. Pp. xxi, 292. $35.00.) Jonathan Edwards's star has been rising among scholars. Recognized widely as America's greatest theologian, he is also cited as America's premier philosopher before the turn of the twentieth century. His Religious Affections (1746) is arguably the most discriminating treatise on spiritual discernment in Christian thought; Perry Miller called it the greatest work of religious psychology ever penned on American soil. Readers of this journal may be interested to know that a recent monograph by Anri Morimoto argues that Edwards's soteriology has more in common with Thomas Aquinas than with Martin Luther (Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation, Penn State University Press). Not to mention his influence on such diverse fields as aesthetics, literary theory, history of religions, and of course homiletics. Amazingly, among the scores of books and hundreds of articles that have appeared in the last century, next to nothing has been done on Edwards's use of the Bible-despite the fact that the Bible was as central to Edwards's vision and literary production as it was to Augustine's or Luther's. Robert Brown's book now helps fill this strange lacuna. But contrary to what the title suggests, this is not about the impact of the Bible on Edwards's thought or spiritual life; nor is it concerned with his use of Scripture in his sermons or even theology. Instead it focuses on Edwards's encounter with nascent biblical criticism, and the result of that encounter for Edwards's understanding of both Scripture and the history of salvation. Brown explains that the deists sought to discredit the Bible by using early historical criticism to insist that true knowledge is a priori and infallible, as in mathematics. Edwards's response was twofold. First, he charged that the deist definition of rationality was too narrow, excluding the experiential and the spiritual. He claimed that Scripture conveys to the mind not only information but also its beauty, which can be seen only by the spiritually enlightened. Second, he argued that the full truth of Christian faith is known only through historical accounts in the biblical drama of salvation. This understanding then becomes the key to discerning God's activity outside the Bible-hence an eighteenth-century version of what we have lately called narrative theology. …

Imagined Images: Visions of Salvation and Intercession in a Double-Sided Icon from Poganovo

Imagined Images: Visions of Salvation and Intercession in a Double-Sided Icon from Poganovo

Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation. By Anri Morimoto. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. viii + 178 pp. $33.50.

Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation. By Anri Morimoto. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. viii + 178 pp. $33.50.

Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation. By Anri Morimoto. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. viii + 178 pp. $33.50.

Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation. By Anri Morimoto. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. viii + 178 pp. $33.50.

Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation. By Anri Morimoto. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. viii + 178 pp. $33.50.

Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation. By Anri Morimoto. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. viii + 178 pp. $33.50.

Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation.

Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation.