scholarly journals Luther‘s Legacy and the Origins of Kenotic Christology

2017 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Law
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Teenth Century ◽  
Reformed Churches

The theological energies released by Martin Luther in 1517 created a set of theological insights and problems that eventually led to the development of kenotic Christology (i. e., the view that in order for the Son of God to become incarnate and live a genuinely human life, he emptied himself of his divine prerogatives or attributes). This article traces how kenotic Christology originated in the Eucharistic Controversy between Luther and Zwingli, before receiving its first extensive treatment in the debate between the Lutheran theologians of Tübingen and Giessen in,the early seventeenth century. Attention then turns to the nine-teenth century, when doctrinal tensions resulting from the enforced union of the Prussian Lutheran and Reformed churches created the conditions for a new flowering of kenotic Christology in the theologies of Ernst Sartorius and, subsequently, Gottfried Thomasius. Kenotic Christology ultimately originates with Luther, however, for it owes its existence to the creative theological energies he unleashed and which remain his lasting legacy.

The Lombardian Formula in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 48-69
Author(s):  
Michael J. Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Critical Events ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Reformed Churches

This chapter, continuing the historical survey of the previous chapter, slows down and focuses on the reception of the so-called Lombardian formula in the Reformation and early Post-Reformation period, especially among the Reformed churches. After looking at how well-known Reformers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Zachary Ursinus understood the Lombardian formula, concentration shifts to a few critical events that provide important background to the Synod of Dordt and intra-Reformed debates on the extent of the atonement. More specifically, the chapter covers a late sixteenth-century debate between the Lutheran Jacob Andreae and the Reformed theologian Theodore Beza on the extent of Christ’s work. Next, it looks at the back-and-forth between Jacob Arminius and William Perkins. Finally, it gives a thorough examination of the Hague Conference of 1611, which featured a discussion of the various doctrines of grace among the Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants.

The Era of Environmental Derangement: Witnessing Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nupur Pancholi ◽  
◽  
Sanjit Kumar Mishra ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Cumulative Impacts ◽  
Environmental Deterioration ◽  
Human Interventions ◽  
Human World ◽  
Climate Crisis

Drawing on Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) together with his nonfictional The Great Derangement (2016), the article strives to present that while advancing endless desires, human-centric culture and the idea of ‘good life’ drive climate change and environmental deterioration. It seeks to enumerate the devastating consequences of changing climatic conditions and degenerating ecosystems and their cumulative impacts on the humankind and non-human world. It aims to locate how human life at the margins has been affected by these cataclysmic consequences through analysing Ghosh’s Gun Island. It attempts to show that human interventions had significantly fuelled the global climate crisis in the seventeenth century, decoding the myth of Bonduki Sadagar that Ghosh identifies in Gun Island.

Images of the Priesthood: An Analysis of Catholic Sermons from the Late Seventeenth Century

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renate Dürr
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Catholic Church

“All, therefore, who consider themselves Christians may be absolutely certain that we are all equally priests.”1 With this declaration Martin Luther categorically repudiated the Catholic understanding of priesthood as a holy estate with indelible marks bestowed at consecration. According to the reformers all Christians, in principle, have the same authority in word and sacrament, but only those authorized by the respective community of believers may wield it. This assessment not only reflected certain irregularities within the clergy but also signified a completely new definition of the priesthood. It cannot be understood outside the context of existing contemporary criticism—not only from reformatory circles—of the state of numerous parishes who suffered under poorly educated, morally unacceptable (from a contemporary point of view) or indeed absent clergymen. The Catholic Church's answer to this challenge, therefore, had two aims: plans for far-reaching reforms were intended to renew the image of priests and, primarily, to provide effective pastoral care. Polemical theological debates against Protestants and discussions within the Catholic Church were intended not only to strengthen the certainty of the fundamental essence of priestly identity but also to facilitate a differentiation of Catholic from Protestant understanding. The decisions of the Council of Trent also touched both areas. At the 23rd session both the theological basis of the sacrament of consecration and the plans to reform the rules concerning the bishops' obligatory residence in their parishes were debated.2

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Modern Times

This chapter tracks the changing fortunes of a fundamental opposition between more Stoic and more Augustinian perspectives on human life, showing that as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, the patterns of Augustinian anti-Stoicism had often found expression in a more secular, Epicurean register. What Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempts, more strenuously than any other thinker of the period, is an extraordinary synthesis of Epicurean, Augustinian, and Stoic argumentative currents. In common with the modern Epicureans, Rousseau uses claims about self-love to illuminate all areas of human behaviour in modern times. But by presenting that self-love as inflamed amour-propre, Rousseau tilts sharply towards the more critical Augustinians than towards those Epicurean writers who were making their apology for commercial society.

Human Life as a State of Mediocrity in John Locke

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-105
Author(s):  
Giuliana Di Biase
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Perfect Knowledge ◽  
Further Development ◽  
The Church

This chapter investigates the genesis and evolution of Locke’s idea of human life as a “state of mediocrity”. While this idea had ancient roots going back to the early Church fathers, it remained current in the seventeenth century where mediocrity was generally equated with a condition of partial ignorance and imperfection. Locke’s account of it is original; while life is a time of mediocrity, death opens the way to the extremes of eternal misery or eternal happiness. Initially, inspired by the Church fathers, Locke conceived of human life as a condition of intellectual mediocrity. Subsequently, and arguably prompted by his reading of the pessimistic outlooks of Nicole and Pascal, he redefined the state of mediocrity in more optimistic terms: humans are naturally suited to their mediocre state. A further development of his conception of mediocrity, again involving a partial rethinking of the human condition, can be found in the Essay, where Locke represents mediocrity as an imperfect state of insatiable desire. It is redeemed, however, by the ability of living human beings to attain perfect knowledge of morality.

Martin Luther and the Eucharist

1983 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stephenson
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Bodily Presence ◽  
The Church

Several years before the mode of Christ's eucharistic presence became a controverted issue which would presently provoke a lasting schism among the Churches of the Reformation, Luther could unaffectedly propound the traditional dogma of the bodily presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar as a necessary consequence of the evangelical quest for the sensus grammaticus of the words of institution. The same exegetical method which led to his reappropriation of the doctrine of the justification of the sinner ‘by grace, for Christ's sake, through faith’ obliged him to confess that ‘the bread is the body of Christ’. Already here, in the mordantly anti-Roman treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther has laid his finger on the model in terms of which he will understand the real presence to the end of his days: the consecrated host is the body of Christ, just as the assumed humanity of jesus Christ is the Son of God. The displacement of the scholastic theory of transubstantiation by the model of the incarnate person illustrates the Reformer's allegiance to the Chalcedonian Definition: ‘Luther is really replacing Aristotelian categories by those derived from Chalcedonian christology, to which he remained faithful: “unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably”.’ While the doctrine of the real presence moved from the periphery to the centre of Luther's theology and piety as the 1520s wore on, his conception of the modality of the eucharistic presence remained constant throughout.

scholarly journals “The Glorious Work of the Reformation”: Andrew Fuller and the Imitation of Martin Luther

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
MICHAEL A. G. HAYKIN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Courageous Action ◽  
The Way

Abstract: While a high view of the life and work of Martin Luther was maintained only in certain quarters of Anglophone Christianity by the close of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth-century Evangelical revival led to a profound rediscovery of him. This article examines the way one such Evangelical, the Baptist Andrew Fuller, who does not appear to have read Luther directly, regularly cited him as a model to be imitated when it came to preaching and courageous action.

scholarly journals A ‘Chief Error’ of Protestant Soteriology: Sin in the Justified and Early Modern Catholic Theology

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 41-72
Author(s):  
Matthew T. Gaetano
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The World ◽  
The Catholic Church

AbstractCatholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of Christ who takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy.

Martin Luther on Prayer in Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Jane Haemig
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Human Response ◽  
In Christ ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

Martin Luther saw prayer as crucial to human life, a life created by the relationship to God. In this relationship God starts a conversation, communicating God’s words of law and promise. Prayer is a part of the human response to God’s speaking, a response itself shaped by the words of command and promise. Luther thought that God’s promise to hear prayer defines both the nature of God and the nature of the human relationship to God, as well as the human approach to life. Luther’s comments and instructions on prayer permeated his work. Luther sought to build an evangelical prayer practice that reflected the key insights of his theology: just as God redeems the unworthy human, so God promises to hear and respond to the one praying, despite his or her unworthiness. Humans respond to God’s actions in law and promise when they pray regularly, forthrightly, honestly, and frequently. Freedom in Christ sets humans free to use prayer practices that help them to do this.

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