Showing papers on "Baptism published in 1994"

Systematic Theology : An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine

Abstract: Includes treatments of subjects of contemporary interest, such as baptism of the Spirit, spiritual gifts, and the ministry of women.

The Last Days of Constantine: Oppositional Versions and their Influence*

Abstract: The earliest surviving account of Constantine's last days, April to May 337, was written by Eusebius of Caesarea as instant history, since Eusebius died in May 338 or 339. Parts of this concluding section of the Vita Constantini, for example the paragraphs about the first Christian emperor's baptism and mausoleum, have attracted scholarly curiosity, others less so. Here I would like to investigate systematically, for the first time, the versions of Constantine's abortive Iranian campaign provided by Eusebius and others, and then move on to consider the origins of a famous account of Constantine's baptism. Both exercises will show how oppositional versions of Constantine's last days influenced the formation of conventionally accepted narratives—or, more specifically, how polytheist historiography helped to mould the Nicaean or ‘orthodox’ perspective, parts of which have prevailed to the present day. Discussion of the fictional accounts of Constantine's baptism by ‘Eusebius of Rome’ and Silvester of Rome will also provide an opportunity to underline the truth of Michel van Esbroeck's observation that ‘the historical aspect of propaganda literature eludes positivist history, of which it is, even so, a part’.

Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative

Abstract: 1. Miscegenation and the Pocahontas narrative in colonial and federalist America 2. The Pocahontas narrative in post-Revolution America 3. The Pocahontas narrative in the era of the romantic Indian 4. John Gadsby Chapman's Baptism of Pocahontas 5. The figure of Pocahontas in sectionalist propaganda Index.

The Fate of Babies Dying before Baptism in Byzantium

Abstract: In the city of the Laodikaians lived a devout, pure, and blameless priest. To this priest one night the local governor came in urgent haste, pressing him to rise up and baptize his child, whose breath was already beginning to fail. Leaping up right away, the priest ran into the church. But while he was preparing the water and the holy oil the child died, before it could be baptized. Taking the child, the priest placed it in front of the font and said to the attendant angel, ‘To you, my fellow servant, angel of God, I say: by the authority that Christ gave us to bind and loose in heaven and upon earth, restore the soul of the child in the body until I shall baptize it, lest it depart unenlightened into that age. For my Master and yours knows that I was not careless, but when I was called, I ran straight away.’ When the priest had spoken, the child returned to life. He then baptized it, kissed it, and said, ‘Go, child, into the kingdom of heaven.’ And immediately the child fell back asleep in the Lord.

Children and the Church in Medieval England

Abstract: At the beginning of Langland's poem Piers Plowman, the narrator, having glimpsed the field of folk and the two castles, meets a lady with a beautiful face, clothed in linen. When he fails to recognise her, she gently chides him. ‘I am Holy Church; you ought to know me. I received you at the first and taught you faith. You brought me pledges to fulfil my bidding and to love me loyally while your life lasts.’ In these few words, Langland affirms the importance of childhood as inaugurating the relationship between human beings and the Church. Every child becomes a member of the Church by baptism soon after birth. The Church teaches its faith to the child, and the child is committed by its godparents to carry out the Church's requirements in a loving way. This view of childhood is a limited one. It centres on the outset of life—birth and baptism – not on the following fifteen years or so, and it does not perceive the status of children in the Church to differ in principle from that of adults, who also received teaching and owed commitments. Nowhere in his work has Langland much to say about children and in this respect he is typical of most medieval writers. Little was written about the work of the Church with children or the involvement of children in Church, despite the extent to which children – actually or potentially – made up the membership of Christendom.

Dictionary of Christian art

Abstract: Christian art is rich, complex and heavily invested with symbolism. The painting reproduced on the cover of this book is a case in point. Who are the central figures? (A glance at the entry under 'Baptism' will enlighten those who are unsure). And, perhaps more challenging, how can we identify the fourteen saints around them? Do the flowers at Jesus' feet have a special significance? The Dictionary of Christian Art provides the answers, giving the modern reader access to the pictorial tradition that was once the common visual vocabulary of western Europeans. There are over 1,000 entries, from Aaron to Zucchetto, covering the following areas: artists, art and architectural terms, the symbolism of numbers, flora and fauna, and parts of the body, Christian saints, biblical and mythological figures, liturgical objects and vestments. In addition, there are more than 160 reproductions by the greatest artists from the two millennia of Christian art, ranging from sixth-century mosaics and icons, through the great Italian fresco painters of the Middle Ages and the contribution of the Renaissance, to Georges Rouault and Salvador Dali in more modern times.

Liturgical hermeneutics : interpreting liturgical rites in performance

Abstract: This thesis applies the resources of philosophical hermeneutics, especially as represented in the work of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, to the project of interpreting liturgy as simultaneously text and performance. The result is a new field, defined as liturgical hermeneutics. The research breaks away from attempts to find objective meaning in liturgy. Through readings of Church of England forms of the eucharist, baptism and burial it argues that meaning happens when worshippers appropriate the promise of the Kingdom of God which liturgical rites propose. Such acts of appropriation occur when worshippers find themselves in a threshold position with respect to the Kingdom. From here, they can make their own the promises enshrined in the biblical tradition and transmitted through liturgical action, by an act of faith. The result is a reconfiguration of the worshipper's subjectivity, or a new mode-of-being-in- the-world, conditioned by his or her claim to citizenship of the Kingdom. The notion of liturgy as a practice raises the questions of intentionality and repeatability in ritual. I have pursued these topics with reference, initially, to J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts. The deficiencies in Austin's theory, especially as treated by Jacques Derrida, can be shown to address particular instances in liturgy. In the end, it has proved more profitable to use Derrida's own discussion of the written performative in order to demonstrate the way in which liturgical proposals are taken up by their recipients. The techniques of analysis applied in the thesis show that liturgy shares the conventions of secular language. The last chapter extends this recognition to demonstrate that liturgy also has an investment in other concerns of secular life. With special reference to the discourses of ethics and politics, it proposes that liturgy itself is capable of standing as a paradigm for secular cultural practices.

Balthasar Hubmaier's Doctrine of the Church

Abstract: This book is written as a resource for scholars and students of Anabaptism and Hubmaier studies. Balthasar Hubmaier understood the church to be a visible assembly of regenerated baptized saints, who both memorized Christ's suffering on the cross in the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, and who participated in that suffering as a church under the cross. Hubmaier's doctrine of the church seems to have many parallels both in medieval and sixteenth-century Anabaptist ecclesiology; but it cannot be solidly placed in either category. Contents: Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Balthasar Hubmaier: The Man and His Theological Development; Hubmaier's Doctrine of the Church; Hubmaier's Doctrine of Regeneration and Salvation; Hubmaier's Doctrine of Baptism; Hubmaier's Doctrine of the Lord's Supper; Hubmaier's Doctrine of the Role of the Church in the World; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Der Didachist Und Seine Quellen

Abstract: The author discusses Didache - comment hypothesis concerning the processing of the sources by the Didachisten to make the body of the text visible. He presents exclusively to the literary relations: where persuaded the Didachist where he cites his sources. He first sometimes refers to as "basic writing" marked and called to mention way treatise, originally a Jewish writing that the Didachist received. Then a series of liturgical traditions, instructions on baptism and Lord's Supper, where one can doubt whether these traditions orally or already writing templates are presented. In addition, a written instrument, probably superior text is to call with instructions on how the local churches wandering teachers, apostles and prophets would take. The texts that the author assigns the Didachisten are in italics. In this way, the extent of the editorial activity of Didachisten and the delimitation of its templates are detected. Keywords: Didachist; liturgical traditions; baptism; Lord's Supper; apostles

Die kerkregtelike posisie van die kind in die Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika, met besondere verwysing na lidmaatskap, dpop, nagmaal en tug

Abstract: The position of the child in the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afirika with specific reference to membership, baptism, eucharist and discipline The position of the child in the church has been taken for granted for many years. This article gives a historical perspective on the church orders of Calvin, Bucer, the Netherlands and the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika, and analizes those articles that shed any light on the position of the child in the church. Matters such as children’s membership of the church, infant baptism, children’s communion and discipline are discussed from the viewpoint of church order.

Et Partu Fontis Exceptum: The Typology of Birth and Baptism in an Unusual Spanish Image of Jesus Baptized in a Font

Abstract: A capital with an unusual scene of the Baptism of Jesus has recently been excavated in the late twelfth-century cloister of San Juan de la Pena (Huesca). Remarkable for its depiction of a youthful Saviour seated in a footed baptismal font, the image deviates significantly from the traditional Romanesque formula of an adult Jesus baptized in the Jordan River. Examination of this motif's iconographic roots locates it among a small family of similar northern Spanish images, the earliest of which is an illumination in the so-called "Beatus of Gerona," dated A. D. 975. The unconventional motif of the Baptism in a font seems to have resulted from a deliberate iconographic borrowing, by which an image of the Bath of the Infant Jesus at the Nativity was deliberately recast as a Baptism scene. This borrowing depends in part upon pictorial similarities between the traditional formulas of Bath and Baptism, but it is supported by a venerable ideological typology which links the purification of Christian baptism with ...

Baptism in the Didache

Abstract: This chapter explores the significance of baptism in Didache 7. Commentators generally agree that the few sentences which are devoted to the baptismal liturgy in the Didache are as notable for what they omit as for what they contain. The author argues that baptism in the Didache is not a rite of "christological" significance, but of eschatological meaning. Baptismal theology in the Didache does not embrace the "death and burial with Christ" ideology of Paul, but continues to show the concerns of Jewish-Christians who are committed to the Torah and to observance of ritual purity in matters which touch the table and the "initiatory bath". For the Didachist, baptism does not create an egalitarian community. The baptismal liturgy of the Didache provides yet another reflection of a Jewish-Christian group which wishes to remain faithful to the Torah, and is unwilling to follow either the "extreme liberals" or the "extreme hardliners". Keywords: Baptism; Didache ; Jewish-Christian group; Torah

The origins and early meanings of Christian Baptism: a proposal

Abstract: L'A. cherche a connaitre les origines du bapteme chretien ainsi que ses significations dans le contexte des sources neo-testamentaires. Les plus anciennes communautes chretiennes ont utilise le theme symbolique du lavage comme entree dans la communaute et comme marque d'identite centrale. Ce symbolisme culturel a ete adopte et utilise pour proclamer la finalite de la grâce de Dieu en Jesus-Christ. Les origines du bapteme chretien se trouvent dans le rituel complexe et les processus par lesquels le baptise est recu et voue a rechercher la grâce

Ethics and the eucharist

Abstract: Summary The Lima (or BEM) report was praised for the way it tried to connect baptism, ministry and especially, the eucharist with ethics. In this connection the unity of the two poles of the ecumenical movement. “Faith and Order” on the one hand, “Life and Work” on the other, is at stake. As a matter of fact, quite a few theologians have, in the recent past, concerned themselves with the link between the eucharist and (social) ethics. The names of many of them appear in the footnotes of this article. In the text the views of two of them are presented and discussed. They are Markus Barth and Louis-Marie Chauvet. Is is shown that, in spite of the different Christian traditions to which they belong (Reformed and Roman Catholic respectively), of the different methods they use and of their rather divergent conceptions of the eucharist, their concern is very much the same.

W.B. Yeats: a Literary Life

Abstract: Preface - Acknowledgements - Chronology: Yeats's Life and Contemporary Events - Introduction - Family and Place - Yeats and the 1890s: Celtic Twilight and Golden Dawn - Yeats and Politics - Yeats and the Theatre: 'Baptism of the Gutter' - Friends and Loves - Masks and Development - A Vision of Byzantium - Yeats and Modern Poetry - Notes - Selected Bibliography - Index

Slegs eenmaal gedoop - Sans Jamais Le Réitérer*

Abstract: Baptized but once - Sans Jamais Le Reiterer In principle re-baptism is rejected by almost all churches and theologians. However, since some regard infant baptism as invalid, they encourage those who have not been baptized in faith and obedience to have it administered by immersion. On the contrary, it is argued that, no matter what circumstances prevailed, any baptism administered with water in the ‘Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ by a church official with the power to baptize is indeed valid and should never be repeated. Neither do baptism of confirmation or ‘double baptism’ offer a solution. At the root of the problem a difference of approach towards the covenant of grace is maintained. Churches maintaining the infant baptism tradition should, however, critically view the praxis of their doctrine and consider whether church members are perhaps too readily allowed to present their children for baptism.