Showing papers on "Divinity published in 1988"

Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great

Abstract: Part I. General Narrative: 1. Prologue 2. The gaining of Empire (336-323 BC) 3. Epilogue: the shape of things to come Part II. Thematic Studies: A. Mainland Greece in Alexander's reign B. Alexander and his Empire C. Alexander and the army D. The divinity of Alexander.

The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic

Abstract: Patrick Riley traces the forgotten roots of Rousseau's concept to seventeenth-century questions about the justice of God. If He wills that all men be saved, does He have a general will that produces universal salvation? And, if He does not, why does He will particularly" that some men be damned? The theological origin of the "general will" was important to Rousseau himself. He uses the language of divinity bequeathed to him by Pascal, Malebranche, Fenelon, and others to dignify, to elevate, and to "save" politics.Originally published in 1986.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe: The ‘new art of lying’: equivocation, mental reservation, and casuistry

Abstract: The word ‘casuistry’ has two meanings. Firstly, it signifies ‘the art or science of bringing general moral principles to bear upon particular cases’. Secondly, it means ‘sophistical, equivocal, or specious reasoning’. The connection between the two is historical. Catholic casuists, and particularly Jesuits, were accused by their opponents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of employing sophistry in support of lax and absurd moral conclusions. The mud stuck. Casuistry was the dominant form of moral theorizing in late medieval and early modern Europe. Yet Henry Sidgwick was content to give it short shrift in his Outlines of the History of Ethics. The Jesuits, he said, attempted to win back souls from Protestantism ‘by accommodating ecclesiastico-moral law to worldly needs’. The excesses to which this laxity led were decisively ‘revealed to the world in the immortal Provincial Letters of Pascal’. In Sidgwick's view, Catholic thinkers had been hampered not only by moral but also by intellectual failings. Scholasticism, he claimed, had shackled ‘the renascent intellectual activity which it stimulated and exercised, by the double bondage to Aristotle and to the Church’. As long as thought remained the slave of authority, moral philosophy in its modern sense remained impossible. Similarly, William Whewell, in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England, dismissed casuistry in a preliminary ‘Note’, and granted it that much space only because he was lecturing as Professor of Moral Theology or Casuistical Divinity.

The interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986

Abstract: This is a new edition of the late Bishop Neill's widely acclaimed book, revised, expanded, and brought up to date by his former colleague the Revd Tom Wright. This masterly survey now describes the historical development of New Testament criticism from 1861 (the year Lightfoot became Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge) to the present day, the contrasting personalities of scholars, and the permanent contributions made by various schools. The study concludes with a new chapter by Tom Wright, covering New Testament scholarship of the last twenty five years.

Kali: The Feminine Force

Abstract: Sakti-worship feminine divinity feminine force manifestations of Kali divine mother supreme reality Kalighat paintings hymns to Kali.

Tractates on the Gospel of John

Abstract: In Christian Latinity, the tractate is a specific type of sermon, delivered as part of a liturgy, which combines scriptural exegesis, preaching, spiritual commentary, and theological reflection. This volume contains the first ten of the 124 tractates on the Gospel of John delivered by St. Augustine, the world-renowned fourth-century bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa. As sermons they exemplify the theory of preaching he outlined in his De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Instruction) --to preach in a simple and direct style accessible to all without compromising the theological knowledge and spiritual experience of the message. Because John's Gospel particularly emphasized the divinity of Jesus, the identity of the historical Jesus with the Messianic Christ, the Trinitarian Word, these sermons necessarily involve much Trinitarian and Christological theology. They explain and defend the orthodox position established at the councils of Nicea (A.D. 325) and Constantinople (A.D. 381). Their major theme is that Jesus Christ is the center of the Christian life, the Son of God and the Son of Man. Beyond contemplation of John's Gospel, the Tractates reveal much about the heresies to which Augustine's congregation was exposed: Manichaeism, with its dualistic logic; Donatism, a schismatic, puritanical, and sacramental movement which involved the intervention of the state in the affairs of the Church; and Pelagianism, with its doctrines of original sin, grace, free will, and predestination. Augustine delivered these sermons in Ciceronian oratorical style, having as his purpose to teach, to please, and to persuade. Through his allegorical exegesis, his audience was led to an understanding of the meaning of Scripture that would so affect their souls as to help them grow spiritually and bring them to eternal salvation.

The Divinity School and Duke Humfrey's Library at Oxford

Abstract: The Divinity School and Duke Humfrey's Library, 1423-1488 the interior decoration of the Divinity School the Divinity School after 1488 Duke Humfrey's Library after 1488

Al Faruqi and Beyond: Future Directions in Islamization of Knowledge

Abstract: Ismlil was born in an influential family in 1341 AH/1922 AC in Palestineduring the British Mandate. He received his early education in traditionalIslamic schools and his college education from the American University,Beirut. At age 24, he was appointed as governor of Gallilee-the lastPalestinian, before the Zionist occupation. Forced to migrate, his family tookrefuge in neighboring Lebanon. Having thus experienced this “fall” at thevery onset of what was promising to be a brilliant political career in anotherwise independent Palestine, the refugee in Isma’il tumed toward the higherreaches of modem education in the contemporary West.Ismlil concentrated in philosophy first at Harvard and then at Indiana,where he earned his doctoral degree. He spent four years at Al Azhar inEgypt, followed by two years at the School of Divinity at McGill, and twoyears at the newly established Islamic Research Institute in Islamabad, Pakistan,which gave him ample opportunity to apply his philosophy to religion or,more appropriately, to apply his religion to modem secular philosophy. Thisis what gave “the wounded Palestinian” a new weapon with which to starton a course of an intellectual encounter with the West. His books on OnArabism, The Origins of Zionism in Judaism, and The Christian Ethics camein a succession in the 1960’s. Naturally, as Rahman (1406 AH/1986 AC) pointedout, while involved in this undertaking, he disturbed some and antagonizedothers. What is amazing is that in doing this, the “Arab Warrior” conqueredhimself ...

From Emerson to Edwards: Henry Whitney Bellows and an “Ideal” Metaphysics of Sovereignty

Abstract: The date was 19 July 1859; the occasion, the commencement address at the Harvard Divinity School. Twenty-one years earlier, as Henry Whitney Bellows well knew, Ralph Waldo Emerson had there delivered the famous Divinity School Address, which offended the Unitarian faculty by berating historical Christianity, by advancing that the moral and religious sentiments were synonymous, and by claiming that intuitive apprehension of these sentiments could elevate persons to Christ-like stature. The ensuing “miracles controversy”—including, on the one hand, Andrews Norton's charges about “The Latest Form of Infidelity” and, on the other, George Ripley's, Theodore Parker's, and (early on, at least) Orestes Brownson's efforts to establish a “religion of the heart” by championing Kant over Locke—has been chronicled elsewhere. More to the present point is the way that, at a time when heated controversy over Emerson and his intuitionalist disciples might have seemed dated, Bellows attacked the self-reliant tendencies of Emerson's 1838 address: “The Emersonian and transcendental school at home, acknowledge[s] only one true movement in humanity—the egoistic—the self-asserting and self-justifying movement—which is Protestantism broken loose from general history.” Such criticism was hardly unprecedented in the school of divinity from which Bellows himself had graduated just a year before Emerson would deliver the Divinity School Address; nor would the faculty at Harvard have deemed Bellows innovative in chastising “the transcendental philosophy” for “making the … human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural, one and the same.

Black Theology and the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa

Abstract: Allan Boesak is president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. He received an honorary doctorate in divinity from Yale University at commencement in May 1984. The following excerpts are taken from Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the Calvinist Tradition, edited by Leonard Sweetmap (Orbis, 1984). - The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Theology in the University — A Contemporary Scottish Perspective*

Abstract: There is a tale which Douglas Young tells of a St Andrews University divine and which may well be regarded as cautionary. Thomas Jackson was born in St Andrews in 1797, and held the Chair of Divinity, first in St Andrews and then in Glasgow. When he retired in 1874, he returned to St Andrews to write his great work, designed to settle all the controversies of the centuries and bring discordant Scots into unanimity. He had one of the big houses on the south side of South Street, with its ‘lang rigg’, at the foot of which was an elegant garden room, with table and chair. Thither, daily, the septuagenarian repaired, garbed in his ecclesiastical frock coat, took off his shiny top-hat, and grasped a quill pen to set down his great thoughts on the virgin white folio quire, daily laid on the table. white folio quire, daily laid on the table. After several hours, he would tear it all up and go back to the house. After four years, they found him dead, aged eighty-one, and the garden house yielded a single written sheet with the sum of his wisdom: ‘Theology is everything, and everything is theology’.

Dumas Malone: An Appreciation

Abstract: D UMAS Malone, who died at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, on December 27, i986, just two weeks before his ninety-fifth birthday, had a varied academic career until at midpassage it converged on the biography of Thomas Jefferson and, in the end, was consumed by that work. The author completed what he called "My Long Journey with Mr. Jefferson"1 in i98i upon publication of the sixth and final volume ofJefferson and His Time. Generally esteemed the preeminent biography in early American history-some may say in all American history-Malone's work is destined to have enduring influence on the way people think about Jefferson and his time, and will likely remain the authoritative biography of its subject for generations to come. Born in Coldwater, Mississippi, in i892, the son of a Methodist minister and a schoolteacher mother with academic ambitions for her children, Dumas Malone grew up in rural Georgia and enrolled in Emory College, the forerunner of Emory University, at the tender age of fourteen. In later years he fondly remembered the college as a "citadel of orthodoxy," yet "a modest home of humane learning" as well.2 He graduated as the youngest member of the Class of i9io but was otherwise undistinguished; after teaching school for several years, he went north to Yale Divinity School to study theology. Yale was liberating religiously and in every other way. "In the free air of a great university," Malone wrote in a memoir left unfinished at his death, "I gained intellectual independence."3 He earned the B.D. degree in i9i6 and took a job at Randolph-Macon Woman's College teaching biblical literature. Eventually, Malone supposed, he would return to the divinity school for a doctorate. His mother expected all her seven children to become Ph.Ds. Malone's elder brother, Kemp, set the pace. Always a voracious student, he was a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Chicago. Within a few years he would be an internationally recognized philologist and a distinguished professor at the