Supreme Being

About: Supreme Being is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 192 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1615 citations.

Ancestors and spirits in the light of Luther's theology

Abstract: When dealing with ancestor veneration in the church we ought to listen to African spirituality, the biblical witness, the ecclesial tradition and modernity. African spirituality is characterised by remoteness of the Supreme Being, submission to ancestral authority and tight communal cohesion. Ancestor veneration was not an issue in Luther’s time, but it is possible to explore how main tenets of Luther’s theology could be applied to ancestor veneration. The hidden and revealed God: the redemptive intentions of God reassure us in times of adversity, suffering and affliction. Sola Scriptura: the claim of Yahweh eliminated ancestor veneration from the biblical tradition. Solus Christus: God is accessible in Christ and needs no ancestral mediation. Sola gratia: all conditions of acceptance are suspended. Sola fide: faith is trust in God’s promise of a redeemed life. The fruit of the gospel: faith leads to freedom and responsibility rather than submission to authority and fixed codes of conduct. Two aspects of God’s rule: believers take up critical responsibility for social structures including the family. The Lord’s Supper: the crucified Christ is identified with tangible substances so that he can be ritually present for us here and now. Finally, the Lutheran tradition is critiqued from the perspective of African spirituality: a spiritualised gospel, a truncated concept of salvation and passivity.

Scientific Law and the Attributes of God

Abstract: Today?s popular apologetic for Theism emphasises perceived empirical ?oddities? ? at the limits of scientific explanation. Intelligent-Design arguments focus on apparent lacunae in the causal framework of the natural order that necessitate special divine action. But even if such ?gaps? did not shrink or disappear, they would still be an inadequate one-sided basis for mature theistic conviction. Christian Trinitarian Theism orbits that Supreme Being, the author and sustainer of all created existence - in all its particulars and relationships, including those increasing facets where there is a valid scientific understanding. Whereas natural sciences, such as particle physics, elucidate firstly what everything is, the question of what everything does is equally central, and such regularities are properly mapped as scientific laws, albeit of Cartwright?s patchy or ?dappled? world. The aims of this paper are: (I) to explore the many fruitful correlations between characteristics of scientific natural law and the classical attributes of the Christian God, and (II) to discuss their significance, more as a theology of natural law, than a natural theology.Grounded in the Biblical text, and the sweep of historical and philosophical theology, classical divine attributes are revealed into the public domain for acknowledgement and worship. Terrestrial and celestial regularities are thereby attributable to God?s covenant commitments and faithfulness. Moreover, the spatial and temporal ubiquity of scientific law correlates with the omnipresence, eternity and immutability of God. Scientific laws, like the immortal and invisible God, are known only through their effects, combined with inference to the best explanation. Reflective scientists perceive the mathematical expression and progressive unification of these laws and are driven to postulate their necessary existence antecedent to the genesis of space and time, matter and radiation. Theism is a short but significant step further, grounding the scientific enterprise in the personal integrity of God.

The Rosieres Movement, 1766-1789: A Clerical Precursor of the Revolutionary Cults

Abstract: The religious question during the French Revolution eventually engages the attention of all historians of the Revolution, lay and clerical, liberal and Marxist. Among the longest-running and most interesting debates in this historiography is the one which pitted Alphonse Aulard against Albert Mathiez at the time of the separation of Church and state in 1905. This was, of course, the first round in a heated and often personal intellectual struggle between the two historians; but its pretext remains a subject for research by students who are younger and less heated. What is the reason for the invented liturgies of the Great Revolution? Why these bizarre and often ridiculous cults of Reason, of the Supreme Being, of Theophilanthropy? Was Aulard right when he proposed in 1892 that the first two cults were fabricated to respond to the patriotic passions of a people at war?' Or do we prefer Mathiez, who concluded in 1904 that they were only elementary forms of the religious life which Frenchmen adopted out of nostalgia for the old?2 Recently John McManners has suggested we adopt both opinions as complementary.3 Are they? And is there perhaps another explanation to which the ideas of Aulard and Mathiez are simply first approximations?

Gods : Toward a contemporary discourse on religion and democracy

Abstract: In memoriam Rabbi Balfour Brickner 1930-2005 As I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, "To the unknown god." What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. --Acts of the Apostles The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority, and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words. Had the purpose been to express great ideas, prophecy would have had to be acclaimed as a triumph. Yet the purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness, to change the inner man as well as to revolutionize history. --Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. --T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Introduction In contemporary times one can interchange the words "Christian," "conservative," "religious," "right," and "Republican" in a sentence without changing the meaning of the sentence. A lexicon shift of this magnitude is an indication of meaning-making power. The greatest victory of the religious right is not political but existential. The hegemonic discourse about a supreme being is synonymous with the American empire and its economy (currency and cultural values)--the imperial god. (1) What is at stake is not only democratic freedom of minority populations, the promise of the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Society vision and the New Deal's social safety net, and international security but also how we make meaning for ourselves in the language of religion and god-talk. Unfortunately, the popular countervailing argument has been wanting and has not addressed the question of meaning-making. The most popular books written by "liberal" religious leaders are critiques of the left's quarrel with religion. Both God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by the Rev. Jim Wallis (2) and The Left Hand of God." Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right by Rabbi Michael Lerner (3) bear an unrelenting critique on the lack of religious sensibilities of the left. Wallis's writing and his Sojourner organization lend themselves to a neo-liberalism that hearkens back to nineteenth-century ideals of religion very much like that of the Social Gospel as espoused by Walter Rauschenbusch. It does not take seriously the discourse of those it claims to serve--the poor. Wallis has yet to engage seriously the radical tradition of African-American religion. On the other end of the spectrum is Michael Lerner's Network of Spiritual Progressives. Lerner's book and organization emerge from a new-age discourse about spirituality that does not recover the best of mainline religion. Hence, it is alien to most American's religious understanding. Both books and organizations are primarily interested in appealing to white spaces. In addition Wallis and Lerner spend a significant amount of ink on teaching the Democratic Party how to be better at courting religious voters. Placing religion in the service of a political party is inappropriate, if not idolatrous. Wallis and Lerner are not willing to situate themselves within communities of the poor and follow their genius. They make simplistic references to the prophetic tradition of the Black church. In fact Wallis and Lerner do a disservice to progressive religion by refusing to sit at the feet of a tradition that has one of the richest histories of social justice in the nation. Their "ahistoricism" is profound. Both leaders and the movements that they embody are concerned with new religious forces, without recovering that which has come before. …