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This work is written for all those who have struggled with the concept of God, with their faith in God, and how God can be at all relevant in our world today. Written in the context of a personal and family crisis, which frames the work, it is the first of a planned three-volume systematic theology under the title, Confessions of a Heretic. It seeks to answer the question of how can one believe in God when horrible things happen, from personal tragedy and trauma, to natural disasters and war. The answer is not a comforting one, but one that asserts that the problem is with our conception of God to begin with. We strive to make God conform to our will. But that is the very definition of idolatry, and the work argues that the established religious traditions, including Christianity, and especially Christianity in America, are idolatrous, based on idolatrous conceptions of God. Yet to see how this is so, we have to delve into philosophical arguments regarding Being, Time, Reality, and the very understanding of what a human being actually is, whereby the argument proposes a radical reconceptualization of the Western philosophical tradition on these issues.
Saak re-interprets Martin Luther as an Augustinian Hermit, whose 95 Theses came as the culmination of the late medieval Reformation.
This volume reveals the political, religious, theological, institutional, and mythical ideals that formed the self-identity of the Augustinian Order from Giles of Rome to the emergence of Martin Luther. Based on detailed philological analysis, this interdisciplinary study not only transforms the understanding of Augustine's heritage in the later Middle Ages, but also that of Luther's relationship to his Order. The work offers a new interpretative model of late medieval religious culture that sheds new light on the relationship between late medieval Passion devotion, the increasing demonization of the Jews, and the rise of catechetical literature. It is the first volume of a planned trilogy that seeks to return late medieval Augustinian theology to the historical context of Augustinian religion.
Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.
The most comprehensive and extensive treatment to date, based on a major reinterpretation, of what has been called late medieval Augustinianism.
Dana E. Katz reveals how Italian Renaissance painting became part of a policy of tolerance that deflected violence from the real world onto a symbolic world. While the rulers upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, they simultaneously supported artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews.
Illuminates the impact of Jews and Turks on the life and work of influential reformer Andreas Osiander
In Beyond the Visible Church, theologian Florian Klug investigates the Abel motif hermeneutically throughout Christian church history. By showing how the biblical motif of Abel was read and used by representative theologians like Augustine, Bonaventure, Martin Luther, Yves Congar, and others of each epoch, Klug builds the story of the Church’s self-conception and shows how it has evolved over time. By tracing this theological and ecclesiological history and how the motif formed theologians and the Church over time, Klug shows readers a new way to conceive and understand God’s universal will for salvation. By deconstructing and reconstructing the historical occurrences of these ideas, Klug demonstrates that the Church’s self-conception is not yet complete. This unique and ground-breaking study opens new ways forward for Catholic ecclesiology—hope for today’s universal Church.
Modern Protestant debates about spousal relations and the meaning of marriage began in a forgotten international dispute some 300 years ago. The Lutheran-Pietist ideal of marriage as friendship and mutual pursuit of holiness battled with the idea that submission defined spousal roles. Exploiting material culture artifacts, broadsides, hymns, sermons, private correspondence, and legal cases on three continents -- Europe, Asia, and North America -- A. G. Roeber reconstructs the roots and the dimensions of a continued debate that still preoccupies international Protestantism and its Catholic and Orthodox critics and observers in the twenty-first century.