Religion

This book explores the life of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, chronicling his childhood and family life, spiritual journey, missionary work, and his role in establishing the Church of God. Its main objective is to reconcile the holiness-pentecostal tradition to its origins, and the trajectory of its subsequent history. The term “plainfolk modernist” is coined, to suggest that both Tomlinson and the world he inhabited expressed a vibrant strain of modernism, though voiced in the idioms of American plainfolk culture.

In Abelard and Heloise, a dual intellectual biography of Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and Heloise (d. 1164), I argue that there is a fundamental continuity to the evolution of Abelard’s thought from his early concern with dialectic, to his growing interest in theology in the 1120s and in ethical questions in the 1130s. Heloise was much more than the disciple and lover of Abelard. She emerges as a distinct thinker in her own right, deeply versed in classical ideals of friendship and ethics, which she wished to apply to her relationship to Abelard. While they have both functioned as mythic figures in the western imagination, I argue that both participated in a broader 12th-century renewal of interest in both classical literature and in religious reform. I examine Abelard’s dialectic as a theory not just about universals, but about language as a whole. Tracing the maturing of his dialectic from his earliest glosses to the Logica ‘Ingredientibus’, written after his early affair with Heloise (1115–17), I argue that Abelard was initially unable to come to terms with the ethical questions presented by Heloise in her side of messages (Epistolae duorum amantium) they exchanged during those years. After Abelard became a monk at St Denis, he started to write about theology. I trace the evolution of his theological interests, from his early concern with linguistic concerns to increasing preoccupation with the Holy Spirit and divine goodness, as manifest in Jesus. After Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete from 1129, responded to his Historia calamitatum and demanded he pay greater attention to the community he had founded, Abelard started to devote much more attention to commenting on Scripture and to reflecting on the ethical questions with which she had always been concerned. Accusations spread by St Bernard that Abelard promoted heresy distort the true character of his contribution to theology, on which Heloise exercised a profound influence.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a virtual cottage industry in all things “Abrahamic.” Directly proportionate to the rise of religious exclusivism, perhaps best epitomized by the attacks of 9/11 and the current problems plaguing the Middle East and Afghanistan, there has been a real desire both to find and map a set of commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is often done, however, not for the sake of scholarship, but interfaith dialogue. Recently, however, the term “Abrahamic religions” has been used with exceeding frequency in the academy. We now regularly encounter academic books, conferences, and even positions (including endowed chairs) devoted to the so-called “Abrahamic religions.” Often lost in contemporary discussions of “Abrahamic religions” is a set of crucial questions: whence does the term “Abrahamic religions” derive? Who created it and for what purposes? What sort of intellectual work is it perceived to perform? In order to answer these and related questions, the book examines the creation and dissemination of this category. Part genealogical and part analytical, this study seeks to raise and answer questions about the appropriateness and usefulness of employing “Abrahamic religions” as a vehicle for understanding and classifying data. In so doing, this book can be taken as a case study that examines the construction of categories within the academic study of religion, showing how the categories we employ can become more an impediment than an expedient to understanding.

This book is an investigation into two basic concepts of ancient pagan and Christian thought, namely activity and participation. It shows how activity in Christian thought is connected with the topic of participation: for the lower levels of being to participate in the higher means to receive the divine activity into their own ontological constitution. It is mainly a discussion of some important Church Fathers. Against a background of Aristotelian and Neoplatonist philosophy, the book discusses Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and culminates with a chapter on Gregory Palamas before some conclusions are drawn. The concern of the author is to highlight how the Christians think energeia (i.e. activity or energy) is manifested as divine activity in the eternal constitution of the Trinity, the creation of the cosmos, the Incarnation of Christ, and in salvation understood as deification. Terms such as essence and energy are associated with the theology and spirituality of the fourteenth-century Byzantine thinker Gregory Palamas. One purpose of this book is to show how Palamas’ theology is in accordance with Greek patristic thinking, with its background in a definite trend in ancient pagan philosophy.

This is a sequel to Richard Muller's The Unaccommodated Calvin (OUP 2000). The previous book attempted to situate Calvin's theological work in its historical context and to strip away various 20th-century theological grids that have clouded our perceptions of the work of the Reformer. This book carries this approach forward, with the goal of overcoming a series of 19th- and 20th-century theological frameworks characteristic of much of the scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy, or what might be called “Calvinism after Calvin”.

In the past half century there has been a significant amount of scholarly attention paid to the thought of Jonathan Edwards so that he is now one of the most studied figures in American history. Much less attention has been directed toward the theological movement that took its point of departure from Edwards, namely, the New England Theology. Yet this school of thought had a profound influence on the shape and character of nineteenth-century American theology, and it is to date the most important and influential indigenous theological movement in the history of the United States. This set of chapters by an international team of specialists in the philosophy, theology, and history of Edwards and the New England theology offers a fresh look at how Edwards’s ideas were transmitted, received, and reworked in the different phases of the life of the New England Theology. The chapters also trace the way in which his thought, and that of his intellectual progeny, had an international impact on the shape of theology in the UK, Europe, and Asia, and on present-day Reformed theology.

Christianity from its earliest times taught the existence of heaven and hell as places where good and evil deeds in this life were judged, rewarded and punished. In the course of time ideas both of promised bliss and threatened woe went beyond anything than can have a purchase on human experience. Nevertheless, in their most developed form, doctrines of heaven and hell were explorations of moral psychology, as seen in their greatest imaginative expression, Dante's Divine Comedy. The present book explores and comments on ideas about post-mortem existence from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, as well as in Christianity and (more briefly) Islam. Having traced the early history, growth, and refinement of these ideas over five millennia, it ends with the discordant voices of spiritualism, liberal theology, Mormonism, Evangelical Christian preachers of Rapture and Armageddon, modern Muslim apocalyptics, and Coptic visions of the Last Days. In a Prologue and an Epilogue the ironic treatment of some of these themes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is evoked to set them in a context of modernity.

The evil of the holocaust demands a radical rethink of the traditional Christian understanding of Judaism. This is because the anti‐Judaism of the Christian Church prepared the way for the holocaust. This rethink includes looking at theological responses to the holocaust and examining which, if any, are adequate. It also means looking at issues of suffering and forgiveness in both Judaism and Christianity. On examination, the approach of the two religions is not as far apart as is sometimes suggested. The basic covenant is not with either Judaism or Christianity but with humanity. These, like other religions, are different, distinctive voices in response to God's primal affirmation of human life, which for Christians is achieved and given in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians should not set out to convert Jews. Jesus is, traditionally, a highly divisive figure for the two religions but modern scholarship, including Jewish scholarship, has revealed some common ground. In addition to the common ground here, there is a shared hope and a common task though contentious questions still remain on questions such as Israel and Jerusalem. The church has a particular responsibility to ensure that its teaching and preaching is not implicitly anti‐Judaic.

Explores the history and doctrines of Traditionalism, a movement established by Ren” Gu”non in the 1920s, and later developed further by Julius Evola (in politics), Frithjof Schuon (in religion), and Mircea Eliade (in academia). Traditionalism sees modernity as terminal decline from traditional metaphysical truth, and attempts to remedy this at both a personal and societal level. All responses depend on the recovery of lost tradition, notably of the “perennial philosophy.” Personal responses are generally religious, and Sufism (mystical Islam) was the most important of these, followed by Freemasonry. Societal responses range from Eliade’s scholarly investigation of archaic religion to Evola’s ultra fascism, by 2000 a major stream in far-right thought. The book examines the origins of Traditionalism in the Renaissance, and then traces the development of the groups and movements that resulted, as well as modification in doctrine. The final chapter looks at Traditionalism’s possible influence in the future, and asks why so many intellectuals found this anti-modernist movement so attractive.