While it has often been recognised that the development of Christian orthodoxy was stimulated by the speculations of those who are now called heretics, it is still widely assumed that their ...contribution was merely catalytic, that they called forth the exposition of what the main church already believed but had not yet been required to formulate.
This book maintains that scholars have underrated the constructive role of these “heretical” speculations in the evolution of dogma, showing that salient elements in the doctrines of the fall, the Trinity and the union of God and man in Christ derive from teachings that were initially rejected by the main church. Mark Edwards also reveals how authors who epitomised orthodoxy in their own day sometimes favoured teachings which were later considered heterodox, and that their doctrines underwent radical revision before they became a fixed element of orthodoxy.
The first half of the volume discusses the role of Gnostic theologians in the formation of catholic thought; the second half will offer an unfashionable view of the controversies which gave rise to the councils of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon. Many of the theories advanced here have not been broached elsewhere, and no synthesis on this scale had been attempted by other scholars. While this book proposes a revision in the scholarly perception of early Christendom, it also demonstrates the essential unity of the tradition.
El debate teológico católico contemporâneo acerca de la catolicidad asegura recuperar una concepción cualitativa de la catolicidad con elfin de corregir el énfasis clâsico sobre la ...amplitudgeográfica. Las tendencias para identificar la catolicidad con la universalidad, confundir la universalidad con la uniformidad y equiparar la continuidad con la inmutabilidad, impidieron que la Iglesia desarrollara un enfoque holístico respecto de la catolicidad. Al enfrentar el reto de la globalización, el cristianismo ofrece una alternativa de unidad en la diversidad que parece ser la traducción actual de la categoría teológica de la catolicidad de la Iglesia. El punto focal de este artículo será, por ende, el papel y el significado de la construcción de comunidad y la unidad de la Iglesia respecto del sostenimiento de la creación y el abordaje de la globalización.
The aim of the article is to demonstrate the significance, meaning and need for a new type of thinking about the Church which has been described as a “dialogical ecclesiology”. This kind of ...ecclesiology responds to the call of the Second Vatican Council to build relations between the Church and the contemporary world based on the category of dialogue. The phrase “from Catholicism to Catholicity” suggests the need to move away from the defensive vision of the Church (referred to as Catholicism) towards the affirmation of the Church’s open and dialogical Catholicity. The elaboration of an adequate, coherent and credible dialogical ecclesiology requires a deeper rethinking of the meaning of the Church’s dialogical essence and a precise determination of the addressees, aspects and objectives of the ecclesial dialogue ad extra. While presenting the Church as a dialogical sacrament of salvation in history, the article combines theological (dogmatic) and existential perspectives. In particular, it takes into account the sensitivity of contemporary people to the phenomenon of suffering, which is difficult to accept but which – due to its universalism – may lead to a creative encounter between believers and atheists/ agnostics. In its theological message, the article is an expression of Christian hope, which also manifests its strength in today’s secularized “culture of the temporary”. It shows the value of an authentic meeting of people representing different religions and worldviews who, through fair dialogue, can discover the deeper meaning of their faith, existence and cooperation in defending the threatened humanity that is objectively the imago Dei.
The theme of love is reflected in a variety of ways in all the works of L.D. Zinovieva-Annibal. As one of the most representative works of the writer, the story “The Thirty-Three Freaks” is an ...important and particularly revealing link in proving the process of change in the creative method and worldview of the author. The aim of the study is to show the complex relationship between love and eros, not only in the story “The Thirty-Three Freaks”, but also in the real married life of Vyacheslav Ivanov and L.D. Zinovieva-Annibal. The writer's artistic embodiment of the ideas of her husband, the symbolist poet V. Ivanov, on the creation of a new religion, where Eros is “entrenched” and becomes a bearer of “solidarity”, is traced. V. Ivanov's utopian ideal project of organizing a new social form, although it ultimately failed, originally meant the intention to overcome individualism among the initiates, among the participants of the love action, which proves the influence of V. Solovyov's philosophy on the symbolists and, in particular, on the circle of visitors of “The Tower”. The study uses biographical, intertextual, and comparative-historical methods. The conclusion is made that in the ideal form of society, in which there is no place for individualism and egoism, the concept of inseparability of spirit and body should have prevailed. However, analysis of the novel “The Thirty-Three Freaks” shows that the heroine had not overcome individualism, that the path to comprehending of eros was theoretically declared, but was not realized in practice. Hence the tragic sound of the work and its disastrous finale.
Introduction.
The article examines collegiality as a category of metaphysics in the religious and philosophical systems of V.S. Solovyov, prot. Sergei Bulgakov and archim. Sophrony (Sakharov). The ...analysis of the category of collegiality is carried out through the prism of personalism, as a basic concept for the metaphysical thinking of these authors.
Materials and Methods.
The research material for the proposed article is monographs and scientific works of Russian researchers devoted to the problems of ecclesiology, sophiology and personalism. In this article, the methods of comparative analysis, historical and philosophical synthesis, generalization, abstraction and interpretation were used.
Results.
The main problem posed in this article is the process of reception of the category of collegiality in Russian religious personalism. Sobornost is a term coined in the Slavophil tradition to express the concept of "unity in a plurality." In the metaphysics of total-unity and in neo-patristic synthesis, this category was perceived because it solved one of the basic questions: how are the personality correlated as the One, and the multitude, as the All-unity? This solution was formally different (for sophiology and neopatristic theology), but structurally identical. Sobornost, as unity in the multitude, realized in the Church, has as its prototype the Trinity of God. At the same time, the study states that collegiality was one of the main categories in which the general Sophian personalism of the Russian philosophical tradition was expressed. Sophia in this case means the nature of the Church, open to hypostasis, and through this hypostasis creates the possibility of Theosis of man. The research focuses on three personalities of the Russian intellectual tradition: the philosopher V.S. Soloviev and theologians Archpriest Sergei Bulgakov and Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov).
V.S. Soloviev, as the founder of the Russian metaphysics of All-Unity, uses the concept of God-manhood as a metaphysician of conciliarity, transmitting a personalistic impulse to subsequent philosophers. Late nightingale moves away from theistic personalism towards immanetism, but his disciples, among whom was Archpriest. Sergei Bulgakov, connect the category of conciliarity and the concept of God-manhood in sophiological ecclesiology. In this case, prot. Sergei Bulgakov substantiates his cathedral personalism on the basis of a trinitarian anthropological model. The tradition of neo-patristic synthesis, which is analyzed using the example of archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), refuses sophiological terminology, preserving the basic intuitions developed in Russian religious philosophy, returning them to the traditional theological field of meanings.
Discussion and Conclusion
. In the Slavophil tradition, collegiality is understood historiosophically, in the metaphysics of All-Unity - sophiologically, and in the neopatristic synthesis - ecclesiologically. In the philosophy of the Silver Age and theology, personalism becomes one of the main themes, which leads to the transformation of the category of collegiality towards polyhypostasis as the main property of the nature of the Church. At the same time, we see the transformation of a certain basic personal intuition of collegiality, which comes from the church tradition and returns to it, enriched with philosophical meanings.
The article reflects the intermediate results of a large study devoted to the analysis of the management of the Old Believer Church of the Belokrinitskaya hierarchy in the early 20th century. The ...purpose of the study is to trace the evolution of the development of the church administration of the Old Believer Church of Belokrinitskaya hierarchy in 1898–1917, overcoming the fragmentary vision of it in the period mentioned. The supreme body of church administration of this Christian denomination was the Consecrated Council, with a number of important functions. In 1911, the Council under the Archdiocese became a new link in church administration. This body was established to help the Consecrated Council to solve practical problems in the period between its assemblies. To conduct a comprehensive study based on the existing corpus of sources and present the results as an information model, the author analyzed the activities of the Council under the Archdiocese. This analysis was carried out on wide archival material — documents from Stock 1475 of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, which has been used before to study the histories of individual regional communities or biographical studies. The study used materials new to science: the archives of the Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia of the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church, which were formed in the 2010s. Materials of the periodical press were involved, the texts of which were compared with clerical sources. The continuation of the activities of the Council under the Archdiocese was annually questioned by each Sobor, and in the end it was still extended for another year, until a new check of the results of its work. At the same time, the Council also received new powers. Despite criticism, the Council under the Archdiocese proved to be an effective body. In 1911–1913 it was gaining strength, but the freezing of conciliar activities in 1914 and the accumulation of many cases by 1915 raised the question of the need to expand its powers. A draft provision regulating the work of this Council was developed, but its approval did not take place. The question of expanding the powers of the Council was also raised in 1916, but in a different context concerning its judicial function. Formally, this change was neither accepted nor fixed on paper, but already in 1917 the Council received this function de facto. In the course of revolutionary events, the activities of the Council under the Archdiocese gradually ceased.
The article is devoted to the problem of actualizing the motive of brotherhood in various spheres of A. S. Khomyakov’s works, identifying the relationships between the ecclesiological theory of the ...fraternal unity of the church community as “the grace of mutual love”, the epistemological concept of fraternal communication as a condition of true knowledge and images of fraternal unity in poetic creativity. The reasons for the lack of clarity in the religious and philosophical constructions of A. Khomyakov of the principles of the relationship between natural (universal, national, peasant-communal, family, friendly) and supernatural, grace-filled unity for the description of which A. Khomyakov uses the same conceptual-figurative system, are considered. Correlations are discovered between the ambiguous ontological status of fraternal Christian unity in the conceptual constructions of A. Khomyakov and the stability of plant and water images in his poetry, associated with the motives of the accumulation of mysterious forces and their sudden breakthrough, going back, on the one hand, to «organic» theories characteristic of romantics, and on the other hand, to folkmythological ideas.
The recent discovery and translation of Herman Bavinck’s (1854–1921) Reformed Ethics and the ongoing work on the sources and contours of his organic ontology create the impetus to relate these two ...trajectories together. The twin questions this article will be asking, precisely, are these: what is the logical relationship between Bavinck’s organic whole federalism, where ethical ties are ontologically constitutive, with his claim in the Reformed Ethics that sin’s organizing principle is the prioritization of the ego above all else? Further, how does that organic whole anthropology inform his vision of renewal and the subsequent ethical imperative that flow from the Spirit’s regenerative work? This article traces Bavinck’s logic through the Ethics on these twin questions, while being cognizant of the rest of his oeuvre. With this exposition in hand, this article then relates Bavinck’s outlook to current discussions in Protestant theological ethics.
PDF
