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August 22 - September 29, 2016
Kant argued like Descartes from the existence of individual consciousness rather than from the givenness of a God found in revelation.
Such a wanton act of cultural vandalism was a sign that the religious outlook of such monarchs had shifted far from the confessional warfare of the Reformation; more evidence was the cynical process which, between 1772 and 1795, witnessed Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox great powers, respectively Austria, Prussia and Russia, amicably dividing up the diminished remnant of the once-great Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, and exiling its Catholic monarch to St Petersburg.
What is striking about Christian Europe at this period, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, is the withering of autonomous Church government in the face of State onslaught: the decay of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, the shackling of the Russian Orthodox Church to the imperial government, the growing impotence of the pope witnessed in the destruction of the Jesuits, but also, in the Protestant world, the effective silencing of the Church of England’s deliberative bodies.
The Revolution which had begun with a sincere effort to improve the Church now sought to replace it with a synthetic religion, constructed out of classical symbolism mixed up with the eighteenth century’s celebration of human reason: the Christian calendar of years and months was abolished, religious houses closed, churches desecrated.
not exactly a common view
It would have taken a man with no ambition to resist this temptation, and Napoleon did not.
really?
During the nineteenth century, first the electric telegraph and then the telephone made communication instant over long distances, at least for those who could pay for it. Now the history of Christianities, previously fairly easy to distinguish as three separate stories of non-Chalcedonians and Western and Eastern Chalcedonians, began to merge and interact far more closely.
For many in the nineteenth century, nationalism became an emotional replacement for the Christian religion.
‘Socialists’ asserted that without the distortions of inequality or poverty, people would naturally behave to one another as brothers
argh.argh.argh.
Yet while Marx prophesied in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, what was distinctive about this new phase of socialism was its commitment to materialism and rejection of religions of revelation.
gh
One underlying structural consideration was that in Western Churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, a large proportion of the clerical leadership had always been drawn from the able rather than the well born, unusually among the institutions of traditional society.
citation??
In Spain, between 1829 and 1834, liberals forced the King to disband that faithful guardian of Spanish Catholic identity, the Spanish Inquisition. What did that say about the Spanish patriotism of liberals?
President Castro was as much heir to the nineteenth century’s anticlerical liberalism as he was to Marx.
sigh
It is extraordinary that the conciliarist tradition, which flourished in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Western Church and which still had weighty advocates in the eighteenth century, should crash in ruin at the time when Europe’s temporal powers were all yielding to the logic of constitutionalism. That was a mark of how much the ultramontanes decided that the principles of liberalism were potentially subversive of their whole project.24
They savoured the sufferings of early Christians in ill-ventilated visits to the newly exposed catacombs, and they returned from these archaeological outings to show their vocal support for the suffering papal ‘Peter in Chains’, often provoking riots with angry Italian nationalists which anticipated the aftermath of international football matches in more recent decades.25
huh?
The sheer nastiness of the ‘Anti-Dreyfusards’ did not present French Catholicism in a good light, particularly their hatred of ‘deicidal’ Jews, whom they saw as staging a conspiracy along with the Freemasons against Christian society.
bit of an understatement
The fault line in French politics between Church and Revolution persisted into the 1960s,
although from 1845 onwards a significant number of strong-minded women intimidated or nonplussed male leaders in the Anglican Communion by founding nunneries which exalted episcopal authority while defying actual bishops, persisting with charitable work or the contemplative life in the face of all discouragement.
In 1853 a Congregational Church in South Butler, New York, extended the same logic in ordaining Antoinette Brown as minister, the first woman outside the countercultural Quakers to hold such an office in modern Christianity.
great range of causes envisaging radical change in social behaviour, especially the abolition of slavery, and a war on that male-dominated subversion of quiet family evenings and secure finance, indulgence in alcohol.
is slavery social behaivour?
They were active in matters where men might easily be compromised if they showed excessive interest, most obviously the welfare of millions of poverty-stricken young women forced into prostitution.
or maybe women were attracted to causes affecting otherr women?
Humanity’s sense of its intimacy with God arose from the fact that humanity itself had created God in its own image: ‘the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. Such are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God.’
More long-lasting, and of genuinely worldwide significance, was another segment of the same enterprise which shared its focus on Palestine: an Evangelical Alliance linking British and German Evangelical Protestants, founded in 1846. One of the Alliance’s concerns was to return Jews to Palestine and convert them there.
still why evangelicals support Israel
Already in eighteenth-century German cities, a significant number of people had ceased to go to church.
a great many working-class people turned away from Protestant churches which had identified themselves with the conservative imperial system, and instead embraced a socialism which had begun providing them with a whole alternative subculture for leisure activities and welfare, paralleling what the Church could provide.
England’s tradition of vigorous dissent meant that hostility to the established Church did not turn into general anticlericalism or hostility to Christianity, but was channelled into alternative Christian practice.
British socialism notoriously owes more to Methodism than to Marx – indeed, in the twentieth century it came to owe more to the Mass than to Marx, as newly enfranchised working-class Catholics turned their votes to the Labour Party.52
argh
The schism was not healed until a reuniting of most of the parties concerned in 1929, by which time the problem of patronage had long been solved in the old established Church. Now it seems incredible that such an issue could have so dominated a major national Church and split it down the middle. Christian preoccupations move on.
issue is wealth as controller
there came the realization that High Church clergy genuinely did care for the Church’s mission to save souls. One of the most important ways in which the movement gained respect in the Church from the 1860s was to launch public missions, especially in settings of urban squalor: Anglo-Catholics took as their model not the emotionalism of Methodist or Evangelical mission but, appropriately, the dramatic missions conducted by various religious orders in Roman Catholic Europe on the classic Jesuit model (see pp. 682–3
As a result of these early Victorian excitements, the Church of England, and the Anglican world generally, developed two self-conscious groupings of Anglo-Catholicism and Evangelicalism, plus a ‘Broad Church’ middle ground whose adherents were more than a little impatient with the extremes (see Plate 63). The fact that the nineteenth-century Church of England never managed to provide any centrally planned system of clergy training, in the fashion of Roman Catholic seminaries, afforded each of the three ‘parties’ the chance to found their own theological colleges. These colleges proved the most
...more
That spectrum has been one of the most fruitful products of that always tense structure, the Anglican Communion. It demands that its adherents use their brains to understand what Anglicanism might be, as well as their aesthetic sense to appreciate how it might reach out to the beauty of divine presence. It encourages a strong sense of paradox and uncertainty, of which Kierkegaard might well have grudgingly approved.
clearly authors passion! insidervview
In central Asia, the Tsaritsa Catherine and her successors controlled Islam by a policy straightforwardly borrowed from their existing control of official Orthodox Christianity: a central ‘Muhammadan Assembly’ of mullahs, and even a system of parishes.
It was Filaret, the Metropolitan of Moscow, a churchman whose liberal reputation led to his complete exclusion from meetings of the Holy Synod between 1836 and 1855, who drafted one of the most idealistic reforming measures of the century to originate with a tsar, Alexander II’s decree freeing the serfs of Russia in 1861.
Key to his thought was a concept which has become central to modern Russian Orthodox thinking, Sobornost’, the proposition that freedom is inseparable from unity, communion or community. In Khomiakov’s view, the concept contained a critique of both halves of Western Christianity, as Catholicism presented unity without freedom and Protestantism freedom without unity.
It was then that Fr Georgii Gapon, a popular and charismatic (one might say headstrong) young St Petersburg parish priest, led a mass demonstration of unarmed workers in the city, demanding political and social reforms. The reaction of the government was to shoot them down, a piece of brutal stupidity which turned demonstrations into attempted revolution.
1905
Greeks had in any case long enjoyed more commercial and travel contacts with the West than most other Orthodox, and it was noticeable that it was in Greece that Orthodoxy was faced with one of its own who had turned to expounding Enlightenment ideas in his own language.
The denunciation of ‘ethnophyletism’ was a commitment to a vision of Orthodoxy which affirmed that it must never simply be an expression of nationalism or even of a single national culture.
When English scholars added their contributions to this work, many of them were devout and orthodox Anglican clergy, led by the cheerfully learned and multifariously curious William Buckland, who kept a hyena at home as much for the enjoyment of its company as for research, and announced his intention of eating his way through the whole range of created animals.
the enhlish are seriously strange
Chambers was himself an interesting product of evolution, since he possessed twin sets of six fingers and six toes.
argh
There has been no intellectually serious scientific challenge to Darwin’s general propositions since his time.
The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
Friedrich Engels started on his journey away from Lutheran Christianity through his enthusiasm for the Hegelianism of the Leben Jesu.
The search had begun for a ‘historical Jesus’, a figure in whom the Church could believe despite the huge gap separating thought-forms and assumptions of the first Christians from those of the nineteenth century.
This was a movement imported from the United States, which seemed able to restore the connection between the material and the spiritual in ‘seances’ which closely resembled the method of the scientific experiment.
Central to these essays was an emphasis on five main points: the impossibility of the biblical text being mistaken in its literal meaning (‘verbal inerrancy’), the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the idea that Jesus died on the Cross in the place of sinners (an atonement theory technically known as penal substitution) and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in flesh.
Before Nietzsche, Hegel had emphasized that the death of God himself in Jesus was an inescapable aspect of the humanity within God.
The nineteenth century has usually been seen as principally the time of these ‘masters of suspicion’ in Europe: a century of disenchantment with Christianity and the supernatural in an age of science, a period of ebbing of European faith. Yet it was crowded with visionaries both Catholic and Protestant, full of excitement about the End Times, noisy with the sound of building for new churches and monasteries and the voices of furious quarrels about the best way forward for Christian renewal.
Great sentances!
The link between blackness and slavery reached the Christian West late, and it was ironically via Judaism. Just when the Portuguese were beginning to take their share of the African slave trade, in the late fifteenth century, a celebrated Portuguese Jewish philosopher, Isaac ben Abravanel, suggested that Caanan’s descendants were black, while those of his uncles were white, and so all black people were liable to be enslaved.
slavery first then biblical interprefation
Certainly a majority of British missionaries were members of Dissenting Churches or Methodists, and they were unlikely to have an automatic sympathy with the aims of the British Establishment.
Various political leaders realized just how much advantage they might gain against rivals from missionary backing – often, as large-scale conversions took place, combatants in murderous wars would ally with missionaries of rival denominations, who frequently did not quite grasp how they were being used in local politics.
by 1845, in under fifty years, at least half the Maori population was worshipping in Christian churches, far outnumbering European churchgoers on the two islands.
