Home » Posts tagged 'hell'
Tag Archives: hell
UPDATE: “Confessions” – Book IX: Chapters 1 – 6
Here are our essays for the first half of Book IX of the Confessions.
We covered the role emotions play to religious and spiritual practices; how conversion changes our view of others and the world around us; the use and place of the Bible in a believer’s life; and whether or not non-believers will be rewarded for good works in the afterlife.
Confessions: Book VI – Chapters 9 – 16
“Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife”, Carlo Cignani (Italian, 1628 – 1719)
We will finish Book VI of Confessions, where Augustine deals with issues of the pursuit of truth, his struggles with lust, the afterlife, and final judgment.
UPDATE: Chapter 25: Culture Wars (1960 – Present) – Part II: Doctrine of Hell in 20th century and the Orthodox Church after the Soviet Union
Russian Orthodox Church has enjoyed a resurgence since the end of atheist Soviet Communist rule in 1991. (Reuters)
This will be our next to last submissions on MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years: two essays on the relevancy of the doctrine of hell in churches today and how the Orthodox Church has changed after the collapse of communism in Russia after 1991.
In our last entry for this series, coming next month, we will reflect on how a knowledge of Church history has impacted our understanding of the Christian faith.
Chapter 25: Culture Wars (1960 – Present) – Part II
Pope John Paul II (1920 – 2005)
It has been a long journey that dated back almost two years ago in April of 2013 when we first started reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. And now we have come to its conclusion.
Please read the remainder of Chapter 25, the last chapter of the book, where we will cover: A Cultural Revolution from the Sixties, Old-Time Affirmations, and Freedom: Prospects and Fears.
New Submissions for Chapter 13: “Hagia Sophia” & “Byzantine Spirituality”
Hi all,
New updates and submissions about the reign of Justinian I (aka Justinian the Great), the Byzantine Empire, Hagia Sophia, and the Orthodox theology of theosis. You can find them here.
Tonight, there were interesting talks about what constitutes theosis and how it perhaps relates to the more Reformed understanding of sanctification.
Also, to clarify some points on terminologies that often confused us tonight:
- Dyophysitism – the Chalcedonian position that full deity and full humanity exist in the person of Jesus Christ as two natures without confusion or change.
- Monophysitism – states that in the person of Jesus Christ, his human nature was absorbed into the divine nature like a cube of sugar dissolves in a cup of water. Therefore, Christ was left with only one nature, the Divine (Greek mono- one, physis – nature). (i.e. Christ had only a Divine nature.)
- Miaphysitism – holds that in the one person of Jesus Christ, his Divinity and Humanity are united in one “nature” (physis), the two being united without separation, without confusion, and without alteration. This is the position of the Orthodox and Coptic Churches.
It was also interesting to see tonight how hard it is for most Christians to articulate very basic terminologies we use all the time like:
- What is a spirit? How is it different from the soul? What is a soul anyway? After death, how exactly does the soul or the spirit separate from the body?
- How is a soul saved by God? Saved from what ? It’s saved from Hell? What is hell exactly and where exactly is it located within the known universe? If it’s outside the universe, how do know that? (Same questions apply to the notion/concept of heaven.)
- What is the nature of a “resurrected” or “spiritual” body? What type of matter will it consist of?
“Do Infants Go to Hell if They Die Before Baptism?: The Doctrine of Original Sin Re-examined” – an Orthodox Perspective
We will be covering the Orthodox Church very soon in MacCulloch’s book, so it’s good to get a glimpse of a bit of its theology and how it differs from the West, especially when it comes to the definition of “sin”.
“It is not clear by what justice humanity can share in Adam’s guilt when it existed only in potentiality in his loins at the time of the Fall. It is also difficult to see why the children of the baptized should inherit a guilt from which their parents have been cleansed.” – Prof. Gerald Bonner, Roman Catholic theologian
It’s good to bear in mind that Augustine never intended his theology of “Original Sin” to be a world-wide, eternal church doctrine – it was the Church many years later that adopted this idea and made it into a doctrine. Later on, Protestantism adopted this as doctrine as well and has shaped Western theology ever since.
It’s amazing how a mis-reading of the Bible that led to a mis-interpretation that led to this doctrine. This is why it’s always critical to have good exegesis precede hermeneutics.
Project Augustine 