Download or read book Without Metaphor No Saving God written by Robert Masson and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of conceptual and neural mapping in cognitive linguistics, while posing a fundamental challenge for religious belief, also suggest new ways of understanding how people conceptualize God and make theological inferences. This book, inspired by that research and attentive to the distinctive insights of Christian theology, elaborates an innovative explanation of God-talk, better able to credibly address confusion and controversies that trouble the church, academic theology, and broader culture. The first part analyzes both cognitive linguistics' challenge to standard theological depictions of metaphorical, analogous, symbolic, and literal language, and the discipline's promise for providing a more satisfactory account. The second half examines six case studies to illustrate how clarifying the conceptual mapping in God-talk and theological inferences provides a powerful tool for advancing religious understanding. The illustrations include the hypothesis that religion is an epiphenomenon of evolution, the so-called "new atheism," Black theology, and controversies between theologians and Church authorities. This book has won the 2014 CTS Book Award.
Download or read book Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence written by Stephen R. Shaver and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the most challenging questions for Christian ecumenical theology is how the relationship between the eucharistic bread and wine and Jesus Christ's body and blood can be appropriately described. This book takes a new approach to controverted questions of eucharistic presence by drawing on cognitive linguistics. Arguing that human cognition is grounded in sensorimotor experience and that phenomena such as metaphor and conceptual blending are basic building blocks of thought, the book proposes that inherited models of eucharistic presence are not necessarily mutually exclusive but can serve as complementary members of a shared ecumenical repertoire. The central element of this repertoire is the motif of identity, grounded in the Synoptic and Pauline institution narratives. The book argues that the statement "The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ" can be understood both as figurative and as true in the proper sense, thus resolving a church-dividing dichotomy. The identity motif is complemented by four major non-scriptural motifs: representation, change, containment, and conduit. Each motif with its entailments is explored in depth and suggestions for ecumenical reconciliation in both doctrine and practices are offered. The book also provides an introduction to cognitive linguistics and offers suggestions for further reading in that field"--
Download or read book The Analogy of Signs written by Rory Misiewicz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The longstanding debate over how God-talk is intelligible gravitates around how we should understand the putative answer, “by analogy.” For some contemporary Christian theologians, analogy involves an ontological claim about creaturely and divine being (i.e., an analogy of being). For others, it involves a semantic or syntactical structure that legitimates the linguistic performances associated with analogy (i.e., a grammatical analogy). Still others appeal to faith in God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ (i.e., an analogy of faith). Rory Misiewicz argues that all of these approaches fall flat in their explanatory efforts. He draws upon the work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce to rethink the relation between God and human beings. He argues that Christian theologians may view that relation as being established by an “analogy of signs”: both God and human beings are univocally involved in semiosis, or sign-process, and the confirmation of God’s semiotic identity is found in the revelation of God in the person of Jesus, the incarnate Son of God. Therefore, ordinary analogical language is intelligible, for divine signs are commensurate with human signs.
Download or read book Theology in the Flesh written by John Sanders and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphors and other mental tools are used to reason (not just speak) about God, salvation, truth, and morality. Figurative language structures our theological and moral reasoning in powerful ways. This book uses an approach known as cognitive linguistics to explore the incredibly rich ways our conceptual tools, derived from embodied life and culture, shape the way we understand Christian teachings and practices. The cognitive revolution has generated amazing insights into how human minds make sense of the world. This book applies these insights to the ways Christians think about topics such as God, justice, sin, and salvation. It shows that Christians often share a set of very general ideas but disagree on what the Bible means or the moral stances we should take. It explains why Christians often develop a number of appropriate but sometimes incompatible ways to understand the Bible and various doctrines. It assists Christians in understanding those with whom they disagree. Hopefully, simply better understanding how and why people think the way they do will foster better dialogue and greater humility.
Download or read book Conceptual Blending in Early Christian Discourse written by Aleksander Gomola and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive linguists and biblical and patristic scholars have recently given more attention to the presence of conceptual blends in early Christian texts, yet there has been so far no comprehensive study of the general role of conceptual blending as a generator of novel meanings in early Christianity as a religious system with its own identity. This monograph points in that direction and is a cognitive linguistic exploration of pastoral metaphors in a wide range of patristic texts, presenting them as variants of THE CHURCH IS A FLOCK network. Such metaphors or blends, rooted in the Bible, were used by Patristic writers to conceptualize a great number of particular notions that were constitutive for the early church, including the responsibilities of the clergy and the laity, morality and penance, church unity, baptism and soteriology. This study shows how these blends became indispensable building blocks of a new religious system and explains the role of conceptual blending in this process. The book is addressed to biblical and patristic scholars interested in a new, unifying perspective for various strands of early Christian thought and to cognitive linguists interested in the role of conceptual integration in religious language. Produced with the support of the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.
Download or read book T T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected in this volume provide a resource for thinking theologically about the practice of Christian prayer. In the first of four parts, the volume begins by reaching back to the biblical foundations of prayer. Then, each of the chapters in the second part investigates a classical Christian doctrine – including God, creation, Christology, pneumatology, providence and eschatology – from the perspective of prayer. The chapters in the third part explore the writings of some of the great theorizers of prayer in the history of the Christian tradition. The final part gathers a set of creative and critical conversations on prayer responding to a variety of contemporary issues. Overall, the T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer articulates a theologically expansive account of prayer – one that is deeply biblical, energetically doctrinal, historically rooted, and relevant to a whole host of critical questions and concerns facing the world today.
Download or read book Imagining the Jewish God written by Leonard Kaplan and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-09-09 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book—a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the “text” as foundational for the imagined “people of the book.” That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.
Download or read book Transformed into the Same Image written by Paul Copan and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the doctrine of theosis has been gaining interest among scholars for some time, most have focused on Roman Catholic or Orthodox traditions. In this constructive account of deification, biblical scholars and theologians focus on the work of major Protestant thinkers and Protestant expressions of the doctrine.
Download or read book Lifting the Veil written by Michael Cover and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What accounts for the seemingly atypical pattern of scriptural exegesis that Paul uses to interpret Exodus 34 in 2 Cor 3:7-18? While previous scholars have approached this question from a variety of angles, in this monograph, Michael Cover grapples particularly with the evidence of contemporaneous Jewish and Greco-Roman commentary traditions. Through comparison with Philo of Alexandria's Allegorical Commentary, the Pseudo-Philonic homilies De Jona and De Sampsone, the Anonymous Theaetetus Commentary, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Seneca's Epistulae morales, and other New Testament texts, Paul's interpretation of Exodus emerges as part of a wider commentary practice that Cover terms "secondary-level exegesis." This study also provides new analysis of the way ancient authors, including Paul, interwove commentary forms and epistolary rhetoric and offers a reconstruction of the context of Paul's conflict with rival apostles in Corinth. At root was the legacy of Moses and of the Pentateuch itself, how the scriptures ought to be read, and how Platonizing theological and anthropological traditions might be interwoven with Paul's messianic gospel.
Download or read book Pauline Hamartiology Conceptualisation and Transferences written by Steffi Fabricius and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2018-11-22 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The understanding of Pauline sin as an action, a personification, and as a power is overturned by the application of cognitive semantic theories. In this work, Steffi Fabricius reveals a metaphoric-ontological thinking of Paul which conveys the ontological effectivity and actuality of metaphors.
Download or read book Religion Language and the Human Mind written by Paul Chilton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is religion? How does it work? Many natural abilities of the human mind are involved, and crucial among them is the ability to use language. This volume brings together research from linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as from religious studies, to understand the phenomena of religion as a distinctly human enterprise. The book is divided into three parts, each part preceded by a full introductory chapter by the editors that discusses modern scientific approaches to religion and the application of modern linguistics, particularly cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. Part I surveys the development of modern studies of religious language and the diverse disciplinary strands that have emerged. Beginning with descriptive approaches to religious language and the problem of describing religious concepts across languages, chapters introduce the turn to cognition in linguistics and also in theology, and explore the brain's contrasting capacities, in particular its capacity for language and metaphor. Part II continues the discussion of metaphor - the natural ability by which humans draw on basic knowledge of the world in order to explore abstractions and intangibles. Specialists in particular religions apply conceptual metaphor theory in various ways, covering several major religious traditions-Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Part III seeks to open up new horizons for cognitive-linguistic research on religion, looking beyond written texts to the ways in which language is integrated with other modalities, including ritual, religious art, and religious electronic media. Chapters in Part III introduce readers to a range of technical instruments that have been developed within cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis in recent years. What unfolds ultimately is the idea that the embodied cognition of humans is the basis not only of their languages, but also of their religions.
Download or read book A Symphony of Distances written by Christopher M. Hadley, SJ and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2022-03-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-fold task of A Symphony of Distances is to provide an overview of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s use of distance imagery with regard to personal distinctions in the Holy Trinity and to offer a critical analysis of him as a modern Catholic theologian. A metaphor of “distance” integrates all of Balthasar’s theological thought as a primary cipher for the many symbols through which he reads the Christian theological tradition in a trinitarian and eschatological mode. The book follows a chronological, four-stage development of Balthasar’s trinitarianism through the lens of this distance metaphor as it occurs across representative texts. The critical analysis employs the conceit of a symphony of four musical movements that correspond to four varieties of theological distance. These distances show certain correspondences of God’s creation and redemption of the world—marked by the first two “distances”—with the relations of the divine persons to each other in the economy of salvation and in the eternal Trinity itself—marked by the third and fourth distances. “Listening” to the four movements of Balthasar’s theological distances enables his readers to “hear” the themes of all four movements in the ascending order of richness, complexity, and inclusivity over the long development of his thought. This fundamentally positive approach of A Symphony of Distances allows for a thorough critique of the internal consistency of Balthasar’s applied method, of the controversial use of gendered trinitarian notions in his speculations on divine pathos, and of his adequacy to the tasks of modern theology. The final judgment is that Balthasar’s theology of distance can be accepted, with reservations, as a positive element of his contribution to contemporary trinitarian theology. The book can thus serve as a critical reference for readers who find Balthasar’s notion of trinitarian distance, and indeed his trinitarianism as a whole, to be compelling, confusing, or frustrating.
Download or read book Varieties of Understanding written by Stephen Robert Grimm and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to understand something? What is the essence of understanding, when compared across multiple domains? Varieties of Understanding offers new and original work on the nature of understanding, raising questions about what understanding looks like from different perspectives and exploring how ordinary people use the notion of understanding. According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world-that it calls on different cognitive resources and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus, in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed-mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. This volume brings together some of the world's leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians in order to shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.
Download or read book Marital Imagery in the Bible written by Colin Hamer and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marital Imagery in the Bible. It can only be imagined that when the New Testament writers made their (albeit brief) comments on divorce and remarriage that they assumed they would be understood. So what has gone wrong? In the years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when Graeco-Roman culture was at its height, the Jewish perspective of marriage and divorce, and thus the context of those brief New Testament comments was lost. The Christian church of that era was influenced by the neoplatonic ideas of the day, and an idealised concept of marriage developed from on Adam and Eve’s marriage recorded in Genesis 2:23—it was love at first sight, a marriage made in heaven. These concepts frame an understanding of marriage in much of Western culture even today. However, that was never the understanding of ancient Israel. Instead they looked to Genesis 2:24: ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’—so a naturally born man chooses a wife for himself, and their union was based on a ‘covenant’—in other words an agreement. The Old Testament makes it clear what the basis of that agreement was. Furthermore, it is clear, if that agreement was broken, there could be a divorce and a remarriage. All the Bible’s marital imagery (where the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures imagine that God is married to his people) is based on that understanding of human marriage. But so strong is our concept of marriage, that when Genesis 2:24 is referred to in the New Testament, it is thought that the reference is to Adam and Eve’s marriage. It is a paradigmatic marriage that for many excludes (or greatly restricts) the possibility of divorce and remarriage. This study looks to challenge that paradigm—and to suggest that the New Testament writers would not have employed an imagery which had at its center divorce and remarriage, only to deny the possibility of such in their own human marriage teaching. Colin Hamer’s thesis represents the only recent work on metaphor theory in biblical scholarship. It challenges centuries of academic scholarship and ecclesiastical assumptions about divorce. Hamer’s detailed and well researched analysis challenges the consensus view that the marriage of Adam and Eve in Gen 2:24 represents an ontological unity, suggesting important implications for contemporary Christian teaching on marriage and divorce.
Download or read book Reasonable Faith written by William Lane Craig and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2008 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition by one of the world's leading apologists presents a systematic, positive case for Christianity that reflects the latest work in the contemporary hard sciences and humanities. Brilliant and accessible.
Download or read book Religion Language and the Human Mind written by Paul Anthony Chilton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is a multi-faceted and complex human phenomenon, combining many different mental and social characteristics. Among these, language plays a crucial though often neglected role. This volume brings together groundbreaking work from linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as from religious studies, in order to illuminate the origins and centrality of religion in human life.
Download or read book Mapping the Differentiated Consensus of the Joint Declaration written by Jakob Karl Rinderknecht and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses the insights of cognitive linguistics to argue for the possibility of differentiated consensus between separated churches. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church in 1999, represents the high water mark of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. It declares that the sixteenth-century condemnations related to justification do not condemn the teachings of the partner church. Some critics reject the agreement, arguing that a consensus that is differentiated is not actually a consensus. In this book, Jakob Karl Rinderknecht shows that mapping the "cognitive blends" that structure meaning can reveal underlying agreement within apparent theological contradictions. He traces Lutheran and Catholic positions on sin in the baptized, especially the Lutheran simul iustus et peccator and the Catholic insistence that concupiscence in the baptized is not sin. He demonstrates that the JDDJ reconciles these positions, and therefore that a truly differentiated consensus is possible.
