1. The document discusses the views of Conversionist Christianity and how Christ transforms culture according to thinkers like Niebuhr, the Gospel of John, Augustine, and F.D. Maurice.
2. Conversionist Christianity believes that redemption is currently transforming the world through Christ, who grounds both creation and redemption.
3. Augustine exemplified how Christ converts culture from pagan to Christian principles, redirecting and regenerating corrupted human life and works through revealing God's love.
Description originale:
reflection and insights on the 5th anatomy of Christ and Culture by Richard Niebuhr
1. The document discusses the views of Conversionist Christianity and how Christ transforms culture according to thinkers like Niebuhr, the Gospel of John, Augustine, and F.D. Maurice.
2. Conversionist Christianity believes that redemption is currently transforming the world through Christ, who grounds both creation and redemption.
3. Augustine exemplified how Christ converts culture from pagan to Christian principles, redirecting and regenerating corrupted human life and works through revealing God's love.
1. The document discusses the views of Conversionist Christianity and how Christ transforms culture according to thinkers like Niebuhr, the Gospel of John, Augustine, and F.D. Maurice.
2. Conversionist Christianity believes that redemption is currently transforming the world through Christ, who grounds both creation and redemption.
3. Augustine exemplified how Christ converts culture from pagan to Christian principles, redirecting and regenerating corrupted human life and works through revealing God's love.
Laweng, Riza August 27, 2014 Paano, Theresa Eleanor Christ the Transformer of Culture
Christs goodness
Conversionist Christianity-Niebuhr defines the conversionist type as basically dualism with a more positive and hopeful attitude toward culture.
Conversionist Christianitys improved perspective on culture arises from its superior understanding of the biblical theology of creation, fall and redemption.
1. Conversionists believe that Gods creative activity is important on its own right. They ground this value of creation in the person of Christ, who not only redeems the world but saves it as well. Niebuhr states that grounding creation in the redeemer is the strongest possible way to say that whatever is is good. Because the same Christ is the Redeemer and the Creator, thus there is inextricable unity between redemption and creation.
2. Conversionists carefully distinguish between Gods good creation and the fall. For them, fall is the great reversal of creation. It is entirely the action of man, and in no way, an action of Gods. It is moral and personal, not physical and metaphysical,though it does have physical consequences. The fall corrupts Gods created world that is now warped, twisted, misdirected. Sins corrupting influence to creation extends to culture. Like creation, culture is now a perverted good though not entirely evil.This fallen culture needs conversion, not rebirth, but so radical that it may seem like new birth.
3. Conversionists believe that redemption is a present possibility. They believe that God is currently transforming the world. The redemption of culture is possible NOW. According to Niebuhr, The conversionist with his view of history as the present encounter with God in Christ, does not live so much in expectation of a final ending of the world of creation and culture as in awareness of the power of the Lord to transform all things by lifting them up to himself.
*Niebuhr describes Christ as mediating symbol of God. Grounding creation with Christ is the best way to express its goodness.
Culture II. Conversion Motif in the Gospel of John
-God is known as the One -The Gospel of John understands creation and redemption to mean the same thing, which is that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternallife(John 3:16) -Like Niebuhr, John does not believe that the worlds perversion is a consequence of historical fall. The fall is not an event connected with the life of the first man in the sequence of historical generation; it is a present falling away from the Word. -Similar to Niebuhr, John defines sin as anthropocentrism. He notes that the world seeks only to do its own will, is intent on glorifying itself; is full of self-love, call attention to itself and loves its life in itself. John warns his readers that CHRIST, not the Christian church as a cultural institution is the hope and true meaning of the world. People alone are responsible for their anthropocentrism, for there are no supernatural agents to tempt them into sin. -Niebuhr is eager to demythologize Johns notion of a devil, asserting that John did not mean that the devil is a real person but rather the world follows a metaphorical devil when it pursues its own will rather than Gods. -Johns description of salvation is Niebuhrian; John possesses a holistic view of redemption, using the term world to refer to the totality of creation and especially of humanity as the object of Gods love. -John defines redemption as radical monotheism, the goal of which is nondefensive worship of the Father. -John expresses radical monotheism in two steps: people should not merely reciprocate love to God but should also love creation and all that is loved by God. This act of love, emphasizes individual motives more than his external actions. God seeks to transform the spirit of the person so that each action, including religious deeds, spring from a genuine trust and loyalty to Him.
III. Augustine and the Conversion of Culture The expectation of universal regeneration through Christ emerges somewhat more clearly in the great Christian leaders of the fourth century. The universalist note does not come to as full an expression as the idea of conversion, since, as in the case of the Fourth Gospel, the conversionists need to contend on two fronts Against the anti-culturalism of exclusive Christianity, And against the accomodationism of culture-Christians.
According to Charles Norris Cochranes interpretation, the regeneration of human society through the replacement of pagan by Trinitarian principles is the theme of that Christian movement which Athanasius and Ambrose began and which Augustine brought to a great climax in his City of God. The interpretation of Augustine as the theologian of cultural transformation by Christ is in accord with his fundamental theory of creation, fall, and regeneration, with his own career as pagan and Christian, and with the kind of influence he has exercised on Christianity. Augustine not only describes, but illustrates in his own person, the work of Christ as converter of culture. Augustine becomes one of the leaders of that great historical movement whereby the society of the Roman Empire is converted from a Caesar-centered community into medieval Christendom. He himself an example of what conversion of culture means; contrast to its rejection by radicals, to its idealization by culturalists, to the synthesis that proceeds largely by means of adding Christ to good civilization, and to the dualism that seeks to live by the gospel in an inconquerably immoral society. For Augustine, Christ is the transformer of culture in the sense that he redirects, reinvigorates, and regenerates that life of man, expressed in all human works, which in present actuality is the perverted and corrupted exercise of a fundamentally good nature; which in its depravity lies under the curse of transiency and death, not because an external punishment has been visited upon it, but because it is intrinsically self-contradictory. To mankind with this perverted nature and corrupted culture Jesus Christ has come to heal and renew what sin has infected with the sickness unto death. By his life and his death he makes plain to man the greatness of Gods love and the depth of human sin; by revelation and instruction he reattaches the soul to God, the source of its being and goodness, and restores to it the right order of love, causing it to love whatever it loves in God and not in the context of selfishness or of idolatrous devotion to the creature. The eschatological hope of a new heaven and a new earth brought into being by the coming of Christ is modified by the belief that Christ cannot come to this heaven and earth but must await the death of the old and rising of a new creation. Though Calvinism has been marked by the influence of the eschatological hope of transformation by Christ and by its consequent pressing toward the realization of the promise, this element in it has always been accompanied by a separatist and repressive note.
IV. The Views of F.D. Maurice The idea of Christs transformation of culture can be, in distinction from the other main motifs of Christian ethics, the tenacity and vitality of the idea of perfection in church history helps to make clear. For Wesley, Christ is the transformer of life; he justifies men by giving them faith; he deals with the sources of human action; he makes no distinctions between the moral and the immoral citizens of human commonwealths, in convicting all of self-love and in opening to all the life of freedom in response to Gods forgiving love. Jonathan Edwards, his profound views of creation, sin, and justification, with his understanding of the way of conversion and his millennial hopes, became in America the founder of a movement of thought about Christ as the regenerator of man in his culture. In the generations represented by Tolstoy, Ritschl, Kierkegaard and Leo XIII, the conversionist idea had many exponents. Among them is F.D. Maurice, the English theologian. Yet Maurices influence is pervasive and permeative. He is above all a Johannine thinker, who begins with the fact that the Christ who comes into the world comes into his own, and that it is Christ himself who exercises his kingship over men, not a vicegerentwhether pope, Scriptures, Christian religion, church, or inner light---separate from the incarnate Word. Maurices understanding of the spiritual constitution of mankind, all the intricate interrelations of love in the Godhead, of the Fathers love of men and of Christs, of the human and divine natures of the Son, of the Creating and Redeeming Word, of mans love of neighbor in God and of God in the neighbor, of family, nation, and church, have their place. But the center is Christ. In him all things were created to live in union with God and each other. Maurice is so deeply aware of the sin of self-love and of the tragedy of human divisiveness, the exploitation of man by man, the self-glorification of notions and churches that he needs to say little in an explicit way about fall and corruption; it is the undercurrent of all his thinking. The full realization of the kingdom of Christ did not, then, mean the substitution of a new universal society for all the separate organizations of men, but rather the participation of all these in the one universal kingdom of which Christ is the head. Maurice mated the idea of eschatological immediacy. For him and as for John eternity meant the dimension of divine working, not the negation of time. The kingdom of God is transformed culture, because it is first of all the conversion of the human spirit from faithlessness and self-service to the knowledge and service of God. This kingdom is real, for if God did not rule nothing would exist; and if He had not heard the prayer for the coming of the kingdom, the world of mankind would long ago have become a den of robbers. Every moment and period is an eschatological present, for in every moment men are dealing with God.
TRANSLATING THE MESSAGE The Missionary Impact on Culture By: Lamin Sanneh
Familiarity Breeds Faith: First and Last Resorts in Vernacular Translation The distinguishing mark of scriptural translation has been the effort to come as close as possible to the speech of the common people. Translators have consequently first devoted much time, effort, and resources to building the basis, with investigations into the culture, history, language, religion, economy, anthropology, and physical environment of the people concerned, before tackling their concrete task. This background work was often indispensable to the task of authentic translation. The field Dimension in Translation Long before anthropology made field work an indispensable part of scientific inquiry, the agents of scriptural translation had blazed trails in that world, making connections that often illuminated hitherto inaccessible worlds of though and life. Sometimes perhaps ofthen the price paid was the committing of gratuitous errors or a blind persistence that elicited completely different responses from what the Bible translator expected. Whatever the case, translator had no way to acquit themselves other than through cannons of the local idioms. In other situations the error is committed before the translator has discovered the cultural gap. One translator in Latin America rendered Rev. 13:15, gave breath to the image, in a way that rendered it as He made the image stink. Quite often the translator will find no analogous expression in the culture. A central category for translation is the concept GOD and it may happen that both the notion and the name are readily accessible. But where this is not the case, the translator is at a serious disadvantages. Valiente Indians of Panama the name for God is great mystery. Alphonse there is no need to dwell on symbolic significance, the trails of the initiated in order to find and claim Ngobo as his God. Ila of Zamba God is called Shikakunamo the besetting one Ila makes crucial points; God eludes firm human grasp The religious will is undeterred by natural obstacles; And ultimately God is One with whom we have always to do.