Books on the topic 'John Universalism'

AAaJohn Davenant’s hypothetical universalism has consistently been misinterpreted and misrepresented as a via media between Arminianism and Reformed theology. This study examines Bishop Davenant’s hypothetical universalism in the context of early modern Reformed orthodoxy. In light of the various misunderstandings of early modern hypothetical universalism, including English hypothetical universalism, as well as the paucity of studies touching on the theology of Davenant in particular, this book gives a detailed exposition of Davenant’s doctrine of universal redemption in dialogue with his understanding of closely related doctrines such as God’s will, predestination, providence, and covenant theology and (2) defends the thesis that Davenant’s version of hypothetical universalism represents a significant strand of the Augustinian tradition, including the early modern Reformed tradition. In service of these two aims, this book examines the patristic and medieval periods as they provide the background for the Lutheran, Remonstrant, and Reformed reactions to the so-called Lombardian formula (“Christ died sufficiently for all; effectually for the elect”). Moreover, it traces how Davenant and his fellow British delegates at the Synod of Dordt shaped the Canons of Dordt in such a way as to allow for their English hypothetical universalism. A careful exposition of the various theses found in Davenant’s De Morte Christi makes up the central core of this book. Finally, this study explores Davenant’s covenant theology and doctrine of the divine will.

This work is an investigation into Hebraism as a category of cultural analysis within the history of Christendom. Its aim is to determine what Hebraism means or should mean when it is used to refer to a culture or characteristics of a culture. In tracing those characteristics that arose in the changing relation between a doctrinally orthodox Christianity and the nation of a ‘new Israel’, sovereignty, and their legal anthropology, Hebraism refers to the development of a ‘Jewish Christianity’ or an ‘Old Testament Christianity’. It represents a ‘third culture’ in contrast to the cultures of the Roman or Hellenistic empires and Christian universalism. While the initial formulation of Hebraism as a cultural category was by Matthew Arnold, an earlier approximation is found in the work of John Selden, with considerable refinements by several scholars in the twentieth century. The categories of Hebraism and Hebraic culture provide a means by which to examine differently the history of religion and the history of early modern Europe.

The ancient topic of universals was central to scholastic philosophy, which raised the question of whether universals exist as Platonic forms, as instantiated Aristotelian forms, as concepts abstracted from singular things, or as words that have universal signification. It might be thought that this question lost its importance after the decline of scholasticism in the modern period. However, the fourteen contributions to this volume indicate that the issue of universals retained its vitality in modern philosophy. Modern philosophers in fact were interested in three sets of issues concerning universals: (1) issues concerning the ontological status of universals, (2) issues concerning the psychology of the formation of universal concepts or terms, and (3) issues concerning the value and use of universal concepts or terms in the acquisition of knowledge. Chapters in this volume consider the various forms of “Platonism,” “conceptualism,” and “nominalism” (and distinctive combinations thereof) that emerged from the consideration of such issues in the work of modern philosophers. The volume covers not only the canonical modern figures, namely, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, but also more neglected figures such as Pierre Gassendi, Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Nicolas Malebranche, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and John Norris.

Saving Abstraction takes up the conflicted history of Morton Feldman’s most important collaboration—his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism—that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? And how might abstraction (both visual and musical) be useful to achieving it? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime “abstract experience,” as well as for the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for spiritual intervention into late modernity. Saving Abstraction develops two central concepts: “abstract ecumenism” and “agonistic universalism.” The former characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss. This emerged as a renewed religious sensibility in late modernist experimentalism. The latter concept describes the particular religious form that Feldman’s music achieves within Rothko Chapel—an ascetic mode of existence that endures hopefully the aporia of postwar modernization’s destructiveness and modernism’s failure to effectively counter it.

As a receiver and giver of love, the self is both subject to transformation and open to exogenous creative powers. In dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard, the chapter constructs subjectivity as continuous becoming rather than given facticity; while gifted from God in inchoate form, the self is constructed in time, history, and relationships of love and belonging. The chapter conceptualizes the self as containing a double layer of universality and particularity and discusses the interrelation of these layers. Regarding particularity, it explores the medieval notion of haecceity as developed by John Duns Scotus and explicates its contribution to contemporary understandings of human difference and singularity. Using universality as a baseline, it examines how the particular self is bilocated in time and eternity—or history and a transhistorical reality extending from God’s life—and characterized by necessity and freedom, concluding that it is this kind of subjectivity that grows through love attachments.

This book analyzes the relationship between liberalism and empire from the perspective of political economy. It investigates the formative impact of “colonial capitalism” on the historical development of British liberal thought between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that liberalism as a political language developed through early modern debates over the contested meanings of property, exchange, and labor, which it examines respectively in the context of colonial land appropriations in the Americas, militarized trading in South Asia, and state-led proletarianization in Australasia. The book contends that the British Empire could be extolled as the “empire of liberty”—that is, the avatar of private property, free trade, and free labor—only on the condition that its colonial expropriation, extraction, and exploitation were “disavowed” and dissociated from the increasingly liberal conception of its capitalist economy. It identifies exemplary strategies of disavowal in the works of John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward G. Wakefield, who, as three liberal intellectuals of empire, attempted to navigate the ideological tensions between the liberal self-image of Britain and the violence that shaped its imperial economy. Challenging the prevalent tendency to study liberalism and empire around an abstract politics of universalism and colonial difference, the book discloses the ideological contradictions internal to Britain’s imperial economy and their critical influence on the formation of liberalism. It concludes that the disavowal of the violence constitutive of capitalist relations in the colonies has been crucial for crafting a liberal image for Anglophone imperialism and more generally for global capitalism.

Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.

Cosmopolitanism is said by many critics to be arrogant. In emphasizing universal moral principles and granting no fundamental significance to national or other group belonging, it is held to wrongly treat those making non-universalist claims as not authorized to speak, while at the same time implicitly treating those in non-Western societies as not qualified. This book works to address such objections. It does so in part by engaging the work of B.R. Ambedkar, architect of India’s 1950 Constitution and revered champion of the country’s Dalits (formerly “untouchables”). Ambedkar cited universal principles of equality and rights in confronting domestic exclusions and the “arrogance” of caste. He sought to advance forms of political humility, or the affirmation of equal standing within political institutions and openness to input and challenge within them. This book examines how an “institutional global citizenship” approach to cosmopolitanism could similarly advance political humility, in supporting the development of democratic input, exchange, and challenge mechanisms beyond the state. It employs grounded normative theory methods, taking insights for the model from field research among Dalit activists pressing for domestic reforms through the UN human rights regime, and from their critics in the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Insights also are taken from Turkish protesters challenging a rising domestic authoritarianism, and from UK Independence Party members supporting “Brexit” from the European Union—in part because of possibilities that predominantly Muslim Turkey will join. Overall, it is shown, an appropriately configured institutional cosmopolitanism should orient fundamentally to political humility rather than arrogance, while holding significant potential for advancing global rights protections.