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3 Theological confrontation with Christianity’s success Apostasy and Jewish identity Theological confrontation with Christianity T he success of the Christians in defeating the Muslims in the Holy Land, conquering it and establishing a Christian colony there, particularly in the Holy City of Jerusalem, was a harsh blow to the Jews from a theological viewpoint. The theological difficulty, which emerged during the course of the twelfth century, became a central issue, one which also affected the status of voluntary converts to Christianity. The Jewish sources
Pope Clement XI issued a decree to Chinese Catholics in 1704. This decree forbade them from worshipping their ancestors and Confucius, or even watching such rituals as a spectator, as that could be perceived as a kind of participation. In other words, they were to give up their cultural practices once they had converted to Christianity. Many Chinese converts found this unacceptable, and the Kangxi Emperor reacted strongly against it: Reading this proclamation, I can only say that the Europeans are really small-minded. They neither read nor
grave. Chapter 2 examined the relationship of law, healing and religion in the late medieval and early modern eras, highlighting the role played by the Church in delivering and regulating health care. This chapter explores the influence of Christianity in shaping secular laws relating to moral dilemmas in medicine. The common law has long addressed debates about the nature of human life, beginning and
6 Working towards health, Christianity and democracy: American colonial and missionary nurses in Puerto Rico, 1900–301 Winifred C. Connerton At the turn of the twentieth century American nurses went to Puerto Rico as members of the Army Nurse Corps, as colonial service workers and as Protestant missionaries. Though the nurses went as members of very different organisations they all espoused similar messages about America, Christianity and trained nursing. This chapter explores the overlapping messages of Protestant missionaries and of the United States (US
This book examines the contribution of different Christian traditions to the waves of democratisation that have swept various parts of the world in recent decades, offering an historical overview of Christianity's engagement with the development of democracy, before focusing in detail on the period since the 1970s. Successive chapters deal with: the Roman Catholic conversion to democracy and the contribution of that church to democratisation; the Eastern Orthodox ‘hesitation’ about democracy; the alleged threat to American democracy posed by the politicisation of conservative Protestantism; and the likely impact on democratic development of the global expansion of Pentecostalism. The author draws out several common themes from the analysis of these case studies, the most important of which is the ‘liberal-democracy paradox’. This ensures that there will always be tensions between faiths which proclaim some notion of absolute truth and political order, and which are also rooted in the ideas of compromise, negotiation and bargaining.
The prevailing historiographies of Jewish life in England suggest that religious representations of the Jews in the early modern period were confined to the margins and fringes of society by the desacralization of English life. Such representations are mostly neglected in the scholarly literature for the latter half of the long eighteenth century, and English Methodist texts in particular have received little attention. This article addresses these lacunae by examining the discourse of Adam Clarke (1760/2–1832), an erudite Bible scholar, theologian, preacher and author and a prominent, respected, Methodist scholar. Significantly, the more overt demonological representations were either absent from Clarke‘s discourse, or only appeared on a few occasions, and were vague as to who or what was signified. However, Clarke portrayed biblical Jews as perfidious, cruel, murderous, an accursed seed, of an accursed breed and radically and totally evil. He also commented on contemporary Jews (and Catholics), maintaining that they were foolish, proud, uncharitable, intolerant and blasphemous. He argued that in their eternal, wretched, dispersed condition, the Jews demonstrated the veracity of biblical prophecy, and served an essential purpose as living monuments to the truth of Christianity.
139 4 Assembling and reshaping Christianity in the Lives of St Cuthbert and Lindisfarne Gospels In the previous chapter on the Franks Casket, I started to think about the way in which a thing might act as an assembly, gathering diverse elements into a distinct whole, and argued that organic whalebone plays an ongoing role, across time, in this assemblage. This chapter begins by moving the focus from an animal body (the whale) to a human (saintly) body. While saints, in early medieval Christian thought, might be understood as special and powerful kinds of human