London About Blog My overriding theological interest at the moment is in how we retell the biblical story as we negotiate the difficult transition from the centre to the margins of our culture following the collapse of
Western Christendom.
It was the Protestant Reformation that undermined once and for all the unity of
Western Christendom.
Such a read of the history of slavery obscures its long, slow death in medieval
Western Christendom and the dramatic revival of the institution in the service of the signature economic achievement of liberal modernity, the capitalist world market.
The practice of numbering years consecutively from the supposed year of Christ's birth didn't take hold in
Western Christendom until the eighth century.
Revelation is not something that can be understood simply by learning to parse the cultural - linguistic system of
Western Christendom.
Western Christendom was an expanding, curious, inventive society - which is perhaps the chief reason historians generally believe that the «terrors of the year 1000» existed largely in the minds of nineteenth - century Romantics like Michelet.
Had the civil monarchs early scored a complete victory, in
Western Christendom the Church would have been divided into many national churches and Christianity would have been fully subordinated to secular interests.
Western Christendom at the turn of the first millennium, however, may have been the first society to give historical meaning to «progress» by undertaking great social enterprises terminating only at a horizon of unguessable distance.
Indeed in
Western Christendom today it has in certain respects become more widespread than in the eras of the Enlightenment, Classicism, and Romanticism.
In theological debates hammered out during the fourth and fifth centuries, Berbers and Teutonics shaped doctrines that became the legacy of
Western Christendom.
The American and Canadian churches entered the period following World War I devoted as they had always sought to be to the service of God and to the continuation of the patterns of
western Christendom. . .
When I saw at first time this pic I thought more about the history of
western christendom, instead of something less broad as within church abuses.
Western Christendom «ceased to exist,» leaving Christians in their various camps «warily keeping an eye on one another and on the rising tide of unbelief and materialism.»
As this year marks the 1,050 th anniversary of the baptism of Mieszko I, Poland's first ruler, an act that firmly aligned the ancient nation with
Western Christendom, his timing is perfect.
Few, if any, other civilizations were so deeply grounded in a feminine mystique as the medieval period of
Western Christendom.
Located on the edge of
Western Christendom and historically bordering Orthodox Russia and Muslim Turkey, Poland often was a defender of Latin Christian civilization.
It goes hand in hand with defending an illusory status quo of
western Christendom culture.
Yet it manifests many of the values and ideals of
western Christendom (partly because this new civilization was fostered by the spread of European culture).
The crisis of Christianism came finally through the division of
Western Christendom by the Reformation and the wars that followed upon that.
As in
Western Christendom, Orthodox Easter is preceded by Holy Week — the liturgical pinnacle of the Orthodox Church.
In Part 3 of the book, she describes this shift in terms of a «gathering center» in which Christians from the four corners (or quadrants) of
Western Christendom — conservatives, renewalists, liturgicals, and social justice Christians — are moving toward the center, grabbing bits and pieces from each tradition and putting them together to make something entirely new.
Nevertheless,
Western Christendom's great spiritual and intellectual founder did teach both church and civilization that the past exists only in the present moment of our remembering it and the future only in the present moment of our anticipating it, and he was utterly and disastrously wrong.
Bonhoeffer analyzes
Western Christendom from this perspective.
And it didn't just split
Western Christendom into «Catholic» and «Protestant», but into «Catholic» and «Protestants» — the latter encompassing many different flavours of evangelical and reformed belief.
They also openly identified conversion to Christianity as an extension, not only of western culture but also of
western Christendom i.e. the pattern of integration of church, community and politics of medieval Europe.
With new vigor in the early nineteenth century, the churches of
Western Christendom, through the overseas missionary movement, began their long and ever more complex recognition that the ministry and church must go to people in special settings or with special problems.
Along with Armenia, Ethiopia was one of the first nations to call itself Christian (
Western Christendom came much later).
Not exact matches
The social, economic, political, and legal ramifications of this rejectionist view of Jews and Judaism were enormous, considering that so much of premodern
Western civilization was indeed
Christendom, where Christians held political power and justified their power in Christian terms.
Whilst in
western Europe Christianity had been expanding, in the east large areas of
Christendom surrendered to Islam.
The idea of living in
Christendom in many
Western countries led to the conviction that it was a matter of nations in which church and society lived in full symbiosis.
Mission as expansion of
Christendom through conversion and church growth was a dominant view during the
Western colonial period.
Sir Winston and other greats of
Western civilization notwithstanding, our good priest from Thebes would have felt most uncomfortable at Trent or in other contemporary centers of
Christendom where dogmas were held in high regard.
Mission as expansion of
Christendom through conversion and church growth, a dominant view during the
Western colonial period, as we said, is still one of the most influential positions as well as understanding especially at the grass - root level of the churches in India.
Usually, as Fowden notes, historians tell a story of Rome evolving into the medieval commonwealth of
Western, Latin
Christendom.
Today, when most people think of «Christians» they do think of a
Western, militarized, power - hungry, egocentric, expansionist
Christendom.
It occurs to me that of the major
Western holidays, Halloween is the only one that originated with
Christendom but got handed over to the pagans.
With the demise of
Christendom or Christian civilization in the
western world, what kind of civilization is left?
Scottish theologian Ronald Gregor Smith said in 1966: «The tide of secularism has swept over the whole of the
western world, the world that was once called
Christendom, and beyond that it has reached into every land... It has flooded over every island and the remotest parts of the world».5 No longer can it be said that Christian beliefs, values and aspirations are shaping our public life.
It is seen, in the third place, in the
Western democracies, where we still pay lip service to the moral and religious principles of
Christendom but have actually lost a great part of this heritage.
The time had passed when spiritual forces and values were determining the character of the
western world; a new era had begun in which the scholar, the artist, the seer and the saint were being replaced by the soldier, the engineer and the politician, resulting in a technical civilization which was no longer
Christendom.
It has been retained more by the Eastern tradition of
Christendom than by the
Western tradition.
Cf. the chapter «
Christendom I» in Eastern Religions and
Western Thought, esp.
Thus, too,
Christendom has known the most terrible guilt in history, and as a religious Christianity has progressively and ever more fully reversed the movement of the Incarnation, the Christian God has increasingly become alien and abstract, until in our own time he has only been present and real in actual experience in a totally alien form, and the whole body of
Western humanity has been initiated into a radical and total state of guilt.
For several centuries «
Christendom» embraced only the
western tip of a peninsula of Eurasia and a few dwindling fragments in W
western tip of a peninsula of Eurasia and a few dwindling fragments in
WesternWestern.
Muslim writing about the West or about Christianity or
Christendom, though in Arabic or Urdu or whatever and produced for Muslim consumption, is being studied and analyzed by
Western scholars, and the results published.
Some non-Pentecostal religious scholars, such as Harvey Cox (Fire from Heaven) and Philip Jenkins (The Next
Christendom), have succumbed to «Pentecostal chic» — a kind of romantic view of Pentecostalism as a much - needed spiritual movement of the poor and oppressed that fills the
Western world's «ecstasy deficit.»
He's referring to the historic divisions of
Christendom: The body of Christ was cleaved in the Great Schism in 1054, and then the
Western half began to suffer severance into thousands of pieces beginning in the sixteenth century.
First, that it has been related to the 18th and 19th century expansion of
western power in the world accompanied by the hope that all the world would soon come under
Christendom.
The easy assumption that the Church was just as it should be was never universally accepted, but central and
western European society, «
Christendom», had come to be based on a majority consensus that it was.
During the following three centuries,
Western Europeans thought of themselves as French, German, Spanish, and English rather than as denizens of
Christendom.