Sentences with phrase «first mystery religion»

In fact, christianity was the first mystery religion to try to pinpoint a time when their mystical mumbo jumbo occured.

Not exact matches

At first the ritual was doubtless figurative, a ceremonial cleansing in water, which was regarded as symbolizing, rather than effecting, the purification of the inner life, and the origin of which lay in the baptism of John and kindred customs rather than in the sacraments of the mystery religions.

Before the flourishing of Bultmann's career, New Testament scholarship had been dominated by literary criticism, which attempted to uncover the secret of how the texts were compiled; by investigation of the Hellenistic background, especially the mystery religions surrounding the early church, as part of a sociological critique of the history of religion; and by excitement about the apocalyptic content of the teaching of Jesus as a first century Jew.

Here we were inducted into the mysteries of our national religion, reasonable, surprisingly masculine for a faith that might at first glance seem soppy and weak, confident, and perhaps above all things unself - consciously beautiful.

Hence, if we situate the call of Abraham, as well as other special revelatory moments of the history of religion, within the wider context of cosmic evolution, this may help soften the «scandal of particularity» associated with any unique or distinctive summoning by God of a particular people to bear witness in a novel way to the divine promise and mystery that come to expression first in the very creation of the world.