The Alluring Brightness of His Glory
The Alluring Brightness of His Glory

Author: R. L. Coursey

Publisher: WestBow Press

Published: 2016-12-29

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 1512765465

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The real problem of the hour is not that we view our problems as insurmountable, nor that we fail to view our God as insuperable in the midst of all these problems, but primarily that we fail to count our God as inestimable, even above our need to solve all of these problems. It is the failure to perceive the supreme glory of Christ that moves the church to promote counterfeit offers that compete with His glory, and moves men to receive a counterfeit Christ, whose highest value consists not of His own excellency, but of His willingness to bestow upon us that which our earthly, carnal and temporal nature counts most excellent. This magnetic pull of the world upon our affections will only cease by a God-ward attraction. It is in the face of Jesus Christ that the brightness of the glory of God shines forth. He alone is the brightness of His glory. And unless we exalt Him to preeminence, we know nothing of that glory.

Discipleship
Discipleship

Author: R L Coursey

Publisher: WestBow Press

Published: 2018-03-05

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1973620081

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As Satan tempted Christ, so he tempts us today. Pointing to the glory of the kingdoms of the world, he says, “All these things I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” Although always with an air of piety, the consumer-driven church is lured into following the counsel of Satan while rejecting the example of Christ. He who is a deity emptied himself of his privileges and became a man. And not just any man but the lowest of men—a servant. He died not just any death but the cruelest of deaths—on a cross, as a condemned criminal. Such a vision of Christ’s humiliation should consume all of our self-interest and pour contempt on all our pride. But the vision of the exalted Christ should all the more compel us to renounce our own self-importance and self-seeking. The enslaving power of self-love does not only attach itself to the church, transforming its spiritual life into empty forms, turning its so-called good works into monuments of self-glory and changing its sacred mission into a search for the significance and fulfillment of self. It also enslaves the individual Christian by exalting the self to preeminence. Thus, it defeats real happiness by producing pride, discontent, envy, bitterness, unforgiveness, ambition, anxiety, and a whole host of other destructive qualities that exist for no other reason than to defend and maintain the self that we have erroneously, and to our own injury, exalted to preeminence. Self-love will never be made subordinate until we get a glimpse, by divine grave, of something far lovelier. Other idols may be replaced by even more enticing ones, but the idol of the self can only be laid aside by the all-entrancing vision of the loveliness of Christ.

Religious Imaginaries
Religious Imaginaries

Author: Karen Dieleman

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0821444344

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Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics. This new study rethinks several assumptions in the field: that Victorian women’s faith commitments tended to limit creativity; that the contours of church experiences matter little for understanding religious poetry; and that gender is more significant than liturgy in shaping women’s religious poetry. Exploring the import of bodily experience for spiritual, emotional, and cognitive forms of knowing, Karen Dieleman explains and clarifies the deep orientations of different strands of nineteenth-century Christianity, such as Congregationalism’s high regard for verbal proclamation, Anglicanism’s and Anglo-Catholicism’s valuation of manifestation, and revivalist Roman Catholicism’s recuperation of an affective aesthetic. Looking specifically at Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter as astute participants in their chosen strands of Christianity, Dieleman reveals the subtle textures of these women’s religious poetry: the different voices, genres, and aesthetics they create in response to their worship experiences. Part recuperation, part reinterpretation, Dieleman’s readings highlight each poet’s innovative religious poetics. Dieleman devotes two chapters to each of the three poets: the first chapter in each pair delineates the poet’s denominational practices and commitments; the second reads the corresponding poetry. Religious Imaginaries has appeal for scholars of Victorian literary criticism and scholars of Victorian religion, supporting its theoretical paradigm by digging deeply into primary sources associated with the actual churches in which the poets worshipped, detailing not only the liturgical practices but also the architectural environments that influenced the worshipper’s formation. By going far beyond descriptions of various doctrinal positions, this research significantly deepens our critical understanding of Victorian Christianity and the culture it influenced.