Without Metaphor, No Saving God
Without Metaphor, No Saving God

Author: Robert Masson

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789042930193

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Studies of conceptual and neural mapping in cognitive linguistics, while posing a fundamental challenge for religious belief, also suggest new ways of understanding how people conceptualize God and make theological inferences. This book, inspired by that research and attentive to the distinctive insights of Christian theology, elaborates an innovative explanation of God-talk, better able to credibly address confusion and controversies that trouble the church, academic theology, and broader culture. The first part analyzes both cognitive linguistics' challenge to standard theological depictions of metaphorical, analogous, symbolic, and literal language, and the discipline's promise for providing a more satisfactory account. The second half examines six case studies to illustrate how clarifying the conceptual mapping in God-talk and theological inferences provides a powerful tool for advancing religious understanding. The illustrations include the hypothesis that religion is an epiphenomenon of evolution, the so-called "new atheism," Black theology, and controversies between theologians and Church authorities. This book has won the 2014 CTS Book Award.

Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence
Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

Author: Stephen R. Shaver

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0197580807

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"One of the most challenging questions for Christian ecumenical theology is how the relationship between the eucharistic bread and wine and Jesus Christ's body and blood can be appropriately described. This book takes a new approach to controverted questions of eucharistic presence by drawing on cognitive linguistics. Arguing that human cognition is grounded in sensorimotor experience and that phenomena such as metaphor and conceptual blending are basic building blocks of thought, the book proposes that inherited models of eucharistic presence are not necessarily mutually exclusive but can serve as complementary members of a shared ecumenical repertoire. The central element of this repertoire is the motif of identity, grounded in the Synoptic and Pauline institution narratives. The book argues that the statement "The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ" can be understood both as figurative and as true in the proper sense, thus resolving a church-dividing dichotomy. The identity motif is complemented by four major non-scriptural motifs: representation, change, containment, and conduit. Each motif with its entailments is explored in depth and suggestions for ecumenical reconciliation in both doctrine and practices are offered. The book also provides an introduction to cognitive linguistics and offers suggestions for further reading in that field"--

The Analogy of Signs
The Analogy of Signs

Author: Rory Misiewicz

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-02-12

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1978710038

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The longstanding debate over how God-talk is intelligible gravitates around how we should understand the putative answer, “by analogy.” For some contemporary Christian theologians, analogy involves an ontological claim about creaturely and divine being (i.e., an analogy of being). For others, it involves a semantic or syntactical structure that legitimates the linguistic performances associated with analogy (i.e., a grammatical analogy). Still others appeal to faith in God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ (i.e., an analogy of faith). Rory Misiewicz argues that all of these approaches fall flat in their explanatory efforts. He draws upon the work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce to rethink the relation between God and human beings. He argues that Christian theologians may view that relation as being established by an “analogy of signs”: both God and human beings are univocally involved in semiosis, or sign-process, and the confirmation of God’s semiotic identity is found in the revelation of God in the person of Jesus, the incarnate Son of God. Therefore, ordinary analogical language is intelligible, for divine signs are commensurate with human signs.

Theology in the Flesh
Theology in the Flesh

Author: John Sanders

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1506408435

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Metaphors and other mental tools are used to reason (not just speak) about God, salvation, truth, and morality. Figurative language structures our theological and moral reasoning in powerful ways. This book uses an approach known as cognitive linguistics to explore the incredibly rich ways our conceptual tools, derived from embodied life and culture, shape the way we understand Christian teachings and practices. The cognitive revolution has generated amazing insights into how human minds make sense of the world. This book applies these insights to the ways Christians think about topics such as God, justice, sin, and salvation. It shows that Christians often share a set of very general ideas but disagree on what the Bible means or the moral stances we should take. It explains why Christians often develop a number of appropriate but sometimes incompatible ways to understand the Bible and various doctrines. It assists Christians in understanding those with whom they disagree. Hopefully, simply better understanding how and why people think the way they do will foster better dialogue and greater humility.

Conceptual Blending in Early Christian Discourse
Conceptual Blending in Early Christian Discourse

Author: Aleksander Gomola

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 311058204X

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Cognitive linguists and biblical and patristic scholars have recently given more attention to the presence of conceptual blends in early Christian texts, yet there has been so far no comprehensive study of the general role of conceptual blending as a generator of novel meanings in early Christianity as a religious system with its own identity. This monograph points in that direction and is a cognitive linguistic exploration of pastoral metaphors in a wide range of patristic texts, presenting them as variants of THE CHURCH IS A FLOCK network. Such metaphors or blends, rooted in the Bible, were used by Patristic writers to conceptualize a great number of particular notions that were constitutive for the early church, including the responsibilities of the clergy and the laity, morality and penance, church unity, baptism and soteriology. This study shows how these blends became indispensable building blocks of a new religious system and explains the role of conceptual blending in this process. The book is addressed to biblical and patristic scholars interested in a new, unifying perspective for various strands of early Christian thought and to cognitive linguists interested in the role of conceptual integration in religious language. Produced with the support of the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

Who Will Be Saved?
Who Will Be Saved?

Author: William H. Willimon

Publisher: Abingdon Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0687651190

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What does it mean to say that salvation is God's business, and God's alone? "Who will be saved?" is almost always a question about them, and rarely about us. Thinking itself wrapped securely in the everlasting arms, the church has spent much of its history speculating on whether God will allow anyone else to join the party. But if we truly believe that salvation is God's business, and God's alone, then perhaps we should stop asking, "Who will be saved?" and ask instead, "How is God calling me to participate in the redemption of the world?" Rejecting the idea that God chooses some and not others, drawing on his Wesleyan heritage, and deepening his longstanding theological conversation with Karl Barth, Willimon reflects as a pastor and a theologian on God's intention that all would someday return from the far country into the loving embrace of the One who created them.

God Is Not Great
God Is Not Great

Author: Christopher Hitchens

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2008-11-19

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1551991764

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Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer
T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer

Author:

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 752

ISBN-13: 0567664376

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The essays collected in this volume provide a resource for thinking theologically about the practice of Christian prayer. In the first of four parts, the volume begins by reaching back to the biblical foundations of prayer. Then, each of the chapters in the second part investigates a classical Christian doctrine – including God, creation, Christology, pneumatology, providence and eschatology – from the perspective of prayer. The chapters in the third part explore the writings of some of the great theorizers of prayer in the history of the Christian tradition. The final part gathers a set of creative and critical conversations on prayer responding to a variety of contemporary issues. Overall, the T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer articulates a theologically expansive account of prayer – one that is deeply biblical, energetically doctrinal, historically rooted, and relevant to a whole host of critical questions and concerns facing the world today.

Imagining the Jewish God
Imagining the Jewish God

Author: Leonard Kaplan

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-09-09

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 1498517501

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Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book—a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the “text” as foundational for the imagined “people of the book.” That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.

Transformed into the Same Image
Transformed into the Same Image

Author: Paul Copan

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1514009854

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Though the doctrine of theosis has been gaining interest among scholars for some time, most have focused on Roman Catholic or Orthodox traditions. In this constructive account of deification, biblical scholars and theologians focus on the work of major Protestant thinkers and Protestant expressions of the doctrine.