The Social Gospel of Jesus by Bruce J. Malina

Author:Bruce J. Malina [Malina, Bruce J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Biblical Criticism & Interpretation, New Testament, Christian Theology, General, Theology, Social Science, Sociology of Religion
ISBN: 9780800632472
Google: 9kA031YGBDoC
Goodreads: 310143
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2000-11-07T23:00:00+00:00

Essentially, I have been arguing that the very possibility of imagining that nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men's minds. The first of these was the idea that a particular scriptlanguage offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth. It was this idea that called into being the great transcontinental sodalities of Christendom, the Ummah Islam, and the Mandarin test. Second was the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centersmonarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation. Human loyalties were necessarily hierarchical and centripetal because the ruler, like the sacred script, was a mode of access to being and inherent in it. Third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical. Combined, these ideas rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence (above all death, loss, and servitude) and offering, in various ways, redemption from them. The slow, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties first in Western Europe, later elsewhere, under the impact of economic change, "discoveries" (social and scientific), and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drive a harsh wedge between cosmology and history. No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways. (Anderson 1991: 36)

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