Flight from persecution and the honour of God in the theology of Peter Martyr Vermigli

Abstract

This article explores the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli dealing with the matter of flight from persecution in which he had a personal interest and involvement. After review of the literature and comparison with other Reformation theologians, Vermigli’s thought is examined in detail. This examination clarifies Vermigli’s reasoning, but also evaluates it in relation to his person to help understand the practical import of his thought.     

‘More than a swineherd’

Abstract

This article suggests that alongside the strongly biblical defence of the royal supremacy, which was common in Elizabethan England, there can be found a distinctive line of argument; it stresses the roots of the magistrate’s ‘cura religionis’ in natural and human law, rather than simply divine law. This argument is often identified with Richard Hooker, who is taken to be innovative at this point. This study argues, however, that many of the same philosophical and theological points can be found in Peter Martyr Vermigli, who may have influenced Hooker. Elements of Vermigli’s Aristotelian political theory are traceable on a reading of his Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and the application of these concepts in his biblical commentaries is noticeable.     

The Architectural Expression of Primitive Christianity: William Beveridge and the Temple of Solomon

Abstract

On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a resurgent religious identity in church and state was informed by identifying the English nation with the biblical Israel, and the worship and buildings of the Church of England with those of the Temple in Jerusalem. The dedication of the Church of St Peter, Cornhill (rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666 and designed by Christopher Wren) in 1681 by the Revd William Beveridge was an expression of the Church of England's confidence in its identity with the ‘primitive Church,’ and as the Church of a chosen and favoured people.     

Peter Pan and the flight from reality: A tale of narcissism,nostalgia and narrative trespass

Abstract

It is argued that J. M. Barrie's ‘Neverland’ represents a latency phantasy of flight to a world apart from that of adults, in which there is scope for both a denial of, and a tentative exploration of, the coming realities of adolescence. Celebrated for his ability to stay a boy forever, Peter Pan can be understood as a character who embodies the narcissistic need of some individuals to retreat from the realities of the adult world. Reactions to Peter Pan have been curiously divided, and it is suggested that this split can be understood in terms of Barrie's highly ambivalent attitude towards childhood – in which sentimental nostalgia quickly turns to bitterness and a sense of exclusion from the maternal object.     

The World Council of Churches and churches in China: partnerships and diaconia

ABSTRACT

Between 1956 and 1991, Chinese church leaders, and Protestant churches active from the formation of the World Council of Churches, experienced a dramatic break in their relations with the international ecumenical movement. This paper will focus on the ecumenical relations between the WCC and the churches in China after 1978, when reforms and the opening up of the country under Deng Xiaoping provided new opportunities for the renewal of ties. The China Christian Council resumed its official ties with WCC in 1991 but between 1978 and 1991, new expressions and new modes of ecumenical relations had already emerged. Central to these ties were the upholding of the Three-Self Principles and the practice of the ‘ecumenical sharing of resources’ influenced by the outcome of the WCC’s El Escorial meeting (1987). These ‘post-colonial’ partnerships contributed substantially to making Christianity better appreciated in China and were important channels for the practice of ecumenism in a rapidly transforming China.     

Peter Martyr Vermigli's Preces sacrae (1564) and the Problem of Prayers as Historical Sources

This article combines a study of Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Sacred Prayers with a methodological concern for the particular challenges involved in coming to grips with prayers as historical sources. It demonstrates that in the reception history of Vermigli’s prayers there has been a recurring tendency to read them as something other than prayers, a commentary on the Psalms for instance. By contrast, this article attends to the specificity of their genre and form as prayers. This approach leads, first, to a fresh appreciation of the Preces sacrae as a rare and revealing source of their kind, since not many prayers offered before lectures in sixteenth-century Protestant universities have survived; secondly, to the discovery of important, as yet unknown connections between Vermigli’s Preces sacrae and Wolfgang Capito’s Precationes; and thirdly to an understanding of the spiritual depth of the Preces sacrae going beyond their propositional theological content.     

Experiences in K and K

In this paper the author explores and expands Bion's concepts of K and -K and delineates the nature of the relationship between the two. While Bion views envy as a principal motivating force for –K, his conception of –K goes considerably beyond this. The author explores manifestations of –K not driven by envy and, consequently, not necessarily pathological or pathogenic. –K is viewed by the author as a psychological process, which may serve many functions, including the communication of the patient's fear that knowing will bring on psychological catastrophe. –K, under circumstances that he describes, may serve to protect the individual's sense of continuity of being. The need to know the truth (K) may be at odds with the need to survive psychically, for example, when a person fears that the truth will kill him, or those he loves and depends upon. This idea is explored in two ways: first, by means of a discussion of the Oedipus myth in which Oedipus attempts to evade knowing for fear of recognizing that a prophesied catastrophe has already occurred; and, second, by means of a clinical exploration of the confiict between the need to know and the need to survive. The author discusses his analytic work with a severely disturbed patient for whom not knowing was felt to be essential to her psychic survival. Her need not to know reached a point where she psychically obliterated the analyst through the use of negative hallucination.     

Bentham on animal welfare

Jeremy Bentham is often thought to have set the groundwork for the modern ‘animal liberation’ movement, but in fact he wrote little on the subject. A full examination of his work reveals a less radical position than that commonly attributed to him. Bentham was the first Western philosopher to grant animals equal consideration from within a comprehensive, non-religious moral theory, and he was a staunch defender of animal welfare laws. But he also approved of killing and using animals, as long as pointless cruelty could be avoided. The nuances of his position are best brought out by comparing it to that of Peter Singer, who draws considerably more radical practical conclusions. This is not primarily explained by competing formulations of utilitarianism, however, but by different empirical background assumptions about the lives of animals.     

The League

About painting, cybernetics, and shared purpose, this article is partly a story, in part a memoir, an adventure in cybernetics, happening 30 years ago, in snow, in the small Swiss city of St. Gallen. A conference of the American Society for Cybernetics meets there. It is 1987. The author, a painter, searching for a new understanding of painting, encounters a convergence of the art of painting and the art of cybernetics through principles of second-order cybernetics in Pask, von Foerster and Maturana, dissolved in Kathleen Forsythe’s poetry. The form, as well as the content of this article, reflects cybernetics.