Ruin and restoration : on violence, liturgy, and reconciliation / by David Martin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Martin, David, 1929-2019, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Atonement.

Religion and sociology.

Physical Description:

xiii, 136 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2016.

Summary:

To suppose that God has a providential plan based on a special covenant with Israel and realised in the atonement presents us with a moral problem. In Ruin and Restoration David Martin sketches a radical naturalistic account of the atonement based on the innocent paying for the sins of the guilty through ordinary social processes. An exercise in socio-theology, the book reflects on the contrast between 'the world' governed by the dynamic of violence as analysed by the social sciences, including international relations, and the emergence in Christianity (and Buddhism) of a non-violent alternative. A 'governing essay' fuses frameworks drawn from Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Jaspers, Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber and explores the relation between the cultural sciences, especially sociology, and theology treated as another but very distinctive cultural science. Six commentaries then deal with the atonement in detail; with the nature of Christian language and grammar, and with its characteristic mutations due to necessary compromises with 'the world'; with sex and violence; and with the liturgy as a concentrated mode of reconciliation. Book jacket.

Contents:

Governing Essay: Sociology and Theology: With and Against the Grain of 'the World' 5

First Commentary: On Sin and Primal Violence; on the Language of Atonement and the Restoration of Fellowship in the Resurrection; on Time as the Generator of Meaning, Action and Motive; on Divinity Revealed in the Human Face 27

Second Commentary: Speaking Christian, its Vocabulary and Grammar 41

Third Commentary: On Universal Love over against the Particular Family and Ethnic Group; and on Sex and Violence 57

Fourth Commentary: On Peace and Violence 71

Fifth Commentary: On the Return of the Liturgical in Modernist Music and Poetry and the Reconciliation Achieved by Liturgical Poetry and Music 81

Sixth Commentary: On Peaceable Wisdom as Mediating between Radical Eschatology and Brute Reality 99.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781472480651

9781472480644

1472480643

1472480651

OCLC:

923017587

Publisher Number:

99968910071