下面是小编为大家整理的宗教对英语国家影响(范文推荐),供大家参考。
宗教对英语国家的影响。
摘要:宗教的影响对于一个民族乃至整个人类的发展史都起到了推动的作用,理解宗教的重要性对于任何一个国家来说都至关重要。宗教的起源与发展像是一个必然存在的事件,是人类社会发展到一定历史阶段出现的一种文化现象,属于社会意识形态。宗教的影响是无孔不入的,涉及到生活的方方面面,宗教信仰和世俗生活交织在一起组成了各个国家独特的民族文化。我们应该充分利用宗教对人的积极影响,规范和约束人们的行为道德,提倡宗教中的真善美,推广合理的社会秩序,共建和谐美满公平正义的人类社会。
框架:
1. 英语国家(英国、美国、加拿大、新西兰、澳大利亚)宗教的起源与发展。
例如:不同英语国家的宗教种类以及信仰人的数量等等。
2. 世界三大宗教:基督教、伊斯兰教、佛教,以及三大宗教的异同点。
3. 宗教对英语国家文化的影响 (1)
节日:例如复活节(Easter)。
(2)
圣职:牧师、修道士等等。
(3)
文学:《圣经》中的妙语常为小说家、诗人效仿,对日常用语和俗语的影响也很多,有很多原宗教中的含义被用于英语中会发生一定的变化,但被人们所熟知。
4. 宗教对于英语国家生活的影响 (1)
不同宗教背景的人们有着不同的消费观。
(2)
宗教在医疗中的作用。
(3)
道德与宗教的关系。
5. 宗教对英语国家思想的影响。
Three different influxes form the background to Christianity in South Asia: St. Thomas Christianity, in Kerala, which has Syriac liturgy and Nestorian doctrine; Catholic Christianity, which was brought by the advancement of Portuguese imperial authority in Goa; and Protestant Christianity, which was brought by missionaries from Britain and other Western nations under the influence of colonial government. Christianity in South Asia has been shaped not only by the interaction with Christians from the West, but also by local Christians" efforts to make Christian practice and beliefs more South Asian. Although there have been tensions with other religious communities over various issues, such as conversion, Christianity in South Asia has made significant contributions to the cultures and societies in that region.
This article considers Christianity in the first 300 hundred years of its existence, before it achieved a close alliance with the Roman state. It pays particular attention to the social forms of early Christianity and their relation to wider society. It considers the development of primitive Christianity (a) from a Jewish sect centered round the figure of Jesus of Nazareth to (b) the emergence of a Pauline church based on a pneumatic corporate Christology to (c) the growth of sacramental catholic Christianity. The article ends by noting the gradual alliance of church and state during the fourth century. This article considers Christianity in the first 300 years of its existence, before it achieved a close alliance with the Roman state. It pays particular attention to the social forms of early Christianity and their relation to wider society.
1. The Jesus Movement The movement that centered around Jesus of Nazareth in his own lifetime seems an unlikely candidate for the eventual transformation of Western society. It appears to have been one of many such movements in early first century Palestine led by a charismatic Jewish teacher appealing to a poor and mainly rural audience (Theissen 1978). Jesus"s message, which is only comprehensible within a framework of contemporary Jewish beliefs and expectations, centered round the proclamation of the imminent reign of God. From this expectation arose the urgent and sovereign demands to repent and believe in the gospel. All other concerns were secondary—including on occasion those of Jewish law and custom. Yet this message was presented as ‘good news’: what Jesus offered his followers was the most intimate relationship with a God not of wrath and judgment but of love and mercy—a ‘father’ who cares with loving tenderness for each one of his children. This God places no barriers on relationship with him—all are welcomed into his kingdom irrespective of their moral, social, or religious status. 2. The Pauline Revolution Whilst Jesus" mission was primarily to the Jews, the unrestricted address of his message gave it a universalist momentum which would make possible the later spread of Christianity beyond Israel. As a universal religion, Christianity provided an alternative to the national or civic religions, both Roman and Jewish, of the time. It appears to have been the apostle Paul, whose letters are preserved in the New Testament, who played the decisive role in drawing out these universalist implications and giving theological justification to a ‘mission to the gentiles.’ A Jew as well as a Roman citizen, Paul was converted by a vision of the risen Jesus. The faith whose spokesman he subsequently became was centered on this risen, cosmic Christ rather than on the historical Jesus of Nazareth. There were important sociological implications in this shift. As Troeltsch (1931) noted, Jesus"s original message was ‘individualistic’ in the sense that it was focused on intimate relation between the individual and God. Whilst its universalist and egalitarian message fostered a broad sense of community between all those called to love God and neighbor, it neither fostered new communities nor made any attempt to influence wider society. It remained a reforming faction within Judaism (Sanders 1985, Elliott 1995). Paul"s reinterpretation of Christianity altered these dynamics of the early Jesus movement very significantly. As Schweitzer (1931) argued, Paul developed a ‘Christ-mysticism’ in which the believer is incorporated through faith into the ‘body of Christ.’ Though thismysticism also has an individualist emphasis, incorporation into the body of Christ is corporate—those who have faith are united not only with Christ but with one another. This corporate Christ-mysticism undergirded the development from the mid-first century of achurch (ekklesia), which took the form of local communities linked together in a ‘catholic’ (universal) alliance by their common possession of the Spirit of Christ. 3. The Emergence of Catholic Christianity Until at least the second century these early Christian communities were charismatic communities (communities of the Spirit), in which social authority was not institutionalized, but conferred by the Spirit. There seems to have been no clear hierarchy of authority, with different functions (such as apostle, teacher, prophet, and miracle-worker) being regarded as mutually constitutive of the body of Christ. In a development that Troeltsch (1931) categorizes as the emergence of ‘catholic’ and ‘sacramental’ Christianity, however, the spirit gradually became institutionalized in the sacraments, particularly those of baptism and the eucharist. Here the presence of Spirit is, as it were, guaranteed. The sacraments are material signs of the freely given grace of God and the efficacious tokens of salvation. The development of a sacramental Christianity allowed for the development of stable and enduring
communities not based on the unpredictable outpourings of the spirit. It went hand in hand with the emergence of a clergy whose authority was bound up with their exclusive authorisation to handle and distribute the sacraments. Their status was not based on personal charisma, superior religious achievement, or inheritance. Rather, they were the authorised representatives of the wider Christian community. Early documents defending a sacramental priesthood reveal that this development was not uncontroversial. On the one hand it made possible catholicity and order. On the other it led to exclusions, most notably the exclusion of women from positions of authority in the church. The development of catholic Christianity also involved the definition and maintenance of uniformity in belief and liturgical practice. This achievement was also a difficult and remarkable one given that ‘early Christianity’ was never as unified as that title implies. Despite the idealized backward glance of a later era (such as that of the fourth-century church historian, Eusebius), Christianity came into being as a diverse set of largely autonomous communities spread around the Mediterranean basin and in Syria and Asia Minor. Many were centered around a particular apostle and a particular gospel (whether in oral or written form), and developed distinctive forms of belief and practice. If we compare the four gospels contained in the New Testament (probably the products of such communities), we get some idea of the range of beliefs they held and of their very different understandings of Jesus. In the face of this diversity, the establishment of an authorised scriptural, creedal, and rhetorical tradition was as important as that of a universal sacramental priesthood (Cameron1991). By the second century we find early representatives of catholic Christianity listing the documents which should be treated by Christians as authoritative, and which would eventually come to form the New Testament. These were then bound up with the firstauthoritative Christian scripture, the Jewish Bible or ‘Old Testament’. The formation of this scriptural ‘canon’ went hand in hand with the development of a ‘canon of faith.’ Both were later debated and defined by the councils and creeds which would become such a distinctive feature of Christianity. Together authorized scripture and doctrine came to define the boundaries of ‘orthodoxy.’ Again, this process involved exclusions, including that of a large number of gospels, lives, and acts of Jesus, the apostles and saints which are now classified as ‘apocryphal,’ together with a large body of philosophical–theological literature influenced by Christian, Jewish, Platonic, and Persian sources, which is often classified together as ‘gnostic.’ Against the spiritualizing tendencies of the gnostics (a tendency which took further the Pauline spiritualization of Christ), the emerging catholic church developed an emphasis which may be characterised as ‘materialist.’ The authority of the clergy, e.g., was said to rest on an ‘apostolic succession’ which consisted of a historical and physical continuity established through the ‘laying on of hands’ by Christ and the apostles down to the present generation. Likewise, the church was the visible community of men and women gathered together to receive these sacraments rather than an invisible body of the elect, and the authorized mea...
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