Free The Mysticism Of Paul The Apostle (The Albert Schweitzer Library) Ebooks Online
Immediately after the Gospels, the New Testament takes up the history of the early Christian Church, describing the works of the twelve disciples, and introducing Paul, the man whose influence on the history of Christianity is beyond calculation. Teacher, preacher, conciliator, diplomat, theologian, rule giver, consoler, and martyr, his life and writings became foundations for Christianity. Paul inspired a vast, serious, and intelligent literature that seeks to recapture his meaning, his thinking, and his purpose. In his letters to early Christian communities, Paul gave much practical advice about organization and orthodoxy. These treated the early Christian communities as something more than a group of people who believed in the same faith: they were people bound together by a common spirit unknown before. The significance of that common spirit occupied the greatest of Christian theologians from Athanasius and Augustine through Luther and Calvin.In The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle Albert Schweitzer goes against Luther and the Protestant tradition to look at what Paul actually writes in the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians: an emphasis upon the personal experience of the believer with the divine. Paul's mysticism was not like the mysticism elsewhere described as a soul being at one with God. In the mysticism he felt and encouraged, there is no loss of self but an enriching of it; no erasure of time or place but a comprehension of how time and place fit within the eternal. Schweitzer writes that Paul's mysticism is especially profound, liberating, and precise. Typical of Schweitzer, he introduces readers to his point of view at once, then describes in detail how he came to it, its scholarly antecedents, what its implications are, what objections have been raised, and why all of this matters. To students of the New Testament, this book opens up Paul by presenting him as offering an entirely new kind of mysticism, necessarily and exclusively Christian."There is at least one other point that Albert Schweitzer scores here... The hard-won recognition that divine authority and human freedom ultimately cannot be in conflict must never be taken for granted, and the irony that the thought of Paul has repeatedly been invoked to undo that recognition truly does make this insight one of 'the permanent elements.'"―from the Introduction
Series: The Albert Schweitzer Library
Paperback: 440 pages
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press (November 9, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0801860989
ISBN-13: 978-0801860980
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #312,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #142 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Bible Study & Reference > New Testament > Biography #209 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Bible Study & Reference > New Testament > Paul's Letters #238 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Mysticism
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a Franco-German theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and profound humanitarian. He was also the most noteworthy scholar on the "life of Jesus" of his day, and his 1906 book The Quest of the Historical Jesus is one of the few absolutely "indispensable" works in the field (which both conservatives and progressives agree about). In "Quest," after surveying all of the various "lives of Jesus" that had been written until 1906, Schweitzer gave his own views as well.This 1930 book expanded his earlier book, Paul and His Interpreters. He states in the Author's Preface, "My methods have remained old-fashioned, in that I aim at setting forth the ideas of Paul in their historically conditioned form... Just because Paul's mystical doctrine of Christ has more to say to us when it speaks to us in the fire of its primitive-Christian, eschatological, manner of thought than when it is paraphrased into the language of modern orthodoxy or modern unorthodoxy, I believe I am serving in this work the cause not only of sound learning but also of religious needs."He writes, "The fundamental thought of Pauline mysticism runs thus: I am in Christ; in Him I know myself as a being who is raised above this sensuous, sinful, and transient world and already belongs to the transcendent; in Him I am assured of resurrection; in Him I am a Child of God.
The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (The Albert Schweitzer Library) The Call: The Life and Message of the Apostle Paul Paul Apostle of the Heart Set Free Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle The Apostle: A Life of Paul St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons) Letters from Heaven by the Apostle Paul: Galatians, Ephesians, Phillippians, Colossians, I & II Timothy Empire's End: A Novel of the Apostle Paul The Life of the Apostle Paul Four Views on the Apostle Paul (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology) The Apostle Paul and the Christian Life: Ethical and Missional Implications of the New Perspective Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (Yale Publications in the History of Art) Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (Translations from the Asian Classics) Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur'an, Mi'raj, Poetic and Theological Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality) Rastafarian Mysticism: An Introduction to the Mysteries of Nyahbinghi Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (Gender, Theory, and Religion) Mysticism and the New Physics (Compass) El Reino de Dios Está en Vosotros [The Kingdom of God Is Within You]: El Cristianismo No como una Religión Mística sino como una Nueva Teoría de Vida [Christianity Not as Mysticism but as a New Theory of Life]
