The opium wars in China during the 1840s were followed by a surge of Christianization in the late Qing dynasty. What a kind of role played by missionaries in the modernization of the Qing China has been a long-lasting issue since the early 20th century. Due to political reasons, the contribution of the Christian mission was either underestimated in view of Cultural Invasion paradigm or overemphasized in view of Modernization paradigm. The thesis employs a less-distorted model, Liberal Theology, to analyze the influences of liberal missionaries, exemplified by Timothy Richard, on the social reform in the modernization movement of the late Qing. It describes the relevance of missionary activities to the development of Chinese history in view of the biographical records of Christian missions. The entry point of this presence is traced in the text through Richard’s activities to contribute to famine relief, literary work, reform advocacy, higher education, cross-cultural exchange, a product of the development of his ideas and strategies gained from the promotion of European models of modernization. Particularly, the thesis brings to light Richard’s symbiotic conception between religion and secularism (i.e., science, technology, education, and political reform). The main contribution of the study hinges on a couple of aspects: (1) Building a thorough portrait of Richard and of his life-long vocation by means of a number of primary and secondary sources in both English and Chinese; and (2) Interpreting the liminal role Richard played in his missionary work to answer the question: are missionaries a proxy of imperialism, or a paragon of modernization, or something in between? After pointing out the limitations of the two old paradigms, the thesis exposes that, armed with the hybrid Liberal Theology model, we can better understand the nature of the mission work done by liberal missionaries, such as Richard. Thus, though their activities happened in an era marked with colonial imperialism, the Christian mission should not be regarded as simply an imperialistic invasion in the cultural field; what is more, though missionaries introduced western civilization to Chinese people in various proselytizing approaches, they could not be considered as one of the prime movers for China’s modernization in the late Qing Dynasty, because the contributions they made subordinately promoted China’s modernization through a series of religious and cultural contacts with Chinese elites via, e.g., meetings, media, literary work, higher education.

The aim of this thesis is to scrutinize how Sveriges Religiösa Reformförbund (Swedish Association of Religious Reform), a pro-Nazi Christian association in interwar Sweden, constructed the concept of race during the years 1929–1940. Using hermeneutic content analysis and a theoretical approach based on “biopolitics” and “political theology,” I examine the construction during three identified periods: 1929–1933, 1934–1937, 1938–1940. Liberal theological in orientation, the association applied a historical-critical exegesis based on late-nineteenth century German Kulturprotestantismus, seeing culture and religion as inseparable components. Also stressing the need for a “religious rebirth” of the Swedish nation, the association pursued a regenerative return to the religious-ethical characteristics of the country’s alleged heroic Germanic past. First using cultural and biological arguments separately in the construction of race, the association would due to its emerging pro-Nazi orientation become influenced by Nazi German theologians, hence incorporating elements of völkisch ideology.

This essay deals with the life and work of the Czech Protestant clergyman Jan Karafiát(1846-1929) and specifically with his editorial and theological activities. Between the years (1896-1905) he published his own theological magazine Reformované listy, where he criticized the ideas of liberal theology that influenced the Czech Protestants around the turn of 19th and 20th Centuries. Here he confronted T.G.Masaryk's ideas.Interesting is his original response to Masaryk's philosophy of Czech history

The aim of this thesis is to examine how Christianity and fascism can be concatenated. The thesis has been conducted as a descriptive content analysis of the Swedish Association of Religious Reform (Sveriges Religiösa Reformförbund), established in 1929. In order to identify the Association’s socio-theological project and agenda, a Foucauldian inspired social constructionism theory has been applied. This thesis argues that by relying on a mission to ‘complete’ the Lutheran Reformation, which considered religion and culture alike, the Association’s struggle for a religious ‘rebirth’ also referred to the rebirth of Swedish culture and society. This assumption was correlated with contemporary conceptions of ‘race’ and Jews, culminating into the perception of Jesus as a masculine Aryan ideal.

This thesis examines the view on society in an early 20th century Swedish periodical journal of liberal theology, Kristendomen och vår tid (Christianity and our time). During the late 19th century, a new school of liberal theology gained influence among various protestant theological faculties in Germany. In emphasising the ethical teachings of the historical Jesus of Nazareth as the basis for Christianity and a worldly kingdom of God, liberal theologians advocated social and political reform, becoming influential in German society at the turn of the century. As this liberal theology was adapted in Sweden, a group of priests and theologians founded the journal KVT as a medium for spreading liberal theology to their peers, but also, this thesis suggests, to advocate a particular view on society and role for the church and the priesthood in a way similar to the development in Germany. The analysis of the view on society in KVT suggests a shift over time regarding the expressed purpose and role of church in society, which can be understood within the context of contemporary development of political life in Sweden. In the early 1900s, an ideal of a church highly active in social welfare practices in society is apparent in the journal, whereas in the 1920s the role and main purpose of the church is understood rather as a sort of societal moral consciousness.

The medium is the message in the first place: the medium as presence, as the author. His contribution to the academic world is his academic Holographic Memoirs. His story, the author's memoirs, is a fictive-narrative discourse with an organic ubuntu open-endedness. The Hologram is both an autobiography, but also all the information at all places simultaneously – nonlocal in quantum physical terms - within an intense hallucinating dream: no illusion, but rather a HyperReality with all its Virtual Identities. The invention of tram hopping is the plot of the story. The plot is like an hourglass where the first part of the story is the emptying of the sand, the deconstruction of modernism, but while the top chamber runs empty and the bottom chamber fills up, so the deconstruction is simultaneously a dependent arising/(social) construction/ubuntuing to revival – the synagogal Shekinah presence of YAHWEH. The top chamber is the unreasonable Newtonian physics and the bottom chamber reasonable quantum physics. The metaphysics (before the physics) of the top chamber is poststructuralism and deconstruction, while the bottom chamber is the virtual Hebraic worldview that delutively merges ubuntu and Buddhism. The long narrow neck in the middle is the moonily narrative that lives us with psychology (Psycho-logic) lost in sociology (Social-physics). Hermeneutics is set forth in the same contrasting hourglass of the top chamber, the inherited tradition, emptying to what it should accomplish – (virtual) presence. / Philosophy & Systematic Theology / D. Th. (Systematic Theology)

La dialectique pluralisme religieux/incertitude religieuse, sur laquelle porte cette thèse, se révèle être un thème majeur dans la pensée de Peter L. Berger, en sociologie des religions et en théologie protestante. Une analyse systématique et détaillée des concepts-clés qui la constituent débouche sur la question des rapports entre sociologie et théologie à laquelle Berger lui-même s’est confronté. Abordée sous l’angle de l’idée du principe protestant, cette question s’est résolue, dès la fin des années 1960, en un certain « mariage » entre son approche de la sociologie de la connaissance et son approche théologique libérale. Les concepts de foi et théologie « inductives », de « voie médiane entre le fondamentalisme et le relativisme », semblent jaillir de cette dialectique et de ce « mariage ». Si néanmoins cette dialectique se retrace dans la pensée de Berger dès ses premières œuvres, la défense d’une via media théologique appliquée à toutes les religions se révèle être la conséquence de l’abandon (dès 1967), de sa posture théologique néo-orthodoxe. Dans cette posture, la dialectique bergérienne s’appliquait à toutes les religions mais laissait la foi chrétienne intouchée et pensée en termes de certitude. Or, une analyse critique de sa pensée permet de situer au moins à trois niveaux un certain nombre de problèmes : le niveau de sa conception de la religion manifestant une ambiguïté; le niveau des rapports entre sociologie et théologie révélant un biais libéral et une absence de contenu religieux concret pour le principe protestant; enfin le niveau de sa critique des quêtes contemporaines de certitudes religieuses, critique dont le fondement sur sa dialectique peut être questionné par des exemples de conception différente de la religion et de la certitude religieuse. Pour ces trois niveaux, l’exemple de la conception de la certitude religieuse par les protestants évangéliques permet au moins une ébauche d’un tel questionnement. Cette conception, surtout dans son idée de l’« assurance du salut», se fonde, dans son approche surnaturelle de la certitude religieuse, sur une adhésion et une confiance fortes quant aux contenus traditionnels de la foi chrétienne. Si les arguments avancés dans cette perspective demeurent discutables, ils semblent assez pertinents puisque la vitalité contemporaine de la religion à l’ère du pluralisme religieux (voir notamment le protestantisme évangélique aux États-Unis) constitue une indication que la validité empirique de la dialectique bergérienne, et la critique qu’elle fonde, sont largement problématiques si l’on tient compte de l’auto-compréhension des groupes religieux eux-mêmes. / The dialectic religious pluralism/religious uncertainty, with which deals this dissertation, reveals itself as a major theme in Peter L. Berger’s thought, in sociology of religion and in protestant theology. A systematic and detailed analysis of the key concepts which constitute that dialectic leads to the question of the relationship between sociology and theology, which has been confronted by Berger himself. It is at the time Berger studied that question from the point of view of the idea of the protestant principle, during the late sixties, that he solved it by a kind of ‘wedding’ between his approach in the sociology of knowledge and his liberal theological approach. Concepts as ‘inductive faith and theology’, ‘middle position between fundamentalism and relativism’, seem to emerge both from that dialectic and from that ‘wedding’. Nevertheless, while that dialectic can be retraced in Berger’s thought since his earlier works, the defence of a theological via media applied to all religions, appears to be the consequence of his rejection (since 1967), of his earlier theological stance deployed from the neo-orthodox approach. In that stance, the bergerian dialectic was applied to all religions but not to the Christian faith, thought in terms of certainty. But, a critical analysis of Berger’s thought allows one to identify some problems at least at three levels: the level of his concept of religion which evidentiates an ambiguity ; the level of the relationship between sociology and theology which reveals a liberal bias and a lack of specific religious content for the protestant principle; and finally, the level of his critique of the contemporary religious certainty impulses; a critique whose base on his dialectic can be questioned by some examples of different conceptions of religion and of religious certainty. About those three levels, the example of the conception of religious certainty by the Evangelical Protestants allows at least a draft of that questioning. It deploys a supernatural conception of the religious certainty, especially by the notion of « assurance of salvation », based on strong adherence and confidence in the traditional contents of the Christian faith. While the arguments of that conception can be subjected to questions, they seem enough relevant since the contemporary vitality of religion at the pluralistic era (cf. Evangelical Protestantism in U.S.A for example) constitutes an indication that the empirical validity of the bergerian dialectic, and of the critique based on it, is largely problematic if one takes into account the self-understanding of the religious groups themselves.

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The medium is the message in the first place: the medium as presence, as the author. His contribution to the academic world is his academic Holographic Memoirs. His story, the author's memoirs, is a fictive-narrative discourse with an organic ubuntu open-endedness. The Hologram is both an autobiography, but also all the information at all places simultaneously – nonlocal in quantum physical terms - within an intense hallucinating dream: no illusion, but rather a HyperReality with all its Virtual Identities. The invention of tram hopping is the plot of the story. The plot is like an hourglass where the first part of the story is the emptying of the sand, the deconstruction of modernism, but while the top chamber runs empty and the bottom chamber fills up, so the deconstruction is simultaneously a dependent arising/(social) construction/ubuntuing to revival – the synagogal Shekinah presence of YAHWEH. The top chamber is the unreasonable Newtonian physics and the bottom chamber reasonable quantum physics. The metaphysics (before the physics) of the top chamber is poststructuralism and deconstruction, while the bottom chamber is the virtual Hebraic worldview that delutively merges ubuntu and Buddhism. The long narrow neck in the middle is the moonily narrative that lives us with psychology (Psycho-logic) lost in sociology (Social-physics). Hermeneutics is set forth in the same contrasting hourglass of the top chamber, the inherited tradition, emptying to what it should accomplish – (virtual) presence. / Philosophy and Systematic Theology / D. Th. (Systematic Theology)