Images Of The New Jerusalem

The Kansas City suburb of Independence, Missouri, is associated primarily with its most famous son, President Harry Truman. Yet Independence is also home to a unique and complex religious landscape regarded as sacred space by hundreds of thousands of people associated with the Latter Day Saint family of churches. In 1831 Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint (LDS) movement, declared Independence the site of the New Jerusalem, where followers would build a sacred city, the center of Zion. Smith prophesied that Jesus Christ would return in millennial and glorious advent to Independence, an act that would make the city an American counterpart to old world Jerusalem. Smith's plan would have mixed the best qualities of nineteenth-century American pastoral and urban psyche. However, the great splintering among returning Latter Day Saint groups has led to divergent beliefs and multiple interpretations of millennial place. Images of the New Jerusalem culls viewpoints from publications and interviews and contrasts them with official church doctrines and mapped land holdings. For example, with a desire to attract mainstream American, the Western LDS Church, which holds the largest amount of land in northwestern Missouri, keeps fairly silent on the New Jerusalem, while the RLDS Church (now the Community of Christ) has dropped millennial claims gradually, adopting a liberal secular style of pseudo-Protestantism. Smaller groups, independent of these two, see sacred space in more spatially and doctrinally limited ways. The religious ecology among Latter Day Saint churches allows each group its place in the public spotlight, and a number of sociopolitical mechanisms reduce conflict among them. Nonetheless, Independence has developed many traits of the world's most seasoned and conflicted sacred places over a relatively short time. This book opens the field of scholarship on this region, where profound spatial and doctrinal variation continues. Craig S. Campbell is professor of geography at Youngstown State University. He has published articles in Journal of Cultural Geography, Cartographica, The Professional Geographer, Political Geography, and other journals.

Blunt discussion about Islam, Zionism and the Middle East from a Catholic perspective.

There is a development between expectation for the rebuilding of the New Jerusalem/Temple in the Old Testament and the coming of the New Jerusalem/Temple in Revelation. In Revelation, there is a dynamic relation between the New Jerusalem and the Heavenly Jerusalem: the New Jerusalem is the descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Moreover, there is no Temple building which was expected as the eschatological promise in the Old Testament but rather God and the Lamb is the Temple. How can this shift be explained? Pilchan Lee examines the exegetical tradition which existed between the Old Testament and Revelation. He assumes that as the exegetical tradition, the early Jewish (apocalyptic) literature functions as a key element for forming the idea of the New Jerusalem in Revelation. John's main argument is that the church (which is symbolized by several images) is placed in heaven now (chapters 4-20) and the church (which is symbolized by the New Jerusalem) will descend to the earth from heaven in the future (21-22).

This study, unparalleled in recent scholarly writing, sets out to examine the broad sweep of the biblical theological tradition about Jerusalem/Zion as the antecedent to Revelation's depiction of the New Jerusalem. In the Old Testament, Jerusalem/Zion is depicted in both its ideal form and its actual manifestation. In the Psalms (and seminally in the Pentateuch), Zion is depicted as similar to the holy mountains of the gods in Ugaritic religion. But it is not only a dwelling-place of the deity: it is also an earthly city inhabited by humans, and so it becomes a place of community of the divine and the human. The historical books of course make no secret of the realities of life in the far from holy Jerusalem, and, in the prophets also, the city of Jerusalem is the site of wrongdoing and corruption, a place attracting judgment; but equally it is the focus for eschatological anticipations of a renewed community that does fulfil the ideal. In the New Testament, by its rejection of the Messiah earthly Jerusalem forfeits its role as the true Jerusalem/Zion, which is taken over by Jesus and the church. Occasionally we get glimpses of the belief that the true Jerusalem is in heaven (a development begun in Second Temple literature). The book of Revelation picks up as well from Second Temple literature the theme of the identity of Jerusalem with the Garden of Eden, combining this idea with renewal-of-Zion passages from the prophets to depict the final state of God's people as a place of blessedness, community, life and safety, as well of intimacy with God.

The chantry movement in late medieval England is situated in this context, and leads to a demonstration of the movement's associations with the highly-wrought poem Pearl and its companion poems; the book analyses Pearl as medieval architecture, offering fresh perspectives on its elaborate construction and historical context."--BOOK JACKET.

John Davenport, who cofounded the colony of New Haven, has been neglected in studies that view early New England primarily from a Massachusetts viewpoint. Francis J. Bremer restores the clergyman to importance by examining Davenport’s crucial role as an advocate for religious reform in England and the Netherlands before his emigration, his engagement with an international community of scholars and clergy, and his significant contributions to colonial America. Bremer shows that he was in many ways a remarkably progressive leader for his time, with a strong commitment to education for both women and men, a vibrant interest in new science, and a dedication to upholding democratic principles in churches at a time when many other Puritan clergymen were emphasizing the power of their office above all else. Bremer’s enlightening and accessible biography of an important figure in New England history provides a unique perspective on the seventeenth-century transatlantic Puritan movement.

Everlasting hell and divine judgment, a lake of fire and brimstone--these mainstays of evangelical tradition have come under fire once again in recent decades. Would the God of love revealed by Jesus really consign the vast majority of humankind to a destiny of eternal, conscious torment? Is divine mercy bound by the demands of justice? How can anyone presume to know who is saved from the flames and who is not? Reacting to presumptions in like manner, others write off the fiery images of final judgment altogether. If there is a God who loves us, then surely all are welcome into the heavenly kingdom, regardless of their beliefs or behaviors in this life. Yet, given the sheer volume of threat rhetoric in the Scriptures and the wickedness manifest in human history, the pop-universalism of our day sounds more like denial than hope. Mercy triumphs over judgment; it does not skirt it. Her Gates Will Never Be Shut endeavors to reconsider what the Bible and the Church have actually said about hell and hope, noting a breadth of real possibilities that undermines every presumption. The polyphony of perspectives on hell and hope offered by the prophets, apostles, and Jesus humble our obsessive need to harmonize every text into a neat theological system. But they open the door to the eternal hope found in Revelation 21-22: the City whose gates will never be shut; where the Spirit and Bride perpetually invite the thirsty who are outside the city to "Come, drink of the waters of life."

'Nature' and the 'city' have most often functioned as opposites within Western culture, a dichotomy that has been reinforced (and sometimes challenged) by religious images. Bohannon argues here that cities and natural environments, however, are both connected and continually affected by one another. He shows how such connections become overt during natural disasters, which disrupt the narratives people use to make sense of the world,including especially religious narratives, and make them more visible. This book offers both a theoretical exploration of the intersection of the city, nature, and religion, as well as a sociological analysis of the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, ND, USA. This case study shows how religious factors have influenced how the relationship between nature and the city is perceived, and in particular have helped to justify the urban control of nature. The narratives found in Grand Forks also reveal a broader understanding of the nature of Western cities, highlighting the potent and ethically-rich intersections between religion, cities and nature.