Summa Theologiae World Order

Paperback reissue of one volume of the English Dominicans' Latin/English edition of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae.

In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.

Since the formation of nation-states lawyers, philosophers, and theologians have sought to envisage the ideal political order. Their concepts, deeply entangled with ideas of theology, state formation, and human nature, form the bedrock of today's theoretical discourses on international law. This volume maps models of early international legal thought from Machiavelli to Hegel before international law became an academic discipline. The interplay of system and order serves as a leitmotiv throughout the book, helping to link historical models to contemporary discourse. Part I of the book covers a diverse collection of thinkers in order to scrutinize and contextualize their respective models of the international realm in light of general legal and political philosophy. Part II maps the historical development of international legal thought more generally by distilling common themes and ideas that have remained at the forefront of debate, such as the relationship between law and theology, the role of the individual versus that of the state, the influence of power and economic interests on the law, and the contingencies of time, space and technical opportunities. In the current political climate, where it is common to state that the importance of the nation-state is vanishing, the problems at issue in the classic theories do not seem so remote: is an international system without central power possible? How can a normative order come about if there is no central force to order relations between states? These essays show how uncovering the history of international law can offer ways in which to envisage its future.

A Book about Current Events in Light of Apocalyptic Trumpets Trumpets were signaling devices in ancient Israel, and a metaphorical and amazing message is hidden in them for the modern human being. The relationship between freedom and responsibility is a very current topic. Who has the authority to define the limits of freedom and responsibility? Which entity has the authority to decide who has the right to access freedoms? The forces of evil, including the Antichrist, aim to take the hold of this authority by deception. The great controversy between light and darkness concentrates on these issues, and it is a battle for our mindset and attitudes. Jesus Christ will have victory in the end. However, it is important to know the means of the hoax of Satan and the Antichrist, so that we would not be deceived. A global medical deception is part of the hoax. Liberty of conscience, not totalitarianism, is at the heart of God’s mindset and government. The interpretation of the trumpets has a long tradition. This book continues the tradition by concentrating on the fifth and the sixth trumpet. Often in Protestantism the events of the fifth and the sixth trumpet are either situated into the past (so called traditional interpretation in Adventism) or they are seen to reach until the present time. In this book, we unite the two views and think that the trumpets are repeated in history. We aim to let the Bible interpret itself. Both global deception and freedom of conscience are issues which are grounded on God’s Word. The book is a self-published work, and it contains 259 pages.

Where does evil come from? If there is a sovereign creator God, as Christian faith holds, is this God ultimately responsible for evil? Does God's sovereignty mean that God causes each instance of sin and suffering? How do Satan, his demons and hell fit into God's providential oversight of all creation and history? How does God interact with human intention and action? If people act freely, does God know in particular every human decision before the choice is made? In this important book Gregory A. Boyd mounts a thorough response to these ages-old questions, which remain both crucial and contentious, both practical and complex. In this work Boyd defends his scripturally grounded trinitarian warfare theodicy (presented in God at War) with rigorous philosophical reflection and insights from human experience and scientific discovery. Critiquing the classical Calvinist solution to the problem of evil, he advocates an alternative understanding of the sovereignty of the trinitarian God and of the reality of Satan that sheds light on our fallen human condition. While all may not agree with Boyd's conclusions, Satan and the Problem of Evil promises to advance the church's discussion of these critical issues.

The Summa Theologica is a compendium of theology written by Thomas Aquinas between 1265 and 1273. In Roman Catholicism it is the sum of all known learning and doctrine, of all that can be known about God and humanity's relations with God -- a landmark in the history of theology that famously offers five proofs of God's existence, the first three of which are cosmological arguments; the fourth, a moral argument; and the fifth, a teleological argument. The third quarter of the thirteenth century marked the first decisive philosophical encounter between Hellenism and Christianity. The rediscovery of Aristotle's works after the Dark Ages ushered in a new era of intellectual fervor in Europe, and the work of Thomas Aquinas is a commentary on Aristotle, whose writings were lost to the non-Arabic world until the beginning of the Thirteenth Century. To many, Aristotle's worldview was a pagan threat to Christianity. To Aquinas, it provided an exciting cosmological framework on which to build an all-encompassing Christian worldview. His thoughts unfolding with a calmness of order and an assurance of judgment, Aquinas explores in the Summa the primary role of the senses in the acquisition of knowledge and the metaphysical analysis of things in terms of matter and form. But unlike Aristotle's "God," who did not care one whit about the world, the God of Christianity, insisted Aquinas, is a personal God. Like Aristotle, Aquinas believed that each human being has a soul and that all created things have a purpose. For Christians, all are part of a divine plan. This dazzling synthesis of Catholic doctrine has had a profound impact on Christian thinking since the thirteenth century and has become the de facto official teaching of the Catholic Church -- the intellectual underpinning of the Church to this day.