Spenser's Epithalamion
How does Edmund Spenser reconcile holiness with passionate love in his "Epithalamion"? For a start, we must acknowledge precisely what "holiness" means to Spenser. Spenser is the pre-eminent English Protestant poet, and supported the religious reforms of the Church of England against the Catholic church. This is precisely relevant to Spenser's imagining of marital love in the "Epithalamion" for one salient reason -- the Catholic church holds marriage to be a sacrament, whereas the English church (to which Spenser adhered) does not. This should be fairly obvious, because the English church was founded so that the King could have a divorce, but it was fairly recent at the time Spenser was writing: the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England were issued in 1563, and Spenser writes the "Epithalamion" a little more than thirty years afterward in the mid-1590s. A sacrament is an official religious sanctification: it imparts holiness to something like marriage. In writing the "Epithalamion," therefore, Spenser finds himself having to use poetry to generate a sense of holiness for his own Anglican marriage that Catholic poets would consider to be inherent in the sacramental act of marriage itself. Spenser's "Epithalamion" is the poet's attempt to generate, rhetorically, the sense of holiness which is appropriate to a Christian sense of marriage, with an awareness that the act is not inherently made holy by the poet's version of Christianity.
As a result, Spenser's sense of holiness in the "Epithalamion" is somewhat bizarre: there are more allusions to pagan...
Sanctification The process of sanctification can also be termed loosely of becoming like God, as we were all created to be like him and in sanctification we are restored to the full human potential designed by god. This has three parts or levels and includes the work done by the Holy Spirit, done by ourselves and through society. All three are required to achieve sanctification and that is the full development
" (Romans 12:1). Assisted Suicide Assisted suicide is when one person aids another person in ending their life, because the person ending their life chooses to do so. This act is alternatively termed voluntary euthanasia, though the semantic difference between the two terms lays in the intent of self-destruction (suicide) versus death with moral forethought and dignity (Downie 2004). It is a fine line, fraught with great moral dilemma. Christian teachings are the
Calvin graphically expresses this in the following excerpt: Why, then, are we justified by faith? Because by faith we grasp Christ's righteousness, by which alone we are reconciled to God. Yet you could not grasp this without at the same time grasping sanctification also. For he "is given unto us for righteousness, wisdom, sanctification, and redemption" [1 Cor. 1:30]. Therefore, Christ justifies no one whom he does not at the
Epistle to the Romans Paul's Epistle to the Romans is one of the most extensive statements of theology in the entire Bible, because in it he attempts to outline and describe the entire process by which mankind is initially condemned for its sinful nature, and thus doomed for a final judgment according to the actions taken in life, but is offered the chance for redemption through faith in Jesus Christ. Paul
There is no judgment from God on the believer, nor annoyance with God in respect to the believer -- neither in the last day nor today. From a familial aspect, God is significantly displeased with our behavior and punishment is sure -- either from God or from our own consequences of that sin. One could look at David's prayer of repentance in Psalm 51 to see the devastating effects of
Foundation for Faith Review Summary A Foundation for Faith: An Introductory Study of Systematic Theology with References to the Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 by Stanford E. Murrell, Th.D., is a massive work consisting of 6 parts. Part I focuses on theology proper—i.e., the study of God, which examines the definition, method, and source of theology and looks at the arguments for the existence of God. The arguments include the ontological, cosmological, teleological, moral
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