A shadow replaced by realities: the theme of temple in relation to Christology, Pneumatology and Ecclesiology in John's Gospel

This dissertation seeks to examine the role of the temple in relation to Christology, Pneumatology, and Ecclesiology in John’s Gospel. The Jerusalem temple, which was believed to be the shadow of the true temple in the heavens, was destroyed in A.D. 70. John, writing his Gospel after its destruction, presented the person of Jesus as the new cultic center of Judaism, in whom the more transcendent reality of the heavenly temple was truly embodied. The eschatological Spirit would animate the new worship inaugurated in the messianic temple, so that the believers could worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The living water of the Spirit was expected to flow from the heavenly temple, which is the glorified Jesus, throughout the earth via the mission of the ecclesial community – a community now constituted as the sacred temple. In this way, the Fourth Gospel presents Israel’s temple and its cult replaced by new realities: the temple of Jesus’ body and the temple of the church. The former is incarnated as the temple, while the latter is transformed into the temple by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.

A study of ignorance: suffering and freedom in early Buddhist teachings and parallels in modern neuroscience

What might early Buddhist teachings offer neuroscience and how might neuroscience inform contemporary Buddhism? Both early Buddhist teachings and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the conditioning of our cognitive apparatus and brain plays a role in agency that may be either efficacious or non-efficacious. Both consider internal time to play a central role in the efficacy of agency. Buddhism offers an approach that promises to increase the efficacy of agency. This approach is found in five early Buddhist teachings that are re-interpreted here with a view to explaining how they might be understood as a dynamic basis for ‘participatory will’ in the context of existing free will debates and the neuroscientific work of Patrick Haggard (et al.). These perspectives offer Buddhism and neuroscience a basis for informing each other as the shared themes of: (1) cognition is dynamic and complex/aggregate based, (2) being dynamic, cognition lacks a fixed basis of efficacy, and (3) efficacy of cognition may be achieved by an understanding of the concept of dynamic: as harmony and efficiency and by means of Buddha-warranted processes that involve internal time.