scholarly journals Scripture, Time, and Authority among Early Disciples of Christ

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 762-783
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Disciples Of Christ ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Alexander Campbell ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Testament Church

This article explores the relationship between the idealization of the Bible and the material characteristics of printed bibles among the Disciples of Christ in the early nineteenth century. The Disciples were founded on the principles of biblical primitivism: they revered the “pure” Bible as the sole source for proper faith and practice. The tenacity with which Disciples emphasized their allegiance to an idealized, timeless Bible has obscured their attention to its physical manifestations and use as printed scripture. The timeless authority of the Bible was entangled with the historical contingencies of mere bibles, and the ways in which they dealt with these tensions offer important perspective on nineteenth-century bible culture. Scholars have treated primitivism as an ahistorical impulse—the idealization of the New Testament church as a mythical sacred era outside of time that could be perpetually inhabited. By contrast, through an examination of the New Testaments edited and published by Disciples leader Alexander Campbell and the heavily-annotated preaching bible of Thomas Allen, an early Disciples preacher, I argue that in seeking to recover the New Testament era through historicized understandings of scripture, primitivists like Campbell and Allen situated the early church itself firmly within historical, not primordial, time.

Soteria

1953 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 406-416
Author(s):  
R. McL. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Good News ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Wrath Of God

In the Gospel according to St. John it is written that ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have ever-lasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.’ In these familiar words is summed up the message of the Bible as a whole, and of the New Testament in particular. In spite of all that may be said of sin and depravity, of judgment and the wrath of God, the last word is one not of doom but of salvation. The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is a Gospel of salvation, of deliverance and redemption. The news that was carried into all the world by the early Church was the Good News of the grace and love of God, revealed and made known in Jesus Christ His Son. In the words of Paul, it is that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself’.

The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Albert Harrill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Moral Imperative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Moral Debate ◽  
The Relationship

The study of nineteenth-century U.S. biblical exegesis on the slavery question illumines a fundamental paradox in American religious culture. The relationship between the moral imperative of anti-slavery and the evolution of biblical criticism resulted in a major paradigm shift away from literalism. This moral imperative fostered an interpretive approach that found conscience to be a more reliable guide to Christian morality than biblical authority. Yet, the political imperative of proslavery nourished a biblicism that long antedated the proslavery argumentation and remains prevalent in American moral preaching. The nineteenth-century desire to resolve this paradox led to important innovations in American interpretations of the Bible.

Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Old Testament

2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Capetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Critical Method ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Historical Investigation

In the nineteenth century the unrestricted application of the historical-critical method posed an unprecedented challenge to inherited Christian notions about the Bible. While this challenge was eventually to be felt most acutely in the study of the New Testament (nt) once the distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” had firmly established itself, traditional viewpoints on the Old Testament (ot) were actually the first to be called into question. As a consequence of historical investigation, it became increasingly difficult for theologians to claim that the gospel is already taught in the ot. Regarding this matter, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) made a bold proposal. He argued against the canonical standing of the ot on the grounds that it expresses Jewish, not Christian, religion. For him this conclusion was the unavoidable result of the advancing critical scholarship that was undermining the christological exegesis used to defend the church's claim to the ot against the synagogue's counter-claim to its sole rightful possession. Opposing such “christianizing” readings, Schleiermacher broke ranks from Christian theologians and championed the side of the Jews in this historic debate. His only predecessors in this regard were Marcion and the Socinians, although his proposal for relegating the ot to noncanonical status was later endorsed by Adolf von Harnack.

The Problem of a New Testament Theology

1973 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernst Käsemann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Biblical Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Church

In the Protestant tradition the Bible has long been regarded as the sole norm for the Church. It was from this root that, in the seventeenth century, there sprang first of all ‘biblical theology’, from which New Testament theology later branched off at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Radical historical criticism too kept closely to this tradition, and F. C. Baur made such a theology the goal of all his efforts in the study of the New Testament. Since that time the question how the problem thus posed is to be tackled and solved has remained a living issue in Germany. On the other hand, the problem for a long time held no interest for other church traditions, although here too the position has changed within the last two decades. In 1950 Meinertz wrote the first Catholic exposition, while the theme was taken up in France by Bonsirven in 1951, and by Richardson in England in 1958. Popular developments along these lines were to follow.

scholarly journals An investigation into the socio-historical influences overcoming ethnicity in the early New Testament Church

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Humphreys Frackson Zgambo
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
In Christ ◽  
New Testament Church

Ethnicity, tribalism and xenophobia could be found inside and outside church walls. Ethnicity and racism are natural, learned and nurtured in human beings. However, ethnic identity and relations exist whether the ethnic groups are competing or not. The first challenge of the early church in the New Testament Church was to overcome ethnicity and hostile divisions between Jews, Gentiles and Samaritans. This study aims at exploring how socio-historical influences and nature of the message of the New Testament managed to overcome ethnicity and ethnic divisions in the early New Testament Church. The study will also reflect on how the contemporary church could manage ethnicity within its structures and redefine its position on what it means to be one in Christ within the diverse church.

The New Testament Church and the Emergence of Religious Identities

2020 ◽  
pp. 102-140
Author(s):  
Savio Abreu
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Born Again ◽  
New Testament Church

This chapter is an elucidation of the process of identity formation among the Catholic Charismatics and the neo-Pentecostals, both at the corporate and the individual levels, with the recreation of the New Testament Church (NTC) as the guiding motif. The process of identity formation for the neo-Pentecostals involves marking clear-cut boundaries with Catholicism and Hinduism, the two dominant religious traditions in Goa. Assuming the identity of the NTC involves appropriating the dualistic spiritual worldview of the early Church and defining their mission as saving the lost, the lost being Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, and all others who are not Born-Again Christians. The identity of the neo-Pentecostals is closely linked with their idea of the mission to include urgent, aggressive proselytization and numerical expansion.

Lucian and the Lucianic Recension of the Greek Bible

1962 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-203
Author(s):  
Bruce M. Metzger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Eastern Orthodox ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Eastern Orthodox Church

Among the several scholars of the ancient Church who occupied themselves with the textual criticism of the Bible, one of the most influential was Lucian of Antioch. Though not as learned or as productive in a literary way as either Origen or Jerome, Lucian's work on the text of the Greek Bible proved to be of significance both in his own day and, to an even greater extent, during the centuries following. In fact, his recension of the text of the New Testament, with only minor modifications, continued to be used widely down to the nineteenth century, and still lives on in the so-called Ecclesiastical text of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

scholarly journals VII.—Lessing's Religious Development with Special Reference to His Nathan the Wise

PMLA ◽  
1893 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-379
Author(s):  
Sylvester Primer
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Church Hierarchy ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Church

The primitive purity of the early Church soon yielded to a Church hierarchy. In those early times, before the New Testament was admitted to equal canonical authority with the Old, the Church became the supreme authority and the Bible was subordinate. After the incorporation of the New Testament into the Bible, the Scriptures and the Church appear to be coördinate authority in the patristic writings of that period. During the Middle Ages the Church grew rapidly in political power and the influence of the Scriptures waned accordingly, so that Dante complains of the way in which not merely creeds and fathers but canon law and the decretals were studied instead of the gospels.

scholarly journals Messiasverwagting en prediking uit die Ou Testament

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
H. F. Herrie Van Rooy
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Related Matter ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Reformed Churches ◽  
The Relationship

Messianic expectation and preaching from the Old Testament In the recent past the issue of the Messiah in the Old Testament received a considerable amount of attention in South Africa, especially in the circles of the Gereformeerde Kerke van Suid-Afrika (the Reformed Churches of South Africa). The debate focused on the question regarding the Messiah in the Psalms, due to the new version of the Psalter in Afrikaans, published in 2001. Similar questions were asked concerning the New Afrikaans translation of the Bible (1983). This matter is related to the whole issue regarding the relationship between the Old and the New Testament. This article deals with a related matter, viz. the matter of Christological preaching from the Old Testament. Once it has described the background of the problem, it formulates some important principles and illustrates the application of the principles through the discussion of four examples from the book of Haggai.

scholarly journals ‘n Prakties-teologiese model vir die verhouding Ou Testament/Nuwe Testament

2000 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-352
Author(s):  
W. G. Thirion
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Communicative Praxis ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Practical Theological ◽  
The Relationship

A practical theological model for the relationship Old Testament/New TestamentFor all Christians the Bible consists of the Old and New Testament. The relationship, however, between these two parts is a hermeneutic-theological problem which confronts the communicative praxis of the Christian faith. Therefore it is necessary to develop a hermeneutic-theological theory for Christians which can serve as a paradigm within which the texts of the Old as well as that of the New Testament may regard as equal authoritative Word of God. As far as this study is concerned, there is but one approach only which can achieve this and that is a theocentric approach to both Testaments. A theocentric approach to the relationship Old Testament/New Testament, a) is capable of treating both Testaments as equal authoritative Word of God, b) prevents the practice of "two-sermons-in-one-sermon" in an attempt to make the message of the Old Testament more Christian like, c) is especially capable of communicating the message of the Old Testament in the communicative praxis of the Christian community and the modern society without reading by force Christ into the Old Testament.

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