The Quest for the Spiritual Sense: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards

1977 ◽  
Vol 70 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 99-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Stein
Keyword(s):  
New Jersey ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Design Life ◽  
College Of New Jersey ◽  
The Mind

It is an irony and something of an enigma that the Bible, one of the shaping forces in the theological development of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), has largely been ignored in the assessments of this colonial divine. Edwards himself acknowledged its influence, especially during his youthful years. “I had then,” he wrote, “and at other times, the greatest delight in the holy Scriptures, of any book whatsoever.” From his meditation on its pages he derived great personal pleasure as well as guidance and substance for his preaching. His enthusiasm for scriptural study never failed. Six months before his death he disclosed to the trustees of the College of New Jersey that he had undertaken two major exegetical projects with the hope of publishing “an explanation of a very great part of the holy scripture; which may…lead the mind to a view of the true spirit, design, life and soul of the scripture, as well as to their proper use and improvement.”

scholarly journals Emblematic Literature as a Form of Biblical Hermeneutics

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (32) ◽  
pp. 61-69
Author(s):  
Nataliia Levchenko ◽  
Olena Liamprekht ◽  
Oksana Zosimova ◽  
Olena Varenikoba ◽  
Svitlana Boiko
Keyword(s):  
17Th Century ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
General Development ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
The Bible ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Emblematic Literature ◽  
The Mind

The article defines the basic principles of the influence of biblical hermeneutics on the poetics of Ukrainian Baroque emblematic literature, which were determined by its general development trends. The four-sense biblical hermeneutics, founded by the Greek and Roman Church Fathers, played an important role in the formation of Ukrainian Baroque literature that mainly developed within the theological framework. The principles of biblical hermeneutics eventually began to go beyond the theological literature. Thus, the medieval interest in symbol and allegory led to the appearance of “empresas” – symbolic drawings that became fashionable at the royal courts of Europe in the 15th century. The Renaissance misunderstanding about the nature of Egyptian hieroglyphs, their perception as ideographic writing through which Egyptian priests expressed their wisdom, led to the appearance of emblems, allegorical prints with long explanatory verses, aimed at giving some moral lessons. It was believed that the emblem could communicate truth to the mind more directly than with the help of words. It was reflected in the mind, while the person’s gaze wandered through the symbolic details of the emblem. The research provides evidence that a large number of literary works of the 17th century showed the influence of the emblem on the formation of symbolic representation, arranged to reveal the truth implicitly or explicitly through the sequential placement of the elements. Many poetic images of the 17th century come from well-known emblems, which were means of perceiving, interpreting, and opening the world of the Bible to the Baroque reader.

Postcolonial Liberation: Decolonizing Biblical Studies in the South African Postcolony

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald O. West
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
The South ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
African Black ◽  
History Of ◽  
Land Economics ◽  
The 1960S

Liberation biblical interpretation and postcolonial biblical interpretation have a long history of mutual constitution. This essay analyzes a particular context in which these discourses and their praxis have forged a third conversation partner: decolonial biblical interpretation. African and specifically South African biblical hermeneutics are the focus of reflections in this essay. The South African postcolony is a “special type” of postcolony, as the South African Communist Party argued in the 1960s. The essay charts the characteristics of the South African postcolony and locates decolonial biblical interpretation within the intersections of these features. Race, culture, land, economics, and the Bible are forged in new ways by contemporary social movements, such as #FeesMustFall. South African biblical studies continues to draw deeply on the legacy of South African black theology, thus reimagining African biblical studies as decolonial African biblical studies—a hybrid of African liberation and African postcolonial biblical interpretation.

Reading from Worlds under the Text: Oceanic Women in the missio Dei

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Rosemary Dewerse ◽  
Cathy Hine
Keyword(s):  
Global South ◽  
Missio Dei ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Women

Abstract Missional hermeneutics is a relatively recent development in the field of biblical hermeneutics, emerging from several decades of scholarly engagement with the concept and frame of missio Dei. In a key recent publication in the field, Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, the voices of the Global South and of women – and certainly of women from Oceania – do not feature. In this article the authors, both Oceanic women, interrupt the discourse to read biblical text from their twice-under perspective. The Beatitudes provide the frame and the lens for a spiralling discussion of the missio Dei as, to borrow from Letty M. Russell, “calculated inefficiency.” Stories of faithful Oceanic women interweave with those of God and of biblical women, offering their complexities to challenge assumptions and simplicities.

Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart

1948 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perry Miller
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Work ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

The reputation of Jonathan Edwards, impressive though it is, rests upon only a fragmentary representation of the range or profundity of his thinking. Harassed by events and controversies, he was forced repeatedly to put aside his real work and to expend his energies in turning out sermons, defenses of the Great Awakening, or theological polemics. Only two of his published books (and those the shortest), The Nature of True Virtue and The End for which God Created the World, were not ad hoc productions. Even The Freedom of the Will is primarily a dispute, aimed at silencing the enemy rather than expounding a philosophy. He died with his Summa still a mass of notes in a bundle of home-made folios, the handwriting barely legible. The conventional estimate that Edwards was America's greatest metaphysical genius is a tribute to his youthful Notes on the Mind — which were a crude forecast of the system at which he labored for the rest of his days — and to a few incidental flashes that illumine his forensic argumentations. The American mind is immeasurably the poorer that he was not permitted to bring into order his accumulated meditations.

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