English Deism and Germany: The Thomas Morgan controversy

2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAN van den BERG

The work of the English Deist Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), a Marcion in his time, received much negative criticism in England and abroad, especially in Germany. His views aroused comments in books, dissertations and journals. Only in the first half of the twentieth century was he to be praised by theologians such as Adolf von Harnack and Emanuel Hirsch, who likewise disparaged the Old Testament.

Author(s):  
James I. Porter

This chapter studies the work of the German literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote in response to the historical upheaval of the mid-twentieth century as a form of historical engagement. In his work, Auerbach endeavors to portray the evolution of historical consciousness in the West and the discovery of the human and social worlds it yielded. He reflects on this evolution in relating the narrative of realism. In this account, realism is not a literary genre, but rather the evolving recognition of human consciousness of its own conditions, the growing awareness, that is, that reality and the real inhere in the sensuous, the mundane, and the human. At the center of this narrative, Auerbach places Judaism and its heritage rather than Christianity. For Auerbach, history and historical consciousness first appear in the Jewish biblical stories, which provide in turn the structure and the framework for all subsequent expressions of historical thought and experience.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-141
Author(s):  
Joshua T. James

The study of the ethics of the Psalms is a relative newcomer in the field of Old Testament ethics, having garnered most of its interest following Wenham’s initial essay on the subject in 2005. In hindsight, the neglect of the Psalms is surprising given its overt ethical concerns, but throughout the early phase of the re-emergence of Old Testament ethics (from 1983 to the end of the twentieth century), it was indeed woefully overlooked. The goal of this article is to provide a survey of work on the subject. Because the content and themes of these studies are still somewhat limited, the article is arranged according to the interpretive methodology or hermeneutical framework guiding the various authors’ contributions. In addition to surveying the field, this approach allows for the dominant trends to be observed and set within their proper context.


Author(s):  
James Barr

This chapter discusses and presents a survey of the Old Testament, beginning with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and its ancient versions. It examines the rise of traditional biblical criticism and considers a study of the Hebrew language and its cognate Semitic languages. Finally, a survey of various topics and their historical perspectives is provided, along with some recent developments. The main focus of the chapter is to describe the dominant position of the mid-twentieth century.


2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doris L. Bergen

In his memoir, German chaplain Hans Leonhard describes a visit to a military hospital during World War II. Leonhard entered a ward full of men with sexually transmitted diseases. “So you're a pastor?” one patient jeered. “We don't need one of them. You just want to tell us those stories about cattle breeders and pimps.” The phrasecame from the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century, he dubbed the Old Testament a collection of “stories of pimps and cattle traders.” Members of the pro-Nazi “German Christian” movement popularized Rosenberg's phrase in church circles. Leonhard, accustomed to hostile reactions, answered the taunt with a challenge: “Tell me just one such story,” he said to the man. “If you can tell me even one, I'll leave the room immediately and never bother you again.” All the patients looked at their comrade. “I can't think of any right now,” he finally said. The others laughed, but he did not give up. “You probably want to tell us something about praying,” he accused Leonhard. “Well, a real man doesn” The chaplain countered with another question: “Were you at the front?” he wanted to know. There was a pause before the man muttered, “We from the reserves have done our duty, too.” According to Leonhard, that admission ended the exchange. The chaplain sat down with the rest of the men and talked about the Old Testament and about prayer.


1954 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Winter

The close affinity in diction and style, and also in the association of ideas, between the first two chapters of the Gospel according to Luke and the great mass of ancient Hebrew literature—even occasionally actual verbal agreements with passages from the thirteenth chapter of Judges or from the story of Samuel's birth—might indicate, yet does not incontrovertibly prove, that the Greek record of Luke i, ii is ultimately derived from a Hebrew literary source. There is nothing inherently impossible in the idea that a Greek writer, thoroughly familiar with the literary character of the O.T. translation and desirous of proceeding with his own narration of the Birth and Boyhood of Jesus, could have intentionally and successfully imitated the style of the Greek Old Testament. He might have adopted Septuagintal mannerisms of phraseology in the belief that a Hebraizing style would be the appropriate means to evoke a congenial atmosphere for the setting of his story. We know from literary competitions in our own time that Englishmen of the twentieth century are capable of imitating convincingly the styles of Ronsard or Rabelais. What is possible for them today would not have been impossible, in his day, for the editor of Luke, who was a man of great literary accomplishment.


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