Bridging the gulf between biblical scholars and theologians: Can Barth and Wright provide an answer?

2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 420-434
Author(s):  
Maico Michielin
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Length Relationship ◽  
Biblical Texts

AbstractThere was a time when the interpretation of the Bible was a seamless integrated theological activity. Today, the separation of biblical studies from theologically interested exegesis amongst theologians encourages a sceptical arms-length relationship between Old and New Testament scholars and theologians. Theologians criticise biblical studies' so-called objective and disinterested approach to interpreting the Bible for requiring scholars of both testaments to suspend their theological convictions. Biblical scholars condemn theologians for misusing biblical texts in support of their own preconceived theological agendas. The article suggests a way to bring these divergent exegetical approaches into conversation in a charitable, yet critical fashion, by comparing Karl Barth and N. T. Wright's exegesis of Romans 3:21–4:25. It concludes that the biblical scholar's and theologian's respective sensitivity to the historical and theological sense of the biblical text can, when brought together, benefit each other's reading of the Bible.

Teaching the Bible and Popular Media as Part of Contemporary Rape Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 423-439
Author(s):  
Beatrice J. W. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Cultural Myths ◽  
Biblical Texts

This essay explores pedagogical strategies for addressing rape culture in biblical studies courses, employing Genesis 34 and Judges 19–21 as primary texts. The first section discusses the nature of popular culture and its impact on gender. The following four sections highlight cultural myths about sexual assault by focusing on significant biblical texts and incorporating aspects of popular media to facilitate conversations about rape culture. The conclusion summarizes the main points and encourage further studies that combine the study of popular media and biblical texts. Overall, the essay contributes to the reading and teaching of the Bible within contemporary rape culture so that students become critical interpreters of biblical texts, as they become resistant readers of past and present rape culture.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

Moral Injury and Biblical Studies: An Early Sampling of Research and Emerging Trends

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Brad E. Kelle
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Moral Injury ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The World ◽  
Biblical Texts

Moral injury emerged within clinical psychology and related fields to refer to a non-physical wound (psychological and emotional pain and its effects) that results from the violation (by oneself or others) of a person’s deepest moral beliefs (about oneself, others, or the world). Originally conceived in the context of warfare, the notion has now expanded to include the morally damaging impact of various non-war-related experiences and circumstances. Since its inception, moral injury has been an intersectional and cross-disciplinary term and significant work has appeared in psychology, philosophy, medicine, spiritual/pastoral care, chaplaincy, and theology. Since 2015, biblical scholarship has engaged moral injury along two primary trajectories: 1) creative re-readings of biblical stories and characters informed by insights from moral injury; and 2) explorations of the postwar rituals and symbolic practices found in biblical texts and how they might connect to the felt needs of morally injured persons. These trajectories suggest that the engagement between the Bible and moral injury generates a two-way conversation in which moral injury can serve as a heuristic that brings new meanings out of biblical texts, and the critical study of biblical texts can contribute to the attempts to understand, identify, and heal moral injury.

'Job the Dog': Hélène Cixous on Wounds, Scars and the Biblical Text

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-448
Author(s):  
Hugh Pyper
Keyword(s):  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Clarice Lispector ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Allusions ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Way

AbstractHélène Cixous' engagement with biblical texts is a significant but neglected aspect of her work. In this essay, the biblical allusions in several of her works are traced, particularly centring around the theme of the dog and the bite or wound. The Bible represents for Cixous both an example of the unbounded writing she sees as feminine, and a text that is confined by masculine authority and taboo. These two aspects come together in her engagement with the writings of Clarice Lispector whose grammatically paradoxical phrase in Portuguese eles a biblia—'those he-bible', as translations inadequately represent it—embodies that tension. The tension between these styles of writing in the Bible opens up as a wound in the text which allows a penetration below the surface. The power of the Bible is in the way that this opening lets the reader see 'the meat we are' in an encounter with the 'root' of being.

Returning To China: Biblical Interpretation in Postcolonial Hong Kong

1999 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Archie C.C. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Hybrid Identity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
New Framework

AbstractThe paper aims to construct a new framework for biblical studies from the context of postcolonial Hong Kong. While present biblical scholarship has largely depended on historical-critical exegesis, biblical scholars of Asia have begun to conceive a different approach to the Bible, because of not only a new context of reading, but also a radically different cultural-political location of the reader. This location, as it is now being formulated, is a reading between East and West, between the dominant interpretation and scholarship of the formerly colonial and Western cultures and the newly arising consciousness of emerging postcolonial identities in the histories and cultures of Asia. After about some 150 years of British colonial rule, the identity of being a people of Hong Kong is highly hybridised. It is a hybrid identity of being cultural Chinese and yet pragmatically British, both a strong sense of identification with China and an unexplainable fear of being national Chinese. Such location of a reader transforms one's understanding of a biblical text such as Isaiah 56-66 and sheds a new light on the meaning of the return in some of its major passages.

scholarly journals The Future of New Testament Theology, or, What Should Devout Modern Bible Scholarship Look Like?

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1072
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Language Game ◽  
The Self ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Triune God ◽  
The Church

Consideration of the nature of New Testament Theology (NTT) necessitates an account of theology or “God-talk”. Karl Barth grasped that all valid God-talk begins with God’s self-disclosure through Jesus and the Spirit, which people acknowledge and reflect on. Abandoning this starting point by way of “Foundationalism”—that is, resorting to any alternative basis for God-talk—leads to multiple destructive epistemological and cultural consequences. The self-disclosure of the triune God informs the use of the Bible by the church. The Bible then functions in terms of ethics and witness. It grounds the church’s ethical language game. Creative readings here are legitimate. The New Testament (NT) also mediates a witness to Jesus, which implies an historical dimension. However, it is legitimate to affirm that Jesus was resurrected (see 1 Cor 15:1–9), which liberates the devout modern Bible scholar in relation to history. The historical readings generated by such scholars have value because the self-disclosing God is deeply involved with particularity. These readings can be added to the archive of scriptural readings used by the church formationally. Ultimately, then, all reading of the NT is theological (or should be) and in multiple modes. NTT focuses our attention on the accuracy of the God-talk operative within any historical reconstruction, and on its possible subversion, which are critical matters.

scholarly journals CROSSING BOUNDARIES. THE TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL OF INTERCULTURAL BIBLE READING IN SECULAR / POST-SECULAR CONTEXTS

Scriptura ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Louis Jonker
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Bible Reading

Intercultural biblical hermeneutics is a fairly recent development in biblical scholarship in general. It emphasises that biblical interpretation almost always takes place in contexts where an array of cultural values and beliefs determine the outcome of the interpretative process. Although this branch of biblical hermeneutics emerged from the need to reflect theoretically on how Christians from different socio-cultural and socio-economic contexts engage the biblical texts, and one another on account of those texts, this approach may also be widened to include the interpretation of the Bible in non-Christian contexts (including the contexts of other religions and secular contexts) or even to engage in discourse on the interpretation of authoritative texts of different traditions (such as the Qur’an in Islam, in addition to the Tenakh of Judaism, and the Old and New Testament of Christianity). In research on intercultural biblical hermeneutics, it has been noticed that intercultural interpretation holds enormous transformative potential. My paper will examine how this could be of use in engagements between religious, secular and post-secular contexts.

scholarly journals Poging tot ’n herdefinisie van die prediking binne die raamwerk van die Reformatiese teologie

1989 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
T. F.J. Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Fundamental Concept ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
The Bible

An attempt to redefine praeching in terms of Reformational theology In the field of biblical studies and hermeneutics, modern research, in many aspects results in questioning the authority of the Bible as the Word of God. The consequences of these results often undermine preaching as the Word of God. Within the theology of the re formation , preaching is based upon sound exegetical study and expository of the biblical text. Hence scientific exegetical research brings the authority of preaching to a crisis. This paper is an attempt to redefine preaching in order to incorporate the results of modem research, as well as to conserve the fundamental concept of preaching as the Word of God.

The Bible as a Document of the Church: A Personal View

2016 ◽  
Vol 128 (6) ◽  
pp. 276-285
Author(s):  
George G. Nicol
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
Personal View ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Church

Following some general remarks on recent significant trends in biblical studies, I note that these will exacerbate the gulf between church and academy with respect to biblical interpretation. A brief introduction to the official documents of the Church of Scotland shows that they provide little indication of how the Bible should be interpreted as a document of the church. In view of the ideological nature of many of the biblical texts an argument against too ready recourse to theological interpretation is outlined.

Elephantine Trespasses

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Collin Cornell
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Persian Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts

Abstract This article identifies two examples of constructive theological argumentation in recent religion-historical research: specifically, research on the Yahwism of a Persian-period island called Elephantine. These examples are significant because the task of history of religions is to offer critical (re)description of the contents of religion and not to make positive recommendations for current-day god-talk or ethics. In addition to setting out these disciplinary stakes, the article suggests that the location of these trespasses is also of interest: the historical subdiscipline that studies Elephantine, by virtue of its propinquity to the Bible proper, draws theological cachet from the Bible, while its smaller infrastructure relative to academic biblical studies makes room for more editorializing. Lastly, the article answers each theological proposal in kind, with brief theological counterarguments made, not obliquely and paracanonically, but directly from canonical biblical texts. In this way, the article advocates for maintaining the integrity of each discipline: descriptive history of religions and constructive theologizing.

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