Bayle, the Bible, and the Remonstrant Tradition at the Time of the Commentaire philosophique

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria-Cristina Pitassi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reason ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Absolute Norm ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status

Bayle’s equivocal relationship to Arminianism is here examined from the perspective of the status of the Bible. Though rejecting the doctrine that every word was to be considered divinely inspired, Bayle did defend the divinity of Scripture in his polemic with Jean Le Clerc. For Le Clerc, biblical criticism could solve theological conflicts by discovering the authentic meaning of Scripture, but Bayle insisted that natural light precedes exegesis, and revelation is limited to those matters that do not conflict with reason. He dissociates himself from Socinianism by distinguishing moral from speculative reason. Only moral reason offers an absolute norm. Bayle disregards the Arminian distinction between what is against reason and what is beyond reason. His Commentaire philosophique juxtaposes the natural light that can identify divine elements in the Bible with our historical reality that frustrates its capacity for apprehending religious truths. Thus Bayle inevitably clashes with the Arminian tradition.

Scripturalizing and the Second Amendment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamond C. Rodman
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
White Children ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Half Decade

Expanding beyond the text of the Bible, this chapter explores instead a piece of political scripture, namely the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Over the last half-decade, the Second Amendment has come to enjoy the status of a kind of scripture-within-scripture. Vaulted to a much more prominent status than it had held in the first 150 years or so of its existence, and having undergone a remarkable shift in what most Americans think it means, the Second Amendment provides an opportunity to examine the linguistic, racial, and gendered modes by which these changes were effected, paying particular attention to the ways in which white children and white women were conscripted into the role of the masculine, frontier-defending US citizen.

Conclusion: The Bible Human and Divine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Word Of God ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Public Church

The conclusion recapitulates the variegated dynamics at play in the interpretation and use of the Bible in the Dutch Public Church when Spinoza articulated his biblical criticism. Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus did not suddenly open the eyes of his contemporaries to the technical and philosophical problems of identifying a text with the Word of God. Rather it arrived at an extremely delicate moment, when forces from various directions were already contesting one another over the authority to interpret Scripture in their own ways. These forces had their own momentum when refuting Spinoza’s outlandish appeal to biblical philology, and responded in turn to one another inlight of the new reality. In result, by 1700 the space allowed for exegetical variety within the doctrinal enclosure of the Public Church had gradually widened, but it remained a contested terrain where innovations were easily considered, or branded, harmful to ecclesiastical unity.

Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Divine Election ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Way

Chapter 1 homes in on Spinoza as a Bible critic. Based on existing historiography, it parses the main relevant historical contexts in which Spinoza came to articulate his analysis of the Bible: the Sephardi community of Amsterdam, freethinking philosophers, and the Reformed Church. It concludes with a detailed examination of the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza’s major work of biblical criticism. Along the way I highlight themes for which Spinoza appealed to the biblical texts themselves: the textual unity of the Bible, and the biblical concepts of prophecy, divine election, and religious laws. The focus is on the biblical arguments for these propositions, and the philological choices that Spinoza made that enabled him to appeal to those specific biblical texts. This first chapter lays the foundation for the remainder of the book, which examines issues of biblical philology and interpretation discussed among the Dutch Reformed contemporaries of Spinoza.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

Biblical Criticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Briggs
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Interpretive Method ◽  
Interpretive Practices ◽  
History Of Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Impact

The Bible as a text can be read with or without reference to its compilation as a theologically constructed collection of sacred Jewish and Christian books. When read without such framing concerns, it may be approached with the full range of literary and theoretical interpretive tools and read for whatever purpose readers value or wish to explore. Less straightforwardly, in the former case where framing concerns come into play, the Bible is both like and unlike any other book in the way that its very nature as a “canon” of scripture is related to particular theological and religious convictions. Such convictions are then in turn interested in configuring the kinds of readings pursued in certain ways. Biblical criticism has undergone many transformations over the centuries, sometimes allowing such theological convictions or practices to shape the nature of its criticism, and at other times—especially in the modern period—tending to relegate their significance in favor of concerns with interpretive method, and in particular questions about authorial intention, original context, and interest in matters of history (either in the world behind the text, or in the stages of development of the text itself). From the middle of the 20th century onwards the interpretive interests of biblical critics have focused more on certain literary characteristics of biblical narratives and poetry, and also a greater theological willingness to engage the imaginative vision of biblical texts. This has resulted in a move toward a theological form of criticism that might better be characterized as imaginative and invites explicit negotiation of readers’ identities and commitments. A sense of the longer, premodern history of biblical interpretation suggests that some of these late 20th- and early 21st-century emphases do themselves have roots in the interpretive practices of earlier times, but that the Reformation (and subsequent developments in modern thinking) effectively closed down certain interpretive options in the name of better ordering readers’ interpretive commitments. Though not without real gains, this narrowing of interpretive interests has resulted in much of the practice of academic biblical criticism being beholden to modernist impulses. Shifts toward postmodern emphases have been less common on the whole, but the overall picture of biblical criticism has indeed changed in the 21st century. This may be more owing to the impact of a renewed appetite for theologically imaginative readings among Christian readers, and also of the refreshed recognition of Jewish traditions of interpretation that pose challenging framing questions to other understandings.

The Bible and Israeli Identity

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Shapira
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
National Life ◽  
National Romanticism ◽  
Land Of Israel

ldquo;In our two thousand years of exile, we have not totally lost our creativity, but the sheen of the Bible dulled in exile, as did the sheen of the Jewish people. Only with the renewal of the homeland and Hebrew independence have we been able to reassess the Bible in its true, full light,” Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1953. This statement illustrates several core attitudes of the Jewish national renaissance movement towards the Bible. Ben-Gurion depicted a direct relationship between the state of the Jewish people and the status of the Bible: The two rose and fell together. His words are reminiscent of philosopher Martin Buber, Revisionist leader Zeءev Jabotinsky, and others, all of whom postulated a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: “Just as the Jewish people need the land to live a full life, so the land needs the Jewish people to be complete” wrote Buber. The Bible, according to Ben-Gurion, was the third component of the Jewish “holy trinity” of people, land, and book. It served as testimony of Jewish national life in the land of Israel in former times, as a blueprint for reestablishing this way of life, as proof of a glorious past and promise for the future. It nurtured a national romanticism and both inspired and buttressed universal ideas; it was the bedrock of myth and epos, of earthliness and valor, and also of a system of ethics and faith that rein in and restrain muscle and brawn. It was paradoxical proof of both Jewish uniqueness and Jewish similitude, “like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5); “materialism” and “spirituality”; historical continuity and historical severance between the people and the land.

Desert Society

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-106
Author(s):  
Clinton Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
Common Descent ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status

Dwelling in dispersion and far from any governmental law enforcement agencies that could provide them security, nomadic desert dwellers needed ways to protect themselves from violations such as murder, assault, insult, and theft. They achieved this security mainly by forming groups based on blood kin, or people of common descent, people whom they believed would honor claims of common loyalty and cooperation when problems with others arose. Each group they organized had a specific security function. The tribal structure of the Israelites as randomly noted in the Bible bears several similarities to that of the Bedouin. This chapter explores these similarities as well as their impact on the status and roles of the genders and on the institution of matrimony in both societies.

scholarly journals Jung, the Pentateuch and ethics

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 653-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eben Scheffler
Keyword(s):  
Modern Human ◽  
Analytical Psychology ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Ethical Behaviour ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Psychological Biblical Criticism ◽  
Genesis 1

This article reflects on the contribution  that can  be made to the interpretation of the Bible by employing the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. After some relevant biographical considerations on Jung, his view of religion and the Bible is briefly considered, followed by a look into Genesis 1-3 in terms of his distinction of archetypes. It is suggested in the conclusion that Jungian psychological Biblical criticism can lead to a changed, but fresh view on the ‘authority’ or influence of the Bible in the lives of (post)modern human beings and their (ethical) behaviour.

In Defence of the Other: Deconstruction and the Bible

1992 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Mark Coleridge
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
The Bible

The article sketches the context and character of deconstruction and, at a time when deconstructionist perspectives are showing themselves surprisingly persistent in the humanities, urges that biblical criticism engage the claims of deconstruction before dismissing them - and this with a view to entering into a more vigorous and enriching conversation with the humanities. The article concludes by viewing aspects of the Lukan Infancy Narrative through the lens of deconstruction, showing that even here “signification overruns nomination without return”. To that extent, God appears in Luke 1–2 as one who stands up in defence of the other.

person’s use of the Bible as the most important religious authority was implicitly to devalue the elaborate edifices protecting scriptural interpretation that prevailed in all the historic European churches, Protestant as well as Catholic. The institutions compromised by such logic included established churches defined as authoritative communicators of divine grace through word and sacrament, institutions of higher learning monopolized by the establishment in order to protect intellectual activity from religious as well as rational error, and the monarchy as the primary fount of godly social stabil-ity. British Protestant Dissent moved somewhat more cautiously in this direction. But even after the rise of Methodism and the reinvigoration of the older Dissenting traditions, the strength of evangelicalism among British establishmentarians never permitted the kind of thoroughly voluntaristic ecclesiology that prevailed in the United States. On questions of establishment, post-Revolutionary American evangeli-calism marked a distinct development from the colonial period when the most important evangelical leaders had spoken with opposing voices. Some, like Charles Wesley, whose hymns were being used in America from the 1740s, remained fervent defenders of the status quo. Some, like George Whitefield, gave up establishment in practice but without ever addressing the social implications of such a move and without being troubled by occa-sional relapses into establishmentarian behaviour. Some, like the Baptists in America from the 1750s, renounced establishment with a vengeance and became ardent proponents of disestablishment across the board. Some, like the American Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, eagerly threw establishment away in the enthusiasm of revival, only later to attempt a partial recovery after enthusiasm cooled. Some, like John Wesley, gave up establishment instincts reluctantly, even while promoting religious practices that others regarded as intensely hostile to establishment. Some, like Francis Asbury, the leader of American Methodists, gave it up without apparent trauma. Many, like Jonathan Edwards and the leading evangelical laymen of the Revolutionary era – John Witherspoon, Patrick Henry and John Jay – never gave up the principle of establishment, even though they came to feel more spiritual kinship with evangelicals who attacked established churches (including their own) than they did with many of their fellow establishmen-tarian Protestant colleagues who did not embrace evangelicalism. By the late 1780s, except in New England, this mixed attitude towards formal church and state ties had been transformed into a nearly unanimous embrace of disestablishment. Even in Connecticut and Massachusetts, where evangelical support of the Congregational establishments could still be found, the tide was running strongly away from mere toleration towards full religious liberty. Methodism was an especially interesting variety of evangelicalism since its connectional system retained characteristics of an establishment (especially the human authority of Wesley, or the bishops who succeeded Wesley). But

2003 ◽  
pp. 160-161
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Partial Recovery ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
The Status ◽  
George Whitefield
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