Ritualizing Iconic Jewish Texts

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-255
Author(s):  
James W. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Bibles and parts of bibles are themselves used as ritual objects in Jewish and Christian worship. Their display and manipulation, oral performance, and semantic interpretation have been ritualized by synagogues and churches since antiquity. The origins of these practices are rooted in the Bible itself. Their influence has shaped every Jewish and Christian tradition and reaches beyond them to Muslims, Manicheans, and other religious communities. This chapter and its companions in this volume on Christianity and Islam focus mostly on how the iconic dimension of scriptures gets ritualized, because the iconic dimension has received less scholarly attention than the ritualization of scripture’s oral performance, artistic illustration, and semantic interpretation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christian Humanism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Zimmermann
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
Christian Humanism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Theological Politics

Based on a comprehensive reading of his entire work, in this book Jens Zimmermann presents Bonhoeffer’s theological ethos as a Christian humanism, that is, as an understanding of the gospel rooted in apostolic and patristic writers who believed God to have renewed humanity in the incarnation. The heartbeat of Bonhoeffer’s Christianity that unifies and motivates his theological writing, his preaching, and his political convictions, including his opposition to the Nazi regime, is the conviction that Christianity as participation in the new humanity established by Christ is about becoming fully human by becoming Christlike. In eight chapters, the author details Bonhoeffer’s humanistic theology following from this incarnational starting point: a Christ-centered anthropology that shows a deep kinship with patristic Christology, a hermeneutically structured theology, an ethic focused on Christ-formation, a biblical hermeneutic centered on God’s transforming presence, and a theological politics aimed at human flourishing. In offering a comprehensive reading of his theology as Christian humanism, Zimmermann not only places Bonhoeffer in the context of the patristic and greater Christian tradition but also makes apparent the relevance of Bonhoeffer’s thought for a number of contemporary concerns: hermeneutic theory, the theological interpretation of the Bible, the relation of reason to faith, the importance of natural law, and the significance of religion for secular societies. Bonhoeffer turns out to be a Christian humanist and a modern theologian who models the deeply orthodox and yet ecumenical, expansive Christianity demanded by our time.

Standardization, Bureaucratization, and Convergence: The Transformation of Governance of Religion in Urbanizing China

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Xiaoxuan Wang
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
State Initiatives ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article explores critical shifts in the governance of religion amid massive urbanization and technological advances in contemporary China. Since the turn of the millennium, along with rapid urban transformation, the Chinese state has greatly expanded its reach into and surveillance of religious communities. At the same time, tensions between state initiatives and religious communities have come to the forefront of public attention. So far, scholarly attention has mostly focused on the repression of religious communities, especially Christians. The goal of this article is to highlight broader transitions in the ways religion is governed in China and to reflect on how these transitions should be understood alongside the government's social and political agendas. The advancement of technologies and the extension of the bureaucratic system to maintain control of a rapidly urbanizing society, I argue, have brought about a “technological turn” of secularism in China, which will have a far-reaching impact on religious life.

scholarly journals Care for the Earth as Archetypal Emergence in the Christian Tradition

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Jonathan Erickson
Keyword(s):  
Belief Systems ◽  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
The Earth

This paper explores the renewed emphasis of care for the Earth in the Christian tradition as an emerging archetypal shift toward Earth-centered psyche. Jung proposed that the Christian psyche would continue to evolve toward greater psychic wholeness. The current trends toward environmental awareness in religious communities offer compelling parallels to Jung’s ideas about the evolution of religious consciousness. “If faith (God) is said to be able to move mountains (Job 9.5; 1 Cor. 13.2), scholars need to explore how belief systems could ‘move’ climates” (Gerten & Bergmann, 2012, p. 13).

MARKETING THE TESTAMENTS: CANONGATE AND THEIR POCKET-SIZED BIBLES

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Positive Potential ◽  
Publishing Firm ◽  
Investment Promotion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
King James Version ◽  
As If

AbstractRecently the Edinburgh-based publishing firm Canongate has brought out the Bible in the form of single books in the King James Version. Each of these volumes is introduced by a writer not necessarily associated with the Christian tradition, thus inviting the readers to approach them as literary works in their own right. For long the Bible came with commentaries written by prominent religious scholars, but now it looks as if it needed an introduction by novelists, pop artists, scientists including and even by some who are outside the Christian tradition to make the once familiar texts now widely neglected in the West come alive again. The purpose of this essay is to look at the following: the positive potential of this Pocket Canon; the role of the interpreter's personal voice within the process of discovering meaning in a narrative; the marketing of the Bible and appropriation of religious themes by secular marketeers; the re-iconization of the Bible though the King James Version; the colonial parallels in the investment, promotion and dissemination of the Bible; and the challenge of personal-voice criticism to biblical studies. Put at its simplest, can this disparate group of essayists rescue the Bible, which is fast losing its grip and importance in the West, and discover fresh significance in it?

North India

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Leonard Fernando SJ
Keyword(s):  
North India ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Nicobar Islands ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Christian Population ◽  
The Church

The Christian population in North India is varied, from less than 1% (in most North Indian states) to 22% in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Many fix its emergence in the 16th century, when Jesuits were invited by the Muslim Emperor Akbar the Great. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many Protestant missionary societies were established in India. Six churches in India united in 1970, forming the Church of North India (CNI). Recently, Christians have been attacked as a threat to the hierarchical social system and threatened by radical Hindu fundamentalism. Amidst the persecutions, Christianity has continued in unique paradigms: whether in the adoption ashram life to promote the mystical traditions of Christianity as well as Hinduism, in translations of the Bible into tribal languages; or in the faculties of philosophy and theology in North India preparing men and women for ministry. Religious communities and NGOs in North India have served those at the peripheries. Lack of growth of Christian communities can be attributed to hostility against Dalit Christians who risk losing constitutional protection given to other Dalits. In fact, the collaboration of lay Christians is on the increase through different associations, basic Christian communities and Charismatic movements.

11. Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 130-140
Author(s):  
John Riches
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Aesthetic Judgement ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Uniform Manner ◽  
The Way

The Bible has been the source of great truth, goodness, and beauty at the same time as it has inspired lies, wickedness, and ugliness. What it has not produced is a uniform manner of its reading and interpretation. The very process of canonization is nevertheless part of an attempt to limit diversity and deviance of belief within religious communities. Ultimately, however, there is no controlling the way it is read. It is important therefore to be critically aware of the different kinds of uses to which the Bible may be put and to learn to discriminate among them. Readers need to exercise their own moral and aesthetic judgement over the different readings which have been offered of these texts, not least in their own traditions. At the same time, their own judgement will be influenced by the texts as they engage more closely with them and their reception.

The Tsene-rene and Purim Plays

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-67
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Veidlinger
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Hebrew Scripture ◽  
Canonical Text ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article addresses some of the ways that Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accessed the Bible. It argues that reading the Hebrew Scripture itself was just one of many ways that common Jews became acquainted with biblical stories, and suggests that historians place greater scholarly attention on the extra-canonical sources Jews commonly used to access biblical narratives. Jewish audiences also heard biblical stories through interpretations, popular retellings, and dramatic performances. The article discusses the most popular Yiddish interpretive retelling, the sixteenth-century Tsene-rene, and demonstrates how some of its variances from the canonical text may have influenced Jewish notions of time and redemption. The article concludes with a discussion of some Purimshpils (plays performed during the holiday of Purim) and how they reinforced the ideas of the Tsene-rene.

Erasmus' Plea for Bible Reading in the Vernacular. The Legacy of the Devotio Moderna?

2008 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-120
Author(s):  
Wim François
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Of Matthew ◽  
Public Access ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Common People ◽  
Initial Exposure ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Devotio Moderna ◽  
Bible Reading

AbstractErasmus has written several pleas for Bible reading in the vernacular, perhaps the most visible being his introduction to the Paraphrases on the Gospel of Matthew. Comparable apologies were already to be found in the milieu of the Dutch Devotio Moderna in the works of, among others, Zerbolt van Zutphen (1367–1398), especially his De libris teutonicalibus and Circa Modum. Erasmus' defences of vernacular Bible translation do not contain verbatim similarities with Zerbolt's works, but the parallels both at the level of the argumentation and the biblical-patristic authorities invoked are striking. There are good reasons to assume that Erasmus was indebted to arguments in favour of the lay Bibles that were already circulating in the milieu in which he was educated in the Low Countries, a milieu that was deeply influenced by the Devotio Moderna. Particular attention is given to a Middle Dutch collation book from the years 1417–1443 (Berchmanianum ms 12 B I), now preserved in the Maurits Sabbe Library of the Leuven Faculty of Theology. The third collation takes Zerbolt's Circa Modum as its basis but provides some supplementary argumentation for the reading of the Bible and other devout books in the vernacular. The argumentation employed exhibits an interesting degree of resemblance with Erasmus' later pleas for a lay Bible. Perhaps Erasmus heard or read the piece when he was a student in Deventer. It should also be observed that Erasmus kept his distance from the inheritance of Devotio Moderna by radicalizing the arguments of Zerbolt. He did not want to reserve individual Bible reading to laici spirituales (those living in semi-religious communities) but wanted to open it to all lay people living in the world. Moreover, he did not only want to place the Gospels, Acts and Psalms at the disposal of the common people but desired to grant the reading public access to all the books of the Bible. The most obvious conclusion is that the Devotio Moderna provided an initial exposure to the ideas that Erasmus apparently reinforced and elaborated as he grew more involved in biblical and patristic studies.

scholarly journals The First Witnesses. Martha, Longinus and Veronica in the Slavic Manuscript Tradition (Initial Observations)

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 101-126
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Skowronek ◽  
Marek Majer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
The One ◽  
Canonical Texts ◽  
Patron Saints ◽  
Popular Texts

The epithet ‘first witnesses’, conferred on the three saints in the title, is but a conventional designation; it seems fitting as common for the figures of saints, who gave proof of their devotion to Christ. Otherwise, although they make no simultaneous appearance in any of the canonical texts, there are – interestingly – far more interconnections between the three characters in pseudo-canonical and legendary literature than could be surmised from the lack thereof in the Bible. The aim of the paper is to present a literary picture of three New Testament heroes, as commemorated in different literary texts representing diverse cultural registers, even from the Ancient Christian Times until the close of the Middle Ages. Among them there are short and extended lives and passions of saints, liturgical poetry, as well as specific, more popular texts, such as ‘tales’ and legends. The material under discussion largely includes texts that form a part of the Slavic Orthodox tradition, depicting them on the background of fairly wellknown works belonging to the Western Christian tradition. It turns out that the legends are inspired by the canonical text on the one hand, while on the other hand they themselves infiltrate official texts – they become officially sanctioned as soon as their popularity is taken over and adopted by liturgical practice. It should be borne in mind that those legends – part of which is known both in the Eastern and in the Western Christianity – confirm one further crucial characteristic of texts constituting the canonical and pseudo-canonical tradition: the commonness of themes and motifs which can without exaggeration be called ‘wandering’. They determine the fact that there is hardly any originality in the formation of the characters of patron saints; moreover, on the level of creating the notion of sainthood and its reception, there seem to be far more common points than differences between both of the Early Christian traditions – the East and the West. The paper is an attempt to point out how the Christian tradition exemplifies various manifestations of holiness, what means it has for annotating, elucidating and embellishing the Biblical hypertext, and how it adapts pseudo-canonical legends for the purposes of liturgical use.

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