The Bible and Popular Christianity in Modern China

2021 ◽  
pp. 574-590
Author(s):  
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee ◽  
Christie Chui-Shan Chow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Bible Reading

This essay investigates the influential role that the Bible played in the sphere of Chinese popular Christianity. It explores the widespread use of the Bible among the lay populace who were traditionally excluded from the concerns and pursuits of Chinese Christian elites in cosmopolitan cities. Beginning with an overview of the cultural influence of the Bible in the mid-nineteenth century, this study argues that the liberating power of the Word was leveraged by peasant converts looking for new cosmologies and norms to change society. The twentieth century witnessed multiple levels of direct engagement with biblical texts, unmediated by foreign missionaries, among Chinese evangelists and congregants. Some drew on new biblical inspirations to found independent churches and sectarian groups, and some relied on the practice of bibliomancy to seek guidance in times of chaos. These examples offer complex view of the symbiosis between Bible reading and conversion in Chinese popular Christianity.

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.

The Quaker Renaissance and Liberal Quakerism in Britain, 1895–1930

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-92
Author(s):  
Joanna Dales
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Liberal Theology ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Educational Initiatives ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Wrath Of God

Abstract Many Quakers who reached maturity towards the end of the nineteenth century found that their parents’ religion had lost its connection with reality. New discoveries in science and biblical research called for new approaches to Christian faith. Evangelical beliefs dominant among nineteenth-century Quakers were now found wanting, especially those emphasising the supreme authority of the Bible and doctrines of atonement whereby the wrath of God is appeased through the blood of Christ. Liberal Quakers sought a renewed sense of reality in their faith through recovering the vision of the first Quakers with their sense of the Light of God within each person. They also borrowed from mainstream liberal theology new attitudes to God, nature and service to society. The ensuing Quaker Renaissance found its voice at the Manchester Conference of 1895, and the educational initiatives which followed gave to British Quakerism an active faith fit for the testing reality of the twentieth century.

A Classification of a Liturgy’s Use of Scripture: A Proposal

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-245
Author(s):  
Matthew S. C. Olver
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Additional Source ◽  
Significant Evidence ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Answering Questions ◽  
Patristic Exegesis

The relationship between scripture and Christian liturgy is one that was discussed and assumed in much of the liturgical and ecumenical literature in the twentieth century. The majority of that work focused on the use of the Bible within liturgical rites in general and not within the text of specific liturgical rites. This article is a constructive proposal of a comprehensive taxonomy to describe all the possible ways that a liturgical text can appropriate scripture as a source. Such attention to the ways biblical texts and exegesis are reflected in euchological texts not only has the potential to provide clarity on how the early Christians related to the Bible in general and within their liturgical rites. It may also provide an additional source for answering questions about the dating and provenance of particular rites by identifying the overlap with strains of patristic exegesis, for which we possess significant evidence.

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.

Writing and Reading about Death

2021 ◽  
pp. 228-244
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The North ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
Basel Mission

This chapter considers the transformation from a culture of speaking about death to one which included writing and reading about death. It spotlights the final quarter of the nineteenth century, from the creation of the British Crown Colony of the Gold Coast in 1874 to its expansion with the formal incorporation of Asante and the savanna hinterland to the north in 1901–2. The chapter focuses on literacy and print culture as they developed on the Gold Coast littoral, a process which would extend into Asante and beyond only in the twentieth century. This print culture comprised both vernacular African languages and, with the departure of the Dutch in 1872, the language of the remaining colonizing power: English. The former was particularly associated with the Basel Mission, whose European and African agents pioneered the transcription of Ga and Twi as written languages and produced the first vernacular printed texts: prayer books, primers, dictionaries, the gospels and, by the 1860s to 1870s, compete translations of the Bible. The Bible, of course, has a great deal to say about mortality and the ends of life, however, the chapter concentrates on a different, secular medium of entextualized discourses about death: newspapers, which, as in Europe, 'accorded mortality new openings.'

Desert Oral Traditions

2018 ◽  
pp. 167-203
Author(s):  
Clinton Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Song Of The Sea ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Bedouin oral literary product—proverbs, genealogies, tribal stories, and poetry—shares many likenesses with these genres as they appear in the Hebrew Bible. This commonality pertains, even though some Bedouin oral traditions survived until the late twentieth century CE, when they were still heard recited, while the biblical traditions existed orally only until their ancient transcription in the Bible. This chapter brings examples from the various genres of oral tradition in both societies, comparing them in form, content, background, and initiative, and offering insights into their use in the biblical texts. Bedouin poetry also sheds light on the Bible’s oldest poems, “The Song of the Sea” and “The Song of Deborah.”

“Motherwork”

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-218
Author(s):  
Jean T. Corey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
The Bible ◽  
To Come ◽  
Interpretive Strategies

Born in 1825, a free African American in Baltimore, Maryland, author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper devoted her life to the struggle for freedom. An abolitionist, and suffragist, the Bible figured prominently in Harper’s poetry, fiction, essays, and speeches. This essay considers how Harper’s poetry particularly challenged her nineteenth century reader to engage in more meaningful biblical interpretive strategies. Anticipating twentieth century Womanist interpretations, Harper disrupts and revises interpretive strategies that had been used to read against the biblical narrative’s message of liberation. Rereading commonly known texts with a different perspective or highlighting lesser known biblical stories, Harper’s biblical interpretations give voice to the voiceless women in the biblical text. Whether writing about women found in the biblical text or women in her own nineteenth century context, Harper’s poetry testifies to the mothers and “othermothers” who have struggled to ensure the dignity and rights of all people, in their own generations, as well as for generations to come.

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Biblical Interpretation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Treier ◽  
Craig Hefner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Theological Education ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Historical Awareness ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Bible Reading ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Formal theological education underwent a twentieth-century revolution that both enriched and fragmented popular Bible reading. Its legacy includes deeper understanding of the Bible and its contexts, new professions of teaching and scholarship, more professional clergy, and liberating critiques of oppressive ideas and practices. Yet its legacy also includes significant fractures, between academy and church, Bible and theology, and so on. Biblical interpretation became marginal to American intellectual life as it became more informed. Theological education’s hermeneutical story highlights the practical-moral agenda of professionals: they sought to inform, frequently even to reform, how Americans approach their Bibles—with historical awareness and various theological-political agendas ideally displacing literalist private application. The mutual popular and professional tensions in this story, given their impact on its interpretation, call for more generous scholarly attention to popular aspirations for understanding the Bible.

Liang Chʻi-chʻao and Intellectual Changes in the Late Nineteenth Century

1969 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Chang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Modern China ◽  
May Fourth Movement ◽  
Fourth Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
The May Fourth Movement

In the cultural transition from traditional to modern China, the decade of the 1890's, along with the early 1900's, stands as an important watershed the significance of which, so far, has not received sufficient appreciation and adequate assessment by historians. Its importance, indeed, can hardly be overestimated. Intellectually, the period saw the conclusion of the ching-shih tradition in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the search for ideological reorientation in the twentieth century. Socially, these years witnessed the differentiation of a hitherto unitary class of gentry into two important status groups which dominated the social scene of twentieth-century China, namely intelligentsia and landlord-gentry. Yet why has such an important watershed so far not received enough attention?Perhaps one reason is that in the past there has been a general tendency among historians to focus attention to the dramatic May Fourth Movement of 1919 as the great divide in the cultural transformation of modern China. This tendency resulted in a widespread impression that during the May Fourth period there was a cataclysmic release of new cultural forces which made a clean sweep of the past and thereby made the post-May Fourth period an entirely different intellectual world from what had been before. Such a view would almost inevitably, as it did, have the consequence of diverting attention away from many important intellectual changes which antedated the May Fourth period and whose significance cannot be appreciated by an isolated focus oh that period. There is no intention here to deny the significance of the May Fourth Movement in the cultural development of modern China. All that is suggested is that the May Fourth Movement needs to be reassessed from a broader historical perspective, a perspective which can only be attained by a detailed investigation of the intellectual changes which took place in the late Ch'ing, in particular, in the decade from mid-1890's to mid-1900's.

The Bible

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Chapter 4 begins with a discussion of attitudes towards biblical criticism in the 1820s and introduces the Irish career of Samuel Davidson, the first British ‘martyr’ to modern criticism. The next section examines Presbyterian biblical scholarship during the mid-nineteenth century with particular emphasis on biblical commentators and missionary explorers who used their first-hand experiences of the Middle East to defend the plenary inspiration and authority of Scripture. There then follows an examination of the wholehearted opposition of Irish Presbyterians to ‘believing criticism’, especially as it developed in the Free Church of Scotland. The final section describes how believing criticism came to be accepted by a number of Presbyterian writers in the early twentieth century, most of whom either spent their careers away from Ireland or came to the colleges from other churches.

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