Biblical Criticism and the Challenge of Postmodernism

1995 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Terence J. Keegan
Keyword(s):  
Reader Response ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

AbstractPostmodernism involves recognizing that the objective certitude sought by modern scientific and humanistic methods is not possible. Deconstruction paved the way for postmodernism in literary studies, but it is most evident in the work of some reader-response critics. Many reader-response critics utilize the indeterminacy of postmodern insight but are hesitant to accept its subjectivist implications. Biblical scholars tend to prefer methods that yield verifiable results, but some have successfully used postmodern approaches. Christian scholars, though committed to an idea of transcendence to which postmodernism seems to deny access, can still profitably use postmodern approaches but must be prepared to deal with such questions as inspiration and the relation of scholarship to the Church.

Community and Controversy: Jews, Anglicans, and Biblical Criticism in Mid-Victorian England

AJS Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Edward Breuer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Jewish Scholar ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Mid-nineteenth-century Victorian England was roiled by public controversies regarding the legitimacy of biblical criticism, largely fueled by Anglicans and the Church of England establishment. Jews were well aware of these public controversies and even spoke out in a forthright manner. At this very juncture there was also a rather remarkable Jewish scholar, Marcus Kalisch, who began to advance critical notions in his commentary to the Pentateuch, ultimately coming to conclusions not altogether different from the leading critical scholars in Germany. This article explores the way in which Anglo-Jews first avoided, and then finally confronted, Kalisch's work, and what that said about communal sensitivities and self-consciousness.

A. H. Clough: a case study in Victorian doubt

1972 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 383-389
Author(s):  
P. G. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

In 1868, F. W. Farrar addressed the Church Congress in Dublin on the reasons why young men were increasingly alienated from the church: ‘the alienation of the most highly educated’, he declared, ‘is as much an intellectual as the alienation of the uneducated is a moral and social phenomenon’. The emphasis we have inherited on the intellectual difficulties in religious belief felt by Victorian doubters of the upper-middle classes has obscured the extent to which their alienation, like that of the uneducated, was part of a broader shift in attitudes. This change of attitudes could precede disengagement from institutional religious allegiance by many years, and had little to do with specific intellectual difficulties. Discussion in terms of ‘difficulties’ caused by geology, biblical criticism, and so on, may be the way doubters chose to explain their detachment from the Church, and only one cause among many of that detachment.

AUX FONDEMENTS DE L’INSTITUTION ECCLÉSIALE: LA POSITION DE SAINT PIERRE PARMI LES APÔTRES (MT 16, 13–20) ET SON RETENTISSEMENT Á L’ÉPOQUE APOSTOLIQUE ET PATRISTIQUE

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-105
Author(s):  
Jacek Wojda
Keyword(s):  
Special Role ◽  
Church Community ◽  
Special Place ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Big activity passed Popes, with the least Francis Bergoglio, is a question about receptiontheir lives and action, especially in times of modern medium broadcasting. Sometimes presentedcontent could be treated as sensation, and their receptiveness deprived of profound historical andtheological meaning. This article depends of beginnings of the Church, when it started to organizeitself, with well known historically-theological arguments. Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ andgot special place among Apostles. His role matures in young Church community, which is escapingfrom Jewish religion.Peter tramps the way from Jerusalem thru Antioch to Rome, confirming his appointing to thefirst among Apostles and to being Rock in the Church. Nascent Rome Church keeps this specialPeter’s succession. Clement, bishop of Rome, shows his prerogatives as a successor of Peter. Later,bishop of Cartagena, Cyprian, confirms special role both Peter and each bishop of Rome amongother bishops. He also was finding appropriate role for each of them. Church institution, basedon Peter and Apostles persists and shows truth of the beginnings and faithfulness to them innowadays papacy.Methodological elements Presented in the introduction let for the lecture of Gospel and patristictexts without positivistic prejudices presented in old literature of the subject.

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.

Outing the Perverse

2018 ◽  
pp. 251-268
Author(s):  
Leland S. Person
Keyword(s):  
Reader Response ◽  
Reader Responses ◽  
The Way

This reader-centered essay examines four of Poe’s murder tales (“The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Cask of Amontillado”) by focusing on the way Poe seduces readers into identifying with criminals. Using Poe’s concept of “perverseness”—the irresistible impulse to do what one should not—the essay examines the ways that Poe plays with perverseness as a means of manipulating reader response. The Imp impels confession in “Imp of the Perverse” but compels both murder and confession in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as perverseness becomes an authorial power. “The Cask of Amontillado” represents the culmination of Poe’s experiment with perverseness, as he manipulates reader responses through first, second, and third readings of the tale.

scholarly journals Die roeping van die kerk

2013 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaco Beyers
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
God's Call ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

The calling of the church. The question as to the calling of the church is not a practical but a theological issue. The church can easily keep itself busy with activities that seem important. However, are these activities really the motivation behind God’s call to the church? This article investigates the calling of the church as perceived from various relationships: church and world, church and culture and church and church. Church and world addresses the age-old argument that the church is in the world but not of the world. The church does have an obligation in the world towards politics and ecology. Another factor addressed in the article is the way in which the church copes with the secularised society. Regarding culture, the premise is that the church has no obligation towards culture. Culture merely becomes a means to an end for the church. The church wants to exist in a ‘free culture’, as Barth suggests. When discussing the calling of the church, an ecclesiology of some sorts is in fact presented. This is reflected in the paragraph on church and church. The church is always seen in relationship with God’s intention with the community He assembles. This might be the true calling of the church: to be a community that calls others to community.

Church Discipline in the Later Middle Ages: the Priors of Durham as Archdeacons

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Margaret Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

It is often forgotten that the medieval Church imposed public penance and reconciliation by law. The discipline was administered by the church courts, among which one of the most important, because it acted at local level, was that of the archdeacon. In the later Middle Ages and certainly by 1435, the priors of Durham were archdeacons in all the churches appropriated to the monastery. The priors had established their rights in Durham County by the early fourteenth century and in Northumberland slightly later. Although the origins of this peculiar jurisdiction were long ago unravelled by Barlow, there is no full account of how it worked in practice. Yet it is not difficult from the Durham archives to elicit a coherent account, with examples, of the way penance and ecclesiastical justice were administered from day to day in the Durham area in this period. The picture that emerges from these documents, though not in itself unusual, is nevertheless valuable and affords an extraordinary degree of detail which is missing from other places, where the evidence no longer exists. This study should complement the recent work by Larry Poos for Lincoln and Wisbech, drawing attention to an institution which would reward further research. It is only possible here to outline what the court did and how and why it was used.

Le protestantisme et les modes d’institutionnalité du religieux. Complexifier le type « Église »

2012 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-514
Author(s):  
Jean-Paul Willaime
Keyword(s):  
Religious Groups ◽  
Institutional Model ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Protestantism includes Church-type as well as Sect-type ecclesiastical organizations. Its study therefore allows the Weberian typology to be elaborated. In terms of the way in which religious groups define their legitimacy, their ritual, ideological and charismatic characteristics acquire greater or lesser importance. As regards the Church-type, the author proposes a distinction between a ritual-institutional and an ideological-institutional model. In the Protestant world, legitimacy is better established through ideology (theology) and the authority of the ‘doctor-preacher’ than by ritual and charismatic function. Protestantism represents another mode of Church-type religious institutionalism as well as another mode of Sect-type religious association.

Between Uniatism and Arabism

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 361-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norig Neveu
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Adaptation Strategy ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
International Networks ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

Abstract In the Emirate of Transjordan, the interwar period was marked by the emergence of the Melkite Church. Following the Eastern rite and represented by Arab priests, this church appeared to be an asset from a missionary perspective as Arab nationalism was spreading in the Middle East. New parishes and schools were opened. A new Melkite archeparchy was created in the Emirate in 1932. The archbishop, Paul Salman, strengthened the foundation of the church and became a key partner of the government. This article tackles the relationship between Arabisation, nationalisation and territorialisation. It aims to highlight the way the Melkite Church embodied the adaptation strategy of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches in Transjordan. The clergy of this national church was established by mobilising regional and international networks. By considering these clerics as go-between experts, this article aims to decrypt a complex process of territorialisation and transnationalisation of the Melkite Church.

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