The Spirit of Life and the Spirit of Immortality: An Appreciative Review of Levison’s Filled with the Spirit

Pneuma ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank D. Macchia

AbstractLevison’s Filled with the Spirit explores the deep difference between the two Testaments in how Spirit filling is understood. While the Old Testament holds Spirit filling to be a flourishing of human life through an interaction of divine and human initiatives, the New Testament sees it as a subsequent gift granted supernaturally through faith in Christ. Yet, there is also a sense of continuity in the midst of this difference, especially in how the flourishing of life resists death. This review appreciatively explores Levison’s understanding of such biblical tensions and continuities in the light of the one-sided accent of Pentecostalism on the supernatural quality of life in the Spirit, but also in the light of the question as to whether or not Levison has unnecessarily widened the gap between the pneumatologies of the two Testaments.

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-229
Author(s):  
Michael Straus

AbstractThis article takes as its springboard the well-known text of Psalm 2:7, in which the Psalmist – presumably David, king of Israel – refers to himself as a ‘begotten’ son of God by virtue of his Lord's decree. The article first explores various linguistic and theological options as to the identity of the ‘son’ to whom the passage refers; and analyses the relationship between that son and the one who is stated to have begotten him. In this context, the article addresses ways in which the passage more generally sheds light on the relationship between God and Israel, including through analysis of a number of fluctuating usages of singular and plural terms in the Old Testament to describe that relationship. Second, and against that background, the article examines texts in the New Testament which quote or refer to Psalm 2:7 to see whether they provide a better understanding of the nature of the relationship between the father and the son described in the Psalm; and further to see whether any enhanced understanding of that relationship reciprocally sheds light on the relationship of God the Father to God the Son as revealed in the New Testament. The article then seeks to determine whether these passages, taken as a whole, provide explicit, implicit, or proto-Trinitarian concepts in anticipation of those given fuller expression in orthodox Church doctrine. Finally, the article explores the concept of circumincession, or coinherence, John of Damascus’ highly abstracted and nearly poetic effort at the close of the Patristic era to provide an extra-biblical explanation of the relationship between the Father and the Son as well as the relationship among the three members of the Trinity. The article concludes by finding that his attempted articulation, and quite possibly all such efforts, will ultimately fail, leaving intact the mystery of the Trinity as one escaping, or rather surpassing, conceptual analysis.


1981 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morna D. Hooker

It seemed appropriate that a lecture given to honour a scholar whose concerns have been centred on the Old Testament, by someone whose field is the New Testament, should link together these two topics. I have therefore chosen to consider one aspect of the problem of the way in which the Old Testament is interpreted by New Testament authors: more specifically, the authority ascribed by one of them – St Paul – to the Old Testament in relation to the revelation of God in Christ.


1969 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-188
Author(s):  
P. C. Craigie

The declaration that ‘Yahweh is a Man of Wars’page 1 poses a problem for the modern reader of the Old Testament. The direct connexion between God and war seems to be alien to the spirit of the New Testament. And today, when the horrors of war are so constantly in the news, this epithet for God seems to be all the more abhorrent. The epithet was quoted at the beginning of an article in an earlier volume of this Journal, A. Gelston's ‘The Wars of Israel’.page 2 The problem becomes most acute in the question of the wars of conquest, for there we can trace two aspects of Yahweh's activity. On the one hand, Yahweh uses war as a means of judgment on the sinful Canaanitespage 3; on the other hand, He uses war as a means to an end, namely the fulfilment of the patriarchal and Covenant promises.page 4 Although Gelston mentions this double aspect of the wars of conquest (p. 326), his conclusions only satisfy the former of the two aspects (p. 331). Of his five summary points, two are applicable to this particular case. The first is that ‘when Yahweh is identified with Israel's cause, the motive is usually the execution of judgment on Yahweh's enemies’, and secondly he declares that ‘Yahweh alone is ultimately sovereign in human history, and his cause is always just’.


PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-789 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Bushnell

For many commentators on tragic temporality, tragic time is the “now,” binding the characters—the actors of the catastrophe—in the anxiety and horror of a blinding present moment. As Northrop Frye observed in his Fools of Time, “The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation” (3). In performance, in particular, that presentness feels relentless: as Stanley Cavell writes, tragic performance “demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this moment, while each thing that happens turns a leaf of time” (93). This sense of the present mimics our everyday sense of how we live in this world: in David Kastan's words, “Tragic time is, then, the experiential time of human life—a time, that like life itself to which it is inextricably tied, is directional, irreversible, and finite” (80).


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Danuta Ślęczek-Czakon

The concept of the quality of life: The medical and the bioethical aspectThe concept of the quality of life initially contained mainly objective indicators. It was only later that it was extended so as to include the subjective ones as well. Upon its transfer from its original medical context into the social sciences, the concept of the quality of life has inspired a new approach to sick persons. It is now acknowledged that it is not enough to merely prolong a life. It also has to meet the standards generally recognized by active, healthy people. In the assessment of the quality of life both objective state of human health and socio-economic status and subjective satisfaction with life and perception of each other indicators are used. It is used, among other things, to evaluate the effects of medical and non-medical health care and medical intervention. In bioethics, it is noted that the term diminishes the value of human life. The methods used to assess the value of human life based on economic analysis and the measuring of the quality of life can lead to undesirable consequences. Conclusion: on the one hand, the estimation of the quality of life is imminent for various reasons; on the other hand, however, it raises ethical objections.


1958 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 406-422
Author(s):  
A. A. Solomon

‘Election is the love of God enacted and inserted into history in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so that in the strictest sense Jesus Christ is the election of God. ’1 In these words of Professor T. F. Torrance, as I hope to show in this essay, lies the heart of the New Testament conception of election. It is ‘in Christ’ that the primitive Church under-stands the meaning and purpose of Election rather than in the Old Testament ‘teaching’ regarding election; although, of course, she does look back to the Old Testament as ground for claiming the existence of an election as such. That is to say, the Church does not invent the idea of the Election, but rather takes up that idea and finds in her own existence and nature the meaning and purpose of election. It is the New Testament that illumines the shadowy Old Testament figure of Election with the light of the glory of Christ. Because of this, we must expect not only to see Election more clearly, as it were, in the New than in the Old Testament, but also we must expect to find in it new truth and new implications.At precisely what point in the biblical witness did the act of election begin? Who are the elect or chosen in the sight of the biblical writers? Writers tend to vary among themselves as to the answer to these questions.


Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert

Chapter 5 shows that Scaliger’s heritage could be used to different ends. Grotius used the tool of biblical philology to back up his somewhat naïve ideal of religious ecumenism between Protestantisms and Catholicism. As a reincarnation of Erasmus, he miserably failed to convince either party, but left an impressive set of annotations on the Old Testament and particularly on the New Testament, which trumped Heinsius’s annotations both in clarity and in sharpness. More than Heinsius, Grotius employed linguistic and political contextualization from pagan history, in the train of Scaliger, and also inspired by John Selden. There was competition between the one-time youthful friends Heinsius and Grotius. Contrary to Heinsius’s more neutral approach, Grotius’s philological study of the Bible ran parallel to a sustained polemic over religious politics.


Author(s):  
Hauna T. Ondrey

Chapter 2, “Theodore of Mopsuestia: The Twelve within the First Age,” identifies the primary role Theodore assigns the Twelve Prophets in their ministry to Old Testament Israel as predicting future events in order to demonstrate God’s care, sovereignty, and providential oversight of Israel’s history. He additionally emphasizes the prophets’ revelatory role in educating Israel of the one creator God and his attributes. Consistent with his Commentary on John and catechetical homilies, Theodore is insistent that none of the Trinitarian hypostases was revealed prior to Christ’s Trinitarian command at Matthew 28. However, Theodore does identify some prophecies as having their literal fulfilment in the New Testament, distinct from both types and retrospective accommodation. Yet even as this reinstates christological prophecy within Theodore’s Old Testament exegesis, it exposes his problematic Christology, as he clearly separates the son of David from the Son of God.


Author(s):  
Dr. Kalsoom Bibi

Shari’ah stands for the laws of Allah. Ma'qasid e Shari’ah means all those laws which existed before the revelation of Qur’an in the shape of the holy scriptures i.e the Old Testamant, the New Testament which were given to Prophet Moses and Jesus respectively. In all these religions basic beliefs, Principles and worships are common (Same), but there is a difference in practices and the way they were exercised. A number of jurists have mentioned past laws as a source of Islamic laws. According to them these are valid until any argument rises against them. Some jurists do not agree with the point and they claim that past laws were sent for specific time and era, so these are not valid now.The last religious laws mean last revelation revealed upon the holy prophet Muhammad (PBUH) by God. The most prominent Quality of the new laws as compared to past laws is that these are not specific to any era and time. The human life always subject to evolution and when there comes a change in the society, it causes and requires change in religious laws. The Shari’ah laws and human’s need should be a compatible thus the Shari’ah laws are obligated to provide better legal procedure and principles for human guidance according to time and environment. It is very important to explian the original meaning of shari’Éh and descirbe the basic concept and the aims of Shari’ah and also determine the relation between the new laws and the pre-Islamic laws.


2021 ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Kristin Swenson

This chapter tackles the issue of why there is no such thing as an “original” Bible. When it comes to the Bible, “going back to the original” usually means referring to the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts, since those are, respectively, the languages of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament, from which our translations come. However, there is simply no single Bible that old or that otherwise stands as “The One” that gave rise to them all. Our earliest versions come from hundreds of years after the Bible's (both Jewish and Christian versions) contents were finalized. There is no authoritative ur-text that can be consulted for the final word. But while there is no such thing as an original Bible, the facts of the Bible's development, the admission that we have fragments of copies sometimes with competing claims or inscrutable passages, invites us to reconsider the most basic ways to read it.


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