Rediscovering Israel’s Messiah

Pro Ecclesia ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 106385122095382
Author(s):  
Jennifer M Rosner
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Vantage Points ◽  
Key Questions ◽  
Land Of Israel ◽  
The Way

In the ongoing endeavor to increasingly recast traditional Christian theology in non-supersessionist terms, recent books by Mark S. Kinzer and Edjan Westerman deserve particular attention. Both authors lucidly illustrate the way in which the gospel of Jesus is intimately bound to the life and destiny of the Jewish people and the land of Israel. From different vantage points, these authors pose a set of key questions to the contemporary church by reframing central aspects of Christian doctrine.

Troeltsch's Eschatological Absolute

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan F. Kuehn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
The Core ◽  
Divine Transcendence ◽  
The Absolute

This study argues that the core of Ernst Troeltsch’s theological project is an eschatological conception of the Absolute. Troeltsch developed his idea of the Absolute from post-Kantian religious and philosophical thought and applied it to the Christian doctrine of eschatology. Troeltsch’s eschatological Absolute must be understood in the context of questions being raised at the turn of the twentieth century by research on New Testament apocalypticism, as well as by modern critical methodologies in the historical sciences. The study is a revisionist response to common approaches to Troeltsch that read him as introducing problematic historicist and immanentist assumptions into Christian theology. Instead it argues that Troeltsch’s theological modernism presents a compelling account of the meaningfulness of history while retaining a commitment to divine transcendence that is unconditioned by history. As such, his theology remains relevant to theological research today, well beyond theological circles that normally take Troeltsch’s legacy to contribute in a constructive way to their work.

The Tenuous Thread: A Venetian Lawyer's Apology for Jewish Self-Government in the Seventeenth Century

AJS Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-250
Author(s):  
David Malkiel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Political Structures

Ghettoization stimulated sixteenth-century Italian Jewry to develop larger and more complex political structures, because the Jewish community now became responsible for municipal tasks. This development, however, raised theological objections in Catholic circles because Christian doctrine traditionally forbade the Jewish people dominion. It also aroused hostility among the increasingly centralized governments of early modern Europe, who viewed Jewish self-government as an infringement of the sovereignty of the state. The earliest appearance of the term “state within a state,” which has become a shorthand expression for the latter view, was recently located in Venice in 1631.

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.

scholarly journals Doing Theology in the Context of the Gift and the Promise of Nostra Aetate

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence W. Tilley
Keyword(s):  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Logical Problem ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Way

This article addresses three problems and suggests ways to address these problems. First, Christian theology has often been supersessionist, especially in Christology and Mariology. Claims about Jesus and Mary being exceptional (in different ways) often involve forms of supersessionism. I report on two theological works that attempt to be orthodoxly Catholic and to avoid supersessionism. Second, I address the conflict between affirming the irrevocable covenant God made with Israel and the universality of salvation God wrought in Jesus. I argue herein that the key problem is logical, not theological. Hence, we should not seek to resolve this problem theoretically, but to dissolve it logically in a manner analogous to the way philosophers of religion have dissolved the logical problem of evil. Third, some have suggested that a commitment to true interreligious dialogue should weaken our commitment to our own tradition. I disagree and show that interreligious dialogue can, in practice, strengthen, not weaken, our commitments to our home tradition. 

Conclusions

2019 ◽  
pp. 243-250
Author(s):  
Lucy C. M. M. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Drama ◽  
Relevant Evidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Questions ◽  
The Way

As well as bringing together all the relevant evidence for the quality and activity of the chorus of drama in the fourth century, this monograph has raised certain key questions about the current understanding of the nature and development of Attic drama as a whole. First, it shows that the supposed ‘civic’ quality of the chorus of drama is, in fact, an association loaned, inappropriately, from the genre of circular, ‘dithyrambic’, choral performance. Being attentive to the cultural differences between these two genres should prompt a further re-evaluation of how to read dramatic choruses more generally. Second, the way in which key fourth-century authors such as Plato and Xenophon use the image of the chorus to discuss the concept of leadership has profoundly shaped ways of construing choreia in ancient Greek drama, and the ancient Mediterranean more generally. Armed with this knowledge, it is possible to retell the story and history of the chorus in drama.

scholarly journals An Altar for Yhwh in the Land of Aram (2 Kings 5:17)

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Nadav Na’aman
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Background ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Original Story ◽  
Land Of Israel ◽  
The Way

Abstract The article discusses the date and cultural background of the Elisha and Naaman story (2 Kings 5). It first analyses the story and emphasizes the difference in its presentation of the prophet and the way he operates vis-à-vis all other stories in the Elisha story-cycle. It then analyses Naaman’s request to carry soil from the Land of Israel in order to erect an altar for Yhwh in Damascus (5:17) and brings evidence that the transportation of earth from one sacred place to another was known in Mesopotamia from the late second millennium BCE onward. In light of all the available evidence, it suggests that the story is not part of Elisha’s original story-cycle; rather, it illuminates the shift of ideas about the prophet, his prophecy, and the land of Israel in the transition from the monarchical to the early post-exilic period.

scholarly journals Christian Theology in the Post-Modern Era

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. Knitter
Keyword(s):  
Christian Theology ◽  
Theological Method ◽  
Reign Of God ◽  
The Times ◽  
It Ethics ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Church ◽  
Moral Convictions ◽  
The Way

Responding to postmodernity as one of the “signs of the times”, Christians will have to carry out a balancing act between commitment to their own convictions and openness to those of others. This has implication for five areas of Christian theology and praxis. In theological method, we must recognise that all our beliefs are symbols that tell us something but never everything about God, self, world. In christology, we understand and follow Christ as the Way that is open to other Ways. The Church will be seen as a community that seeks a Reign of God that will always be more than what we now know of it. Ethics will be based on the principles and practice of non-violence: full commitment to moral convictions joined with genuine respect and compassion toward the convictions of others. Such a theology will need to be rooted in a spirituality in which we are “absolutely” committed to truths that we recognise are always “relative” - a truly eschatological spirituality that is always “on the way”.

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