The Passion Cycle in the Sanctuaries of the Saxon Fortified Churches in Southern Transylvania

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Raluca-Georgiana Cobuz ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mural Painting ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
Passion Narrative ◽  
Strong Link ◽  
Religious Services ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Church

"This paper aims to reconstitute the pictorial program of some medieval Saxon churches’ sanctuaries, which are Mălâncrav, Curciu, Râşnov and Sibiu, with particular interest on the images regarding the Passion Cycle. The article will try to bring a stylistic and iconographic analysis of the Passion Cycle in the sanctuary, episodes that usually appear on the northern choir wall. Therefore, we aim to highlight the reasons why this Passion narrative was chosen to decorate this part of the sanctuary and what was its role both regarding the place that it occupies, that is near the most sacred place of the church, and also the role it had in the religious services. Given the complexity of the narrative programs and the strong link with the biblical texts, the paintings have a double role, both educational and devotional. Keywords: Passion Cycles, mural painting, fortified churches, iconography "

Inspiration and Textual Preservation: A Catholic Essay on the Bible

Pro Ecclesia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 106385122199391
Author(s):  
James B. Prothro
Keyword(s):  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Single Text ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Church

The doctrine of inspiration grounds Christian use and interpretation of Scripture, making this doctrine at once theoretical and practical. Many theoretical accounts, however, restrict the “inspired” status of biblical texts to a single text-form, which introduces problems for the practical use of Scripture in view of the texts’ historical multiformity. This article argues that such restrictions of inspiration are theologically problematic and unnecessary. Contextualizing inspiration within the divine revelatory economy, this article argues that the Spirit’s same goals and varied activities in the texts’ composition obtain also in their preservation, so that we can consider multiple forms of a text to be inspired while acknowledging that not all forms are inspired to equal ends in the history and life of the church. The article concludes with hermeneutical reflections affirming that we, today, can read the “word of the Lord” while also affirming the place of textual criticism in theological interpretation.

scholarly journals Church as a factor in the self-determination of a nation in a cultural and civilized environment

1999 ◽  
pp. 43-52
Author(s):  
Olga Nedavnya
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Church

At the end of the second Christian millennium, Christians united in the church of different denominations and ceremonies. The most devoted ones are looking for ecumenical paths, "that all be one." However, every person is free in his own way to build ties with the Lord. But, as emphasized by the first Metropolitan Rusich Ilarion in the "Word of Law and Grace," every person and the whole people are responsible before God. This statement is based on the authority of biblical texts. Therefore, Christians must worry not only about their own salvation, but also about the best, most natural and most useful arrangement of the Christian life of their nation.

scholarly journals Geloofsekerheid in die kerk se geskiedenis van Bybelinterpretasie

2001 ◽  
Vol 57 (3/4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kobus Labuscbagne
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
History Of Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Original Audience ◽  
The Church

Assurance of faith in the church's history of Biblical interpretation. The aim of this article is to focus on biblical interpretaion. It relects on the implications of biblical interpretaion for the foundaions of faith. People generally understand their world on the basis of their own presupposed convicions and on the basis of what they already know and have experienced of life. This tendency afects interpreters, understanding of the original audience of biblical texts. The article argues that the challenge to study Scipture accurately and objecively requires hermeneutical guidelines from the church in order to prevent subjecivism.

The Marcan Framework

1961 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-294
Author(s):  
Harry Sawyerr
Keyword(s):  
Early Church ◽  
Considerable Time ◽  
Passion Narrative ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Difference ◽  
John's Gospel ◽  
Early Compilation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Vital Element ◽  
The Way

In 1932, Professor Dodd published in the Expository Times an article on ‘The Order of Events in St. Mark's Gospel' which broke fresh ground in the Study of that Gospel. Dr Dodd then stated that in planning the first ten chapters St. Mark had a skeleton outline of our Lord's earthly career which he broke up into what now stand as editorial summaries. This outline he suggested was in the nature of a summary of the kerygma and approximated to the Petrine speech of Acts 10.37–41 or the Pauline speech in Acts 13.23–31. Into this outline were inserted the pericopae Mark collected sometimes on a historical, and at other times on a topical basis. This hypothesis held the field for a considerable time but it has recently been questioned by Professor Nineham in an examination of Dr Dodd's hypothesis in his contribution to Studies in the Gospels published in 1955. Indeed Professor Nineham takes the line that the presupposition of such a skeleton outline of our Lord's ministry which Mark used in the way Dr Dodd suggests is ‘highly improbable’.1 He questions the probability of such an outline having been preserved by the early Church. Referring to the changes in the Marcan pattern which both Matthew and Luke felt free to introduce when using St. Mark's Gospel as a basis, and to the difference in outlook between St. John's Gospel and the Synoptics, he concludes: ‘It does not appear that the precise order in which the saving events occurred seemed to the early Christian mind a very vital element in the saving proclamation or kerygma.'2 Professor Nineham is of course prepared to admit that the Passion narrative is in a class by itself and does not appear to question the accepted opinions of scholars that it was an early compilation of the primitive Church. But he rightly contends that there is no cogent evidence that the Church quite early agreed on ‘a formal outline account of the progress of the Lord's earthly ministry’.3

A Text with Teeth: Augustine’s Exegesis of Song of Songs 4:2 as Paradigm of His Hermeneutics

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Song Of Songs ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
Modern Reader ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Church

In the second book of his treatise on scriptural interpretation, On Christian Doctrine, Augustine introduces the theme of the obscurity of some biblical texts with a quotation from the notoriously difficult Song of Songs: ‘‘Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes coming up from the washing, which all give birth to twins, and there is not one among them that is barren’’ (4:2). Unsurprisingly, he finds references to baptism and the double commandment of love of God and neighbour. What strikes a modern reader is Augustine’s unembarrassed use of violent imagery to describe how the saints cut off errors and then chew the newly converted until they are soft for digestion by the Church. In later texts, Augustine will advert to the violence of biblical imagery to emphasize the necessity of transformation into the likeness of God and to reinforce the eschatological hope of the Church. This paper will examine the role of difficulty and obscurity in Augustine’s understanding of the process by which Scripture forms and orients its readers to prepare them for the vision of heaven.

Brahms's Opus 45 and German Protestant Funeral Music

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 616-640
Author(s):  
Robin A. Leaver
Keyword(s):  
Death And Dying ◽  
The Other ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Basic Understanding ◽  
Funeral Music ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Church

Brahms's German Requiem stands at the end of a long line of Lutheran funerary music. Luther reworked funeral responsories into a new, totally Biblical form, and later Lutherans collected anthologies of Biblical texts on death and dying. Such sources were used by later composers, including Schüütz and Bach, to compose funeral pieces on Biblical texts together with appropriate chorales. Brahms's opus 45 is similar in that its text is made up of Biblical verses assembled by the composer, and connections may be drawn between chorale usage in this work and the composer's Protestant upbringing in Hamburg on one hand, and in his knowledge of two cantatas by Bach (BWV 21 and 27), on the other. The text and structure of the work accord with general, north German Protestantism, and the famous letter to Reinthaler, which many have taken as a demonstration of Brahms's general humanistic tendencies, shows Brahms to be standing aloof from the theological controversies of his day in favor of a basic understanding of Biblical authors. Part of the problem was that the first performance was scheduled for Good Friday in Bremen cathedral; Reinthaler, the organist, and the cathedral clergy would have preferred passion music of some kind and what Brahms gave them was something different. Brahms surely knew of the distinctive Lutheran observance of "Totensonntag," the commemoration of the dead on the last Sunday in the church year (the Sunday before Advent). There are many similarities between Brahms's Requiem and Friedrich Wilhelm Markull's Das Gedäächtnis der Entschlafen (The Remembrance of those Who Sleep) of ca. 1847. Since Markull's work is subtitled Oratorium füür die Todtenfeier am letzten Sonntage des Kirchenjahres (Oratorio for the Celebration of the Dead on the Last Sunday of the Church Year), it is possible that Brahms had the same occasion in mind when composing his German Requiem.

An ‘Unnatural Alliance’ for Religious Toleration: The Philosophes and the Outlawed Pastors of the ‘Church of the Desert’

1973 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-523
Author(s):  
John Dunning Woodbridge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Life Imprisonment ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Religious Services ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reformed Churches ◽  
The Church

The struggles and sacrifices of those pastors and laymen who reconstructed the Reformed churches in southern France during the eighteenth century compose one of the intriguing chapters of the history of the “Church of the Desert.” Members of an outlawed Protestant church in a country which was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic by religion, these pastors and their flocks ran great risks in holding open-air religious services in the secluded and rugged countryside of the Midi—or the “Desert”—in southern France. Attendance at their services was punishable by perpetual service in the king's galleys for the men and life imprisonment for the women; the Reformed pastors who led these meetings did so on pain of death. Not a few of these Calvinists suffered extreme physical and mental anguish because of their obstinate refusal to abandon the faith of their fathers.

scholarly journals Medieval Liturgical Vestments Depicted in the Iconographic Programs of Southern Transylvanian Churches (14th to 16th centuries)

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-55
Author(s):  
Adrian Stoia
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Black Church ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Mural Paintings ◽  
Religious Services ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Church

Abstract This work sets out to list and describe the liturgical vestments present in panel and mural paintings of churches located in southern Transylvania. The surviving body of such vestments on display in the ”Brukenthal” National Museum of Sibiu and that of the Black Church of Brașov not only confirms their use in religious services, but also the fact that they served as models for Transylvanian ecclesiastical painting. Of Western derivation, this type of vestment reflects a way of thinking and stands testament to social status or to the different hierarchies within the church. It is, at the same time, an indication of the development of this kind of craft, produced by specialized workshops.

scholarly journals Defiling the Church: The Impact of Mmusuo in Akan Conception

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Agana-Nsiire Agana ◽  
Charles Prempeh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
African Culture ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

Many Christian churches in parts of Ghana dominated by Akans do not allow corpses to be brought inside the church during funerals services. Others face constant and vehement objection when it is done. Cultural differences on the subject have fuelled heated disputes that have led in some cases to severe congregational division. Opposition is often sustained by a culturally biased approach to biblical texts concerning sacredness and defilement as related to Old Testament sanctuary and temple ritual. Particularly, the religious philosophy of mmusuo provides the psycho-emotive motivation from which many Akan Christians vehemently oppose the practice as sacrilegious. It also provides an analytical and rhetorical framework for appropriating various biblical passages relating to religious sacrilege. This paper unpacks this framework and proposes effectively contextualized theology as a means of avoiding such erroneous conflations and resolving the disputes that arise at the interface of African culture and Christian religion, especially in multicultural congregations.

Rich and poor in the kin-dom of God

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-63
Author(s):  
Debra J. Mumford
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Economic Dynamics ◽  
God's People ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

Prosperity preachers contend that God wants all of God’s people to be rich. However, the reality is that wealth is often gained for the few through the labor of the many. Prosperity for the rich minority in first century Palestine, much like in our day, was made possible by the systematic exploitation of the working class majorities. By studying the socio-economic ecology at work in the biblical texts, we are better able to understand the socio-economic dynamics at play throughout our world (both inside and outside of the church) and develop strategies to secure justice for all of God’s people.

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