What Did We Hear at Sinai?

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-144
Author(s):  
Larry Tabick
Keyword(s):  
The Bible ◽  
Ten Commandments

This article examines key texts on the experience of the giving of the Ten Commandments from the Bible, through rabbinic tradition, medieval commentators and two Hasidic masters.

scholarly journals Jacobus Capitein: Champion for Slavery and Resisting Mimic?

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Hendrik L. Bosman
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
First Year ◽  
Hybrid Identity ◽  
University Of Leiden ◽  
The Public ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The University

Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein (1717-1747) was a man of many firsts-the first black student of theology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, the first black minister ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands, the author of the first Fante/Mfantse-Dutch Grammar in Ghana as well as the first translator of the Ten Commandments, Twelve Articles of Faith and parts of the Catechism into Fante/Mfantse. However, he is also remembered as the first African to argue in writing that slavery was compatible with Christianity in the public lecture that he delivered at Leiden in 1742 on the topic, De Servitute Libertati Christianae Non Contraria. The Latin original was soon translated into Dutch and became so popular in the Netherlands that it was reprinted five times in the first year of publication. This contribution will pose the question: Was Capitein a sell-out who soothed the Dutch colonial conscience as he argued with scholarly vigour in his dissertation that the Bible did not prohibit slavery and that it was therefore permissible to continue with the practice in the eighteenth century; or was he resisting the system by means of mimicry due to his hybrid identity - as an African with a European education - who wanted to spread the Christian message and be an educator of his people?

scholarly journals Kerk en burgerlike owerheid: Die Nederlandse geloofsbelydenis en drie kerkordes

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Piet J. Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Church History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
Church Life ◽  
Reformed Churches ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

Church and state authorithy: The Confessio Belgica and three church orders. In reformed churches the Bible is regarded as the norm of the norms. The confessions of faith of these churches are the second norm and subjected to the Bible. The church order is less powerful than the Bible and the confessions but of a higher status than the normal decisions of church assemblies. Therefore, the influence of the Belgic Confession on three church orders is an important issue in these churches.The author recommends four principles to understand the relation between the church and the state authority in article 36 of the Belgic Confession: both should honour God in their activities; both are guided by the Ten Commandments; both have their own internal law to fulfil the purpose as an institution; and both should respect and co-operate with one another. Although they are not in agreement on every aspect, these principles give the guidance to understand the main issue in all four documents which are investigated. The theme of this article is of a theological and church historical nature and a contribution on a well-discussed topic in reformed churches.Contribution: It should be important for the reformed churches in the Dutch tradition that a dynamic relationship exists between their confessions of faith and their church orders. While the Bible is the first and most important norm for church life, the confessions are the second most important. Church history shows that the relationship between the church and state is of utmost importance for the church, the quality of the confessions and the order of the church.

The Ten Commandments, Postcards, and Methodological Issues and Opportunities

2020 ◽  
pp. 503-520
Author(s):  
Scott M. Langston
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Dynamic Interplay

Understanding the relationship between the Bible and popular culture requires a multidimensional approach that recognizes and integrates the various factors involved in particular uses of the Bible. Rather than studying these features in isolation from each other, focusing on their dynamic interplay demonstrates how biblical texts function as but one of many components in larger cultural productions. Furthermore, it shows how popular culture can act as a filter that selects and excludes elements of a biblical text for its own purposes, while transforming the text’s meanings. Popular uses of the Bible frequently reflect keen insight into biblical texts and often create innovative readings that go beyond academic methodologies, purposes, and abilities. Scholars therefore can learn much about the Bible from popular culture. Gilded Age and Progressive Era picture postcards of the Ten Commandments reflect this interplay, illustrating how factors such as capitalism, Victorian gender norms, American Protestant Christianity, and American exceptionalism combined to shape biblical expressions and uses.

In Our Own Image, After Our Likeness

2020 ◽  
pp. 308-315
Author(s):  
Charles Hatfield
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Exhibition Design ◽  
California State University ◽  
State University ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Design Comparison ◽  
Picture Stories

This chapter includes a 2010 article by author, scholar, and California State University Northridge professor, Charles Hatfield, recollecting his experience viewing the R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and providing in-depth analysis of Crumb’s Genesis book. This chapter discusses narrative in exhibitions, exhibition design, comparison of Crumb’s work with illustrations by Basil Wolverton, Picture Stories from the Bible, The Picture Bible, and DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments. Images: Hammer exhibition photo, comparative panels from Crumb and Wolverton.

The Land Ethic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marybeth Lorbiecki
Keyword(s):  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Ecological Literacy ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
Land Ethic ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
Back Door

Cooking my house specialty, New Mexican green chili, I heard the knock at the back door and dried my hands to open it for my expected guest. Shyly, the young man in the collar offered a bouquet of bright spring flowers and another gift, the golden- sunned paperback copy of A Sand County Almanac. “I thought you might like this—it’s a favorite of mine.” He had no idea how beloved this book was to me, or the author. In this small gesture, I felt like he was unintentionally offering me a concrete symbol of the growing bridge between the spiritual ethics of Aldo Leopold the naturalist and scientist, and his beloved wife, Estella, the devout Roman Catholic. Leopold had once noted that we would not ever come to integrating a land ethic into our American culture until churches and faith communities got involved. This obviously makes sense when you consider that only a small percentage of the nation, and indeed the world, possess a depth of scientific and/or ecological literacy. But in 2014, over 75% of Americans (and 84% worldwide in 2010) self-described themselves as having a religious affiliation. Another substantially growing group consider themselves spiritual, though not affiliated or have “fallen away” from their original religious practice. Scientific findings though rationally convincing often have less power to move people in their decision making, or perspectives, than faith. In the past, this has often led to land damage rather than health, but as shown by Pope Francis’s recent actions, this paradigm is shifting. Leopold was a student of the Bible, and he observed that the Mosaic Decalogue of the Ten Commandments dealt with humans’ relationships with each other in society. Leopold stated that the human ethical relationship to the land community was an evolving process, just as was human-to-human morality, mentioning the evolvement of human understanding that slavery is wrong. Leopold, in his “Land Ethic” essay, cited that leading thinkers in the Bible, the prophets (such as Ezekiel and Isaiah), urged deeper understandings.

Torah and Life in the Land—Deuteronomy 12–34

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-128
Author(s):  
Ellen F. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Present Form ◽  
Legal Code ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Fertile Soil ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
Permanent Residency

IT IS LIKELY that the Torah scroll that was brought before King Josiah (2 Kgs 22) was some version of Deuteronomy 12–26, which constitutes the lengthiest legal code in the Bible. In the present form of the book, the code functions to lay out in detail the prescriptions and prohibitions that derive from the “Ten Words,” or Ten Commandments, the seminal principles that are meant to enable Israel to live in love and fear of YHWH and thus “prolong [their days] on the fertile-soil” that YHWH swore long ago to give them. Permanent residency in the land “oozing milk and honey” (Deut 11:9) is the goal of Torah living, and the most consistent affirmations of Deuteronomy are these three: the land is ...

The Ten Commandments: Interpreting the Bible in the Medieval World

2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-198
Author(s):  
Linda Stone
Keyword(s):  
The Bible ◽  
Ten Commandments

Bible and Biblical Theology in the Early Reformation

1961 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-352
Author(s):  
J. A. B. van den Brink
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Biblical Theology ◽  
General Situation ◽  
Lord's Prayer ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Everywhere in Europe the translations of the Bible into the evernacular languages have been the strongest help towards Reformation. It would be a very attractive task to study in detail, to compare and to summarise the history of the Bible in the Reformation movement, from West to East and from South to North in Europe.2 John Knox tells us that, when the Act of Parliament of 1543 allowed the Scriptures to be read freely, this was ‘no small comfort to such as before were held in such bondage that they durst not have read the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, nor articles of their faith, in the English tongue, but they should have been accused of heresy. Then might have been seen the Bible lying almost upon every gentleman's table. The NT was borne about in many men's hand.3 By these words is given no doubt a true and striking picture of the general situation in Scotland in those days and this may be true also for the beginnings of the Reformation in other countries some decades earlier. The Scots reformer adds that, although for reasons of profit many acted in an inexcusable way with the new book, ‘yet thereby did the knowledge of God wondrously increase and God gave his Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance’.Now this is my first thesis: that the Bible in the early Reformation was passionately desired, not for the book as such, nor to have it as a weapon against the Church and its superfluous appendages, but as a help to find a better way to God.

scholarly journals ‘WHEN YOUR SON ASKS YOU’.... HOW REMEMBRANCE CAN TEACH LIFE-SATISFACTION

2015 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-72
Author(s):  
Geert Franzenburg
Keyword(s):  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Religious Education ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Global Village ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
Elder People

Jewish-christian tradition is memory-tradition. Just from the beginning, people are confronted with the God of Abraham, Isaak and Jacob and with particular situations, which are worth remembering (Exodus, Ten Commandments). Because the Bible combines remembering and teaching („When your son”... (Dtn 6, 20)), religious education means memory-education. Like Israel in real Exile and Diaspora, young pupils and students suffer from „virtual Exile or Diaspora“, when they are dwelling within their digital global village, and in „patchwork-families“, often without real home-experience and without any sense of belonging. Suffering from such experiences of missed orientation and belonging, they feel – as discussions in schools and groups underline - unsatisfied and uncomfortable, and look for authentic coping-models. Therefore, the study emphasizes – based on narrations of elder people - on a particular religious education-approach, which facilitates life-satisfaction by memory-learning from other experiences. The focus of research is on the question, whether memory-learning, combined with religious contents, rituals and/or metaphoric, could encourage life-satisfaction, and whether there are significant differences between East (Latvia) and West (Germany). Key words: education, life-satisfaction, memory-learning, religiousness, remembrance.

scholarly journals The Impossibility of Queering the Mother: New Sightings of the Virgin Mother in the ‘Secular’ State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Sherwood
Keyword(s):  
Family Law ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Mothers And Fathers ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
The Family ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Secular State

In this part autobiographical essay, I explore the social consequences of the rise of the so-called ‘tender years’ doctrine coinciding with the rise in divorce. I argue that this has led to increased gender apartheid around the figures of M-for-Mother and F-for-Father, and a new sanctification of the figure of the holy mother-and-child. I look at the inverse and complementary relations between M-for-Male and F-for Female and M-for-Mother and F-for-Father, and I argue (counterintuitively) that origins, mothers, and fathers are queerer in ancient myths and the Bible than they are in contemporary semantics and law. I use strange old biblical texts (Solomon’s judgment; the trial of Abraham) to create unheimlich echoes for the so-called secular state and its strange constructions of the family; and I show how the Ten Commandments continue to influence family law.

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