scholarly journals Entanglement as a Hermeneutic Tool for Interpreting Humanities Texts: The Case of Oedipus the King and The Book of Job

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 274
Author(s):  
Ronald Glasberg
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Levels Of Reality ◽  
Interpretive Strategies ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Non Locality

The essay seeks to develop the foundations of a general hermeneutics, by which I mean a strategy of interpretation that not only encompasses the sciences and the humanities, but also seeks to integrate them.  More specifically, certain classic texts in the humanities (i.e., those deemed representative of certain cultural traditions) are accordingly interpreted by way of categories derived from physics.  In the present case, categories associated with quantum entanglement are applied to the classic or foundational humanities texts: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and the Old Testament Book of Job. The main categories brought to bear in this experiment in hermeneutics are the following: (1) entanglement itself, (2) locality-non-locality, (3) realism-non-realism, (4) latent and manifest levels of reality, and (5) internality-externality. After an introductory section defining the foregoing categories, the second section applies them to the texts in question with a view to redefining the relationship between two major components of the ancient world: the Greco-Roman and the Hebraic.  The final section concludes the essay by outlining the framework of a general hermeneutics whereby schemas and objects of interpretation are structured in terms internality and externality.  The former pertains to mind and culture while the latter is associated with a non-conscious materiality.  Thus, four interpretive strategies can be deployed to give a comprehensive understanding of the world: (1) externalist schemas of interpretation applied to internalist objects of interpretation; (2) internalist schemas applied to externalist objects; (3) externalist schemas applied to externalist objects, and (4) internalist schemas applied to internalist objects.   Received: 8 July 2021 / Accepted: 19 August 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021

Mimetic Monsters

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Edge Of Chaos ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship

This article reads between two recent explorations of the relationship between religion, chaos, and the monstrous: Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and Author's Religion and Its Monsters. Both are oriented toward the edge of chaos and order; both see the primordial and chaotic as generative; both pursue monstrous mythological figures as divine personifications of primordial chaos; both find a deep theological ambivalences in Christian and Jewish tradition with regard to the monstrous, chaotic divine; both are critical of theological and cultural tendencies to demonize chaos and the monstrous; and finally, both read the divine speech from the whirlwind in the book of Job as a revelation of divine chaos. But whereas one sees it as a call for laughter, a chaotic life-affirming laughter with Leviathan in the face of the deep, the other sees it as an incarnation of theological horror, leaving Job and the reader overwhelmed and out-monstered by God. Must it be one way or the other? Can laughter and horror coincide in the face of the deep?

Mission And Grace of God According to the Book of Jonah

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susilo Susanto
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
The Relationship

In the Old Testament there is a debate between two related topics, namely the mission and grace of God. Specifically seen in the Book of Jonah, this book contains several dialogues which perfectly support the motion of the story and the themes it carries. Its structure provides a contrasting picture of Yahweh and Jonah. To answer this debate, by looking at the relationship between mission and God's grace in the Book of Jonah. We can find in it Jonah's disobedience in carrying out the mission that God gave him and the rewards he experienced by God's grace to him. Likewise the Ninevites received the grace of God which the prophet of God did not want. Then the question arises what is the mission and mercy of God in universal relationships. Thus this paper seeks to elaborate on these two topics.

THE ONTOLOGICAL ROOTEDNESS OF COGNITIVE PRACTICES LINGUISTIC FORMS IN RELIGIOUS SOCIO-CULTURAL TRADITIONS: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH

Communicology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-148
Author(s):  
NATALIA MALSHINA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Fundamental Ontology ◽  
Ontology Language ◽  
The World ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
The Relationship

This study examines the ontological problems in the aspect of the ratio of different cognitive practices and their mutual conditionality in the context of communication and their socio-cultural prerequisites, which is possible only if the traditional approach to the distinction between epistemology and faith is revised. Based on the idea of identity of common grounds of cognitive practices “belief” is included in the understanding of interpretation in the communicative situation for true knowledge in each of the modes of being. Belief in the philosophical tradition reveals the ontological foundations of hermeneutics. Three reflections are synthesised: the hermeneutic concept of understanding, the structuralist concept of language, and the psychoanalytic concept of personality. It is necessary to apply the method of phenomenological reduction to the ontological substantiation of hermeneutics in the Christian Orthodox tradition. Hence, the very natural seems the meeting of semantics, linguistics, and onomatodoxy, with the ontology language of Heidegger, the origins of which resides in in Husserl phenomenology. Fundamental ontology and linguistics, cult philosophy - both in different ways open the horizons of substantiation of hermeneutics. The beginning of this justification is the hermeneutic problem in Christianity, which has appeared as a sequence of the question of the relationship between the two Covenants, or two Unions. In the paper, the author attempts to identify the stages of constructing the philosophical concept of Pavel Florensky. As a result, the substantiation of the birth of the world in consciousness by the cult is revealed. Ontological tradenote words can be seen in Florensky through symbols. The symbol makes the transition from a small energy to a larger one, from a small information saturation to a greater one, acting as a lumen of being - when by the name we hear the reality. The word comes into contact with the world that is on the other side of our own psychological state. The word, the symbol shifts all the time from subjective to objective. The communicative model acts as a common point uniting these traditions. The religious approach as part of semiotic approach reveals the horizons of ontological conditionality of language and words, and among the words - the name, as the name plays a central role in the accumulation and transmission of information, understanding of the commonality of this conditionality in the concepts of phenomenology and Christian, Orthodox tradition.

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Relationship

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions brings together thirteen scholars of late-antique, medieval, and renaissance traditions who discuss magic, religious experience, ritual, and witch-beliefs with the aim of reflecting on the relationship between man and the supernatural. The content of the volume is intriguingly diverse and includes late antique traditions covering erotic love magic, Hellenistic-Egyptian astrology, apotropaic rituals, early Christian amulets, and astrological amulets; medieval traditions focusing on the relationships between magic and disbelief, pagan magic and Christian culture, as well as witchcraft and magic in Britain, Scandinavian sympathetic graphophagy, superstition in sermon literature; and finally Renaissance traditions revolving around Agrippan magic, witchcraft in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and a Biblical toponym related to the Friulan Benandanti’s visionary experiences. These varied topics reflect the multifaceted ways through which men aimed to establish relationships with the supernatural in diverse cultural traditions, and for different purposes, between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance. These ways eventually contributed to shaping the civilizations of the supernatural or those peculiar patterns which helped men look at themselves through the mirror of their own amazement of being in this world.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Otto
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Philo Of Alexandria ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Text Production ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Intellectual Formation ◽  
The Relationship

Between the second and the sixteenth centuries CE, references to the Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria occur exclusively in texts written by Christians. David T. Runia has described this phenomenon as the adoption of Philo by Christians as an “honorary Church Father.” Drawing on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith and recent investigations of the “Parting of the Ways” of early Christianity and Judaism, this study argues that early Christian invocations of Philo reveal ongoing efforts to define the relationship between Jewishness and Christianness, their areas of overlap and points of divergence. The introduction situates invocations of Philo within the wider context of early Christian writing about Jews and Jewishness. It considers how Philo and his early Christian readers participated in the larger world of Greco-Roman philosophical schools, text production, and the ethical and intellectual formation (paideia) of elite young men in the Roman Empire.

A Religion of Reason

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick C. Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Religion Of Reason ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter is an examination of Cohen’s main work on the philosophy of religion, his Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Cohen’s religion of reason was an attempt to respond to two opposing conceptions of religion: that of the romantics (Schleiermacher, Fries) and that of the Tübingen school (Baur, Strauβ‎). The romantics saw the essence of religion in feeling, the Tübingen school saw it in myth. Cohen tried to rescue the rational content of religion by interpreting it mainly in ethical terms, which he believed to consist in rational imperatives. Cohen’s concept of God is interpreted in terms of the validity of these ethical imperatives and not in terms of the existence of any entity. One section considers Cohen’s re-examination of the relationship between religion and ethics, which now stresses the distinctive characteristics of religion within ethics. The final section criticizes Rosenzweig’s interpretation of Cohen as a proto-existentialist.

Canons to the Left of Him: Brevard Childs, his Critics, and the Future of Old Testament Theology

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Provan
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Biblical Theology ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Probable Origin ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

It is well known that the seeds from which the modern discipline of OT theology grew are already found in 17th and 18th century discussion of the relationship between Bible and Church, which tended to drive a wedge between the two, regarding canon in historical rather than theological terms; stressing the difference between what is transient and particular in the Bible and what is universal and of abiding significance; and placing the task of deciding which is which upon the shoulders of the individual reader rather than upon the church. Free investigation of the Bible, unfettered by church tradition and theology, was to be the way ahead. OT theology finds its roots more particularly in the 18th century discussion of the nature of and the relationship between Biblical Theology and Dogmatic Theology, and in particular in Gabler's classic theoreticalstatementof their nature and relationship. The first book which may strictly be called an OT theology appeared in 1796: an historical discussion of the ideas to be found in the OT, with an emphasis on their probable origin and the stages through which Hebrew religious thought had passed, compared and contrasted with the beliefs of other ancient peoples, and evaluated from the point of view of rationalistic religion. Here we find the unreserved acceptance of Gabler's principle that OT theology must in the first instance be a descriptive and historical discipline, freed from dogmatic constraints and resistant to the premature merging of OT and NT — a principle which in the succeeding century was accepted by writers across the whole theological spectrum, including those of orthodox and conservative inclination.

Das frühe Christentum und die Bildung

2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Udo Schnelle
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Urban Congregations ◽  
Intellectual Level

Early Christianity is often regarded as an entirely lower-class phenomenon, and thus characterised by a low educational and cultural level. This view is false for several reasons. (1) When dealing with the ancient world, inferences cannot be made from the social class to which one belongs to one's educational and cultural level. (2) We may confidently state that in the early Christian urban congregations more than 50 per cent of the members could read and write at an acceptable level. (3) Socialisation within the early congregations occurred mainly through education and literature. No religious figure before (or after) Jesus Christ became so quickly and comprehensively the subject of written texts! (4) The early Christians emerged as a creative and thoughtful literary movement. They read the Old Testament in a new context, they created new literary genres (gospels) and reformed existing genres (the Pauline letters, miracle stories, parables). (5) From the very beginning, the amazing literary production of early Christianity was based on a historic strategy that both made history and wrote history. (6) Moreover, early Christians were largely bilingual, and able to accept sophisticated texts, read them with understanding, and pass them along to others. (7) Even in its early stages, those who joined the new Christian movement entered an educated world of language and thought. (8) We should thus presuppose a relatively high intellectual level in the early Christian congregations, for a comparison with Greco-Roman religion, local cults, the mystery religions, and the Caesar cult indicates that early Christianity was a religion with a very high literary production that included critical reflection and refraction.

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