scholarly journals Relevance Theory as an approach to interpreting the Bible for children: The Lucan version of the Lord�s Prayer as a test case

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette H. Evans

Recent research has demonstrated that children are sensitive to the underlying causal structureof the world and seek to form new causal representations at a much earlier age than hadpreviously been supposed. Modern scientific understanding of the evolution of life conflictswith the biblical representation of earth as the centre of the world, and of human beings as theimago Dei. Consequently, young children frequently experience cognitive dissonance whenexposed to biblical texts. Two previous pilot studies utilising specifically designed illustratedbooklets demonstrated that children respond more readily to a text that is relevant to their owncultural context. This article tests the possibility of presenting a universally relevant biblicaltext (Lk 11:2b�4) to young children in a form that does not conflict with modern science andtakes aspects of recent research on child psychology into account.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: In our postmodern culturalcontext children tend to experience cognitive dissonance when exposed to biblical texts,and consequently lose interest. This article proposes that by presenting the biblical contentin accordance with Relevance Theory, and in coherence with recent scientific explanatorytheories, the interest of the children may be sustained.

Author(s):  
Rainer Kessler

It is evident that the world of the Bible is pre-modern and thus distinct from the globalized civilization. This chronological gap challenges readers, whether they are feminist or not. Mainly three attitudes can be observed among scholarly and ordinary readers. For some readers, the Bible is a document of the losers of a historical process of modernization that already began in ancient Israel. For other readers, the Bible is outdated and of no use to confront the challenges of globalization. A third readerly position challenges both of these views. This essay offers four arguments to orient biblical readers in the contemporary globalized world. First, the essay posits that globalization is an asynchronous development. Thus, even today, most people living in the impoverished regions of the world face conditions similar to those dominant in the Bible. Second, the essay asserts that women are the first victims in biblical times and still nowadays. Third, the essay maintains that biblical texts display social relations that still unveil contemporary relations. Fourth, the essay suggests that intercultural Bible readings give hope, as they nurture biblical readings from “below” to strengthen people to overcome the fatal consequences of today’s globalization.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Brad E. Kelle

Moral injury emerged within clinical psychology and related fields to refer to a non-physical wound (psychological and emotional pain and its effects) that results from the violation (by oneself or others) of a person’s deepest moral beliefs (about oneself, others, or the world). Originally conceived in the context of warfare, the notion has now expanded to include the morally damaging impact of various non-war-related experiences and circumstances. Since its inception, moral injury has been an intersectional and cross-disciplinary term and significant work has appeared in psychology, philosophy, medicine, spiritual/pastoral care, chaplaincy, and theology. Since 2015, biblical scholarship has engaged moral injury along two primary trajectories: 1) creative re-readings of biblical stories and characters informed by insights from moral injury; and 2) explorations of the postwar rituals and symbolic practices found in biblical texts and how they might connect to the felt needs of morally injured persons. These trajectories suggest that the engagement between the Bible and moral injury generates a two-way conversation in which moral injury can serve as a heuristic that brings new meanings out of biblical texts, and the critical study of biblical texts can contribute to the attempts to understand, identify, and heal moral injury.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Jarosław Horowski

One of the most difficult problems, which is to be solved by contemporary culture, is the ecological problem. It concerns the culture because the hedonistic and consumerist mentality of man plays an important part in it. Biocentrism states that the ecological problem results from traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world based on the belief that humans are the central and most significant entities in the universe. Biocentrism puts forward a teleological argument for the protection of the environment. It indicates that non-human species have inherent value as well and each organism has a purpose and a reason for being, which should be respected. Biocentrism states that the anthropocentric attitude to the non-human world results from the Christian worldview based on the Bible where it is written that God gives man dominion over all creatures. The author analyses the main issues of the Catholic concept of the relationship between human beings and other creatures. He indicates that ecotheology respects the inherent value of non-human creatures because, as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the modern world Gaudium et spes says: “all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order”, but maintains that the purpose of the world is connected with its relationship to God. The author considers also what is the human subjectivity in behaving towards the environment and what is the dependence between the autonomy of the world and the subjectivity of man in ecotheology. In the end, the author comes to the conclusion that according to ecotheology the ecological problem results from the broken relationship between the human and God and in consequence it the broken relationship between the world and God.


Author(s):  
José Jorge Gutiérrez-Samperio

<p>Pests, in their broad sense, have played an important part in the history of humankind. We could say that humans, crops and pests have walked together through life. Codices, glyphs, paintings and countless ancient documents, including the Bible and the Koran, bear witness to this. Humanity has been attacked by its own diseases, but also by those that limit them from obtaining food and deteriorate the environment. COVID-19, which is now troubling us and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March of 2020, became a part of the list of experiences we have suffered in the past, with pests or epidemics that caused millions of deaths by diseases or famines. It is paradoxical that this health contingency occurs when the United Nations General Assembly, on December 20th, 2018, in its resolution A/RES/73/252 decides to declare 2020 the International Year of Plant Health in order to “highlight the importance of plant health to improve food security, protect the environment and biodiversity and boost economic development” according to the pronouncement by the FAO. For the first time, in an era with great technological and scientific breakthroughs, humanity was aware of its vulnerability against the inevitable evolution of life forms in the face of dilemmas global impact caused by human beings. Thus, the pest or parasite makes its own declaration of existential preeminence through SARS-CoV-2 to remind us that the health of humans or plants is the essence of life and its continuity. But perhaps absolute health is not enough. It is necessary to find a balance in a world overwhelmed by giving so much in return for almost nothing to everyone living on it. If the sensor of our anthropocentric intervention of the world is climate change, then biological chaos is a masterpiece. The reemergence of pests and diseases considered eradicated, or those of zoonotic origin that had never accompanied our existence is a surreal dystopia that we will never be able to deny again.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 2453
Author(s):  
Sırrı Tiryaki

The first inventions made by the first humans on earth to survive started the beginning of first scientific activities. The first instruments made of bone and stone are a product of this philosophy. The fact that human beings begin to lead a life based on settled life means the world science develops rapidly. Because the settled life enabled the establishment of villages and cities for world civilization and the commencement of trade. Along with all these things, concepts such as writing, books, literature, library, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and physics began to enter into human life. The discovery of mining revealed the facts like armed soldiers, armies and states. Along with the concept of the state, scientific activities have become more systematic and more widespread. Because it is known that states supported scientific activities within their borders. For example, the creation of the writing by the Sumerian civilization, the preparation of textbooks, the development of the calendar, the development of medical science in Egypt, the invention of the compass by the Chinese civilization, the opening of the museum in Alexandria in the Hellenistic Age and the starting of the studies about anatomy in this museum, the opening of a three different educational institutions in Rome, were all happening as a result of the encouragement and support of the respective states. In this study, we tried to put forth that all the scientific activities in the Old Era the basis of the modern science as well.Extended English abstract is in the end of PDF (TURKISH) file. ÖzetYeryüzündeki ilk insanların hayata kalabilmek için yaptıkları ilk icatlar aynı zamanda ilk bilimsel faaliyetleri başlamaktadır. Kemik ve taştan yapılan ilk aletler bu felsefenin bir ürünüdür. İnsanoğlunun yerleşik yaşama dayalı bir hayat sürdürmeye başlaması ise dünya biliminin hızla gelişmesi anlamına gelmektedir. Çünkü yerleşik yaşam dünya uygarlığı için köylerin ve kentlerin kurulması ve ticaretin başlaması demekti. Bütün bunların yanı sıra yerleşik yaşamla birlikte yazı, kitap, edebiyat, kütüphane, astronomi, matematik, kimya ve fizik gibi kavramlar insan hayatına girmeye başladı. Madenciliğin keşfi ise silahlı askerler, ordular ve devletler gibi olguları ortaya çıkardı. Devlet kavramıyla birlikte bilimsel faaliyetler daha sistematik hâle geldi ve daha da yaygınlaştı. Çünkü devletlerin kendi sınırları içerisinde bilimsel aktiviteleri teşvikleri söz konusuydu. Örneğin yazının Sümer uygarlığı tarafından icat edilmesi, ders kitaplarının hazırlanması, takvimin geliştirilmesi, Mısır’da tıp biliminin oldukça gelişmesi, pusulanın Çin uygarlığı tarafından icat edilmesi, Helenistik Çağ’da İskenderiye kentinde müzenin açılması ve bu müzede anatomi alanında çalışmaların başlatılması ile Roma’da üç farklı eğitim kurumunun açılması gibi konuların tamamı dönemin söz konusu devletlerinin teşvik ve destekleri sonucunda gerçekleşen olgulardı. Çalışmamızda Eski Çağdaki bütün bu bilimsel faaliyetlerin aynı zamanda modern bilimin temelini oluşturduğunu ortaya koymaya çalıştık.


2021 ◽  
pp. 290-313
Author(s):  
Laura Dassow Walls

American Transcendentalism, a religious, literary, and social reform movement whose acknowledged leader was Ralph Waldo Emerson, characteristically deployed world soul thinking to harmonize Protestant individualism with Deist rationalism and modern science. Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” whose sources include Platonism, German Idealism, and the transcendental anatomy of Georges Cuvier, enabled the Transcendentalists to distance themselves from orthodox theism by turning God’s magisterial law from outer command into inner creative principle, based on the fundamental concept that all human beings (and, for some, all life) share an inner divine principle that radiates meaning into the world. This chapter draws on William James, who analyzed world soul thinking in terms of the varieties of transcendentalism: this lens suggests that for many Transcendentalists, Emerson’s idealist, absolute monism yielded to a range of pluralist and materialist variants, as seen in Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and the radical pluralism of William James himself.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 433-453
Author(s):  
Job Y. Jindo

This article examines the biblical notion of the “fear of God” as a fundamental normative category for all human beings. First, the Hebrew word for “fear” is examined in correspondence with the word for “knowledge,” for they oftentimes appear as synonyms in the Bible. Fear of God is thereby identified as a particular state of mind that directs one’s perception of the world and the self and qualifies, essentially, one’s existence as human. This study is part of a work-in-progress that explores the conceptual world of biblical authors.


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Huub Welzen

The first print of the book of Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, appeared more than 25 years ago. With the help of the hermeneutic theories of Gadamer and Ricoeur, she proposes a kind of exegesis that integrates scholarly methods and spiritual reading. In this article we investigate how the model of Sandra Schneiders is congruent with the old intuition of the lectio divina. We compare the model of Schneiders with the systematisation of the lectio divina by Guigo II, the Carthusian. As a result, we see in the text of Guigo the pre-understanding of the Carthusian spiritual life at work. And as a result we also recognise Schneiders’ transformative understanding of the subject matter of the text in the phase of the oratio and the comtemplatio. In the model of Guigo, there is also room for critical analysis in the phase of the meditation. We investigate also if the Bible itself gives indications for the kind of exegesis Schneiders proposes. What Schneiders says about pre-understanding is present in the prologue of the Gospel of Luke. Luke considers the story he tells as a history guided by God. What Luke tells about the genesis of his text belongs to the world behind the text. The world of the text is present as a well-ordered world. Luke speaks also about the transformation of the reader. In this, we recognise what Schneiders says about the world before the text and the transformative understanding of the subject matter of the text. We conclude that the model of Schneiders is innovative in relation of common academic exegesis. It is rooted in the tradition of Christian spiritual reading, and it is present in those biblical texts which indicate how to read.


Karl Barth ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 362-382
Author(s):  
Christiane Tietz

Barth’s Church Dogmatics is the most extensive theological work of the twentieth century. Barth worked on it from 1932 until 1967, reconceptualizing theology from the very foundations. He distinguishes three forms of the Word of God, avoiding a biblicistic reading of the Bible. The doctrine of the Trinity is a consequent exposition of the concept of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This God is the one who loves in freedom, that is who relates to human beings because of grace. Barth therefore completely transforms the Reformed doctrine of double predestination. The doctrine of creation as well has to be derived from God’s self-revelation; God created the world because God wanted a covenantal partner. To this creation belong shadow sides as well as nothingness. God in Jesus Christ entered the confrontation with nothingness and reconciled the world with God. Only from reconciliation can we understand the essence of sin.


Author(s):  
James P. Byrd

This epilogue examines the central themes of the Bible in the Civil War, including confidence in clear analogies between biblical texts and the war; faith in the war’s redemptive outcome, which, for many in the North, charged the United States with a divine mission in the world; and above all, reverence for the sacred sacrifice of the dead, whose blood had “consecrated” the nation. Through all the death and injury, endless debates over slavery, defenses of secession, and patriotism, the Bible was a constant reference. The American Civil War may not have been “a war of religion,” James McPherson wrote, but we should not forget “the degree to which it was a religious war.” In a similar way, the American Civil War was not primarily a war over the Bible, but it was a biblical war for many Americans.


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