The End of Days

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Harper
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Black Religion ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Early Reconstruction ◽  
End Times ◽  
Made In

For 4 million slaves, emancipation was a liberation and resurrection story of biblical proportion, both the clearest example of God’s intervention in human history and a sign of the end of days. This book demonstrates how black southerners’ theology, in particular their understanding of the end times, influenced nearly every major economic and political decision they made in the aftermath of emancipation. From considering what demands to make in early Reconstruction to deciding whether or not to migrate west, African American Protestants consistently inserted themselves into biblical narratives as a way of seeing the importance of their own struggle in God’s greater plan for humanity. Phrases like “jubilee,” “Zion,” “valley of dry bones,” and the “New Jerusalem” in black-authored political documents invoked different stories from the Bible to argue for different political strategies. This study offers new ways of understanding the intersections between black political and religious thought of this era. Until now, scholarship on black religion has not highlighted how pervasive or contested these beliefs were. This narrative, however, tracks how these ideas governed particular political moments as African Americans sought to define and defend their freedom in the forty years following emancipation.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Harper
Keyword(s):  
Local Politics ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Religion ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Political Events ◽  
State And Local Politics ◽  
State And Local ◽  
End Times ◽  
Political Decisions

This chapter introduces the book’s main arguments: that black southerners interpreted political events by discerning God’s purposes in emancipation and that they understood the entire late nineteenth century as an age of emancipation, notwithstanding political setbacks. Although most black Protestants agreed that God had intervened dramatically to free four million slaves, they disagreed in the decades that followed about what exactly God planned for their emancipated race. They placed their own experience within biblical narratives in order to predict a hopeful future. Black Protestants’ end times theology, or eschatology, defied categories of white Protestant theology and mattered in both black political decisions and black self understanding. The book brings state and local politics to the scholarship of black religion by focusing on North Carolina. The introduction argues that historians cannot understand black politics without understanding how black Protestants read different biblical stories and interpreted prophecies of the end times.

God and Story in the Church and in Doctrine

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Paul S. Fiddes
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Reciprocal Relation ◽  
Narrative Theology ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Tradition

The paper aligns theological discussion about narrative theology with an empirical study of story-telling in a congregational setting, drawing conclusions about the ecclesial basis of method in doctrinal theology. It proposes to develop a narrative theology in a form that is inclusive of non-biblical narratives, drawing deductively upon story in Scripture and the past tradition of the church in constructing regulative doctrinal concepts for the community, while insisting that these must always be shaped inductively by the stories which people inhabit inside the church today, and outside the church in cultures which interpenetrate it. The paper offers a particular case-study of reflecting on stories from the Bible, church tradition and modern life among a group of young people of mainly West African heritage in the uk. From a ‘thick’ account of ‘everyday theology’ in the church, it offers suggestions for a reciprocal relation between deductive and inductive movements in making doctrine, taking as an example the doctrinal issue of ‘naming’.

Terms of Scriptural Interpretation: A Study in Hebrew Semantics

1962 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Gertner
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Behaviour ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
Divine Wisdom ◽  
The Subject

In the last centuries before the current era and in the early centuries after its beginning the major intellectual and literary activity in the realms (first) of the Jewish and (later) of the Christian communities was wholly centred in the field of interpretation. The OT, as the mainspring and foundation of all religious thought and teaching in those days and in those spheres, was the subject of this interpretation activity. In both the Jewish and the Christian world the Bible was considered to be not only holy and authoritative, but also, and this is in our context more important, the only and exclusive source of divine religious doctrine and of good ethical behaviour. Also historical events, political or religious, were seen, even foreseen, and evaluated from the aspect of this holy source of divine wisdom and planning.

History, Providence, and Eschatology

2021 ◽  
pp. 214-234
Author(s):  
Jan Stievermann
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Theology ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
End Times

This chapter discusses Edwards’s view of history and the end times. It does so by examining four interlocking frameworks of interpretation that Edwards inherited from Reformed-Puritan theology: first, a general approach to relating the Bible and history; second, an intense kind of providentialism; third, specific forms of biblical theology aiming toward an integrated salvation history; and fourth, a futurist type of millennialist eschatology. What emerges from this is the picture of an Edwards who was, for the most part, a traditionalist. At the same time, he, like many of his peers, engaged with the intellectual discourses of the Enlightenment, both by partaking in them and criticizing their perceived excesses. Edwards’s version of a moderate Protestant Enlightenment produced a deepened, eschatologically inflected interest in redemption history, which he understood as a progressive continuum. Within this framework of history Edwards came to assign crucial significance to revivals.

Global Thefts of Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald West
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
The Subject

This chapter takes its starting point from the African experience, across a range of African contexts, of Africa as both the subject and object of biblical narrative. When the Bible came to Africa, it came with well-established colonial metanarratives, constructed in part from biblical narratives. These colonial metanarratives were in turn partly reconstructed by the engagement with African others, from both a European and an African perspective along two diverging trajectories, with biblical narrative making a contribution to both. This chapter focuses on the capacity of biblical narrative, biblical story, to be both incorporated into “local” metanarratives and to shape these metanarratives. The contexts that are the focus of this chapter are largely “third world” contexts, across which there are significant family resemblances and important contextual differences.

scholarly journals The Dissolution of the Monasteries and its Impact on Education in Tudor Times

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120
Author(s):  
Marek Smoluk
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Academic Education ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
English Society ◽  
Selective Basis ◽  
Lord Chancellor ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
Made In ◽  
Key Questions

In 1536 the English Parliament under pressure from Henry VIII and the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, gave its consent for the dissolution of the lesser monasteries and abbeys in the king’s realm, and three years later with the sanction of MPs some of the greater religious houses also suffered the same fate. The principal aim of this paper is to assess the importance of this political decision with a view to examining the progress being made in the field of education in England in the middle of the sixteenth century resultant upon this dissolution. The evaluation of the merits and demerits originating from the suppression of the English monasteries is made in terms of both primary and academic education. The answers to these key questions are preceded by a short analysis of the reputation monasteries and abbeys had acquired by that time. Also on a selective basis, some opinions have been presented here to provide an overall picture of the standing of the monks and nuns and their concomitant activities, as perceived through the eyes of English society; the eminent scholars and humanists In particular. Subsequently, before assessing the consequences resulting from the dissolution of the religious houses in England, some consideration is given to the reasoning and rationale which lay behind both Henry VIII and his Lord Chancellor’s political decisions.

scholarly journals Perang Armagedon

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Lanny Laras
Keyword(s):  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
End Times ◽  
False Prophet ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Generic Sense

The Armageddon will be the site of gathering of armies for a battle during end times, variously interpreted as either or symbolic location. The term is also used a generic sense to refer to end of the world scenario. According to the Bible, Jesus will return to earth and defeat the Antichrist, the False prophet and Satan the Devil in the Battle of Armageddon. Then Satan will be put into the “bottomless pit” or abyss for 1,000 years, knows as the Millennium.

The Southern Levant and the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Rachel Hallote
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Southern Levant ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.

scholarly journals Lassa Fever: Viral Replication, Disease Pathogenesis, and Host Immune Modulations

Pathogens ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 437
Author(s):  
Hinh Ly
Keyword(s):  
Lassa Fever ◽  
West African ◽  
Host Factors ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Disease Pathogenesis ◽  
Virus Life Cycle ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Made In

Despite major discoveries made in the last few decades about Lassa fever, there are still many unresolved key issues that hamper the development of effective vaccines and therapies against this deadly disease that is endemic in several West African countries. Some of these issues include the lack of a detailed understanding of the viral and participating host factors in completing the virus life cycle, in mediating disease pathogenesis or protection from disease, and in activating or suppressing host innate and cellular immunity against virus infection, as well as of the animal models required for testing vaccines and therapeutics. This Special Issue is devoted to understanding some of these important issues and to exploring the current status of the research and development in combating Lassa fever.

Behind Auerbach's “Background”: Five Ways to Read What Biblical Narratives Don't Say

AJS Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
James Adam Redfield
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Contemporary Work

The Hebrew Bible's narrative style has impressed interpreters of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension between fragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auerbach's famous thesis that the Akedah is “fraught with background.” But is it possible to give a coherent account of what the Bible does not say? This article offers a comparative critical analysis of attempts to do just that, starting with Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) and continuing through the contemporary work of James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Avivah Zornberg, and others. It claims that, rather than the text itself, the Bible's “background” serves as a metaphor by which the biblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normative construct of the reader's mind. This comparison concludes with practical considerations about its potential for research and teaching in biblical poetics, understood as rigorous intersubjective communication, rather than as either method or ideology.

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