scholarly journals Sjukdom och lidande och den kristna berättelsen: en biblisk och hermeneutisk analys

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greger Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Worldview ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Understanding Of Illness ◽  
Point Of Departure

How do Christians, who try to understand their lives according to the Christian narrative, cope with illness and suffering? This issue is the main concern of this article. Its point of departure is the assumption that the concept of “narrative” expressed in the idea that Christian faith is a narrative, might be taken to refer to a worldview, to a larger narrative (ie salvation history) or to the fact that Christians, in a process of hindsight, interpret their lives narratively. Based on talks with students and a process at Örebro Theological Seminary (ÖTH), in which we have been discussing the subject of illness and healing, I argue that some Christians are rethinking their understanding of illness and suffering. Since these Christians often have a high view of the Bible, it is important to examine how these issues are handled in scripture, and how biblical texts have been used traditionally. These Christians also refer to their experiences and to common apprehensions of illness and suffering in society. I propose that the Christians I refer to tend to avoid religious causal or teleological explanations of illness and suffering. They even seem to prefer not to involve God in these issues at all. This could be taken as a token of secularisation, but I argue that this is not the only possible explanation. I suggest instead that it can be linked to a reconsideration of basic tenets of these Christians’ theology and I make the claim that this reconsideration occurred during the process at Örebro Theological Seminary I have referred to above. The narrative reinterpretation of illness and suffering in the personal lives of these Christians is thus closely linked to a reinterpretation of the Christian worldview and salvation history.

scholarly journals Joseph Ratzinger’s Argument for the Epistemological Seriousness of Faith

Verbum Vitae ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1277-1294
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Cezary Kaucha
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Scientific Reason ◽  
Fundamental Theology ◽  
End Point ◽  
Scientific Certainty ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure

Christianity, and the Christian faith, seems to be losing when confronted with scientific reason and scientific certainty. Christianity needs new arguments for the epistemological seriousness of its faith. Those could be found in Joseph Ratzinger’s writings, providing new insights into fundamental theology. The subject of faith as an element that is crucial to him (and to Christianity) pervades all his works. This paper aims at proving that Ratzinger has worked out an original epistemological way of defending the Christian faith. It is an attempt to recreate his argument on the basis of his entire intellectual output. The present research leads to the conclusion that Ratzinger’s way of argumentation is quite unique. In classical fundamental theology, the Christian faith (comprehended mostly as an individual act of faith) is placed at its end point, while in Ratzinger’s fundamental theology, faith (understood mostly as a historical and communal act) is practically a point of departure. From the beginning of his reasoning Ratzinger (due to his meta-faith perspective) persuades that the Christian faith is epistemologically very serious. Faith may not only manifest its presence alongside other serious attitudes to reality, but also be capable of demonstrating its foundation, rationality, originality, uniqueness, and even absoluteness (definitiveness).

scholarly journals What is the Christian Religion?

1914 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Clyde Macintosh
Keyword(s):  
Recent Literature ◽  
Present Writer ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Princeton Theological Seminary ◽  
The Way

In the October number of this Review for 1912 there appeared, as many readers will doubtless remember, a striking article by Professor Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary, under the caption “Christless Christianity.” This is his rather clever designation for the religion of those who hold that belief in the historicity of Jesus, however valuable to the Christian, is nevertheless not absolutely indispensable to Christian faith. The article shows a wide acquaintance with the recent literature of the subject, is written in a spirited and forcible manner, and altogether makes an appreciable contribution, as it seems to me, to the clearing up of this interesting question.As making for this devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, however, what we have chiefly to thank Professor Warfield for is the way in which, having chosen his presuppositions, he carries them through to their logical conclusion, and states the result with all the candor that could be desired. He plays the game; he is never “off side.” And when he intimates that, in his judgment, the exponents of this “Christless Christianity”—among whom the present writer finds himself included—are not Christians at all, there is no just ground for complaint; it is all in the game. It is a case where, in strict logic, everything depends upon how Christianity is defined.

A Nineteenth-Century New England Exegete Abroad: Adoniram Judson and the Burmese Bible

2019 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-339
Author(s):  
John deJong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Subject

AbstractAdoniram Judson’s life and work have long been the subject of popular and scholarly interest, but the intellectual and exegetical background for his Burmese Bible translation has not been closely studied. This background was the biblical studies movement in New England, which began in the early nineteenth century and flourished before declining and eventually disappearing by about 1870. The opposing New England orthodox Calvinist and liberal Unitarian schools were equally involved in the movement. Judson was an early product of Andover Theological Seminary, the center for orthodox Calvinism in New England. From 1816 to 1840 Judson translated the Bible into Burmese and his references to the scholarly works he used, along with the text-critical and interpretive decisions in his Bible translation, identify him as an ongoing participant in the New England biblical studies movement. This scholarly background helps us understand interpretive decisions in the Judson Bible, which is still the main Burmese version used by Protestants in Myanmar.

'Ilahle Elinothuthu'?* the Lay Reader and /or the Critical Reader- Some Remarks On Africanisation

1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrie F. Snyman
Keyword(s):  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Lay Reader ◽  
Fundamental Shift ◽  
Point Of Departure

AbstractThis article intends to link Africanisation, lay readings and critical scholarship. Its point of departure is the dialectic of colonial inferiority complexes and the realisation of a Babelesque confusion as a defining element of South Africanness. Within this socio-political context the focus falls on Semeia 73 ('Reading with': an exploration of the interface between critical and ordinary readings of the Bible), drawing some implications for a grassroots reading of Esther 9 as well as the role of critical scholarship in the Afrikaans Reformed tradition. Bearing in mind the work of Edward Said on the subject of intellectuality, the article suggests that as long as the renewed focus on the lay reader represents only a change in political grid and power relations, it does not initiate a new trend in hermeneutics. A fundamental shift will only occur when the underlying reading strategies of lay reading are revealed and critically assessed. Instead of merely reproducing the ideological mechanisms and alignments whereby description becomes prescription and the local is represented as universal, it is suggested that these mechanisms should be challenged by the critical reader, even when and while socially engaged.

Light and Sensitivity: Love in the Time of the Daguerreotype

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Czeczot
Keyword(s):  
Male Gaze ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Sensitive Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Passive Object

The article deals with the love of Zygmunt Krasiński to Delfina Potocka. The point of departure is the poet's definition of love as looking and reads Krasiński's relationship with his beloved in the context of two phenomena that fascinated him at the time: daguerreotype and magnetism. The invention of the daguerreotype in which the history of photography and spiritism comes together becomes a pretext for the formulation of a new concept of love and the loving subject. In the era of painting the woman was treated as a passive object of the male gaze; photography reverses this scheme of power. Love ceases to be a static relationship of the subject in love and the passive object – the beloved. The philosophy of developing photographs (and invoking phantoms) allows Krasiński - the writing subject to become like a light-sensitive material that reveals the image of the beloved.

The first century of English protestantism and the growth of national identity

1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 309-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
First Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Zeal

Their sense of national identity is not something that men have been in the habit of directly recording. Its strength or weakness, in relation to commitment to international causes or to localist sentiment, can often only be inferred by examining political and religious attitudes and personal behaviour. So far as the early modern period is concerned, the subject is hazardous because groups and individuals must have varied enormously in the extent to which national identity meant something to them or influenced their lives. The temptation to generalise must be resisted. It is all too easy to suppose that national identity became well established in England in the Tudor century, when a national culture, based on widespread literacy among gentry, yeomen and townsmen, flowered as it had never done before, when the bible was first generally available in English, when John Foxe produced his celebrated Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs. Recent work reassessing the significance of Foxe’s account of the English reformation and other Elizabethan polemical writings provdes a convenient starting point for this brief investigation of some of the connections between religious zeal and national consciousness between 1558 and 1642.

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.

scholarly journals The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filip De Boeck
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Point Of Reference

Abstract:Temporality in contemporary Kinshasa is of a very specific eschatological kind and takes its point of departure in the Bible, and more particularly in the Book of Revelation, which has become an omnipresent point of reference in Kinshasa's collective imagination. The lived-in time of everyday life in Kinshasa is projected against the canvas of the completion of everything, a completion which will be brought about by God. As such, the Book of Revelation is not only about doom and destruction, it is essentially also a book of hope. Yet the popular understanding of the Apocalypse very much centers on the omnipotent presence of evil. This article focuses on the impact of millennialism on the Congolese experience, in which daily reality is constantly translated into mythical and prophetic terms as apocalyptic interlude.

Ruth

1975 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward F. Campbell , Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Generation Gap ◽  
Sensitive Analysis ◽  
King David ◽  
Moving Force ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Times ◽  
The City ◽  
And Linguistics

Ruth, a tale of human kindness and just dealing far beyond the norm, contains elements that for centuries have been the subject of debate. With a sprightly translation and a commentary rich in informed speculation, Professor Campbell considers the questions of layman and scholar alike. Finding no overt mighty acts, the layman asks, “Why was Ruth included in the Bible at all? Where is God?” Professor Campbell shows that God is not only present throughout but is indeed the moving force behind all the developments of the story. Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz each act as God to each other, by taking extraordinary responsibility and performing extraordinary acts of kindness. And it is God who is responsible for the series of coincidences on which the plot hinges. The scholar’s questions deal with such matters as purpose, date, and genre. Professor Campbell’s research into ancient customs and linguistics suggests to him that Ruth is a historical novelette, entertaining and instructive, composed not long after the reign of King David, during the time of Solomon or within the subsequent century. Professor Campbell demonstrates the storyteller’s skill with sensitive analysis of form, pacing, and wordplay. By delving into word origins and nuances he shows how convincingly the characters are developed. One instance: Naomi and Boaz use obsolescent language, emphasizing the generation gap between them and Ruth. In addition, the illustrations help the reader understand unfamiliar elements of the story—the setting, the agricultural seasons and harvesting, the clothing of the times, the city gate where elders and interested villagers gather to make sure that all is done in a just and godly way.

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.

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