scholarly journals Den liturgiske eksegese og Grundtvig

2000 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-125
Author(s):  
Christian Thodberg

Grundtvig and Liturgical ExegesisBy Christian ThodbergLiturgical exegesis is defined as the way in which the Church re-actualised the words and deeds of Jesus in the service of worship in trying to answer the need of the congregation for being simultaneous with the biblical events. In the Western Church this liturgical exegesis received an emphatic exposition in connection with the old series of pericopes in the roman mass and in most of protestant churches as well.Many modem preachers do not like the old lectionary because it is crammed with the stories of Jesus’ miracles which - as they say - have no relevance to churchgoers of today. Grundtvig, however, always met those stories with pleasure, because in his opinion, they dealt with Jesus’ strong deeds in the worship today in baptism and communion. And essentially the biblical readings are worked out on the Sundays before and after the old baptismal terms, either at Easter time, or on the sixth of January, or at Whitsun. Thus baptism is defined in three ways by the three old baptismal terms: on January sixth as a birth with Christ, at Easter as death and resurrection with Christ and at Pentecost as the reception of the gift of the Holy Spirit.The Western system of gospel readings in general survived the Reformation, but in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the account of Christ’s acts of power came under critical scrutiny. They were understood as magical elements, which obscured the character of the bible as the teaching of Christianity. Parallel with this, in the context of the liturgy, the renunciation and the naming of the Devil and the word Hell was removed from the Apostles’ Creed in the baptismal rite and the Annunciation, the Resurrection and the Ascension were understood as images.As an old-fashioned believer, Grundtvig protested against all this. Christianity depended on Christ’s works of power. But despite his faith that the bible was literally God’s word, his problem was this: When and how did God’s word and Christ’s deeds of power touch him personally? Theologically, the question about the presence of God was a problem for Grundtvig throughout his life. In simple terms: Where does God speak to mel Grundtvig’s problem was solved by his famous »unparalleled discovery«, which became the hermeneutic key to his sermons. The thesis of liturgical history scholarship is that liturgical exegesis has its place already in the New Testament, and that the secondary epistles of St. Paul in connection (Ephesians, Colossians) can be rehabilitated, since they give us the key to the understanding of Jesus’ miracles in relations to baptism. In the end it points to Grundtvig’s persistent attempt to find the place where God speaks to him, where he intuitively rediscovers the early church’s understanding of the connection between Jesus’ works of power and baptism, and which thus becomes a contemporary challenge to New Testament scholarship and preaching today.

Author(s):  
David H. Price

Renaissance artists represented the Bible as the preeminent monument of classical culture well before humanist scholars began their revolutionary efforts to recover the ancient forms of biblical texts. Once Renaissance humanism and the Reformation turned decisively to biblical philology (and began overturning the authority of the Vulgate Bible and medieval theology), artists supported their creation of innovative conceptualizations of the Bible. Remarkably, the three most influential artists of the Northern Renaissance—Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger—made profound contributions to all the major Renaissance and Reformation Bibles in Germany and Switzerland and to the biblical humanist movement generally. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the history of biblical humanism, including the emergence of new authoritative Bibles beginning with Erasmus’s first edition of the New Testament in the original Greek.


Author(s):  
Judith N. Shklar

This chapter is occupied with the question of religious belief, different “official” religions and related competing notions of what it means to believe in God’s word. It looks in particular at the period of the Reformation, differing interpretations of the New Testament, and the problems such interpretation raise in relation to both loyalty and obligation.


2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Norman Tanner

The ecumenical and general councils of the Church have produced arguably the most important documents of Christianity after the Bible. How this ‘book’ of the councils came to be composed is the subject of this paper. In the composition, Christians have had to confront three problems similar to those involved in establishing the book of the Bible. First, which councils are to be considered ecumenical or general, paralleling the question of which books are to be included in the Bible. Secondly, which decrees are to be considered the authentic decrees of a particular council, paralleling the question of which chapters and verses make up a particular book of the Bible. Thirdly, which manuscripts or editions form the best text of a given decree, paralleling the search for the best texts of Scripture. There are, too, the additional issues of establishing some hierarchy in the importance of the councils and their decrees – the great creeds and doctrinal statements outrank, surely, most decrees of a purely disciplinary nature, just as the Gospels have a certain priority within the New Testament or Romans and Galatians outrank in importance the Pastoral Epistles – and secondly the difficulties of translating the original texts into the vernacular languages, alike for the councils as for the Bible. Alongside these similarities between the book of the councils and that of the Bible was the tension between Scripture and Tradition. How far could Tradition, represented cumulatively and retrospectively by the councils, interpret or develop the teaching of Scripture? This tension was never far below the surface, and erupted especially in the Reformation controversies.


2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 134-155
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy

Between June 1529 and December 1533 Thomas More published no fewer than seven books comprising more than a million words against the Reformation. The young More had achieved European fame as the author of Utopia, and the friend and defender of the greatest scholar, satirist and literary innovator of the age, Desiderius Erasmus. Utopia remains one of the handful of books which would have to be included in any representative library of Western civilization. More himself, however, came to place a far higher value on the remarkable stream of English works which gushed from his pen in the four years leading up to his arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, which, however, are nowadays read, if at all, mainly as evidence that More was losing his grip. They form a remarkable series: the Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Supplication of Souls, in June and September 1529 respectively; the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (Part I, the Preface and Books I–III, published in January 1532, and Part II, Books IV–VIII, more than a year later, after his resignation as Chancellor). That same year, 1533, saw the last four in this astonishing polemical outpouring, the Apology of Sir Thomas More, the Debellation of Salem and Byzance, the Answer to a Poisoned Book and the Letter Against Frith. Though these books were directed against a variety of authors, Mores main target, implicit even in writings ostensibly directed against others, was the Bible translator and controversialist William Tyndale. More viewed Tyndale as the most important conduit for Lutheran ideas into England, and he saw in Tyndale’s version of the New Testament the fountainhead from which lesser heresiarchs drew lethal draughts of error with which to poison the souls of unsuspecting English men and women.


Phronimon ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-90
Author(s):  
Ponti Venter

Peculiar − just before and after the 1789 French Revolution secular and even atheist catechisms and confessions appeared. Within a wider project to study these peculiar documents, in this article it is attempted, by way of introduction, to disclose the nature of catechisms and confessions, by returning to the source: the Jewish- Rabbinical pedagogical tradition, as elaborated in the New Testament – the method of question-and-answer and repetition. I argue that the rabbi-talmid relationship was also adopted by Jesus and the apostles and is neglected in translations of the New Testament. The development of this genre is followed in main traits via Augustine and the Middle Ages, and it is indicated how philosophical-theological influences (Platonism, rhetoric) changed catechetical practice into scholarly continuous narratives, that have been simplified again in rosaries into daily ritual recitals, like in Kalde’s Kerstenspiegel just before the Reformation. Luther and Calvin’s recovery of New Testament practice is briefly indicated, as well as the worldview or ontological basis of their type of catechisms. It is summarily argued that the new worldview which made “nature” into origin and the “civil, rational human” into the final end of progress, accepted a new divinity – the natural-historical world – that required new confessional documents: a confession of science, of the state, the fatherland, the economy, labour, and so forth. The new catechisms and confessions expressly focused on these.


Author(s):  
Дмитрий Евгеньевич Афиногенов

Трактат 1 из сборника «Амфилохии» св. патр. Фотия на примере истолкования конкретных мест из Библии объясняет методологию библейской экзегезы вообще. Во внимание должен приниматься не только богословский или исторический контекст, но также чисто филологические аспекты: семантика, интонация, языковой узус Нового Завета и Септуагинты, возможные разночтения и т. д. Патриарх убеждён, что при правильном пользовании этим инструментарием можно объяснить все кажущиеся противоречащими высказывания Св. Писания таким образом, что они окажутся в полном согласии друг с другом. The first treatise from «Amphilochia» by the St. Patriarch Photios expounds the general principles of the biblical exegesis on a specific example of certain passages from the Bible. It is not just the theological or historical context that has to be taken into consideration, but also purely philological aspects, such as semantics, intonation, the language usage of the New Testament and Septuagint, possible variant readings etc. The Patriarch is convinced, that the correct application of these tools makes it possible to perfectly harmonize all seemingly contradictory statements of the Scriptures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
David J. Neumann

AbstractSwami Vivekananda was the most influential pioneer of a Yogi Christ, illustrating well over a century ago how the life and teachings of Jesus might be incorporated within a larger Hindu worldview—and then presented back to Western audiences. Appropriation of Jesus, one of the central symbols of the West, might be viewed as the ultimate act of counter-Orientalism. This article begins by providing a brief biography of Vivekananda and the modern Hinduism that nurtured him and that he propagated. He articulated an inclusivist vision of Advaita Vedanta as the most compelling vision of universal religion. Next, the article turns to Vivekananda's views of Christianity, for which he had little affection, and the Bible, which he knew extraordinarily well. The article then systematically explores Vivekananda's engagement with the New Testament, revealing a clear hermeneutical preference for the Gospels, particularly John. Following the lead of biblical scholars, Vivekananda made a distinction between the Christ of the Gospels and the Jesus of history, offering sometimes contradictory conclusions about the historicity of elements associated with Jesus's life. Finally, the article provides a detailed articulation of Vivekananda's Jesus—a figure at once familiar to Christians but, in significant ways, uniquely accommodated to Hindu metaphysics. Vivekananda demonstrated a robust understanding and discriminating use of the Christian Bible that has not been properly recognized. He deployed this knowledge to launch an important and long-lived pattern: an attractive, fleshed out depiction of Jesus of Nazareth, transformed from the Christian savior into a Yogi model of self-realization. Through his efforts, Jesus became an indisputably Indian religious figure, no longer just a Christian one. The Yogi Christ remains a prominent global religious figure familiar to Hindus, Christians, and those of other faiths alike.


2017 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 149-157
Author(s):  
Cherryl Hunt

Ordinary Christians’ responses to a dramatized reading of the New Testament, together with reflection on research in the area of performance criticism, suggests that understanding of the Bible and spiritual encounter with its texts may be promoted by the reading aloud of, and listening to, substantial portions of the Bible in an unfamiliar format; this might be found in a dramatized presentation and/or a previously unencountered translation. This practice should form part of any programme designed to promote biblical engagement within churches.


1953 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 406-416
Author(s):  
R. McL. Wilson

In the Gospel according to St. John it is written that ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have ever-lasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.’ In these familiar words is summed up the message of the Bible as a whole, and of the New Testament in particular. In spite of all that may be said of sin and depravity, of judgment and the wrath of God, the last word is one not of doom but of salvation. The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is a Gospel of salvation, of deliverance and redemption. The news that was carried into all the world by the early Church was the Good News of the grace and love of God, revealed and made known in Jesus Christ His Son. In the words of Paul, it is that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself’.


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