The insignificant impact of the historical Jesus

There is a natural tendency in the church to idealise the historical Jesus. This may lead to believers turning Jesus into an ideal moral or religious exemplar or lead to a prosperity gospel by predominantly focusing on the miraculous power and accomplishments of the earthly Jesus. This depiction of Jesus is in sharp contrast to the rejected and crucified Lord. This article follows a systematic theological methodology by challenging the theological framework which leads to the idealised perception of Jesus as a super-hero. The article does so, by reconsidering the interpretive framework employed to understand the inter-relationship between the person and actions of the historical Jesus, and the kingdom of God breaking through. I argue that the eschatological hermeneutical approach to salvation history best accommodate the tension between ‘consistent’ and ‘realised eschatology’, and help the church overcome the temptation to turn Jesus into a universal spiritual symbol or moral exemplar. The eschatological hermeneutical approadch to salvation history often focuses on the death and resurrection of Jesus, but I contend, should be expanded to include the life and ministry of Jesus. In this article it is argued that Jesus came to share in our human weakness and fallibility. Jesus fully experienced the ‘not yet’ of the Kingdom, by identifying and sharing in our lack of success. The unique character of Jesus as ‘God who became human’, sets him radically apart from all other humans and nullifies any attempt to idealise him. The resurrected and glorified Jesus whom the church worships, is and remains the crucified and rejected Messiah.Contribution: The implications of the research will radicalise the believers’ understanding of the significance of the incarnation. It challenges some of the assumptions regarding Jesus’ power to help believers be successful in life. The article also holds pastoral implications for all those who experience the pain of failure, rejection and insignificance.

The Eschatological Key

In the first volume of his systemic series, German theologian Jürgen Moltmann begins his systematics with a musical metaphor; “The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything is set …” Moltmann then goes on to propose that the eschaton is a temporal event, which breaks the logic of his initial metaphor of the key signature. This essay will explore the differences between understanding the eschaton explicated as the key that Christian hope is set as opposed to a temporal alternative, such as the time signature. Jeremy Begbie is brought into the conversation to explicate how “harmony” can guide our conversation of music theory, and Miguel De La Torre illuminates how Moltmann’s claim, which while revolutionary in many aspects, continues to rely on Eurocentric understanding of salvation history, just as music theory tends towards Eurocentrism. We also examine what we lose out on when we leave this uninterrogated. To conclude, we explore how Moltmann’s proposal about Christian hope becomes more coherent within the metaphor of key signature and right relationship instead of time signature and temporality.

Die Entstehung des Reformatorenbildes: Luther und Honterus im Vergleich

Due to the rather different source situation, comparing the formation of a Reformer’s image in the cases of Luther and Honterus is not an easy task. For Luther, the article therefore concentrates on the early historiography of his environment. In doing so, it becomes apparent that his role more and more was described as an active one. With this, the understanding of Reformation as liberation came to the fore. Hence, salvation-historical categories predominated. In contrast, the interpretation of Reformation as an educational event was in the foreground in Honterus, for whom above all some utterings of Schesaeus could be drawn upon. Despite this clear orientation towards the humanistic ideal, Luther still remained emphasized as spurring the entire movement. While Luther was seen as marking the shift in salvation history from the time of the Antichrist to the Gospel, Honter focused on the transition from a disordered society to one structured by education.

The Muhammad Avatāra

The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam reveals the powerful role of vernacular translation in the Islamization of Bengal. Its focus is on the magnificent seventeenth-century Nabīvaṃśa of Saiyad Sultān, who lived in Arakanese-controlled Chittagong. Drawing upon the Arabo-Persian Tales of the Prophets genre, the Nabīvaṃśa (“Lineage of the Prophet”) retells the life of the Prophet Muhammad for the first time to Bengalis in their mother-tongue. This book delineates the challenges faced by the author in articulating the pre-eminence of Islam and its Arabian prophet in a land where multiple religious affiliations were common, and when Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇava missionary activity was at its zenith. Sultān played a pioneering role in setting into motion various lexical, literary, performative, theological, and, ultimately, ideological processes that led to the establishment of a distinctively Bengali Islam in east Bengal. At the heart of this transformation lay the persuasiveness of translation on a new Islamic frontier. The Nabīvaṃśa not only kindled a veritable translation movement of Arabo-Persian Islamic literature into Bangla, but established the grammar of creative translation that was to become canonical for this regional tradition. This text-critical study lays bare the sophisticated strategies of translation used by a prominent early modern Muslim Bengali intellectual to invite others to his faith.

A New Prophetology for Bengal

Saiyad Sultān’s narratological innovation of a Hindu prehistory to the traditional Islamic prophets is examined in this chapter. Saiyad Sultān reconstitutes Islamic prophetology to include Hindu divinities and sacred texts, tacitly enlarging the qurʾānic category of People of the Book to embrace the Hindus of Bengal. After the creation of Nūr Muhammad, specific Hindu deities, identifiable as Śiva and various avatāras of Viṣṇu, make their advent to eradicate evil from the earth. Their failure to reform their communities brings forth Ādam, and after him the line of Islamic prophets, culminating with the Prophet of Islam. One concern of this chapter is to demonstrate Sultān’s reliance upon various Perso-Arabic sources of the Tales of the Prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ) genre. Through analysis of Sultān’s portrayal of Ādam, Śīś (i.e., Shīth/Seth), and Iblīs, the chapter also highlights narratological features that exemplify how the author composes a “Purāṇa-Korān” salvation history for Bengal.