The Renewal of Perception in Religious Faith and Biblical Narrative

Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and teach is by renewing their characters’ and readers’ imagination. The texts do so not inexorably but in a similar way as (other) works of art. This paper therefore investigates the ways in which works of art engage and develop the imagination, and thereby enable renewed perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world. The paper introduces predictive processing as a helpful psychological theory for analyzing this dynamic, and outlines questions for further research.

“On Healing”: Paul Tillich’s Contribution to Current Research on Resilience

This article discusses how Tillich’s psychologically informed re-interpretation of dogmatic and biblical narratives may offer ways to cope with complex experiences of adversity that are characterized by a pressing need for resilience, along with extreme difficulties in communicating meaningfully. In tandem with the focus on the practical applications of Tillich’s theology, the source material comprises Tillich’s sermons (cf. The Shaking of the Foundations [1948]; The New Being [1955]; The Eternal Now [1963]). The analysis concentrates on three aspects of Tillich’s treatise on healing, namely (a) Tillich’s discussion of the healer’s capability to heal “in spite of”; (b) his understanding of “in spite of” and the connected semantics of fighting; (c) his (implicit) approach to re-examining the idea of healing as narratively mediated, which allows to further the discourse on resilience in regard to semantic representations and narrations.

Nächstenliebe und Selbstliebe

The contribution starts anthropologically, following biblical narratives but also modern anthropological research, by assuming that people are fundamentally related to others and that human cultural development is based on fundamentally cooperative processes. Against this background, love of self and love of neighbour are not understood as competing patterns of behaviour; rather, they are mutually dependent. This is confirmed by empirical results with regard to volunteer work, which show that for most volunteers altruism, sociability and self-development do not denote contradictory motives, but rather interpret each other reciprocally.

Theodicy Incarnate: Divine Self-Justification

The most prominent obstacle to hope and faith in God is an experienced world evidently at odds with the goodness and thus the reality of God. This obstacle gets traction when combined with the assumption, found in many Biblical narratives, that God merits worship and trust from humans owing to impeccable divine goodness. This article examines whether, and if so how, God can avoid the charge that divine failure to eliminate or to reduce actual human suffering disqualifies God from being worthy of worship and trust. We thus ask whether God merits the benefit of the doubt regarding a charge of divine neglect for evil human suffering. This leads to the key issue of the adequacy of a vantage point from which divine goodness is assessed. If a particular human vantage point is so narrow as to be misleading regarding divine goodness, it can be inferior to other available vantage points. Clarification of this lesson opens the door to a widely neglected vantage point of a ‘showing-how theodicy’ in contrast with an ‘explaining-why theodicy.’ The former theodicy fits with many of the Biblical narratives, and it enables God to merit the benefit of the doubt regarding a charge of divine inadequacy toward human suffering.

From discursive resistance to new genealogies: rethinking Israelite identities in Africa through the case of Nuer Christian Zionists

Scholars have commonly interpreted the emergence of claims of Israelite descent among African peoples as attempts of marginalized communities to construct empowering identities by drawing on biblical narratives. This article tries to make sense of such claims from a more emic perspective, not as an instrumental counter-discourse but as a genuine attempt to grapple with the nature of ethnic membership and the place of certain communities in relation to biblical genealogies, time and space. The article explores the claims of Nuer members of several Evangelical Zionist churches operating in western Ethiopia and South Sudan that the Nuer are among the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. It demonstrates how Nuer Zionists have reinterpreted Nuer identity, known for its permeability and constructivist nature, in light of contemporary premillennialist Zionist notions of history and peoplehood, which emphasize ethnic fixity and focus on lineages, exclusive bloodlines and biological descent. The article offers a new perspective on Israelite identities in Africa and on the influence of born-again Christianity on the construction of ethnic identities.

9. The Bible in politics

‘The Bible in politics’ examines the place of the Bible in politics. Martin Luther and the mainstream Reformers used it to justify the power of the sword and to draw a clear line between the laws which were to govern secular society and the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, which was intended only for Christians. The Quakers in England, like the Anabaptists, interpreted the commandments of the Sermon of the Mount literally and so refused to bear arms or to swear oaths. It is worth considering how the Bible has been a major source of the patriarchy which has marked Christian societies and exploring some feminist critiques of biblical narratives.

The structure of Ezra-Nehemiah as a literary unit

The OT books, Ezra and Nehemiah, are to be considered as one book. This is more or less the common conviction of most OT scholars today. However, their redaction process raises many questions. What is their relation to the book of Chronicles, and how is their actual structure to be understood? Why do we find two almost identical lists of returnees from exile in Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7? What about the differences between these lists? This article understands the structure of Ezra-Nehemiah as a consciously created literary unit, where the two lists of returnees serve as an important part of the literary structure. The author works on the assumption of the so-called new literary criticism, understanding the narrative in the book on a synchronic basis. He shows that the book of Ezra-Nehemiah can indeed be understood as one literary unit, and that the two lists of returnees function as a literary means to structure the book. There is therefore no need to ‘re-organise’ the narrated events in Ezra-Nehemiah according to an alleged different chronological order.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The study argued for a canonical and synchronic approach to biblical narratives. The biblical texts should be understood as consciously created narratives, where the apparent discrepancies are important aspects of the narrative fixture.

Reading the wedding at Cana in Galilee (Jn 2:1–11) through the lenses of introverted sensing and introverted intuition: Perceiving text differently

Working within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, a series of empirical studies have tested the theory that the readers’ psychological type preference between sensing and intuition (the two Jungian perceiving functions) shapes distinctive readings of biblical narratives. More recently, closer attention has also been given to differentiation within these two perceiving functions of sensing and intuition with regard to their introverted and extraverted orientation. Against this background, the present study examines the distinctive reading of the Johannine narrative of the wedding at Cana, a passage rich in materials to engage the perceiving functions, by two groups whose dominant or auxiliary functions were introverted sensing and introverted intuition.Contribution: Situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking (SIFT) method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of text. The foundations of the SIFT approach distinguish amongst the four functions of sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking. The present study builds on this foundation by introducing the nuance of the orientation in which the function is expressed, in this case focusing specifically on introverted sensing and introverted intuition.

Women in the Bible: What can they teach us about gender equality?

What can we learn about gender equality from the women in Scripture today? Can women in Scripture serve as role models for the women striving for leadership positions and could there be a potential correlation with current-day policies and practices supporting gender balance, and Christian ethical standards? This article, based on the Reformed paradigm, addresses women portrayed in formal and informal roles spanning from leaders, teachers, prophets and other prominent characters – each playing their roles in Scripture. It is argued that despite women often being placed in marginal positions in Scripture, they nevertheless permeate the Bible in narratives on resourcefulness, auto-leadership, and in their place in securing and upholding the Covenant with God. It will be demonstrated how women are presented as necessary partakers in the most significant of biblical narratives, and that their leadership exertion typically has a necessary role in the overarching scriptural scenarios. It will appear that by taking a closer approach to Scripture, we can take inspiration from female biblical leadership figures in most, if not all realms of today’s life.Contribution: It will be clear that Scripture lends sufficient support to promote full and complete gender equality, whether this be expressed in corporate life, government, or family. The examples gleaned from Scripture will demonstrate how gender equality not only is something that Scripture allows, but also expects.