Gerhard Lohfink’s Interpretative Key to the Sermon on the Mount

The purpose of this article is to elicit and analyze the main interpretative key used by the German exegete Gerhard Lohfink in his reading of the Sermon on the Mount. It does not attempt, however, tracing in detail the scholar's interpretation of the individual passages within that biblical text. In Lohfink’s understanding, the Sermon on the Mount is not addressed directly to all people but only to those who become disciples of Jesus, and who allow themselves to be gathered as the new Israel. By living according to the message of the Sermon on the Mount, communities of disciples become a light to the world, creating a “contrast society” and thereby demonstrating to the world that human relationships can be shaped in new ways. It is only through this mediation of Christian communities that the world at large can discover the message of the Sermon on the Mount which, in the end, is not a set of abstract moral norms, but rather an indication of the way of life appropriate for the social sphere in which God reigns.

Encroachment and Reaction of Civil Society in Non-liberal Democracies: The Case of Israel and the New Israel Fund

Recent decades have seen a major political shift in many nations, manifested in democratic regression, rise of populist non-liberal democracies, resurgence of extreme right, infractions against democratic watchdogs, and increasing nationalism and unilateralism. A central manifestation of this process is the active encroachment by governments on civil society, and particularly on its liberal elements. These manifestations allegedly emanate from resistance to the liberal world order and to threats from pressures imported by national NGOs, and are made possible by changing political opportunity structures. We explore the case of Israel, through an analysis of the New Israel Fund (NIF), as a particular yet demonstrative example of these dynamics. The manifestations of civil society encroachment in Israel include concerted and coordinated actions meant to weaken and delegitimize left-wing civil society actors and their supporters and donors, by Israel’s right-wing governments and their NGO allies, through legislation and rhetorical assaults; attempts to curb international funding of human rights organizations; and differential treatment of civil society organizations according to political stance. Interviews with former and current leaders of the NIF show that the attacks have galvanized liberal civil society actors to counteract, and drove them from passive response to active and strategic engagement, professionalization of media work and program evaluation, adjustment of public relations and legal strategies, and even adjustment of programmatic choice, shifting focus to supporting the infrastructure of civil society and democracy. The discussion stresses pressures by international illiberal forces, alongside the backlash to liberal world society, as causes for encroachment, and highlights the less explored reactions of civil society actors to such encroachment.

The Church as the new Family of God

Jesus founded His Church as the new family of God by instituting the Twelve. The new family is a real space which fulfils the Kingdom of God. It is a community of Jesus’ disciples which fosters the rule of God in the world and has an explicitly institutional dimension. The founding of the new family fulfils the promise to create the new Israel made in the Old Testament. The ethos of the new family of God is aimed at proclaiming the universal reign of God, as it is the mission bestowed on the family by Jesus. Its moral principles were laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. The new family of God is a space where all the promises made by God to Israel come to fulfilment. In this sense, we can speak of continuity between the nation of Israel and the Ecclesia. The Church does not replace the people of the Old Testament but is a continuation thereof in Jesus Christ.

Hebraism

This chapter examines Hebraism as the ‘third culture’, distinct from Greek and Roman Christianity, as a kind of Jewish Christianity. Hebraism, as a current of intellectual history, is expressed in the work of the Christian Hebraists of early modern Europe, the quintessential example being John Selden. Hebraism’s focus on life in this world led to the problems of how life should be organized through law, the territorialization of tradition, and the paradoxical national monotheism of the ‘new Israel’. A different interpretation of the Old Testament emerged, influencing the relation between the Old and New Testaments. The theological, political, legal, and social characteristics of Hebraic culture are clarified.

Hebraism in Religion, History, and Politics

This work is an investigation into Hebraism as a category of cultural analysis within the history of Christendom. Its aim is to determine what Hebraism means or should mean when it is used to refer to a culture or characteristics of a culture. In tracing those characteristics that arose in the changing relation between a doctrinally orthodox Christianity and the nation of a ‘new Israel’, sovereignty, and their legal anthropology, Hebraism refers to the development of a ‘Jewish Christianity’ or an ‘Old Testament Christianity’. It represents a ‘third culture’ in contrast to the cultures of the Roman or Hellenistic empires and Christian universalism. While the initial formulation of Hebraism as a cultural category was by Matthew Arnold, an earlier approximation is found in the work of John Selden, with considerable refinements by several scholars in the twentieth century. The categories of Hebraism and Hebraic culture provide a means by which to examine differently the history of religion and the history of early modern Europe.

The Religious Roots of the American Concept of Human Rights

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the primary source of the modern concept of human rights – the United States Declaration of Independence, a document directly related to the “Jefferson’s Bible” quilted by the author of the Declaration T. Jefferson. The author emphasizes that the United States of America were perceived by Jefferson as New Israel, the idea traditionally supported by the dominant US ideology, which determines the nature of foreign policy and the interpretation of international law. Tracing historical dynamics of Jeffersonian ideas, the author briefly analyses the current state of human rights concept in international law in its constant political time-serving changes. The author concludes that the concept of human rights does not have its own ontology, and in modern conditions becomes the basis of the idea of the West exceptionalism in relation to the rest of the world. The article notes that the idea upheld by the West concerning the primacy of human rights over the principle of State sovereignty leads to the collapse of the entire system of international relations and international law and means permanent war.

Moscow—The Third Rome or the New Israel?

This chapter reviews recent events in the former Soviet Union that have stimulated the rethinking of many previously axiomatic notions about the past and present of Russia. It also looks at situations in Russia that created a propitious environment for the famous idea that sixteenth-century Russians thought of themselves as inhabitants of “the Third Rome.” It also explains how the Third Rome helped to create the impression that Muscovite Russia was exotic and expansionist, a worthy predecessor of the evil empire that occupied people's attention in the 1980s and before. The chapter cites the flaws of the conventional notion that the Third Rome theory is an early justification for Russian expansionism. It points out the relative scarcity of evidence for the Third Rome theme in Muscovite sources, especially in sources that originated before the 1590s.