L’insegnamento di Girolamo sulla confutazione dell’eresia contenuto nelle sue Lettere

Reviewed by: Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France by Daniel J. Watkins Darrin M. Mcmahon Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France. By Daniel J. Watkins. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2021. Pp. xviii, 325. $130.00 CAD. ISBN 9780228006305.) This is a history of French Catholicism in the long eighteenth century organized around the history and reception of a single book, the French Jesuit Isaac-Joseph Berruyer's Histoire du peuple de Dieu. Published successively in three parts in 1728, 1753, and 1757, the work was a rare, if tremendously popular, French example of what the historian Jonathan Sheehan has described, with reference to the more prevalent varieties in England and Germany, as an "Enlightenment Bible," an attempt to apply Enlightenment scholarly practices, attitudes, and opinions to the hermeneutical investigation and translation of Scripture. In Berruyer's case, the work reflected, as well, the broader Jesuit effort to accommodate time and place in its teaching of the Christian word. Whereas Matteo Ricci and his brethren had famously donned the vocabulary and dress of China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to proselytize more effectively there, Berruyer made a similar calculation about eighteenth-century France. "To combat the unbelievers of our day," he insisted, the Church needed "new weapons." Drawing freely on the Enlightenment's own arsenal, Berruyer produced a Bible that aimed to appeal to an [End Page 410] enlightened eighteenth-century public. Employing novelistic conventions (and in a revised edition the illustrations of the great rococo painter François Boucher), the booked aimed to appeal to the sentiments, recounting the Biblical narrative through characters and stories in paraphrase that relegated the actual words of the Vulgate to glosses in the margin. It also stressed that the Bible's chief aim was that great eighteenth-century concern—earthly happiness—and it used sensationalist epistemology, accounts of natural religion, and doctrines of human progress to show Christianity's evolution and consonance with reason. If in this way, as Watkins observes in a nice line, "The Enlightenment became yet another mission field" for Jesuit proselytism, the impact of Berruyer's Bible was decidedly mixed (p. 28). Enlightenment authors like Voltaire predictably mocked it as a "salon novel," while others, like the radical abbé Morellet, hailed its innovative Christology. Yet despite evidence of the work's genuine popularity among the laity (precise publication figures, unfortunately, seem to be lacking), the work irked the Jesuits' Jansenist critics, who drew attention to theological concerns and decried the book's allegedly lax morality and its presumption in substituting the word of man for the word of God. For their part, more traditionally minded figures within the Jesuit order itself worried out loud about dangerous "innovation," and their complaints soon caught the ear of Gallican authorities in the French hierarchy, who detected their own dubious departures from tradition and orthodoxy, as well as hints of ultra-Montanism. Watkins spends the bulk of the book showing how these disputes metastasized into a full-blown affaire, which not only divided Jansenists from Jesuits, and Gallicans from Ultramontanes, contributing ultimately to the expulsion of the order and various official condemnations of Berruyer's book, but drove a further wedge between those ready to accommodate aspects of Enlightenment thought to Catholic teaching and those who saw any such flirtation with Catholic Enlightenment as traffic with the enemy. The upshot of his analysis, Watkins argues, "flips the traditional narrative of the Enlightenment … on its head, by suggesting that the damage that the Enlightenment did to the church had as much to do with internal efforts of Catholic theologians to appropriate it as it do with external assaults by radical, anti-clerical philosophes" (p. 5). Tracing that same tension into the nineteenth century, when various French Catholics attempted to revive Berruyer's book in the effort to better reach the laity, Watkins writes with an admirably limpid style and is well-versed in the relevant scholarship. The consequence is a book about a book, which is also a great deal more. Scholars of Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and the interaction of the two over the course of...

Historically, the work of Bible translation has involved multiple disciplines in a commitment to translate Scripture with integrity and faithfulness to the original Greek and Hebrew texts. Translating Scripture for primary oral societies has added another dimension to the need for accuracy, beauty and clarity in Scripture translation. It has been widely accepted in Western literate society that the Bible is accessed in written print in the form of a book. For oral-preference societies, such as the nomadic Himba and San peoples of southern Africa, a printed Bible has presented a challenge. Few people read or wish to read as their primary means of communication. In the case of the San family of languages, complex phonemic systems of up to 85 contrastive clicks have presented a challenge in developing ‘readable’ orthographies. This article has highlighted the rationale for oral-based Bible translation. The research aimed to address the translation needs of oral societies – some of whom are nomadic or semi-nomadic people groups. The recent missiological positioning of certain Bible translation practitioners has led to an oral-based approach to Bible translation which validates the cultural identity of modern oral communicators. Orally crafted translations of Scripture passages have been recorded and made available to oral societies through a range of media, including MP3 players, SD cards and mobile phone applications. The effectiveness of oral-based Bible translation among the Himba people has been seen in their response. What began as a three-year pilot project to explore the potential impact of oral-based Scripture among oral societies has led to a unanimous demand for a second three-year phase, and an expressed desire for a full oral-based Bible in the Himba language. The oral-based approach as described is currently used in nearly 20 other oral Bible translation, which reflects a felt need for oral-based Scripture among oral societies in southern Africa.Contribution: Insights from the emerging practice of oral-based Bible translation in southern Africa provide valuable data for missiological approaches to communicating the gospel in the context of modern oral societies.

Putting “Theological Interpretation” in Its Place: Three Models and Their Limits

This article focusses on the question of whether a hermeneutic of congruent biblical theology, founded in the classic reformed tradition, can still be regarded as plausible and intelligible for doing theology and applying Christian ethics today. The central theoretical argument of the discussion is that a hermeneutic of congruent biblical theology in the abovementioned sense can still be plausible and intelligible under specific conditions. First and foremost: Scripture should be seen as the written revelation (Word) of God, inspired by the Spirit of God, and as more than just an ancient text. This inspiration can be termed “organic inspiration” because the Spirit inspired and used humans, within their cultural and socio-historical contexts, their spiritual experiences, languages and expectations to write the texts. Approaching Scripture from this premise, interpreters should for understanding the text, read the text using the modern tools of lexicography and deal thoroughly with the cultural and socio-historical contexts of the ancient authors and the implications thereof. In this process, interpreters must be aware of the fact that they approach Scripture with various forms of pre-understanding and should deal with these by way of the tools of the hermeneutical circle. Passages in Scripture must be analysed and interpreted in light of the wholeness of Scripture and its congruent biblical theology. Furthermore, a “hermeneutic of congruent biblical theology” can add value to biblical studies and new theological knowledge by considering findings in modern literary theories as long as these do not disregard the belief that Scripture is the inspired authoritative written Word of God. Lastly, a hermeneutic of congruent biblical theology must function within the ambit of the Reformed dictum of “semper reformanda” – the quest for continuous revisiting and reevaluation of the findings of biblical interpretation in the course of history.

Modern methods of historical-critical and literary interpretation have secularized biblical interpretation by treating scripture as a strictly human text that can be understood by discerning the meaning of its many human authors and redactors. In a similar way modern fundamentalist and patristic exegesis have also secularized biblical interpretation in that they assume that scripture itself is the Word of God, whose meaning is readily evident from the words on the page and no longer requires the gracious gift of God's action and presence to make its meaning manifest. This paper argues that Karl Barth's theology of scripture provides the resources to revitalize biblical interpretation because Barth takes seriously the full humanity of the Bible and the need for historical interpretation while understanding that any interpretation of scripture's transcendent subject matter requires the presence of God's Word and Spirit to make its meaning understood and applied in the Church and world today.

When a change of speaker in a Scripture text is not explicitly introduced by a speech orienter, Bible readers may feel the text is “intrusive.” This article proposes a taxonomy for categorizing such intrusive voices in various passages of Scripture. The intrusion may be external (due to scribal activity) or internal (as written by the original author). Internal intrusions can be further classified as citations or unmarked conversational turns. Textual signals that a change of speaker has occurred in the original texts include a change in deictic reference (primarily pronominal) and change in semantic content. The article lists orthographic and linguistic devices that translators have used in existing Scripture translations to clarify that a change of speaker has occurred, and also examines several passages where it is not fully clear whether an intrusive voice is present or not.

“In the Beginning Was the Word”Evangelical Christian Women, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Competing Definitions of Womanhood Chelsea Griffis (bio) During the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratification period from 1972 to 1982, evangelical Christian women’s organizations played an important role in the debate and discussion over the amendment. Though these organizations were all grouped under the same title of evangelical, they did not all argue for the same side of the ERA debate. Evangelical Christian female leaders and women’s organizations supported or rejected the Equal Rights Amendment based on how they defined womanhood. While they all used the Bible as the main source of evidence in their arguments about proper roles for women, and therefore whether to support the Equal Rights Amendment, they came to very different conclusions. Concerned Women for America and its leader Beverly LaHaye used what they perceived as a literal interpretation of the Bible to support their view that God made the two sexes different, and therefore inherently politically unequal, though not inferior or socially unequal. In their view men were made to rule, and subsequently the ERA had no place within the United States’ rule of law. The Evangelical Women’s Caucus argued that the Equal Rights Amendment was necessary as God wished for the sexes to be equal in all ways, including politically. In their view human fallibility led to biblical interpretation, deemed by some as literal, which supported female oppression and did not resonate with the word of God. In this way differing biblical interpretations led evangelical Christian women’s organizations to opposite definitions of womanhood, though all of them held that their biblical interpretations were literal. Their definitions of womanhood in turn informed their varying opinions on the Equal Rights Amendment and complicated the idea that all evangelical women held the same religious and political beliefs. Due to this historical context of discussion about proper gender roles for evangelical communities, the ERA ratification campaign fanned the flames of a growing separation among evangelical women, between those who supported [End Page 148] new liberalized definitions of womanhood and those who wanted to stick to old, traditional standards. Historical analysis of evangelical women’s roles throughout the twentieth century is riddled with attempts at psychological explanation, especially when it was connected to perceived fundamental or literal biblical interpretation. As American Studies scholar Axel R. Schafer has pointed out, “rather than being understood on its own terms, orthodox religion was defined as a reaction against, a deviation from, or an adjustment to the given modern setting.” Scholars continue to describe traditionally religious people, particularly evangelical Christians, in this light. Historian Randall Balmer claims fundamentalist Christians and those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible “have felt beleaguered and besieged by forces beyond their control” during much of the twentieth century and sees their insistence on voicing their beliefs as “a desperate attempt to reclaim” a culture that has abandoned them. Religious scholar Karen McCarthy Brown emphasized this point and states that “fundamentalism, in my view, is the religion of the stressed and the disoriented, of those for whom the world is overwhelming.” Her belief is that they were not rational actors but, instead, psychologically disturbed and unwilling or unable to participate fully in the modern world. Evangelical Christian women receive the same treatment, sometimes even more harshly than that given to their male peers. Betty DeBerg, religious studies scholar, argues that “any hint of androgyny—a world without gender limits—seemed very frightening.” Linda Kintz supports this point by arguing that antifeminism offered a “solace to women who feel exhausted and desperate because they cannot keep up with the competitive world supposedly introduced by feminism, a world in which women who have felt humiliated by the more general historical contempt for women now feel even less secure because they are unable to keep up.”1 This essay seeks to add nuance to this historiography through discussion and analysis of evangelical Christian women’s theological and political ideologies, as well as their definitions of womanhood, and how these ideologies helped inform their stances on the ERA. Before this discussion can begin, though, it is important to define evangelical Christianity. As with...

“Clear as God's Words?”—Dealing with Ambiguities in the Bible Manfred Oeming Between guidance and confusion—the discrepancy between expectation and reality When humans read the Bible, they look for clear guidance. “Teach me your way, O LORD” (Ps 27:11)—the authors of the Psalms consistently pray. In difficult life situations, on the margins, in ambiguity, they expect that God shows them which way to turn. “Make me understand the way of your tenets” (Ps 119:27). In our cultures, influenced by Jewish and Christian traditions, almost everyone might agree that the Bible serves as ethical guideline helping us making hard moral decisions. But how, exactly, does that work? Human artists create works that are ambiguous and cannot be reduced to one single and unambiguous meaning. We accept this in our daily lives. For instance, when several people look at a painting, they will associate different things—and this is perfectly acceptable. Even more so, art shouldn't be unambiguous but should produce a multitude of different interpretations and reactions. This has been accepted in hermeneutics and aesthetics at least since Umberto Eco's “Postscript to The Name of the Rose” (1984). But what happens if these multitudes of meaning happen in God's Word? If the Bible is ambiguous? What in secular art is seen as positive and enriching becomes problematic in the realm of the sacred. And even worse: how can we deal with discrepancies and conflicts in the Sacred Scriptures? What happens when normative texts provide different and even opposing guidelines to important questions? “The Rabbis say: “What happens when a hammer meets a rock? Sparks fly. Every spark is the result of the hammer hitting the rock but no spark is a singular result.” This is similar to the scriptures where one verse can convey many different teachings” (bSanhedrin 24). It seems that they do not have a serious problem with the plurality of interpretations. But Protestant Theology has continuously taught claritas scripturae. According to this dogma, there are four rules: (1) No dogma necessary for salvation can be unclear. (2) The Scriptures explain themselves; if something is unclear, it can be explained by other parts. (3) If the Scriptures seem to be unclear, the reason can be found in human sin and ignorance. (4) The Scriptures are unambiguous because God has authored them and God would never contradict himself. So far the Protestant dogma. However, reality looks very different. Since the development of the historic‐critical method in Biblical interpretation, it has become obvious that the teachings of the Bible are not unified and clear; rather, the Bible contains numerous points of view. Even key themes and key ethical guidelines are ambiguous as can be shown in numerous instances. I will present one example. How to deal with strangers within the framework of Old Testament (OT) ethics A search of all Biblical passages about the ethical approach to strangers will immediately reveal that the New Testament only offers very general advice. “So there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free people, between men and women; you are all one in union with Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). This is a statement about the internationality of the interconnected church without hierarchy. It challenges us to invite all strangers in, which is seen as service to Christ himself (see also Matthew 25:35 “I was a stranger, and you invited me in”). It even becomes a cardinal virtue—”Remember to welcome strangers in your homes. There were some who did that and welcomed angels without knowing it.” (Hebrews 13:2) But our modern discussions about strangers are embedded in the idea of “the nation” and their competing markets. The question “How many foreigners can we accept into our country without endangering out inner peace?” is a complex one. For its answers, we rely on insights from ethics, the law, economics, and psychology. The OT offers some important insights here, since the distinction between oneself and the other, and the difficulty of living as stranger in an often hostile culture are—without exaggerationöthe key problems in the history of Israel and the theology and ethics of the OT. Three theological arguments...

Roman Catholic theologians of the late Middle Ages inherited a system of methods and sources with which to work out answers to philosophical and practical questions long held in controversy among Christian believers. Catholic interpreters of Scripture, usually university professors and higher-ranking clergy, used the Latin Vulgate version and made extensive use of patristic writings by renowned early scholars of the faith such as Augustine of Hippo (354–430). They also applied methods of pre-Christian philosophers, including Aristotle's system of categorising and applying knowledge. Other theological sources included canon law (containing conciliar decrees and patristic writings), the decretals (papal decrees since the mid-twelfth century) and multi-volume scriptural commentaries such as the Glossa Ordinaria and works by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and Peter Lombard ( c . 1100–60). Use of such canonical sources, a single translation of Scripture (that varied among manuscript copies), and philosophical methods of sorting through all possible conclusions and objections for one presumably correct answer to a question gave rise to the term ‘systematic’ for this type of theology. While chiefly maintaining status quo doctrines and practices, such theological work, the focus of the first section of this chapter, challenged powerful forces in society and called for reform. Catholic spiritual writings of the era also exhibit a systematic, Bible-centred approach to monastic and personal devotion. In the second section I treat controversial theology: writings by Catholics aimed at a Protestant audience or meant for the instruction of Catholics in how to refute Protestant doctrines and biblical interpretation. The final section examines Catholic theology collectively from 1600 to 1750, when a demand for Scripture-focused popular theology in northern Europe contrasted with traditional works maintaining an integrated use of sources. Systematic theology and spiritual writings before Trent The familiar Protestant accusation that the Bible played a small role in Catholic theology would have seemed very strange to the late medieval theologian. Intellectual life revolved around the study of the Bible, from the highest degrees at universities, to the basis of legal systems, to the cornerstone of lay spirituality. Still, the complexity of the scholastic method, the inaccessibility of dense biblical commentaries in Latin and the central authority exercised over the highest levels of scriptural interpretation left the Church vulnerable to allegations that the Pope and clergy were enemies of Scripture rather than the Christian Bible's custodians and inspired exegetes since late antiquity.

This essay attempts to explore Prof. Suh, Joong-Suk’s sermons and examine the meaning and significance of the biblical interpretation, embedded therein. During his tenure as a New Testament professor, pastor, and vice president of Yonsei University, Prof. Suh delivered the sermons, profoundly based on the text of the Bible. For those Christian believers who seek the truth and liberation, his messages relate to the teaching of “self-emptiness” and “moderation”, beyond the desire to have and have more. His messages have emerged from the midst of problems involving ‘greed’ and ’pride’ in an era of modernization, industrialization, and globalization. Hence, the engagement in, and reflection of, the Bible in his sermons becomes a prophetic event for the world today. Prof. Suh pointedly declares the vision of the beyond and encourages the believers to react to the present disarray. By critical transcendence, such as “looking into the sky,” the People of God may find a new pathway to the future, ensuring the sacred vision for themselves. Biblical interpretation has powerful effects on people and their lives in diverse ways, since it affects them in their life contexts as a ‘Word of God’ to live by. In this regard, Prof. Suh’s sermons become an invaluable source for the life of Christians and a site of emergent possibilities for the future of biblical interpretation. This essay employs the insights from the biblical studies as well as homiletics in order to analyze Prof. Suh’s 71 sermons, published in three different volumes.

This essay explores the overlapping territory between the phenomenon known as ‘imaginative resistance’ in literary, psychological and philosophical circles and Karl Barth's theological hermeneutic. Imaginative resistance refers to the way readers are willing to give consent to all sorts of implausible things in the context of a fiction, but become uneasy when asked to imagine that something they consider morally or ethically reprehensible is good. The essay offers an overview of the current scholarly theories regarding the origins of the phenomenon of imaginative resistance, arguing that none of them provide an adequate account of imaginative resistance in relation to a text read as ‘Word of God’. The essay suggests that Karl Barth's theological hermeneutic does not offer a ‘solution’ to imaginative resistance in relation to scripture, but rather deepens and redescribes it in meaningful ways by acknowledging the appropriateness of the interpreter's resistance while encouraging continued engagement even with the claims of challenging biblical texts.

This essay seeks to explore speech-act theory in its relation to biblical interpretation. Its initial focus falls on the application of N. Wolterstorff whose book Divine Discourse provided the decisive catalyst for the recent debates. Building on the different kinds of action involved when speaking (locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary) Wolterstorff draws two important hermeneutical implications. First, the theory affords a way of understanding the unity of scripture in its entirety as God's book; second, it enables the reader to acknowledge the infallibility of God's Word as divine discourse without ascribing infallibility to the human words of scripture.The second part attempts to offer a critical assessment of Wolterstorff's application of his theory, especially in its failure to deal adequately with the function of the Christian canon which shaped the church's traditions in such a way as to provide a rule-of-faith for the theological guidance of subsequent generations of readers. By abandoning the hermeneutical understanding of scripture developed by Irenaeus and Calvin, Wolterstorff flounders in his inability to overcome the threat of scripture's becoming a ‘wax nose’ in which the noematic content of what God now says in divine discourse is not identical with the meaning of the biblical sentence itself.The final section examines the exegesis of the well-known scholar A. Thiselton, whose work has done much in developing a speech-act theory. The conclusion reached is that Thiselton's application of the theory is far different from that of Wolterstorff's and avoids many of the problems which plague Wolterstorff's exegesis. The implication of this analysis is to argue that speech-act theory cannot be indiscriminately lumped together, because various forms of the theory often reflect different hermeneutical theories of biblical interpretation.

This article is a plea for a non-biblical approach to biblical texts, the so called “Rezeptionsästhetik” (aesthetics of reception). Important points of this approach are reading biblical texts as fictional (poetic) texts and the reader’s role in decoding the texts according to his “encyclopaedia”. Using aesthetics of reception in interpreting Bible texts can contribute to the better acceptance of different points of view on the same scripture passage and to more respect and understanding between the different religious traditions concerning biblical interpretation.

The doctrine of biblical inspiration is the view that the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of the sacred texts so that the resultant Scripture is the word of God. To say that Scripture is “God-breathed” does not mean that the scrolls fell down from the sky. Inspiration, in this sense, is the supernatural force that moved the sacred writers to transmit what God has revealed using, human language. How does one understand the Bible as the inspired word of God despite the apparent and sometimes manifest inconsistencies that one finds in the Scriptures? Does inspiration imply divine dictation, as taught by the Augustinian school of thought? Is the Bible purely a product of human ingenuity as held by some humanists? Or are we dealing with a confluence of divine will and human ability? This is the problem that this article intends to address. This will be done by applying an exegetical study of the relevant Scriptural passages dealing on this subject.

Why Science and Faith Belong Together: Stories of Mutual Enrichment