Biblical Christ Research Articles

Christ-figures in modern Anglophone West African fiction: Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and the Church in West Africa today

ABSTRACT Over the years, a good number of West African fiction writers in English, influenced, as it were, by several factors, but especially, by their Christian background, have come up, in their works, with characters fashioned in the image and likeness of the biblical Christ, otherwise, Christ-figures. This paper, in the first place, looks at how, through the characters, Jaja, Papa-Nnukwu and Father Amadi, the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, continues, in her novel, Purple Hibiscus, the aforementioned tradition. It then considers the implications that the said Christ-figures in Purple Hibiscus hold for the contemporary Church in Anglophone West Africa. It is hoped that the paper will remain an invaluable addition to current efforts at deepening the relationship existing between religion, in this case, Christianity, and Anglophone modern West African creative literature.

Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung: Von Kelsos und Origenes bis heute by Marius Reiser

Reviewed by: Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung: Von Kelsos und Origenes bis heute by Marius Reiser Linda M. Maloney marius reiser, Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung: Von Kelsos und Origenes bis heute ( SBS 235; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2015). Pp. 204. Paper €28. [Full disclosure: this reviewer and Marius Reiser have been friends and conversation partners since our student days in Tübingen in the 1980s.] In this volume for the Stuttgarter Bibelstudien series, Marius Reiser has reviewed in a scant two hundred pages the history of Jesus research, beginning with Origen's Contra Celsum and ending with our own contemporaries. R. is an acute and widely read scholar in Greek history and literature, and he brings that background, as well as his expertise in NT, to the task. He finds that Origen was in many ways a more accurate assessor of the evidence regarding Jesus than most, if not all, subsequent critics. Among the ancients he also includes a section on Porphyry. In the first chapter, "Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung," R. reviews a panoply of scholars whom, in his Vorwort, he divides essentially into skeptics and "orthodox." He numbers himself among the latter and describes these scholars as those who seek to think in accord with the ancient creeds that constitute the universal Christian confession: the conviction, that is, that historical-critical biblical research is done in a context of and is part of theology. The scholars whose work is treated in the first section include (among the non-orthodox) Reimarus, Johann Gottfried Herder, Matthias Claudius, David Friedrich Strauss, and Ernest Renan. A subsection on Marie-Joseph Lagrange locates him within his time period as an "orthodox" outlier. Then comes a chapter called "Der kreisende Berg" (with sardonic reference to the mountain that labored and brought forth a mouse). R. concentrates on the issue of identifying the historical Jesus with the biblical Christ, which he sees as the fundamental question asked (and for the most part answered in the negative) by the several "Quests." The most influential figure here is, of course, Rudolf Bultmann, and he receives the most extended critique. Ernst Käsemann, Günther Bornkamm, John Dominic Crossan, and the Jesus Seminar are sharply criticized; Gerd Theissen fares somewhat better. R. disputes Geza Vermes's thesis that Jesus was a Galilean ḥāsîd, with reference to R.'s own [End Page 346] previous book, Der unbequeme Jesus (Biblisch-theologische Studien 122; NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft, 2012), in which he sought to show that Jesus was and remains an irritant in his own and subsequent religious communities. Even John Meier comes in for criticism here: though R. deeply respects his profound and diligent scholarship, R.'s response to the attempt to discover a Jesus-image acceptable to agnostics as well as believers is essentially: cui bono? The chapter on the conservative-critical line of thought starts with Martin Dibelius and includes the Jewish scholar Hans-Joachim Schoeps; R. agrees with Schoeps and Joseph Klausner, that Jesus "opened a path that necessarily led away from Judaism" (p. 115, citing Schoeps's 1963 essay, "Jesus und das jüdische Gesetz," in idem, Studien zur unbekannten Religions- und Geistesgeschichte [Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1963]). Others treated here are C. H. Dodd, Milan Machovec, Ben F. Meyer, and N. T. Wright. R. finds his own point of view especially close to that of Meyer, whose attention to the work of Bernard Lonergan R. respects, and whose scholarship probably comes closest to that of R.'s and my own teacher, Gerhard Lohfink. He also values the late scholars Graham Stanton and Martin Hengel (who was teaching in Tübingen during our studies there). There follows a summary chapter on "the results of scholarship," and then a concluding section on fundamental principles and methods: those in use in the past and those still worth employing for the future. I have my disagreements with R. here and there. It seems to me that his summary dismissal of a "hermeneutic of suspicion" is too blunt an instrument. He means by it a principled skepticism of the veracity of the biblical witness (in essence, regarding the biblical writers as guilty until proven innocent), which is not what it means, for example, to...

The Ethics of Negative Capability

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes “The burthen of the mystery” (line 38) in “Tintern Abbey.” Ou's Introduction includes a comprehensive overview of almost 200 years of scholarship on negative capability. In the Keatsian creative paradigm, the connection between empathy, healing, and poetry is not unlike what we see in the Biblical Christ who feels the pain of others, effects magical cures, and tells stories to enlighten as well as soothe. In fact, Christ could be seen as the penultimate shaman-poet. As Keats's poetry matures, he becomes increasingly Christ-like, suffering from not only his own illness but also from the exquisite sensibility he cultivated to become a successful poet. (See discussion of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion in this essay.)

The power of sacrifice: Roman and Christian discourses in conflict

The rhetoric and the ritual practices associated with sacrifice filled the ancient world. They were potent tools that maintained a balance between the powers of heaven and earth. They were also impressive vehicles used politically for establishing and maintaining social control. In short, the idea of sacrifice was itself a form of social discourse - a rhetorical means that generated and constituted social identity through the exercise of power. In this work, George Heyman offers a fresh perspective on the similarities between pagan Roman and Christian thinking about the public role of sacrifice in the first two and a half centuries of the Christian era. He shows that both imperial Rome and early Christianity capitalized on the rhetoric of sacrifice as a discursive means to craft their location, their identity, and their social power within the cosmos. Early Christian authors, like those responsible for the New Testament and other Christian literature, adopted this sacrificial discourse in order first to understand the death of Jesus and then later to valorize the deaths of the early martyrs. Heyman shows that such a discourse, however, was not unique to early Christianity. The sacrificial practices associated with the Roman imperial cult also established civic and national pride throughout the Empire. Because of their refusal to participate in the normal Roman civic sacrifices, Christians were perceived as a threat to the complex and fragile balance of power that existed between the gods and the state. The earliest Christians responded by crafting the death of Jesus in sacrificial rhetoric and exalting the spectacle of the martyr in imitation of the biblical Christ. Even though they refused to participate in Roman sacrifices, Christianity created its own social order through a novel formulation of sacrificial discourse. While many scholars have researched the discourse of the Roman imperial cult, none has included a comprehensive analysis of the impact of this discourse on early Christianity. This book offers a synthesis of contemporary theory and historical data, a novel approach to the power of sacrifice and conflict between Rome and early Christianity.

Mission, Evangelism and Evangelization – from the Perspective of the Lausanne Movement*

most authoritative documents of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE) are the 1974 Lausanne Covenant (LC) and the 1989 Manila Manifesto (MM), which is an elaboration of the LC, and always to be read and understood in connection with the LC. In addition, the movement has produced about 30 Occasional Papers on mission-related themes, as well as several books reflecting the conferences and consultations of the LCWE over its more-than-thirty years of existence. (1) Par. 4 in the LC is entitled The Nature of Evangelism, and I quote it here in extenso: To evangelize is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the scriptures, and that as the reigning Lord he now offers forgiveness of sins and the liberating gift of the Spirit to all who repent and believe. Our presence in the world is indispensable to evangelism, and so is the kind of dialogue whose purpose is to listen sensitively in order to understand. But evangelism itself is the proclamation of the historical, biblical Christ as Saviour and Lord, with a view to persuading people to come to him personally and so be reconciled to In issuing the gospel invitation we have no liberty to conceal the cost of discipleship. Jesus still calls all who would follow him to deny themselves, take up their cross, and identify themselves with his new community. results of evangelism include obedience to Christ, incorporation into his church and responsible service in the world. It is important to notice that this paragraph deals explicitly with evangelism. It does not deal with mission in its totality. Although there is no consistent way of speaking of mission, evangelization and evangelism within the Lausanne movement, we may say that while mission and evangelization are the broader, more comprehensive terms including both proclamation and social concern, evangelism is a more narrow concept being defined primarily in terms of proclamation. paragraph on evangelism is the fourth, which means that there are three preceding articles that should be seen as presuppositions for the fourth. They are all indicative of the evangelical (2) position. first paragraph deals with the Purpose of God. term mission of God (missio Dei) does not figure in the LC but this first article comes very close to the concept. (3) It draws the origin of mission back to the eternal purpose of the Triune God, and defines mission basically as God's sending of the people he has called to himself hack into the world to be his servants and his witnesses. Hence, the people of God, the church, is missional in its very essence or nature, because of its being sent by God and by being God's witnesses and servants in the world. Here, the more holistic concept of mission comes to expression: the people of God are called to be witnesses (evangelism, proclamation) and servants. latter concept is dealt with in par. 5 which is called Social Responsibility. (4) objectives of the church's mission are the extension of Christ's kingdom, the building up of Christ's body, and the glory of the name of We notice that the objectives or goals of mission are not exclusively related to conversion of individuals or the growth of the church, but are seen in a wider theological context. However, mission also includes the growth of the church numerically and spiritually. There is also no trace of the older geographical understanding of mission where mission is understood as the church in the Christian countries (most often in the West) sending missionaries to the non-Christian countries (most often in the South). decisive boundary that the mission of the church crosses with the gospel is the boundary between church and world, faith and unbelief. Mission takes place all over the world. old separation between foreign and home mission is overcome. …

The Historical and Theological Problem of the Jesus Question

The So-called Historical (historisch) Jesus and the Historic (geschichtlich) Biblical Christ is the title of a work which Martin Kiihler, systematic theologian at the theological faculty at Halle, Germany, published in 1892. Kahler deals with the Jesus problem as it had arisen in the face of the growing importance of the historical-critical method in biblical studies, especially for the systematic theologian. […] He distinguishes, therefore, between the historical Jesus whom the eye of the historian perceives, and the Christ of faith, the "manifest God." The opponent who called for such a differentiation is represented by the life-of-Jesus literature of the nineteenth century. For Kiihler, the call came from those who sought to reconstruct an historical life of Jesus from the New Testament Gospels, with the aid of historical criticism. […] That is the extent of Kahler's position, reflecting an opinion which signals a fundamental alternative to the Jesus problem. In the following paper, I will look at whether and to what extent• this position can be maintained today.

THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS IN CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC SYSTEMATICS

THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS IN CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC SYSTEMATICS

Book Review: I. Biblical Studies: The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, the Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ: Essays on the New Quest of the Historical Jesus, Kierkegaard and Bultmann: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the Continuing Search for the Historical Jesus

Book Review: I. Biblical Studies: The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, the Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ: Essays on the New Quest of the Historical Jesus, Kierkegaard and Bultmann: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the Continuing Search for the Historical Jesus

The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, by Martin Kähler, Translated by Carl E. Braaten. 153 pp. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1964. $1.75

The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, by Martin Kähler, Translated by Carl E. Braaten. 153 pp. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1964. $1.75

Book Review: Apologetics and the Biblical Christ

Book Review: Apologetics and the Biblical Christ

Martin Kähler: Kerygma and Gospel History

Martin Kähler lived at the turn of the century when the impact of the methods of historical criticism was being felt acutely by theologians. What can one say about the authority of the Bible for the believer in the light of critical historiography? What can one say about the relation of history and faith if that faith is living faith which is awakened in response to the testimony of Scripture, especially to the apostolic preaching of the Lord's resurrection? Can one say that there is a ground for such faith in results derived from the picture of the so-called ‘historical Jesus’ in the Gospels? It is in the area of questions like these that Kähler has been acknowledged by Tillich, Barth, and Bultmann as a pioneer. Whereas only a few theologians were directly influenced by Kähler's systematic theological work, many regarded his critical position as a harbinger of the future. Barth pays tribute to Kähler for insisting at a time when it cost something to say so that the real historical Christ is the biblical Christ attested by the New Testament as the risen and exalted One. In the course of our essay we shall have occasion to note the positive affinity which exists between Kähler's position and that of Barth. Cullmann has indicated the significance of Kähler for the rise of Form Criticism with its insistence that the Gospels are by nature the Church's witness to its faith as embodied in its preaching.