Biblical Exegete Research Articles

Bucer Among the Biblical Humanists: The Context for his Practice in the Teaching of Theology in Strasbourg, 1523-1548

Without denying Bucer's initial training in a scholastic context, it is arguable that the biblical humanist milieu was the more important for his development as a theologian as well as an exegete. Bucer was a full participant in that group of Rhenish reformers that has been termed ‘l'école rhénane d'exégèse', as is evidenced by his prescriptions for the practice of theology found in the various ordinances for theological education in which he had a hand in drafting, as well as in his own practice of ‘doing’ theology. For Bucer, as for all biblical humanists (preeminently Erasmus), the true theologian is the biblical exegete.

Augustine. Biblical exegete. Edited by Frederick van Fleteren and Joseph C. Schnaubelt. (Augustinian Historical Institute.) Pp. xvii+397. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. £44. 0 8204 2292 4

Augustine. Biblical exegete. Edited by Frederick van Fleteren and Joseph C. Schnaubelt. (Augustinian Historical Institute.) Pp. xvii+397. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. £44. 0 8204 2292 4 - Volume 55 Issue 1

Selected Correspondence by John Locke

95 meant there was only one head or face, the sovereign’s. Those many heads, looking out from the body, away from the sovereign , each having a view of its own, are potential insurgents. Especially valuable are Mr. Malcolm’s accounts of Hobbes’s reception in Europe, how Hobbes was read, and Hobbes’s view of international relations. He opposes the simplified realist view in favor of a more complexone, suggesting that Hobbes indeed envisages the possibility of an international system. Questions that Mr. Malcolm tantalizes the reader by not raising include how Hobbes’s contemporaries failed to address the analogy between original sin and Hobbesian human nature; why Behemoth was refused publication; whether Hobbes’s view of the corporeality of the soul and his antipathy toviolenceareconnected . It is disconcerting to find that Hobbes’s student William Cavendish is ‘‘only a few years younger than Hobbes,’’ but dies in 1628 ‘‘attheageof 43,’’having somehow become at the time of his death three years older than Hobbes, aged forty in 1628. Illustrations are not listed in the front matter or keyed in the text, so the reader may finish the essay on Leviathan ’s title-pages before seeing them, since the illustrations end the essay. Mr. Malcolm seems to have taken seriously Diderot’s stirring preference for Hobbes over Locke (albeit the Hobbes of the Elements of Law, not Leviathan): ‘‘This is a book to read and comment on all one’s life.’’ As would be expected from so distinguished a Hobbesian, these Aspects, like their subject, serve enlightenment. Regina Janes Skidmore College JOHN LOCKE. Selected Correspondence, ed. Mark Goldie. Oxford: Oxford, 2002. Pp. xxxvi ⫹ 378. £35. In 1689, when Locke returned to England from exile in Holland, he was fiftysix years of age and almost entirely unpublished and unknown. Had Locke been required to publish early in order to secure tenure, it is possible that we should not now be discussing him. His ideas germinated slowly; his drafts were frequently revised; he released them to the press only after much reflection and sometimes anonymously. He was ‘‘known’’ for only the last fifteen years of his life. Because Locke ventured late into publishing , his correspondence is of more than ordinary interest. From Esmond de Beer’s eight-volume edition of the Correspondence (1976–1989), Mr. Goldie gathers 244 (7%) of the 3,637 surviving letters written by and to Locke.Theeditor has made sensitive abridgments so that little of substance is lost from the letters . Happily, he has retained de Beer’s numbering so that full texts may easilybe found. The letters run from May 1652 to October 1704—that is, from the Puritan Revolution to the beginnings of the English Enlightenment. Newton and Boyle are among the correspondents represented , as are Locke’s publishers, the stewards of his estate, the children of his friends, and assorted politicians, divines, and deists. Edward Clarke and PeterKing are well represented; so too, Damaris Masham, Le Clerc, Limborch, and Molyneux . Mr. Goldie passes over Locke the bibliophile and Locke the biblical exegete . He has also spared us ‘‘many hundreds of letters which are by turns mundane , arcane, mercenary, dutiful,gossipy, fractious, or fawning.’’ Something of the flavor of the letters may be gleaned from the following snippet . John Strachey advises Locke not to take holy orders: ‘‘This is such a trade as may be tooke to at any time and as longe 96 as there are dunces in the world a man of parts . . . need want noe preferment.’’Toleration , Calvinism, and free will are discussed with Limborch; the distinctionbetween the natural and the divine law, with Tyrrell. A number of philosophical topics are reviewed with Molyneux, while publishers are denounced for issuing poor editions of Locke’s works at inflatedprices . The stir caused by The Reasonableness of Christianity is covered. Locke is also revealed as one who could be crochety , sympathetic, angry, gentle. His interests were so wide that there is a certain consolation in Mr. Goldie’s observation that Locke had deficiency in music, drama , and the visual arts. ‘‘Locke’s credit today,’’Mr. Goldieobserves , ‘‘stands low among postmodern and postcolonial doubters of the Enlightenment ‘project.’’’ Some who have not bowed the knee...

The Edwards at 300 Symposium and the Future of Jonathan Edwards Studies

The Edwards at 300 Symposium and the Future of Jonathan Edwards Studies Thomas S. Kidd (bio) Marking Jonathan Edwards's 300th birthday, specialists assembled at the Library of Congress in October 2003 to discuss their latest work and to assess the state of scholarship on Edwards. The conference came precisely 50 years after Perry Miller conceived the Works of Jonathan Edwards project. It provided an excellent opportunity to assess the renaissance in Edwards studies that has flourished since the project began. The occasion also offered an opportunity to suggest new directions in Edwards scholarship, a valuable discussion given the multitudinous studies of him and his thought in the past 50 years. The 2003 publication of George Marsden's Jonathan Edwards: A Life served as a unifying point for the conference, as Marsden's biography built upon the foundation of the past decades of Edwards scholarship. Marsden gave the keynote address for the conference and considered Edwards's uses in the twenty-first century. He believes that Edwards's Calvinism can be used to chasten America's cheery self-image and help explain the problem of human evil. Marsden contrasted Benjamin Franklin's fame with Edwards's relative lack of popular attention, and argued that wider popular knowledge of Edwards might supply America with much-needed history "in a minor key." Edwards also could provide the large American evangelical community with an exemplar devoted to the life of the mind, he argued. Attention to Edwards might give Americans a renewed appreciation of the [End Page 405] ideal of beauty, which has been discarded in favor of instrumentalism in both churches and the broader culture. Marsden's sense of the past and future usefulness of Edwards's thought was echoed in other papers and discussions. For instance, Amy Plantinga Pauw contended that Edwards's deep conviction of human and national limitations could help the United States embrace more humble and realistic narratives of its own purposes. John Saillant showed how Edwards's Calvinist typology provided significant theological resources for the first generation of African-American Christian abolitionists. Philip Gura argued that the Edwardseans exercised a great deal of mostly unrecognized influence on nineteenth-century sentimental literature. Finally,Mark Noll showed how Edwards's Freedom of the Will more profoundly influenced British intellectual life than American, but often in entirely unpredictable ways, as various thinkers, sometimes even skeptics, made use of his theory of the bound will in ways that Edwards would have found abhorrent. The national obsession with "freedom" made Edwards's view of severe human limitations intellectually unpalatable to most American observers. Some participants suggested that despite the enormous amount of writing on Edwards, we still may not know him that well. In particular, several panelists argued that scholars have yet to appreciate Edwards the biblical exegete. Douglas Sweeney and Stephen Stein both suggested that if many scholars honestly considered Edwards's utter devotion to the Bible, they might not like him as much. This selective forgetfulness about Edwards's core Calvinist beliefs goes back at least to Perry Miller. Stein noted that Edwards's biblicism committed him to justifying many brutally violent scriptural episodes. Another challenge raised by the state of Edwards studies is that of seeing the brilliant and prolific Edwards in context. To be sure, most studies of Edwards have simply sought to understand and explain Edwards's ideas, and this has been a daunting but rewarding task. However, some panelists called for more understanding of Edwards in his imperial/colonial context. Ava Chamberlain, for instance, discussed Edwards's scramble to contend with legal Anglicization and the increasingly negative view of women in adultery cases. Rachel Wheeler used Edwards's writings at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to reveal the difficulty of joining Native American and European histories. Little work has been done on the Native American influence on Edwards's most important theological works, despite the fact that [End Page 406] he produced them while at Stockbridge. However, especially in Original Sin one can see a strange kind of egalitarianism. All nations needed forgiveness, thought Edwards, and in this sense all were equal. But the belief that all nations needed forgiveness in Christ also justified the inequalities inherent in the...

Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, and: War of Words: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Press (review)

Ronald C. White's careful exposition of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address offers new insights into the thoughts and style of America's greatest presidential [End Page 304] wordsmith. With the skill of a Biblical exegete, White dissects one of Lincoln's most famous and important speeches—second perhaps only to the Gettysburg Address. This admirable volume places Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in multiple contexts, from the tradition of presidential inaugural addresses to the development of Lincoln's thoughts about the Union, emancipation, reconstruction, and a host of other issues.

Theophilus of Antioch: The Life and Thought of a Second-Century Bishop (review)

It must first be said that Rick Rogers, who teaches at Eastern Michigan University, has done us all a favor by providing a book-length study of Theophilus of Antioch. The bibliography itself reveals the scanty treatment given by scholarship to this relatively unknown second-century bishop. Clearly Rogers likes his subject: "Theophilus is truly a remarkable personality. This second-century bishop from Syrian Antioch was an apologist, a biblical exegete, a chronologist, an evangelist, an heresiologist, a teacher and a theologian" (3). That is a lot to say about a virtual unknown. And Rogers discusses this life in six pages, doing what he can to glean inferences from the two short notices by Eusebius and Jerome and the few, wholly oblique self-references in the Ad Autolycum, the only remains we have from Theophilus. There is not much to go on. Part 1 of the book also includes a second chapter in which Rogers very [End Page 601] helpfully analyzes the genre and the rhetorical development of the Ad Autolycum. Here we meet the principal thesis of the book: that in the Ad Autolycum Theophilus has written a "protreptic theology," a theology designed "to recruit converts to a moral life consistent with biblical law" (21). Rogers's description and analysis of the three books (Homilia, Syngramma, Hyponmena) of the Ad Autolycum is helpful and insightful.

Iberian Jewry from Twilight to Dawn: The World of Rabbi Abraham Saba

The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Those surviving the ordeals they encountered tried to rebuild their personal lives and to reconstruct Sefardic religious and cultural traditions in North Africa and in the East. This volume attempts to depict the world of one of the refugees who formed part of the cultural bridge between Spain and the new havens of the Sefardim. Rabbi Abraham Saba of Zamora was a preacher, cabbalist and biblical exegete. He attempted to settle in Portugal, suffered the persecutions instigated by the Crown with his co-religionists and was finally expelled to North Africa. His literary works and thought are put in their proper cultural context and are analyzed against the background of historical reality.

Von Balthasar as Biblical Theologian and Exegete

‘[T]heology in the Bible can have no fundamentally different form from later theology in the Church: each is an interpretative act of standing and circling around a midpoint that can indeed be interpreted, but is always in need of interpretation and has never been exhaustively interpreted.’Balthasar’s affirmation of the identity between the theology of the Bible and later church theology, like so much of his writing and work, poses a fundamental challenge to powerful tendencies in the contemporary church, both Protestant and Catholic, at the same time as it claims to be in harmony with the tradition itself. Where Protestant theology from Ritschl and Hamack wants to draw a sharp line between the Bible and the theology of the early church, Balthasar claims a continuity which sees in both the same process of reflection on the relation of the ‘Christ-event’ to the history of God’s love in the Old Covenant and the same interpretative effort to express the centra! mystery in the language of their contemporaries: Jewish or Hellenistic. If Catholic ‘school’ theology wants to emphasise the nature of theology as the formulation and exposition of ‘truths to be believed’, Balthasar asserts that theology, both in the Bible and the Fathers, is part of an inexhaustible and never-ending process of reflection on the experience of grace in the encounter between the Word made flesh and the community of believers. Such an experience of the outpouring of the divine love can never be encompassed by a reading of the Bible as a collection of prooftexts or what Balthasar calls a ‘mere “fundamentalism” of facts of salvation’, for all such attempts at meditation on and expression (Auswortung) of the divine reality fall under the law of the deus semper maior they can never exhaust the, reality of the divine mystery.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone: the Utter De(Con)Struction of Matthew and His Church

AbstractSince its very inception, the institutional church has interpreted Matt. 16:13-20 in such a way as to confer authority upon itself. Roman Catholics especially, but Protestants too, have claimed that the passage bestows power, prestige, and supremacy upon their respective structures. As long as the passage continues to be examined in isolation, it will certainly lend itself to that sort of interpretation. I propose, however, a radical departure from this hermeneutic. Deconstruction provides the biblical exegete with a whole new set of critical tools-tools that allow him or her to read the Gospel of Matthew in an innovative way. In this paper I apply several techniques of deconstructive theory to the aforementioned passage in an effort to uncover alternative meanings which, though perhaps not evident upon superficial inspection, are valid nonetheless. By creatively analyzing how Matt. 16:13-20 functions within the larger context of the Gospel of Matthew, I shall demonstrate that the text undermines itself.

The Computer as Biblical Exegete:

The Computer as Biblical Exegete:

Grace, Politics and Desire: Essays on Augustine

Augustine makes his mark in many fields: as political philosopher, biblical exegete, theorist of culture and spiritual autobiographer. His phenomenal range is reflected in this collection of papers. Three essays deal with Augustine's conversion; his account of the norms of authentic conversion, his psychological analysis of his own conversion, and his conversion as compared with that of Pascal. Others treat his concept of concupiscence, his theories of music, rhetoric and politics, his relation to the Roman Empire of his time, his changing stance towards Neoplatonism and his pluralism, his attitude to poetry, and the principles he employed for the interpretation of Scripture. Contents: Augustine and the Norms of Authentic Conversion; Memory and Scripture in the Conversion of Augustine; Two Converts: Augustine and Pascal; The Body and Human Values in Augustine of Hippo; Justice and Love in the Political Thought of St. Augustine; Augustine and Poetic Exegesis; Augustine's Methods of Biblical Interpretation; Augustine on Music; Love as Rhetorical Principle: The Relationship Between Content and Style in the Rhetoric of St. Augustine; Religion and Society in the Age of Theodosius; The Background to Augustine's Denial of Religious Plurality.

Against the Fantasts

Amongst Kant's lesser known early writings is a short treatise with the curious title Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics, in which, with considerable acumen and brilliance, and not a little irony, Kant exposes the empty pretensions of his contemporary, the Swedish visionary and Biblical exegete, Emanuel Swedenborg, to have access to a spirit world, denied other mortals. Despite his efforts, it must be feared, however, that Kant did not, alas, succeed in laying the spirit of Swedenborg himself to rest once and for all, for there has arisen in our own day, and within philosophy itself, a movement of thought, if such it can be called, which, like that of Swedenborg, is founded upon an unbridled and unhealthy exercise of the imagination, and apparently believes that philosophical problems can be discussed and resolved by the elaboration of fantastical, and at times repulsive, examples; if we require a name for this contemporary pretence at philosophy, we could take as our model the Italian word for science fiction, fantascienza, and call it ‘fantaphilosophy’: it is my aim to show that this fantaphilosophy is a phantom philosophy.

Robert Holcot's Quodlibeta

As historians of medieval theology and philosophy increasingly turn to study intellectual developments in the early fourteenth century, it is natural that Robert Holcot, O.P. († 1349), should come to stand out as an Oxford master worthy of further investigation. During his own lifetime, when he was associated with the household of Richard de Bury, the famous bishop of Durham, and on even into the early years of the sixteenth century, when several editions of his major works were printed, Holcot was held in high regard as a commentator on the Sentences, as a biblical exegete, and as a supplier of moralizing sermon exempla. His view of predestination was carefully studied by John Eck, and the Parisian master Jacques Almain devoted a treatise to his Sentence commentary.