Christian Bible Research Articles

Can Catholicism Validate Jewish Biblical Interpretation?

This article analyses the Pontifical Biblical Commission's 2001 study, The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible and its significance for Christian-Jewish relations. While praising the study for addressing a large and complex issue, the essay raises some questions about particularity and relativism, elements of supersessionism, and inter-textuality.

What Can a Catholic Learn from the History of Jewish Biblical Exegesis?

This article considers the claim of the 2001 Pontifical Biblical Commission Study, The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible that the Christian reader can be instructed by post-biblical Jewish reflections on the Bible. It explores Jewish understandings that the role of the biblical prophets was not only to communicate God's messages to Israel but also to represent Israel before God. The essay demonstrates the correctness of the PBC's assertion by applying this Jewish tradition about the prpohets to Christian reflection on the meaning of Jesus' death.

Before forgiveness: the origins of a moral idea

1. What is forgiveness? 2. Before forgiveness: Greeks and Romans on guilt and innocence 3. Did they forgive? Greek and Roman narratives of reconciliation 4. Divine absolution: the Hebrew and Christian bibles 5. Humility and repentance: the church fathers 6. Enter forgiveness: the self transformed.

Rozanov, the Creation, and the Rejection of Eschatology

This paper examines Vasilii Rozanov's focus on the Creation of the Earth by God, and the opposition he posits between the Creation and the Apocalypse as presented in the Christian Bible. It argues that Rozanov uses the Creation to demonstrate the sanctity of the material world, a stance which enables him to counter the general Christian tendency towards contemptus mundi, and more specifically the eschatological aspect of Russian culture. It also examines Rozanov's peculiar relationship with Jesus Christ as a created being, and argues that Rozanov presents an opposition between the creative activity of God, and the anti-creative work of Christ.

Information Processing in Bible Study Groups

This paper focuses on information processing in Christian Bible study groups through surveys of three Midwestern churches. By considering the significance of the small group as integral to the vitality of religious organizations, this paper will consider how these groups process information from sermons, books, and peers. This processing is considered in three parts: pre-discussion, local discussion, and post-discussion. Pre-discussion information processing includes all of the topic-specific information that members of these groups obtain prior to meeting as a group. This information is either unique to an individual or shared among many individuals in a group, and the nature of this information affects how it is used in actual discussion. Because of the religious nature of these groups, the paper will explore the authoritative nature of information used, and whether or not this nature affects processing of information. Results show that Bible study groups report a significantly larger than expected quantity of unique information, but also that this information is continuously corrected by what is considered biblically correct. It is concluded that members join Bible study groups primarily for spiritual and relational purposes, but that this purpose does not restrain members from debate and discussion.

ON “THOMISTIC KABBALAH”

AbstractThe Christian Bible was from the outset a dogmatic and Christological conception, which entailed a mystical reading of signs and events, a practise of speculation at once narratological and phenomenological. The trilogy of Olivier‐Thomas Venard OP – Thomas d'Aquin, poète théologien – is proposed as crucial to understanding how Thomas Aquinas preserves the authentic biblical character of Christian theology, proceeding along the diagonal axis of the mystagogical, an axis neither purely vertical nor purely horizontal but a blending of both at once. Here a reading of Aquinas is offered as initiating a participational ‘linguistic turn’, an alternative modernity that can heal the dissociation of the science of being from the phenomenal and hermeneutical embeddings in which human life is constituted.

Musical Inculturation, Theological Transformation, and the Construction of Black Nationalism in Early South African Choral Music Tradition

In their encounter with Europeans under colonialism and apartheid, black South Africans struggled to preserve their African identity. From the middle of the nineteenth century, an emergent urban black intellectual elite used choral music to articulate the experiences and aspirations of their people. This paper discusses their use of choral music as expressive culture and a form of cultural nationalism that sought to maintain a balance between the integrity of their African identity and their Christian experience by reformulating and reinterpreting elements of biblical Christianity to correspond to their African worldview.

In the name of God: translation and transformation of Chinese culture, foreign religion, and the reproduction of “Tianzhu” and “Shangdi”

Translation between one language and culture into another assumes that a fundamental set of commonalities exist between the two cultural and linguistic contexts. In the case of the Christian Bible, Chinese translations not only involved translating words into Chinese, but also adapting and transforming an exotic Western religion for local sensibilities in such a way that Christianity might be recognized as a legitimate system of thought within a Chinese cultural milieu. Focusing on the perspective of different Chinese translations of the name of the Christian God, this article examines the history of the debate regarding the issue of translation, and the approaches adopted by the Catholic and Protestant faiths. It examines the reclamation and evolution of traditional Chinese vocabulary into new terminology through the application of Western religious concepts, and the ways in which indigenous Chinese society accepted these concepts, with an eye towards examining the course of historical progress through the history of social adoption of these ideas.

The Literary Quality of Scripture as Seen by the Early Church

Christians in the first five centuries of the church lived in an environment that placed a high value on literary and rhetorical expression. Within this context, cultured critics of Christianity often disparaged the literary style of the Christian Bible in its Greek and Latin forms. The most common response in the first Christian centuries was to concede Scripture’s simple style but to assert the superiority of its divine content. But eventually Christians began to suggest paradigms for seeing artistic crafting in the biblical text. One stream of thought, exemplified by Jerome, looked to the original language of the Old Testament to discover the literary quality of Scripture. Another stream of thought, developed by Augustine, explored the literary quality of Scripture by reflecting on the relationship between human conventions and divine inspiration.

Geography is Better than Divinity: The Bible and Medieval Geographical Thought

This article examines the role of the Christian Bible in forging a distinctly medieval geographical consciousness. Though the sacred text had little explicit to say about basic issues of cosmography or even about the location of places beyond the bounds of the Holy Land, the fact that God's act of creation marked not just the beginning of time but also of space, meant that many of the exegetical assumptions and techniques honed to shed light upon the unfolding of Providence from the perspective of people mired in temporality could just as readily be applied to comprehending space; clearly, particular evidence for the direction of God's plan was written across the face of the earth as much as it was in past events. But as a corollary, the Bible could also be seen as providing a series of unassailable deductive premises that made the whole world readily knowable — and even known. The result is that through the Middle Ages a discourse about space developed that was at once confident and resilient, echoes of which continued to reverberate in the thinking of some of the major geographical figures of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

How the Science Versus Religion Debate Has Missed the Point of Genesis 1 and 2: Jacques Ellul (1912-1994)

From a social and historical perspective, the conflict between science and religion regarding the opening chapters of Genesis in the Jewish and Christian Bibles may have more to do with uncritically reading these texts through our “cultural glasses” than with what these texts actually say. Within the context of his work, Jacques Ellul read these texts as having nothing to do with creation or evolution, but instead with the relations between God, his people, and the land. It includes a polemic against morality and religion as fundamental threats to these relations. This is an excerpt of a larger study of the first three chapters of Genesis, as well as other portions of the Jewish and Christian Bibles.

ARE LIBERALS AND EVANGELICALS SINGING FROM THE SAME SONG SHEET?

Characterising Liberal and Evangelical theology as positions on a continuum or spectrum is common within Protestant circles. I argue that Liberals and Evangelicals do not share a common conceptual framework but embody competing and incommensurable conceptual schemes. Liberal theology then is not a distortion of true Biblical Christianity, as is often supposed, but rather is an entirely different approach to doing theology, indeed, to seeing the world. What I hope to achieve by way of this paper is to provide a context within which to better understand both Liberal and Evangelical claims, and to offer an explanation as to why the debates between the two schools are seemingly intractable. Further, I hope to encourage Liberals and Evangelicals to pursue the difficult task of understanding each other's position so that genuine dialogue can take place.

A Christian mission of glocal culture within riven societies in God’s world

Globalisation today seems to be an implacable force at work trying to homogenise world cultures into the same format. Huntington’s well-known thesis sees a clash coming between Christian Western civilisation and the rest of the world. This article argues against Huntington that civilised cultures with different identities have comparable structural features. Because contrary cultures are all human constructs with good and bad mixed in, they can, like human relatives, learn from and correct one another rather than demonise others. It is posited that the deepest antagonism disturbing the world is not a Christian West versus the rest, but is largely the struggle between two tyrannical ideologies: a post-Christian capitalistic secularism and a theocratic fundamentalism. A biblical Christian mission of glocal culture formation (global awareness and local action) is offered as an alternative vision for our worsening dilemma. This biblically-rooted diaconal way to be redemptively busy in salvaging cultural activity proffers concrete hope. The life work of Bennie van der Walt is cited as an example, and a few illustrations of glocal artistry provide evidence that such a Christian mission can be deed as well as talk.

The Home Environments of Christian College Freshmen: Behind Closed Doors

This study provides a descriptive snapshot of high school students’ home lives from their perspective as first-year college students as they attended a Bible college or Christian liberal arts college. The sample of over 2,300 surveys was collected annually for 14 years through selected freshmen courses, and the data reports on the frequencies of particular practices found in the home environment, such as illegal drugs, tobacco products, the frequency of attending religious services, and family prayers. A data comparison is made from other research, particularly the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) and the National Study of Youth and Religions (NSYR). Implications for church workers and faculty at Bible colleges, Christian liberal arts colleges, and seminaries are also discussed.

Scriptural engagement, communication with God, and moral behavior among children

How often an individual reads or listens to scripture is one dimension of private spirituality rarely discussed in the literature. In this study, we use data from a random sample survey of 1009 American children (ages eight to 12) to explore children’s engagement with the Christian Bible, their views of communicating with God, and their moral behavior. Most American children do not read or listen to the Bible regularly, but they do communicate with God almost daily through prayer. There is greater diversity in how children believe God communicates with them, including the Bible, actions (e.g. ‘answered prayers’), and the outcome of events (e.g. ‘good things happen to me’). Consistent with earlier studies of adults and teens, we find significant relationships between Bible engagement and moral behaviors. However, an important difference among children is that the effects are most prominent for those behaviors that are less subject to parental control and monitoring.

Sinai, Zion, and Tabor: An Entry into the Christian Bible

Abstract Building on the insights of Jon Levenson's work, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible, this article endeavors to show that a similar approach, which could be labeled "theophanic," has traditionally guided the Christian—perhaps especially the Eastern Orthodox—entry into the Bible. Relating the Sinai theophany and the transfiguration on Tabor was crucially important for early Christian theology. It underlay their appropriation of the Scriptures of Israel as "OT," it lent itself to polemical use against dualism and monarchianism, and it was eventually absorbed into Byzantine festal hymnography and thereby into the mainstream of theology as performed and experienced in liturgy. Similar interpretive strategies are at work in early Christian works and later Byzantine festal hymns and icons that take up theophanies centering on God's throne in Zion. After discussing hymns and icons dealing with Sinai, Zion, and Tabor, I argue that this type of exegesis is difficult to frame within the categories commonly used to describe patristic exegesis and that a more suitable category would be that of "rewritten Bible," current among scholars of the OT pseudepigrapha. I then examine the relationship between the Christology emerging from the hymns under discussion and the normative conciliar Christology. Finally, I sketch a few ways in which today's readers can benefit, both exegetically and theologically, from Byzantine hymnographic and iconographic exegesis.

Sinai, Zion, and Tabor: An Entry into the Christian Bible

Abstract Building on the insights of Jon Levenson's work, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible, this article endeavors to show that a similar approach, which could be labeled "theophanic," has traditionally guided the Christian—perhaps especially the Eastern Orthodox—entry into the Bible. Relating the Sinai theophany and the transfiguration on Tabor was crucially important for early Christian theology. It underlay their appropriation of the Scriptures of Israel as "OT," it lent itself to polemical use against dualism and monarchianism, and it was eventually absorbed into Byzantine festal hymnography and thereby into the mainstream of theology as performed and experienced in liturgy. Similar interpretive strategies are at work in early Christian works and later Byzantine festal hymns and icons that take up theophanies centering on God's throne in Zion. After discussing hymns and icons dealing with Sinai, Zion, and Tabor, I argue that this type of exegesis is difficult to frame within the categories commonly used to describe patristic exegesis and that a more suitable category would be that of "rewritten Bible," current among scholars of the OT pseudepigrapha. I then examine the relationship between the Christology emerging from the hymns under discussion and the normative conciliar Christology. Finally, I sketch a few ways in which today's readers can benefit, both exegetically and theologically, from Byzantine hymnographic and iconographic exegesis.

Stumbling over the Testaments: On Reading Patristic Exegesis and the Old Testament in Light of the New

Abstract This essay begins with the distinction between two questions: why is patristic exegesis important, and why might a contemporary reader—particularly a university-trained biblical scholar—benefit from reading it? It observes that patristic exegesis has played an important role in the spiritual practice of lectio divina, and for this reason, it promises to help counter some of the ways in which the forces of professionalization and fragmentation in the theological disciplines undermine our ability to think theologically as exegetes and to converse with Christianity's long exegetical tradition. The essay argues that if biblical scholars are to find something of enduring value in patristic exegesis and some way of appropriating what we find there, we need a clearly articulated understanding of the relationship between the two Testaments of the Christian Bible, as well as an understanding of how Christ might be found in the first of those Testaments in a way that takes into account the ongoing life of these same biblical texts in Jewish interpretation and practice. The remainder of the essay explores three contemporary ways of conceiving of the relationship between the Testaments. The first and third of these allow for ways of reading the OT in light of the NT that avoid the dangers of supersessionism, while the second offers some cautions and touches on the place of Christian theological exegesis in the larger pluralistic context of biblical studies.

Stumbling over the Testaments: On Reading Patristic Exegesis and the Old Testament in Light of the New

Abstract This essay begins with the distinction between two questions: why is patristic exegesis important, and why might a contemporary reader—particularly a university-trained biblical scholar—benefit from reading it? It observes that patristic exegesis has played an important role in the spiritual practice of lectio divina, and for this reason, it promises to help counter some of the ways in which the forces of professionalization and fragmentation in the theological disciplines undermine our ability to think theologically as exegetes and to converse with Christianity's long exegetical tradition. The essay argues that if biblical scholars are to find something of enduring value in patristic exegesis and some way of appropriating what we find there, we need a clearly articulated understanding of the relationship between the two Testaments of the Christian Bible, as well as an understanding of how Christ might be found in the first of those Testaments in a way that takes into account the ongoing life of these same biblical texts in Jewish interpretation and practice. The remainder of the essay explores three contemporary ways of conceiving of the relationship between the Testaments. The first and third of these allow for ways of reading the OT in light of the NT that avoid the dangers of supersessionism, while the second offers some cautions and touches on the place of Christian theological exegesis in the larger pluralistic context of biblical studies.

Wa re o Bona e Hlot�a, wa e Namet�a Thaba! Bibele, Basadi ba Maafrika ba Afrika-Borwa le HIV le AIDS

The question of the history of the reception of the Christian Bible in South Africa particularly by African- South Africans has not been a smooth ride. It was part of a bigger package that included among others, the importation of European patriarchy onto African soil, the land grabbing exercise which resulted in among others, the impoverishment of African peoples and, the emasculation of the African man. The latter in turn led to the intensification of patriarchy within the average African family. The preceding situation, was not helpful to the context and/or situation of African women who were already then, at the bottom of the patriarchal ladder, because, as can be expected, within the context of the Black church and theology then, little if any except for a handful of liberation theologians and members of some ecumenical bodies, was done to make the theology propagated then, relevant to pertinent issues which affected the lives of Black people.Given the historical marginalisation of women in the Bible and Theology, not only in South Africa, but also globally, it becomes obvious that even in our context, mainstream theology and biblical hermeneutics left issues pertaining to gender justice basically untouched. It is no wonder, as we will argue in this paper, that given that already vulnerable situation into which African women have been thrown into by the preceding factors as well as by how the Bible continues to be used in our HIV and AIDS contexts, their situation may be succinctly captured as that of a limping animal that has been made to climb the mountain! The Northern Sotho proverb or saying: Wa re o bona e hlot�a, wa e namet�a thaba (while limping, you let it climb the mountain) simply means that a certain situation is being aggravated (by an external factor). The present article will use the preceding proverb as a hermeneutical lens through which to analyse the reception of the Bible by African women in the HIV and AIDS context of South Africa.