Rule Of God Research Articles

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Providence and responsibility Providence is usually regarded as a theological concept that sets human hearts at rest. God rules our lives, and in particular those of Christians. Modern people often have problems with this idea. How can a good God rule a world with diseases and disasters? And can we actually imagine such an all-controlling power? Nevertheless, these are not the real issues concerning the concept of providence. The existential problem is that providence in the Bible has to do with responsibility: God takes responsibility for his world. This responsibility is total; it even implies responsibility and punishment for sin. Thus providence and atonement are not two separated fields of theology, but coincide. The chapter in the Bible to which the concept is originally related makes this plain: Genesis 22, and verse 8 in particular, states, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son”. (The Vulgate reads: “the victim for the holocaust”.) In Genesis 16-22 the word “to provide”, literally “to see” (r’h), turns out to be a key concept. Who sees? The Lord sees, Abraham sees and Hagar sees – and it is always in a situation of life and death in which they are called to responsibility to save lives. But actually these are lives that have already been sacrificed. Thus providence demands the ultimate from human beings, as it asks the ultimate from their God. Noordmans highlights this in a meditation on Matthew 6:34: “Jesus does not say this in order to lay worries to rest but in order to raise worries”. If you search for the kingship of God, all things that are needed will be given to you – such as feet to walk the second mile.

Annunciation As Election

In his review of the historical tradition, James McClendon concludes that ‘the doctrine of election or predestination in Scripture viewed as a whole seems fully to warrant none of the paths ecclesiastical doctrine has so far taken’. He finds some hopeful signs, particularly in his own Radical Reformation tradition. Yet his redrawn contours of the doctrine rarely appeal to the tradition so far. ‘The old associations of the doctrine die so hard that (in my judgment) this part of Christian teaching is of litde present service. We do well to emphasize the rule of God in every effective way, while exercising great reserve with regard to this Augustinian deposit’.

Die boek Prediker: Alles is nie sinloos nie!

Ecclesiastes: Everything is not meaningless!Ecclesiastes is not dominated by the statement of meaningless, but also provides positive advice. The majesty and glory of God and his sovereignity, reflects one of the main themes in this book. God rules man’s destiny, his/her successes and happiness. Man’s attitude can best be summarized in the following words from Ecclesiastes 12:13: “Fear God and keep his commandments”. Ecclesiastes continuously emphasizes the great value of wisdom. This can be attributed to the fact that God Himself is the author of wisdom. However, wisdom also has limits. Even with all man's wisdom, she/he is still limited, as even wise people can not explain all that happens on earth. Ecclesiastes does not only become meaningfull when looking at the New Testament, it has its own message for today's Christians.

The Kingdom of God in the Gospel of Matthew

It would be entirely wrong to regard "kingdom of God" as the central motif of the New Testament. Matthew's kingdom depiction should be read against the backdrop of a (mainly) Jewish Christian community in the process of re-defining its own identity over against Jewish opposition, which was consolidating itself under Pharisaic-scribal leadership. The genitive "of God/of heaven" signifies the kingdom as God-determined, but God's transcendence is mitigated by Matthew's portrayal of him as the Father of believers. Kingdom of Godlheaven is a dynamic concept indicating God's active reign. The rule of God and righteousness, as its human correlate, are the key motifs in the Sermon on the Mount. Although the kingdom in Matthew involves a critical decision and the acceptance of strict entry requirements, it is not an entirely ethical concept, as is shown by the first beatitude. A growing correspondence between the kingdom motif and messiah christo logy can be traced. Modern churches in the process of losing their identity can benefit from a responsive reading of Matthew's kingdom message.

The Importance of being Josiah: An Image of Calvinist Identity

Calvinist reformers expected secular authorities to champion religious reform. Preachers presented kings and princes with ideals of godly rule drawn from the history of biblical Israel-an aspect of the Hebraic patriotism that was pursued with much enthusiasm by early modern Calvinists-to encourage magistrates to lead the implementation of reform programs. Many Calvinists found the life of King Josiah to be an excellent model for contemporary magistrates: Josiah as religious reformer, as iconoclast and destroyer of false religions, and as territorial expansionist. Calvinist writers also noted the prophecy of Josiah's violent death, which exemplified the fate believed to await those princes who failed to cooperate completely with projects of religious reform and social renewal. The importance to Calvinist rulers of being Josiah therefore reveals much about the political and cultural identity of Reformed Protestants across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Gender, Power, and Jesus' Identity in the Gospels

In this presentation, the author offers some considerations of the meaning of Jesus in the light of the patriarchy of his time and place. The essay begins with a consideration of the domestic domain as the root of patriarchal culture. The domestic domain provides the first experiences of power and control, of male and female gender roles. Individual identity is initially formed within the family, which reflects the prevailing social system. The Gospels share the patriarchal perspective of the first-century Mediterranean world. It is in this world that the gospel tradition tells of Jesus' introducing a family based on belief, not on blood. In the light of Jesus' death and resurrection, and presuming the patriarchal understanding of what consatitutes power and control, the evangelists tell how Jesus introduced the kingdom of God. His life and teaching reflect the perspective and values which reflect the family where God is father and the Kingdom in which God rules. The outcome is a new identity that his followers are called to emulate in both their private and their public lives.

Was John Foxe a Millenarian?

That many divines during the middle decades of the seventeenth century were filled with high hopes for the Church's future, and that many of these high hopes were expressed in millenarian terms is by now a commonplace. That, furthermore, this phenomenon did not appear out of the blue and must have had a prehistory would be evident to most. But how far back should one go to find its roots? More than twenty years ago William Lamont argued in his controversial studyGodly rulethat Elizabethan reformers shared with their more radical brethren of the revolutionary years the hope of ‘godly rule’, a term he never clearly defined but which he nevertheless called millenarian. He singled out John Foxe as the chief spokesman of the ‘godly rule’ idea, and moreover claimed that Foxe was the one who above all ‘made the pursuit of the millennium respectable and orthodox’ in England. The idea that Foxe was a millenarian, even the chief spokesman of millenarianism in Elizabethan England, has not found general approval. In well-documented studies on Foxe, the British apocalyptic tradition, or the English Reformation, scholars such as Bernard Capp, Viggo Norskov Olsen, Richard Bauckham, Katharine R. Firth and Patrick Collinson have all denied that Foxe believed in a this-worldly and future period of peace and ecclesiastical felicity; they have instead drawn attention to his view of end-time persecution, and to his belief in the imminent end of the world.

Die mag van God volgens die belydenis van Daniël se vriende

A debate regarding the control of God over all events has lately been going on. This article attempts to indicate which light Daniel 3 :1 7,18, in the con­text of the book as a whole, sheds on understanding the supreme rule of God by combining three factors : God's omnipotence, his freedom in exer­cising his omnipotence, and his personal way of exercising his powerful­ness.

Patriarchs, Polygamy, and Private Resistance: John Calvin and Others on Breaking God's Rules

Cet article analyse la relation entre l'exegese biblique et le changement social en mettant l'accent sur l'attitude de Jean Calvin. Une correlation de l'histoire exegetique des recits patriarcaux avec deux cas d'etudes specifiques au XVI e siecle, met en evidence l'ambiguite avec laquelle les commentateurs ont recu les exemples bibliques. Pour certains, cette ambiguite donne naissance a une serie de lignes directrices, refletant la repugnance a utiliser l'Ecriture comme une justification du changement social. Ces memes cas d'etudes montrent que l'exegese de Calvin resiste aussi a cette tendance, suivant ainsi la pensee du theologien qui se refuse a donner quelque ambiguite que ce soit a l'Ecriture

A gateway to the chronicler's teaching: The account of the reign of ahaz in 2 chr 28,1–27

Abstract Using the account of the reign of Ahaz in the Book of Chronicles (2 Chr 28,1–27) as a gateway to a better understanding of the Chronicler's work and teaching/preaching methods, this article shows that the Chronicler conveyed a nuanced theology through separate accounts qualifying each other. The lessons abstracted from the separate “historical” accounts were thus set in “proper” theological perspective. This article concludes that the Chronicler wished the receiving community to abstract from the “historical” account several lessons, among them: (a) the existence of a correspondence between actions and effects that is maintained by God, according to certain rules and qualifications; (b) the continuity of history through time due to the permanent character of both God's rules for governing the world and the human choice to accept or reject God's will; (c) the godly character of freeing the captive, feeding the hungry, and the like, (d) the actual meaning of divine elections; (e) sin is not necessa...

The historical Jesus: the life of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant

comes as yet unknown into a hamlet of Lower Galilee. He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at a subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution. He looks like a beggar yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle. He speaks about the rule of God and they listen as much from curiosity as anything else. They know all about rule and power, about kingdom and empire, but they know it in terms of tax and debt, malnutrition and sickness, agrarian oppression and demonic possession. What, they really want to know, can this kingdom of God do for a lame child, a blind parent, a demented soul screaming its tortured isolation among the graves that mark the edges of the village - from Gospel of Jesus, overture to The Historical Jesus The Historical Jesus reveals the true Jesus-who he was, what he did, what he said. It opens with Gospel of Jesus, Crossan's studied determination of Jesus' actual words and actions stripped of any subsequent additions and placed in a capsule account of his life story. The Jesus who emerges is a savvy and courageous Jewish Mediterranean peasant, a radical social revolutionary, with a rhapsodic vision of economic, political, and religious egalitarianism and a social program for creating it. The conventional wisdom of critical historical scholarship has long held that too little is known about the historical Jesus to say definitively much more than that he lived and had a tremendous impact on his followers. There were always historians who said it could not be done because of historical problems, writes Crossan. There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.' With this ground-breaking work, John Dominic Crossan emphatically sweeps these notions aside. He demonstrates that Jesus is actually one of the best documented figures in ancient history; the challenge is the complexity of the sources. The vivid portrayal of Jesus that emerges from Crossan's unique methodology combines the complementary disciplines of social anthropology, Greco-Roman history, and the literary analysis of specific pronouncements, anecdotes, confessions and interpretations involving Jesus. All three levels cooperate equally and fully in an effective synthesis that provides the most definitive presentation of the historical Jesus yet attained.

The Rule of God in Iran

The Rule of God in Iran

The Place, Structure, and Meaning of the Sermon on the Mount Within Matthew

For disciples who live in the sphere where God rules through the risen Jesus, doing the greater righteousness is the normal order of things.

New Rule of God, New People of God

New Rule of God, New People of God

Resistance and the Ungodly Magistrate in the Sixteenth Century: The Marian Exiles

he backdrop against which English theories of resistance must placed can seen clearly in the thought of William Tyndale. Rather than look toward Wittenberg, ZUirich, or Geneva for the formative roots of English Protestantism, it is more perceptive to see English Protestant thought in its own singularity and uniqueness. Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man should help us to focus on the situation in sixteenth-century England, without distortion from our own contemporaneity; for, as Gordon Rupp has reminded us, human life from biblical times to the sixteenth century lived closer to the edge of things, to the elemental struggle for bare existence (76). Tyndale argued in 1527 that the powers that be were executors of the of God. The king's was the law of God, and the monarch was ordained by God whether he was good or bad (1848:163). Simply put, God rules the world in and through kings, governors, and rulers. The question of abuse of office made no difference; if rulers were evil, it was God's way of punishing his people. Obedience was due, thus, even to a heathen ruler. The tyrant would punished by God himself, in his own way and time. Despair this would doubtless produce, but ours is not to read the word of thy soul's health (1848:94-95). It need not added that this is not passive obedience, but active trust in the plan and will of God. It is important to reminded again of Tyndale's world. His thought was etched within the sacred halls of Christendom where the unbeliever, heralded perhaps in secular societies, was the stranger within the gate. The state must accept its duties and perform them, or

The Wearing of Long Hair by Men as Viewed by Some New England Magistrates in 1649

Professor Richard Drinnon of Bucknell University in his introduction to his recently published edited edition of John Dunn Hunter's Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America (1823) writes as follows about the wearing of long hair in the Bay Colony. In 1649 there was even a campaign to Clean up the Bay Colony or, as Thomas Hutchinson called it, "an association against long hair." Among the documents later collected by the governor, one bears that date and the signatures of the doughty John Endicott, Richard Saltonstall, and other magistrates. It reads: "For as much as the wearing of long hair, after the manner of ruffians and barbarous Indians, has begun to invade New England, contrary to the rule of God's word, which says it is a shamne for a man to wear long hair, as also the commendable custom generally of all the Godly of our nation until within these few years, we, the Magistrates who have subscribed to this paper (for the showing of our own innocency in this behalf), do declare and manifest our dislike and detestation against the wearing of such long hair, as a thing uncivil and unmanly, whereby men do deform themselves and offend sober and modest men." The elders were instructed to manifest their zeal in insuring that members of their "respective Churches be not defiled therewith." Hard on themselves, to be sure, these sober and modest men were merciless when it came to native long hairs.1

Cosmic optimism in some Genesis myths.

Myths are statements in metaphor about rigorous life problems; thus they project emotional realities. Among Genesis myths are etiologic rationalizations for: harsh toil for sustenance; woman's pain in childbirth; the unequal struggle against conscience; punishment for murder; world destruction and rebirth. A good God rules; the dominant tone is optimism.

The Rule of God: Essays in Biblical Theology, by G. Ernest Wright. 133 pp. New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960. $2.95

The Rule of God: Essays in Biblical Theology, by G. Ernest Wright. 133 pp. New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960. $2.95

‘Reign’ and ‘House’ in the Kingdom of God in the Gospels

The object of this paper is to examine the tenability of the generally accepted view that the term ‘kingdom of God’ or ‘kingdom of heaven’ ought properly to be rendered as ‘Reign, or Rule of God’. This view assumes that the basic idea of the expression βασιλεία Τοũ θεοũ implies that God is, or becomes, king, that he sets up his kingly rule, or asserts his divine sovereignty over or in the world.

Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth

In this third part of volume III of his Dogmatics Barth sets forth the doctrine of divine providence as the objective and universal rule of God which establishes and encompasses but does not absorb the existence of the person or community which becomes the object of His preservation. Barth's steadfast aim has been to produce a theology dominated by its object, Jesus Christ. This part of the Dogmatics is no exception, for here he argues that the order of being and the order of knowledge start with the event of God's action in Christ. Hence he does not speak of a natural theology with an independent cosmological interest in the work of divine preservation, for he insists that Scripture is differently orientated. It does not witness simply to the highest being as first cause; it witnesses primarily to the Lord of history, the God of the Covenant. This means that the doctrine of providence does not become a Weltanschauung. What Barth says concerning this problem in C.D.III.3 should be read in conjunction with C.D.III.2, pp. 3ff. Because he affirms that the central concern of theology is the relation of God and man established in Jesus Christ he regards cosmology as a peripheral concern arid draws the line against attempts to integrate scientific views and theological interpretation into a comprehensive Weltanschauung. Yet he readily admits that the natural sciences which know their limits have their appropriate place in elucidating the nature of man against the background of creation.