Theological Reading Research Articles

The ascension of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit in patristic perspective: a theological reading

Scripture is replete with the antithesis of descent and ascent, and the early Church Fathers often employed this framework for understanding the relationship between the ascension of Jesus and the sending (descent) of the Holy Spirit. This essay outlines how many of the early Fathers saw an inseparable connection between the bodily ascension of Christ and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost. While not normally denying the historical reality of these events, their main emphasis was theological rather than merely historical. In this way the Fathers creatively attempted to relate their Christology to their pneumatology without allowing one to swallow the other.

Recurring Themes In The Book Of The Twelve: Creating Points Of Contact For A Theological Reading

Four themes in the Book of the Twelve (the Day of YHWH, fertility of the land, the fate of God's people, and theodicy) have surfaced in the discussion of editorial activity, literary development, and theological perspectives. These themes deserve exploration for the role they play as a lens for reading the Book of the Twelve as a composite unity.

En Grundtvig-salme teologisk fortolket

En Grundtvig-salme teologisk fortolket[A hymn by Grundtvig interpreted theologically]By Theodor JørgensenWithout a theological and dogmatic reading of Grundtvig’s hymns an interpretation of them would be incomplete. The point is demonstrated by a dogmatic reading of Grundtvig’s Christmas hymn “Welcome again God’s little angels” (“Velkommen igjen, Guds Engle smaa”).

A theological reading of Hilary's ‘autobiographical’ narrative in De Trinitate I.1–19

Hilary of Poitiers begins his treatise De Trinitate with what appears to be an autobiographical narration of his journey to the Christian faith. Scholars, though taking different approaches to explain this narration, have overlooked its significance for Hilary's treatise. In the following essay, I argue that Book I is a reflection on sources of knowledge about God, the role of faith and reason in theological inquiry, the proper approach to scripture, and the soteriological context of any discussion on the mystery of God. These methodological reflections guide the reader through Hilary's treatise and make Book I crucial to understanding his purpose in De Trinitate.

A Teoria da Imagem como Chave de Leitura das Representações do Divino e as Crises Eclesiásticas Contemporâneas: Uma Introdução

A missionary Church opens itself, without distinction, to persons. As such, it permanently welcomes diverse religious spiritualities and imageries. This creates conflicts, normally, regarding the question of what “really represents God”. In order to help understand these conflicts, this article dialogues with the theory of image and relates it with a theological reading based on the concepts of iconoclasm and iconofilia.

The church in liquid modernity: A sociological and theological exploration of a liquid church

The characterization of the current phase in the modernization process as ‘fluid’ or ‘liquid’ has recently received a place in the theological plea for a late modern church reformation. An example is Pete Ward's call for a liquid church. His message diverges from that of Zygmunt Bauman, which is supposed to support it. Ward suggests that fluid structures are helpful in marketing the gospel. I argue that this approach takes the sting out of Bauman's social theory. A theological reading of the concept of liquid modernity challenges the churches to adopt a hermeneutic reconstruction of their mission.

The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (review)

The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, by Leon R. Kass. New York: Free Press, 2003. 700 pp. $35.00. If evidence were needed for the profundity of the book of Genesis, it may be found in the unceasing flood of volumes which seek to plumb its depths. Contemporary scholarship now interacts with biblical texts in ways undreamed of a mere generation ago. More conventional interpreters sometimes look askance at such innovations, but Kass's volume, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, provides much food for thought on how this ancient text may speak to a contemporary readership. There are numerous exegetical, historical, and theological readings of Genesis which approach the text with divergent presuppositions and which arrive at multifarious and often mutually exclusive conclusions. Kass's approach is to investigate Genesis from a philosophical perspective, that is to say, to approach it with the expectation that it will speak to those who wish to acquire the wisdom necessary to live an enlightened life in the 21st century. The moral perspective of Genesis, and how this challenges much that is crass in western (American) culture, is a major thread woven by Kass throughout his book. Yet this is no pious moralistic homily addressed to the faithful by an author expounding the authority of the Bible as Scripture. Kass is neither a biblical scholar nor an active participant in a community of faith. He writes as a distinguished bio-ethicist from a secular Jewish perspective. In several places Kass himself expresses surprise that a person from his background should have engaged with Genesis in the first place, and even more amazingly, have been won over by its moral vision. At 700 pages this is a long book. Its length is a testament to how significant and enriching Kass considers Genesis to be. However, its size makes it impossible to provide more than a broad view of its content. Essentially the book takes a holistic, final-form approach to Genesis, arguing for its total coherence, in which every word counts and juxtapositions are important (p. 14). Kass's presuppositions soon become obvious. This is an essentially modernist interpretation, yet which at the same time conveys a deep skepticism about the values of modern culture-its technological strengths merely mask its deep weaknesses. He frequently dismisses postmodernism (e.g., p. 243). More than once he vigorously attacks feminist hermeneutics. He accuses contemporary feminists of reading thoughtlessly and tendentiously because like most of the rest of their society they do not reflect, philosophically (pp. 112-113). At the same time, however, he shows sensitivity to gender issues and attempts to show how Genesis argues against male domination (e.g., p. 115). As well as broad brush strokes there is detailed engagement with the text. For example, he provides a comparison of the verbs used in the creation and flood narratives (p. 231), examples of paranomasia in Gen. 32 (p. 450), and the precise etymology of Israel and its implications (p. 460). However, all of the above is already present in the literature. Does this volume merit a place on bookshelves or in library catalogues already over-crowded with works on Genesis? As a biblical exegete rather than philosopher myself, I must admit to some skepticism on first picking up The Beginning of Wisdom. …

Re-Claiming Biblical Women: Feminist (Jewish) Re-Readings of Hebrew Narratives

In the last three decades, biblical feminist scholarship has proliferated in ways that could not have been imagined by the early practitioners of this theory, myself included. Not only have a number of manuscripts, diction aries, reference works, commentaries, and companions been published, but increasingly feminist criticism has become an acceptable, if not normative, approach among several other leading contemporary approaches to the field of Bible Studies. Hardly a female character in the Hebrew Bible has evaded a contemporary interpretation. The proliferation of monographs in the field has further spawned a diversity of approaches and theories adding to the question of gender the analytic categories of class, nation, race, and culture. Critical approaches taking aim at biblical ideologies of ethnocentrism, monotheism, and androcentrism have routinely been questioned and debated by reconstructive and appropriative approaches, influenced largely by femi nist theological readings, notably Womanist, Latina, Lesbian, and Post colonial readings, which often consider biblical women as models of empowerment rather than embodiments of patriarchal thinking. Jewish scholars have been active in the field of biblical studies, though little has been done to elaborate a theoretical articulation of a distinctly Jewish femi nist approach to the Hebrew Bible. These two books may signal an interesting development of a specifically Jewish feminist scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, though neither one of the authors explicitly identifies her reading in such terms. Schneider's book pays special attention to the double meanings of consonantal Hebrew, taking the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and Masoretic blocking of the Masoretic Text of Genesis?(parashot rather than later sequencing of chapters).

Anthony Low. Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton. Pp. xxii+242. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003. $60

This latest book from the pen of Anthony Low has been long in the making. He started work on it in 1995, and all of its chapters but the last have appeared in earlier forms in various journals over the past five or six years. Its material will therefore be to some extent familiar to readers of this review, but, even so, the book version is worth a second reading. With the exception of a weaker chapter on The Wanderer, Low's discussions of the religious matrix of the development of subjectivity from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance—from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Paradise Lost—presents a compelling argument, carefully articulated and elegantly delivered. This argument is based in a refutation of the radical postmodernist position that there is no such thing as a universal human nature. Low regards this as an overstatement of the case, arguing that, while human nature is clearly not immutable, parts of it are ‘hard-wired’ (p. 191). In other words, there is bound to be some continuity in human subjectivity through the ages, even if there have also been seismic shifts in la condition humaine from time to time. He is particularly concerned to demonstrate the continuity of certain aspects of subjectivity from the medieval to the early modern periods, while recognizing the extent of the change which brought in the latter and (as many aver) led to the modern age and eventually to postmodernity. Religious institutions provide the key to continuity and change in Low's account: confession in Gawain, penance in the first book of The Faerie Queene, purgatory in Hamlet, and two complex and satisfying theological readings of conscience and ‘the fall into subjectivity’ in Paradise Lost bring the volume to a close.

The 'Mind' of Scripture: Theological Readings of the Bible in the Fathers

: This article seeks to describe theological readings of the Bible in the Fathers, and then to consider whether we might learn anything from them. The first section considers the patristic appeal to the overall sense, intent or mind of scripture when confronted with debate about particular texts in doctrinal disputes. The second looks at Cyril of Alexandria's ‘more dogmatic’ exegesis of the Gospel of John. Thus the patristic approach is explored both from a systematic and an exegetical perspective. Then, a number of constructive suggestions are offered, even as it is recognized that modern exegetes and systematic theologians now operate in a very different world.

Crucifixion in Rabbinic Context: Juridical or Theological?

1. A Secular, Juridical, versus a Sacred, Theological Reading of the Passion Narratives: What Is the Difference? How people view the death penalty governs their reading of the Passion narratives. The prevailing picture is simple and secular. Execution after trial and conviction represents a legal punishment after an unjust trial—pure and simple. Jesus was tried for a crime, found guilty, and executed. Reading the execution as penalty for a crime does not accommodate the next chapter in the [End Page 79] story. The resurrection disrupts that narrative rather than completing it and forming its climax. Within that framework, Good Friday alone —the trial, conviction, sentence, and execution—registers. Within the teleology of the juridical narrative there is no accounting for Easter Sunday. That destroys the juridical transaction. That juridical perspective on the Passion narratives, secular at its heart, governs in the prevailing culture and stresses a secular reading of the matter. It draws attention away from those components of the narratives that underscore an other-than-punitive evaluation, an other-than-juridical approach to the story. There is no compelling logic, from that perspective, that requires the climactic chapter of resurrection. Accordingly, the culture in which we live affords no space for an other-than-secular perspective, accords short shrift to a final chapter of resurrection and eternal life. So the representation of the Passion Narratives is truncated, with its emphasis on trial and execution, and it is unable to explain the resurrection except as a contradiction. That is why the culture, defying the continuity and logic of the narrative as a whole, dwells on Good Friday, not on Easter Sunday, to speak liturgically: the death of Jesus the man, not the resurrection of Christ, atoning for humanity's sins. That secular reading of the Passion with its emphasis on the horror of the trial and the gruesome penalty inflicted necessarily rather than on the sublime conception realized in the narrative treats as an epilogue what is and theologically is meant to be the climax. And it is not how the Gospels present the matter. But how else, and in what context if not the juridical one, are we to read the Passion Narratives? A perspective on the death penalty formed within the theology of monotheism restores the correct emphasis of the Passion Narrative, that is, within monotheism we see the climactic place of the resurrection and the realization of eternal life. What I wish to show is how the model of the rabbinic framing of the monotheist narrative allows us to read the Passion narratives in all their proper proportion and perspective: how the crucifixion fits in to the salvific narrative. And that, we shall see, not only accommodates all of the details in a governing theory of the transaction, but imposes the focus on the Passion narratives that the punitive, juridical model distorts. 2. The Monotheist Narrative To understand the centrality of resurrection in monotheism, and therefore the trial and punishment of the felon as an act of mercy, we have to stand back and ask, why is resurrection, whether of Christ on Easter Sunday or of holy Israel [End Page 80] at the end of days, critical to the monotheist system, whether that system is expressed in philosophical or mythic categories? Monotheism resolves the problem of evil, which so troubled Ecclesiastes and Job, by a narrative. Specifically, God ultimately will restore that perfection that embodied his plan for creation. In the work of restoration death that comes about by reason of sin will die, the dead will be raised and judged for their deeds in this life, and most of them, having been justified, will go on to eternal life in the world to come. The paradigm of man restored to Eden is realized in Israel's return to the Land of Israel. In that world or age to come, however, that sector of humanity that through the Torah knows...

Voces del desierto, historia, teología, espiritualidad

The Fathers, 4th-7th century anchorites and cenobites, both from the East and the West, set up an enormously valuable and fruitful way of living Christianism. In the first part of this study, the author offers a historical analysis. By recalling the main printed sources, he gives reading keys to understand them as hagiographic literature, and the different lifestyles of the anchorites. In the second part, he makes a theological reading of the historical phenomenon, wondering about the sense of the accounts -are they history or theology?-, life as historia salutis, and eremitic life as mediation of reforms in Church History. In the third part, reflections and suggestions are offered about the significance of those deeds of the athletes of exile and its possible recovery in our days, at least of some of the ideals and reasons of the Desert Fathers.

Paper Chains: Bureaucratic Despotism and Voluntary Servitude in Franz Kafka’s The Castle

This article is an attempt at a ‘political’ reading of Kafka's The Castle, as an ironical, radical critique - from a libertarian perspective - of the despotism of the modern bureaucratic apparatus. This reading is not self-evident. Like all Kafka's unfinished novels, Das Schloss is a strange and fascinating literary document that creates perplexity and inspires various contradictory and/or dissonant interpretations. And like The Trial it has been the object of very many religious and theological readings. Some authors have followed Max Brod's apologetic interpretation: ‘This “Castle” which Kafka does not obtain permission to enter and which he cannot even properly approach is precisely “Grace” in the theologians’ sense, God's government that directs human destinies (the “Village”) …’. However, others acknowledge that, far from seeming to be the symbol of Grace, the Castle appears instead to belong to a hellish logic. Erich Heller correctly notes that we find in Kafka both a dream of absolute freedom and the knowledge of terrible servitude: from this insoluble contradiction there arises ‘the conviction of damnation’, which is ‘all that is left of faith’. But Heller is wrong to think that we can discern in Kafka's work a Gnostic manicheism, such that the Castle of the novel would be something like ‘the heavily fortified garrison of a company of Gnostic demons’.3

Free, Present, and Faithful: A Theological Reading of the Character of God in Exodus

Free, Present, and Faithful: A Theological Reading of the Character of God in Exodus

Past and Present in Victor Hugo Rascon Banda's La Malinche and Marisol Martin del Campo's Amor y conquista

Mexican writers have repeatedly used the life of La Malinche as a vehicle for their reflections on the question of Mexican national identity. This has resulted in a tradition of ahistorical and unduly theological readings of Mexican history which presents La Malinche either as traitor to or symbolical mother of a nation that did not in fact come into being until several centuries after his death. With the help of Michael André Bernstein and Gary Saul Morson's work on closed and open narratives, this article reads two recent works on La Malinche, in order to determine to what extent they reiterate traditional views of La Malinche's role in Mexican history. V'ctor Hugo Rascón Banda's play La Malinche deploys postmodernist techniques of anachronism and pastiche, but nevertheless reinserts La Malinche into the standard master narrative of the Mexican nation. Marisol Martín del Campo's novel Amor y conquista mixes painstaking historical reconstruction with the overt fictionalizing of the past, and succeeds in capturing a sense of uncertainty and openness of the story of La Malinche's life.

Religion, Science, and Evolution: Paul Tillich's Fourth Way

Abstract. In his book God After Darwin John Haught provides a useful categorization of theological approaches to evolution: some theologians actively oppose Darwinian evolution, another group maintains that science and religion have nothing to say to one another, and a third seeks to engage evolution. Haught wishes to pursue the third way. But many theological attempts to talk about divine action in the world, including divine involvement in the process of evolution, run afoul of the scientific principle of the conservation of matter‐energy. Haught's reliance on the now‐familiar notion that information can have causal efficacy does not in fact escape this difficulty. I suggest a fourth approach, represented by a constructive reading of Paul Tillich's theology. The central argument is that Tillich offers a way of taking Darwinian evolution up into one's ultimate concern without claiming that God has any causal relation to evolution. God provides no historical telos for evolution, but rather a “depth teleology” that springs from the manner in which God, as the depth of the structure of finite being, is the object of Christian faith.

A Sociological Reading of Catholic Theology of Social Sin

A Sociological Reading of Catholic Theology of Social Sin

« Thou didst Medusa see, / And should thy selfe, a moving marble bee » : Les statues de Méduse dans quelques poèmes élisabéthains

In the English Renaissance, the myth of Medusa is endowed with a variety of moral, theological and literary readings which are intricately superimposed. With her snaky locks and petrifying look, Medusa takes on the shape of a monstrous beauty and spreads terror and evil around her. At the sight of this stunning yet repulsive woman, humans are petrified into statues. Conversely, in Petrarch’s poems, she appears as a cold, insensitive mistress who never responds to the call of the poet, who is thus translated into a lifeless block. Faced with this overwhelming literary tradition, the Elizabethan poet is either mesmerized by Medusa’s power and trapped in a stereotyped style, or become a new Perseus who, thanks to the reflection of his polished style, strives to fight against set literary codes. Ultimately, these new Medusas are overpowered by their own reflections and end up like statues.

Saint Francis versus McDonald’s? Contemporary Globalization Critique and Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics

Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Nice, Gothenburg, Genoa, Brussels, Barcelona, ≡ All these cities formed the setting of mass globalization protests. In most mass media reports, the presence of thousands of peaceful demonstrators has been outshone by the pictures of radical activists smashing McDonald's and Niketown. In the search for an adequate theological response to today's context of globalization, this article takes precisely this radical activism as a starting–point. In line with those postmodern iconoclasts’ own legitimation, a theological approach to this case leads to the Marxist theory of fetishism and idolatry as it has already been investigated by liberation theologians two decades ago. Surprisingly, a renewed version of this critique of the theologization of economics can be found in No Logo (2000), the trend–setting globalization critique written by the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein. A theological close reading of this best–selling book brings to the light a recurrent use of religious metaphor to characterize the corporate logo as a major aesthetic figure in the context of globalization. In order to understand the aesthetic and (pseudo–)theological processes involved, a confrontation with the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar (in particular his essay on Bonaventure) delivers a striking formal parallel between the Church's cross and today's corporate logo. Beyond an at first sight similar theo–aesthetic programme, Balthasar's theological aesthetics however opens up a position which enables us to expose the contemporary global socio–economic system as a subtly inverted Christianity.

Yahweh versus Baalism: A Theological Reading of the Gideon-Abimelech Narrative

Book Review| January 01 2003 Yahweh versus Baalism: A Theological Reading of the Gideon-Abimelech Narrative Yahweh versus Baalism: A Theological Reading of the Gideon-Abimelech NarrativeBluedorn, Wolfgang Brian P. Irwin Brian P. Irwin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Bulletin for Biblical Research (2003) 13 (1): 141–143. https://doi.org/10.2307/26422786 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Brian P. Irwin; Yahweh versus Baalism: A Theological Reading of the Gideon-Abimelech Narrative. Bulletin for Biblical Research 1 January 2003; 13 (1): 141–143. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/26422786 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressBulletin for Biblical Research Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2003 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2003The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.