|
|
Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > The Bible
Rudolf Bultmann was the most significant New Testament scholar we
have known in the twentieth century. This study approaches his work
arguing that his theology can only be understood correctly as an
interpretation of the New Testament. Naturally it is a
twentieth-century interpretation involving complex hermeneutical
questions. But it is the New Testament which provides the subject
matter to be interpreted. Bultmann's theology, stemming from the
conviction that the New Testament addresses the present age, offers
important solutions to many problems for Christian theology in our
materialistic, relativist, pluralistic age. The book introduces the
reader to: Bultmann's theology; the problem of contemporary New
Testament hermeneutics; the problems of New Testament theology; the
question of the relation of New Testament theology to theology as
such. It makes a necessary critique of simplistic modes of
interpreting Bultmann, and shows a masterly hand in assessing his
continuing significance.
Take your Bible reading to a deeper, more personal level with this
thoughtfully designed journal. It offers three simple writing
prompts that loosely guide you through The Bible Recap
chronological reading plan. The open-ended nature of the
questions--and the pattern they help you establish through daily
repetition--is ideal for building your understanding of Scripture,
section by section, day after day. With a lay-flat binding that
provides a comfortable writing experience, this journal will help
you get the most out of your time in God's Word. Getting to know
Him will grow your faith and strengthen your joy, because He's
where the joy is! Praise for The Bible Recap "I have grown closer
to God in ways I couldn't expect." "It has helped me understand the
Bible like never before." "More than a Bible study, it is a God
study."
The book of Hebrews has often been the Cinderella of the New
Testament, overlooked and marginalized; and yet it is one of the
most interesting and theologically significant books in the New
Testament. A Cloud of Witness examines the theology of the book in
the light of its ancient historical context. There are chapters
devoted to the structure of Hebrews, the person of Jesus Christ,
Hebrews within the context of Second Temple Judaism and the
Greco-Roman empire and the role of Hebrews in early Christian
thought.
This book deals with Bible translation and its development from
Antiquity to the Reformation. Helen Kraus compares and analyses
those translated passages in Genesis 1-4 that deal with the
male-female dynamic, tracing linguistic and ideological processes
and seeking to determine the extent of interaction between
contemporary culture and translation. In response to the challenge
of late 20th-century 'second wave' feminist scholarship, Kraus
considers the degree and development of androcentricity in these
passages in both Hebrew and translated texts. The study is
therefore something of a hybrid, comprising exegesis, literary
criticism and reception history, and draws together a number of
hitherto discrete approaches. After an introduction to the problems
of translation, and exegesis of the Hebrew text, five translations
are examined: The Septuagint (the first Greek translation, thought
to date from the 3rd century BCE), Jerome's 4th-century CE Latin
Vulgate version, Luther's pioneering German vernacular Bible of
1523, the English Authorized Version (1611), and the Dutch State
Bible (1637). A brief study of contemporary culture precedes each
exegetical section that compares translation with the Hebrew text.
Results of the investigation point to the Hebrew text showing
significant androcentricity, with the Septuagint, possibly
influenced by Greek philosophy, emphasizing the patriarchal
elements. This trend persists through the Vulgate and even Luther's
Bible - though less so in the English and Dutch versions - and
suggests that the translators are at least partly responsible for
an androcentric text becoming the justification for the oppression
of women.
Lieu examines theological and historical issues within the
Johannine tradition.
In this book Barbara Green demonstrates how David is shown and can
be read as emerging from a young naive, whose early successes grow
into a tendency for actions of contempt and arrogance, of blindness
and even cruelty, particularly in matters of cult. However, Green
also shows that over time David moves closer to the demeanor and
actions of wise compassion, more closely aligned with God. Leaving
aside questions of historicity as basically undecidable Green's
focus in her approach to the material is on contemporary
literature. Green reads the David story in order, applying seven
specific tools which she names, describes and exemplifies as she
interprets the text. She also uses relevant hermeneutical theory,
specifically a bridge between general hermeneutics and the specific
challenges of the individual (and socially located) reader. As a
result, Green argues that characters in the David narrative can
proffer occasions for insight, wisdom, and compassion.
Acknowledging the unlikelihood that characters like David and his
peers, steeped in patriarchy and power, can be shown to learn and
extend wise compassion, Green is careful to make explicit her
reading strategies and offer space for dialogue and disagreement.
This volume discusses links between the exegetical trends current
in various Second Temple Jewish circles and patterns of New
Testament conversation with Jewish Scripture. The standard focus on
Jewish background of Christianity is complemented here by an
alternative direction: the "mapping" of New Testament evidence as
the early witness to more general trends attested in their fully
developed form only later, in rabbinic literature. The question
that dominates much of the discussion is: How can the New Testament
be used for creating a fuller picture of Second Temple Jewish
exegesis? The book deals with a representative variety of samples
from different layers of the New Testament tradition: Synoptic
Gospels, Pauline Epistles and Acts.
Scholars generally see the aspiration of the Roman Empire and the
imperial cult in Asia Minor as the great villain in "Revelation",
treating the depiction of a cosmic conflict in the book mostly as
metaphors that hold little or no explanatory power in the story.
This book pursues the conviction that the cosmic conflict imagery
is the primary and controlling element in the account. Such a
reading puts the war-in-heaven theme in the foreground and calls on
interpreters to pay more attention to the heavenly being whose
attempt to subvert the truth about the divine government is the
unremitting concern in "Revelation". This book redresses the
distortion that results from leaving the larger conflict theme
underexposed. Having first developed the story line, it aims is to
show that the phrase 'Pistis Iesou' in "Revelation" is best
understood when "Revelation" is read as a theodicy of God's
handling of the reality of evil.
The CSB She Reads Truth Bible aims to live at the intersection of beauty, goodness,
and Truth. Featuring She Reads Truth devotionals and Scripture reading plans that
include supplemental passages for deeper understanding, this Bible invites every
woman to count themselves among the She Reads Truth community of "Women in the
Word of God every day." The CSB She Reads Truth Bible also features 66 key verses,
artfully lettered to aid in Scripture memorization.
The She Reads Truth Bible includes almost 200 devotionals, 66 artist-designed key
verses, 35 full-color timelines, 20 full-color maps, 11 full-color charts, reading plans
for every book of the Bible, one-year Bible reading plan, detailed book introductions,
key verse list, carefully curated topical index, smyth-sewn binding, two colored ribbon
markers, and wide margins for journaling and note-taking.
Women’s study Bibles and devotional Bibles are a great resource, but a beautiful and
theologically sound Bible like this can be a great encouragement in a woman’s time in
God’s Word. .
The CSB She Reads Truth Bible hardcover Bible (also available in genuine leather and
leathe touch) features the highly readable, highly reliable text of the Christian
Standard Bible® (CSB). The CSB stays as literal as possible to the Bible's original
meaning without sacrificing clarity, making it easier to engage with Scripture's
life-transforming message and to share it with others.
The Book of Job functions as literature of survival where the main
character, Job, deals with the trauma of suffering, attempts to
come to terms with a collapsed moral and theological world, and
eventually re-connects the broken pieces of his world into a new
moral universe, which explains and contains the trauma of his
recent experiences and renders his life meaningful again. The key
is Job's death imagery. In fact, with its depiction of death in the
prose tale and its frequent discussions of death in the poetic
sections, Job may be the most death-oriented book in the bible. In
particular, Job, in his speeches, articulates his experience of
suffering as the experience of death. To help understand this focus
on death in Job we turn to the psychohistorian, Robert Lifton, who
investigates the effects on the human psyche of various traumatic
experiences (wars, natural disasters, etc). According to Lifton,
survivors of disaster often sense that their world has "collapsed"
and they engage in a struggle to go on living. Part of this
struggle involves finding meaning in death and locating death's
place in the continuity of life. Like many such survivors, Job's
understanding of death is a flashpoint indicating his bewilderment
(or "desymbolization") in the early portions of his speeches, and
then, later on, his arrival at what Lifton calls "resymbolization,"
the reconfiguration of a world that can account for disaster and
render death - and life - meaningful again.
Considering the importance of pneumatological themes for
interpreting Paul's argument of Galatians, Grant Buchanan explores
how Paul draws from Jewish traditions of creation and the Spirit
and presents a fresh cosmogony to the Galatian church. He suggests
that Galatians outlines an epistemological shift in how Paul sees
past, present, and future reality in light of Christ and the
presence of the Spirit in the lives of the believers. Central to
this new cosmogony is the centrality of the Spirit in Paul's
argument in Galatians 3:1-6:17, with Buchanan's exegesis revealing
that the Spirit, the Galatians' identity as children of God and the
new creation motif are not merely elements of Paul's argument but
central to it. Examining Galatians through a pneumatological lens,
Buchanan demonstrates that Paul renders Jewish and Gentile
identities no longer valid, instead revealing that God's favour and
election is already with them by stating that those who have the
promised Spirit are all children of God. He examines Jewish
biblical and Second Temple extra-biblical texts that explicitly
connect the Spirit to creation themes, including Genesis, Ezekiel,
the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Wisdom of Solomon. Taking Galatians
6:11-17 as the body-closing of the letter, the new creation motif
directly implies the activity of the Spirit in the creation of
Christian identity. Analysing 6:15 from this pneumatological
perspective, Buchanan argues that the new creation motif represents
a key aspect of Paul's generative cosmogony and pneumatology,
denoting a far broader socio-cosmic transformation than previously
assumed and becomes a key to understand Paul's argument.
There are few texts as central to the mythology of Jewish
literature as the Garden of Eden and its attendant motifs, yet the
direct citation of this text within the Hebrew Bible is
surprisingly rare. Even more conspicuous is the infrequent
reference to creation, or to the archetypal first humans Adam and
Eve. There have also been few analyses of the impact of Genesis 2-3
beyond the biblical canon, though early Jewish and Christian
interpretations of it are numerous, and often omitted is an
analysis of the expulsion narrative in verses 22-24. In Remembering
Eden, Peter Thacher Lanfer seeks to erase this gap in scholarship.
He evaluates texts that expand and explicitly interpret the
expulsion narrative, as well as translation texts such as the
Septuagint, the Aramaic Targums, and the Syriac Peshitta. According
to Lanfer, these textual additions, omissions, and translational
choices are often a product of ideological and historically rooted
decisions. His goal is to evaluate the genetic, literary, and
ideological character of individual texts divorced from the burden
of divisions between texts that are anachronistic ("biblical" vs.
"non-biblical") or overly broad ("Pseudepigrapha"). This analytical
choice, along with the insights of classic biblical criticism,
yields a novel understanding of the communities receiving and
reinterpreting the expulsion narrative. In addition, in tracing the
impact of the polemic insertion of the expulsion narrative into the
Eden myth, Lanfer shows that the multi-vocality of a text's
interpretations serves to highlight the dialogical elements of the
text in its present composite state.
John Stott writes, 'During the gestation of this book I seem to
have lived inside the second letter of Paul to Timothy. In
imagination I have sat down beside Timothy and have tried myself to
hear and heed this final charge from the ageing apostle ... 'On
each occasion I have been impressed afresh by the timeliness for
today of what the apostle writes, especially for young Christian
leaders. For our era is one of theological and moral confusion,
even of apostasy. And the apostle summons us, as he summoned
Timothy, to be strong, brave and steadfast.'
|
|