Interpretation articles from April 1995

Interpretation archives from April 1995

Congregations as communities of health and healing. (Salvation and Healing)
April 1, 1995... Dr. David Satcher, director of the Centers for Disease Control, is urging public health agencies to form partnerships with churches, especially in medically underserved African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods. In an address to religious...

Sickness and healing in the New Testament gospels. (Salvation and Healing)
April 1, 1995... Sickness and health are matters of universal human concern. Every person and culture must address the experience of sickness, the pursuit of healing, and the need to discern meaning in both sickness and health. It is no wonder, then, that the...

A case for theology in the ministry of healing.
April 1, 1995... The Ambiguous Quest for Healing Healing is big-time business in America, consuming upwards of twelve percent of our gross national product and employing one of our nation's largest work forces. Such a sizable commitment of resources indicates...

The church as an institution of health: making it happen.
April 1, 1995... Many people wonder if today's church is being true to its history, true to the apostolic church. In fact, the church in this century, despite its services of worship, preaching, and celebration of the sacraments, has nonetheless largely forgotten...

Song of Songs 3:1-4. (Between Text and Sermon)
April 1, 1995... Mary Magdalene and Song of Songs 3:1-4 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. . . . Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she...

Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles.
April 1, 1995... This is an ambitious and comprehensive effort to construct a theology of Paul that takes into account the influences of Hellenistic diaspora Judaism, Pharisaism, and Jewish apocalypticism on Paul before his call and the role the gentile church in...

Revelation: A Continental Commentary.
April 1, 1995... This impressive Theology of the Book of Revelation is part of a series of interpretations of the theology of individual New Testament writings. Bauckham had already dealt with several problems of Revelation in his earlier writings and now...

The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation.
April 1, 1995... This erudite critique of the Protestant project of modernity focuses on the Eurocentric rites of textual interpretation, its culture of atonement, and its abiding reliance on a specious juxtaposing of "Hebraic" to "Hellenic." Lambropoulos...

The HarperCollins Study Bible, New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal Deuterocanonical Books.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... The April 1992 Bible Review presented a tabular review of twenty-six study Bibles. Can another be justified? It can indeed, if the other is the HarperCollins Study Bible, which constitutes the third volume of the HarperCollins Bible Reference...

The Oxford Companion to the Bible.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... I was not sure what to expect from a Companion to the Bible, but the editors were right to avoid the more familiar word "dictionary" in the title. Though this volume has many traits of a dictionary - entries on persons, places, and events - it...

Israel and the Book of the Covenant: An Anthropological Approach to Biblical Law.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... As the subtitle suggests, Marshall proposes a method that reads biblical law from an anthropological perspective, a method that considers both process and form. The method assumes an interaction between law, social structure, and cultural base,...

The Early Career of the Prophet Jeremiah.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... In an effort to determine the chronology of Jeremiah's early career, Lundbom, in this expanded presentation of lectures given at Uppsala University, first sketches the history of scholarship on this issue. Particular attention is given to the...

Jonah: A Commentary.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... This attractive commentary on Jonah should please anyone who wants a responsible treatment of a beloved book and a straightforward resource for Christian education. The "Introduction" situates Jonah among prophetic books, discusses its literary...

Raising Up a Faithful Priest: Community and Priesthood in Biblical Theology.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... I still can't believe it. A book on the institution of the priesthood in ancient Israel is just two hundred small (5[inches] by 8[inches]) pages, with scarcely a footnote, and yet it is comprehensive, nearly always accurate - in a word, superb....

Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... Brueggemann has been encouraging ministers and laypersons for some time to use our imaginations in order to liberate the Bible and our churches from the insecurity and stagnation that is becoming all too common in our Christian communities. Texts...

Prophetic Figures in Late Second Temple Jewish Palestine: The Evidence from Josephus.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... Gray provides a comprehensive study of Josephus's view of prophecy in the first century C.E., a view that includes Josephus himself as a prophetic figure. In her first chapter, Gray contends that scholars have mistakenly imported modern...

The Religion of Jesus the Jew.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... This book by Vermes, professor emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, represents the final volume of his trilogy about Jesus. As in the two earlier volumes, Jesus the Jew (1973) and Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983), Vermes bases...

Reading Luke-Acts: Dynamics of Biblical Narrative.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... Kurz explains the purpose of his book in this way: "This book therefore attempts to read Luke-Acts as biblical narrative, which has a composite unity formed from disparate sources, as contributing to the Christian Bible viewed as fountainhead of...

The Ongoing Feast: Table Fellowship and Eschatology at Emmaus.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... That the story of Emmaus is important to the narrative of the Third Gospel is beyond doubt; that it brings to fulfillment Luke's twin themes of table fellowship and eschatology is a thesis that this book sets out to prove. For Just, the climax of...

Relation Analysis of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Reader-Response Criticism.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... "Relation analysis" is a method that Harner himself developed. Applied to the Fourth Gospel, it entails a close examination of the network of relationships that exist between its narrative personae (e.g., Jesus, the Father, the disciples, "the...

Mystical Christianity: A Psychological Commentary on the Gospel.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... Of all the new testament documents, the Gospel of John lends itself best to symbolic interpretations. Sanford offers us the latest contribution to this tradition. In thirty-two chapters averaging ten pages each, he analyzes Johannine vignettes...

According to Paul: Studies in the Theology of the Apostle.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... This book offers a collection of eight essays, five previously published but revised and three new, from one of the foremost Roman Catholic New Testament scholars of our day. More than a simple collection of various writings related to Paul, the...

Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of I Corinthians.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... This book employs rhetorical interpretation to demonstrate that First Corinthians is an example of a unified, deliberative argument for unity over against division. Buttressed by a wide-ranging series of examples from classical orators,...

Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... Grant, a long-time contributor to early Christianity scholarship, adds to his substantial legacy of books and essays with this insightful and effective correlation between the early Christian and classical societies. He shows how each group...

Ecumenical Faith in Evangelical Perspective.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... In this book, one of the leading theologians of our day shares his reflections on evangelical ecumenicity. Appealing to Philip Schaff and the Mercersburg tradition, Fackre rightly discerns that evangelical faith can retain its biblical moorings...

Humanization and the Politics of God: The Koinonia Ethics of Paul Lehmann.
April 1, 1995... The recent death of Paul Lehmann has taken from us the last representative of something on the order of a "golden age" in American theology. An early student and friend of Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth, Lehmann brought together the interests of...

A Theology of Power: Being Beyond Domination.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... Pasewark, assistant professor of religion at Gustavus Adolphus College, presents his revised University of Chicago doctoral thesis as A Theology of Power. His brief introduction provides an argument as to why power should not be defined as...

Liberation Theology: An Introductory Guide.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1995... Brown once again has shared his passion for liberation theology and its challenge to dominant theology and United States imperialism. This guide, based on a series of lectures to laypeople on the role of the church in Latin America, shares...