Interpretation articles from April 1996

Interpretation archives from April 1996

The premodern Bible in the postmodern world.
April 1, 1996... For half a century, Union Theological Seminary has nurtured theological work by publishing a journal whose distinct vocation is announced in its title: Interpretation, namely of scripture. It is entirely fitting, therefore, that the Sprunt...

Scripture, Church, and dogma; an essay on theological method.
April 1, 1996... Introduction: The Ecumenical Center The overarching theme on which we have been asked to reflect is: "Doing theology under the authority of scripture within the context of the church." This is surely an ecumenical way of defining the matter....

Kingdom and cross; Christian moral community and the problem of suffering.
April 1, 1996... The basic thesis of this essay is that scripture guides ethics by revealing ways in which Jesus and early Christianity transformed standard cultural patterns of moral relationships, making them less hierarchical and status-oriented and more...

The interrupted sermon.
April 1, 1996... Several months ago I found myself worshipping for the first time in a small church near the place where my family and I were vacationing. The preacher was giving a homily on the story of David and Bathsheba. She confessed that the story had set...

Psalms.
April 1, 1996... May's commentary represents the fruit of a lifetime of studying, teaching, and worshipping with the Psalms. For many years, Mays taught a seminar on the Psalms at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. Equally important, from the time of his...

The Lord Reigns: A Theological Handbook to the Psalms.
April 1, 1996... Readers of the journal will be familiar with Mays's commentary on the Book of Psalms in the Interpretation series (John Knox Press, 1994). The essays gathered here, written over a period of some 25 years, provide a companion volume for that...

The Death of the Messiah - From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives.
April 1, 1996... Among the many for which Brown will be known, and the one that will invite the most comparison with this, his magnum opus, is his earlier work The Birth of the Messiah, recently re-released in a new and updated edition (Doubleday, 1993). Although...

The Theology of Paul's Letter to the Galatians.
April 1, 1996... Paul's letter to the Galatians has the power to effect profound changes in a person's whole understanding of faith. As a seminary student, I was so moved by the exegesis of Galatians by Victor Furnish and other Pauline scholars that I could...

The Theology of the Shorter Pauline Letters.
April 1, 1996... Paul's letter to the Galatians has the power to effect profound changes in a person's whole understanding of faith. As a seminary student, I was so moved by the exegesis of Galatians by Victor Furnish and other Pauline scholars that I could...

Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory.
April 1, 1996... This book performs two important functions. In the first place it provides a history of "the Christian tradition's struggle with questions of war and peace" (p. ix). That struggle is for Cahill "a test case" for Christian views of discipleship in...

I and II Chronicles: A Commentary.
April 1, 1996... In looking over the list of commentaries in this prestigious series, I was surprised to find that this is the first volume by an Israeli scholar, and the first by a woman scholar. But Sara Japhet, professor of Bible at Hebrew University of...

Early Israelite Wisdom.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1996... This monograph challenges the thesis that biblical wisdom literature, especially the Book of Proverbs, is: (1) best understood as the product of a special group of "wise" associated with the royal court; and (2) concerned with the education of...

Divination in Ancient Israel and its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1996... Cryer wants to explain "the meaning of the practice" of divination, and he begins by discussing magic, the "more inclusive category" to which it belongs. Reviewing critically major studies of magic by Frazer, Mauss and Hubert, O'Keefe, and...

Israel's Scripture Traditions and the Synoptic Gospels: Story Shaping Story.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1996... Swartley has produced an extensive intertextual analysis of specific Old Testament theological traditions that may have influenced the content, theology, and structure of the synoptic Gospels. These traditions include the Exodus and Sinai, the...

Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1996... Witherington's study provides the first comprehensive treatment of the wisdom material in both Old and New Testaments. As the title indicates, the central focus is on Jesus; as the subtitle reveals, such a focus calls for an accounting of...

Matthew's Christian-Jewish Community.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1996... Saldarini explores the social and literary dimensions of the Matthean group of Jewish believers-in-Jesus by using theoretical concepts and categories of deviance, sect, and community. Saldarini argues that the Gospel of Matthew addresses a...

A Gospel for the New People of God: Studies in Matthew.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1996... This first-rate collection of essays, half of which appear here for the first time, falls into three parts. Part I concerns itself with method in the interpretation of Matthew. Stanton reviews the contributions of source criticism, redaction...

Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1996... Attempting neither to sketch a personality nor to write a biography, the author of this study provides his readers instead the history of an image and its function as recorded in the canonical writings (Part I) up through Eastern and Western...

The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1996... Since new constructions of meaning are generally produced by the application of heuristic theories and models, Hamerton-Kelly's use of Rene Girard's theory of sacred violence is to be welcomed as a method of interpreting Mark's Gospel, if only to...