Interpretation articles from July 1994

Interpretation archives from July 1994

"Why do you hide your face?" Divine silence and speech in the Book of Job.
July 1, 1994... THE BOOK OF JOB constitutes a masterful ancient expression of human grief and suffering. At the same time, the book's vocabulary of human grief and suffering cannot be fully understood apart from a confrontation with the grammar of divine silence...

The prophetic word of God and history.
July 1, 1994... Presently, there are two views of human history vying for our allegiance. The one is grounded in the Enlightenment and insists that history is a closed process whose course is determined by the dictum that "might makes right." The other view is...

The pharisee and the tax collector: Luke 18:9-14 and Deuteronomy 26:1-15.
July 1, 1994... In the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, Jesus trades in the language of hyperbole: The Pharisee and the tax collector are both caricatures of a particular way of responding to God. In itself, each of these ways is not without its...

Work and meaning: some theological reflections.
July 1, 1994... Because work is of central significance in our lives, it is important to ask theologically about its meaning. At its crassest, the Protestant work ethic suggests that to do work well and to amass wealth are religious duties. In reflecting on the...

Psalm 125. (Between Text and Sermon)
July 1, 1994... ONE YEAR before he was hung by the Nazis, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote these words: By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered, And confidently waiting, come what may, We know that God is with us night and morning And never fails to...

Proverbs 8:22-31. (Between Text and Sermon)
July 1, 1994... OF ALL THE PASSAGES in the collection known as the Book of Proverbs, none have been so controversial and have had such a far-reaching influence on later Christian theology as 8:22-31. The issues that have developed around this poem are due to its...

Luke 5:15-26. (Between Text and Sermon)
July 1, 1994... LUKE BEGINS his Gospel with a careful presentation of Jesus. His reason for writing, like that of John, is "that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (John...

Hebrews 4:1-13. (Between Text and Sermon)
July 1, 1994... SELECTIONS from the epistle to the Hebrews appear during the closing weeks of Year B in the Common Lectionary. While the pericopes capture some of the high points in the epistle, they are fragmentary and without continuity. Only five verses from...

The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years: Prayerbook of a Cloud of Witnesses.
July 1, 1994... THE SUBJECT of this book is vast and various. The time covered is three millennia. The topic is the origin of psalms and Psalter, their use in the life and liturgies of Judaism and Christianity, and the problems and possibilities in this...

Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis.
July 1, 1994... SUBTITLED "The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis," this well-written book requires clarification of both terms: "Yahwist" and "historian." For Van Seters, there is no "E" document; the label "Yahwist" covers "the entire pre-Priestly corpus of the...

Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian, 2 vols.
July 1, 1994... THE SECOND-TEMPLE PERIOD of Jewish history (539/38 B.C.--A.D. 70) has become something of a growth industry in recent years. It is difficult to imagine a more important and formative time in Western culture: The epoch includes not only the latter...

Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: A Mentor to the Twentieth Century.
July 1, 1994... THIS is Stone's second major study of Reinhold Niebuhr's life and thought. What, besides nostalgia or an excess of filial piety, compels such an effort on the part of Niebuhr's last graduate student? Does Stone offer us any insights not already...

We Have Been Believers: An African-American Systematic Theology.
July 1, 1994... A CENTRAL TASK of systematic theologians is to interpret their community's religious experience. For Evans, this task is a "response to the autobiographical impulse" emerging from the need of the African-American church to discover "who we are,...

Nature, God and Pulpit.
July 1, 1994... THERE ARE FEW THINGS more thrilling than seeing a first-class mind at work. This book gives the reader such an opportunity as Elizabeth Achtemeier tackles some of the most vexing issues of today. Achtemeier is a theologian who writes with a "Thus...

Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THE AUTHOR states the major theme of his work as "the importance of mythopoesis, that is, of myth and mythmaking speculation within the Hebrew Bible . . . and therefore [it] should be considered a standard biblical method of 'doing theology'". He...

The Citizen-Temple Community.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THIS BOOK CONSISTS of seven previously published, though now somewhat revised, essays from the 1970s, and a new, final essay in which Soviet historian Weinberg defends himself in response to some of his critics. Weinberg's complex thesis may be...

Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... FOLLOWING an invaluable introduction, the authors apply to each of the synoptic Gospels the fruits of several decades of social science research on the world of the Bible. For each periscope, the reader is provided with a translation, brief...

The Theme of Recompense in Matthew's Gospel.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... SIX WORDS perhaps should have been added to the title of this well-written revision of a Sheffield thesis: "Against the Background of the Old Testament." Charette's major contention is that Matthew's teaching about reward and punishment...

The Figure of Abraham in the Epistles of St. Paul: In the Footsteps of Abraham.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THE INTENT of this study is to set Paul's interpretation of Abraham within the context of the biblical and Jewish writings that speak of the patriarch in order to establish the literary antecedents of the apostle's portrayal. An evaluation of...

Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... A RESISTANCE to any univocal reading is the hallmark of Pippin's book. Pippin considers the Apocalypse as fantasy or horror literature, which she regards from reader response, Marxist, and liberationist vantage points, among others. The...

Assertive Biblical Women.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... PHIPPS CONTINUES to offer fresh insights into gender issues with this book's explorations into the stories of over twenty biblical women from Sarah of Ur to Phoebe, Prisca, and Junia of Rome. In the introduction, Phipps indicates that he sees...

The Passion of Interpretation.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THE CONTRARY GOALS Of this book are to point out, first, that interpretation, especially the interpretation of the Bible, is in crisis and, second, to indicate the way through and beyond that crisis. Rather than being allowed to maim one another,...

Noncanonical Writings and New Testament Interpretation.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THIS BOOK CONTAINS chapters on each of the following different types of noncanonical literature: apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, and Dead Sea Scrolls, Old Testament versions, Philo and Josephus, targums, rabbinic literature, New Testament apocrypha,...

Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... IT IS BECOMING increasingly clear that, for Jews and Christians alike, the Dead Sea Scrolls constitute the most important archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. Found in the land of Israel (or Palestine) itself and written in Hebrew,...

Josephus and the New Testament.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THE PURPOSE of this book is to assist New Testament students in reading Josephus. The first chapter describes abuse of Josephus by Christians who used his writings to glean background information without considering his purpose as an apologist...

From Synagogue to Church: Public Services and Offices in the Earliest Christian Communities.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... WAS THE EARLIEST POLITY of Christianity "episcopal," "presbyterian," "congregational," or "free" of formal structure altogether? Just listing these adjectives shows how much a matter of a modern denomination's core identity the response to that...

Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... MILES ARGUES that the Confessions of Augustine is a text of pleasure both in the sense that the book is itself a pleasure to read and in the sense that the book is about pleasure: "how to find, get, and keep maximal pleasure." Miles explores the...

Themes and Variations for a Christian Doxology: Some Thoughts on the Theology of Worship.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... OLD'S BOOK is an engaging attempt to formulate a theology of worship that is both biblically grounded and reflective of the Christian community's finest effort, across the centuries, to achieve the same. The study originated as a series of...

The Body of God: An Ecological Theology.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... MCFAGUE'S NEW BOOK develops in depth the insight that she began to explore in her earlier work, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (1987), namely, the relation of creation to God as Body of God. McFague shows that this metaphor...

Reclaiming the Jesus of History: Christology Today.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... ECKARDT IS A SENIOR STATESMAN among the religion teachers who have continued to do Christian theology in the setting of America's colleges and universities. He has been a leader in rethinking Christian theology in light of the Holocaust. His work...

No Other Gospel! Christianity Among the World's Religions.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... The TITLE No Other Gospel! has been consciously chosen as a response to Paul F. Knitter's No Other Name?, although Braaten by no means restricts himself to answering this one book. He states in his Introduction that today we stand "between the...

Processive Revelation.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THE QUESTION OF REVELATION (what it is, how it happens, how it is related to human knowledge) has vexed theologians since the beginning of the modern period. Reist attempts a fresh consideration of this problem, drawing on a wide variety of...

The Sense of A People: Toward a Church for the Human Future.
July 1, 1994... "THERE CAN BE LITTLE DOUBT that a central theological issue of this decade will concern the public role and purpose of churches and other faith communities in a rapidly changing and deeply troubled global civilization," writes Mudge, and to...

Loyalty to God: The Apostles' Creed in Life and Liturgy.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... IN THIS NEW COMMENTARY on the Apostles' Creed, Jennings seeks to situate the Creed in its communal and liturgical context as a response to the liberating news of the gospel, and he admirably accomplishes his goal. He demonstrates how the Creed...

Belonging to God: A Commentary on a Brief Statement of Faith.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... BELONGING TO GOD is an uncommon genre of theological writing in our time--but a welcome one, especially to those who give theological leadership in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Framed as a commentary on A Brief Statement of Faith, the...

A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THIS IS an impressive account of the debates by the Spaniards in the 1490s and 1500s over their colonial policies in the Caribbean and Spanish America. The author is a professor of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and has...

Body Theology.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... IN THIS VOLUME, Nelson, professor of Christian Ethics at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, continues his development of a sexual theology that, among other things, will be marked by "principles [that] apply equally and without...

The Depleted Self: Sin in a Narcissistic Age.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... CAPPS RETHINKS SIN for us in the categories of neo-Freudian psychology of the self, especially that of Erik Erikson and Heinz Kohut. Because the psychological disorders from which people most typically suffer today are narcissistic--problems of...

Mozart: Traces of Transcendence.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... KUNG COMBINES in this brief pamphlet two loosely related lectures, one given to mark the Mozart Jubilee year (1991), the other used on television to accompany a performance of the Coronation Mass. In the first lecture, Kung reviews the lively...

Messiah: The Gospel According to Handel's Oratorio.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... THE MESSIAH consists of fifty-three movements, which use a libretto of biblical citations selected from both Testaments and the Apocrypha. These citations were first chosen and arranged by the librettist Charles Jennens; they were then set to...

What Happened to the Southern Baptist Convention? A Memoir of the Controversy.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... "MEMOIR" characterizes well this highly personal account of the controversy that secured fundamentalist control of the Southern Baptist Convention. The work of a veteran "insider," it reveals in a graphic way the pain that those who formerly led...

Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... TOWNES HAS DEDICATED herself to recognizing and acknowledging the contribution of African-American women to our church and to our lives. She begins her mission with this volume, which focuses on the life, times, and work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett...

A Brief History of Christian Worship.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... LITURGICAL HISTORIANS have been turning out histories of Christian worship for more than a century, and their contributions to our understanding of Christian worship--particularly in the early and medieval periods--have been indispensable. On the...

Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Other in an Age of Therapies.
July 1, 1994... ROBERTS, a philosophy professor at Wheaton College, has written a two-part volume dealing with a Christian critique of contemporary psychotherapy. The first part considers the presumptions of Rogerian, Rational-Emotive, Assertive, Family,...