L’articolo offre una presentazione analitica del documento della Pontificia Commissione Biblica: Che cos’è l’uomo? (Sal 8,5). Un itinerario di antropologia biblica (30-IX-2019), segnalando alcuni ...aspetti del messaggio teologico di Gen 1–3. Dopo aver presentato il contesto, la finalità e l’articolazione del Documento, si sottolineano due motivi esemplari del messaggio antropologico di Gen 1–3: a) ’ådåm e le sue relazioni; b) Alla ricerca del volto (Gen 3,8). Vengono infine segnalate tre prospettive emergenti dalla riflessione sul Documento. La prima prospettiva è data dalla relazione tra antropologia e cristologia. La seconda prospettiva si inquadra nell’interpretazione ampia della vicenda umana alla luce della storia di alleanza con Dio. La terza prospettiva concerne la dialettica tra la debolezza creaturale e la potenza vivificante dell’azione divina.
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The default translation of the phrase δι' οὗ καὶ ἐποίησεν τοὺς αἰῶνας in Heb 1:2c is spatial: "through whom he made the worlds/universe." The typical explanation for why this temporal term should ...have a spatial meaning is that αἰών can have the sense of "the ages and everything in them," so that it is roughly equivalent to the universe of space and time. In contrast, this paper demonstrates on the bases of lexical-historical, broad contextual, and immediate contextual evidence that a temporal translation ("ages" as in history) is preferable and that this temporal sense is more specifically salvation-historical in meaning.
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The text asks the question about the role of the Word of God in connection with Pascha and its being made present in the liturgy. The article first refers to Joseph Ratzinger’s theology of liturgy. ...According to the Bavarian theologian, in Christian worship the historical event of the Passover (“just once”) corresponds to its continuous actuality (“once for ever”). The essence of Jesus’ words and actions – as the Son of the Father – at the Last Supper remains always present. It is then shown that the inspired writings can only be understood in connection with the words of institution at the Last Supper. The privileged time for listening to the word of God is the liturgy, during which Christ-the Lamb becomes the Exegete who opens up the deepest sense of Scripture (“Eucharistic hermeneutics”). An analogy is then presented between the entry of the past Passover into the present of the liturgy and the actualization of the events witnessed in the inspired books. This kind of “making present” is related to the sacramental transformation of the Jewish scriptures and feasts that Christ accomplished. The historical experience is not recreated, but recapitulated in the Eucharistic Passover. In the Blessed Sacrament Christ is also present in the spoken (and written under inspiration) word. In turn, the liturgy of the word is the verbal aspect of the sacramental action.
In this essay, I articulate an Augustinian “philosophy of history” by highlighting some important texts sprinkled throughout St. Augustine’s writings, especially his City of God. I concentrate on ...Augustine’s claim that there are “joints of time” that structure God’s self-disclosure to us through sacred history, and I develop these Augustinian insights with the help of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. While Augustine enables us to see that God’s revelation is achieved in a sacred history that illuminates the deepest structure and order of the temporal flow of human events, Husserl’s phenomenology can be used to show that the structure and order of sacred history is fitting for our natural human mode of encountering being through successive stages of presence and absence. Husserl’s descriptions of the ways in which the identical thing is given to us in grades of fulfillment sheds light on the mystery of God’s revelation by highlighting the temporal dimension of our grasping of the being of things. Throughout the essay, I make use of Robert Sokolowski’s writings in the areas of Husserlian phenomenology and the theology of disclosure.
The Bible in Arabic Griffith, Sidney H
2013., 20130721, 2013, 2013-07-21, Volume:
48
eBook
From the first centuries of Islam to well into the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians produced hundreds of manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic. Until recently, however, these ...translations remained largely neglected by Biblical scholars and historians. In telling the story of the Bible in Arabic, this book casts light on a crucial transition in the cultural and religious life of Jews and Christians in Arabic-speaking lands.
In pre-Islamic times, Jewish and Christian scriptures circulated orally in the Arabic-speaking milieu. After the rise of Islam--and the Qur'an's appearance as a scripture in its own right--Jews and Christians translated the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament into Arabic for their own use and as a response to the Qur'an's retelling of Biblical narratives. From the ninth century onward, a steady stream of Jewish and Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament crossed communal borders to influence the Islamic world.
The Bible in Arabicoffers a new frame of reference for the pivotal place of Arabic Bible translations in the religious and cultural interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church (FLOW) is an admirable and important document, not least because it affirms natural scientific insights as valuable resources ...for Christian theology and social teaching. Given the current Ecumenical Patriarch's extensive engagement with environmental concerns, this affirmation is especially apposite. However, I do not believe FLOW fully recognizes the implications of such insights for its conception of God's creation or its social ethos. In particular, FLOW maintains that scarcity, competition, violence, and death are distortions of God's creation due to human sin and that human beings are commissioned and capacitated by God to strive to overcome them. By contrast, I contend that contemporary scientific understandings of planetary forces and ecological processes—and indeed Christian scripture—give Christians cause to consider scarcity, competition, violence, and death aspects of God's creation. I further claim that striving to overcome scarcity, competition, violence, and death would be environmentally disastrous and spiritually deleterious since it would domesticate the rapidly disappearing wilderness that biblical wisdom literature depicts as delighting and glorifying God. Happily, allowing natural scientific insights to inform Orthodox conceptions of God's creation in this way would render FLOW's injunction that human beings redress the environmental implications of their sin an imperative to reduce and remedy pollution and to minimize and restore anthropogenic habitat degradation and destruction, thereby fostering the ecological sustainability Orthodoxy champions and the respect for wilderness Christians have multiple reasons to commend. Although this abandons FLOW's aspiration that human beings wholly civilize God's creation, such respect for wilderness does not imply acquiescence to human deprivation and distress, for just as it is inappropriate to impose cultural values on all of nature, it is wrong to regard all natural dynamics culturally normative. Similarly, attributing scarcity, competition, violence, and death to God's creation rather than its sin need not undermine Christian hopes for freedom from these and all other maladies, for Christians await not only God's salvation from sin and its effects but God's new creation too. Thus, in addition to honing Orthodoxy's social ethos, heeding FLOW's embrace of natural scientific insights as constructive theological resources foregrounds a commonly neglected dimension of Christians' traditional depiction of the divine economy.
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This article challenges a part of the introductory chapter of Biblical Truths in which Dale Martin rejects the nineteenth- and twentieth-century project called New Testament theology, contrasting it ...with his alternative theological use of the Bible. That contested discipline’s characteristic combination of biblical scholarship with the often unspoken religious aims of the interpreters distinguishes it from the explicit theological interpretation of Barth, Martin, the ‘biblical theology movement’ and most Christian readings of scripture. The latter has priority in churches, but both types are needed for scripture to be a source and norm of faith and theology, and the former is therefore prominent in theological education.
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At a superficial level there is a clash between purposeful creation and purposeless evolution, but at a deeper level it is possible to reconcile them. The Agapic Principle explains that the purpose ...underlying creation is the relationship that develops between a loving God and a conscious creature of any sort, in any location in the universe. The Agapic Principle allows for evolution to proceed by random changes in the genome, while at the same time providing a way to think about purpose in creation and evolution in a manner consistent with Christian salvation history.
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In this contribution, the five main views in understanding the fulfilment of the law in Matthew 5:17 are critiqued in terms of their inconsistency with the co-text of the Gospel. The whole of 5:17-48 ...is assessed in terms of the challenging relationship between the statements about fulfilment or completion of the law and the Prophets in 5:17-18 and the way in which Jesus seems to intensify obedience to law per se in 5:19-48. The interpretation of 5:19-48 is sought by considering all of Jesus’ words in the entire Gospel in terms of entry into the kingdom (5:19-20), doing the perfect will of the Father (5:48), and the way in which the law and the Prophets are fulfilled and accomplished in Christ (5:17-18). A dialectical approach is followed wherein statements concerning the retention of strict obedience to law are considered to be part of the thesis; statements that are opposed to strict obedience to law are considered to form the antithesis, and the way in which these opposites are related is considered as the new synthesis. This thesis, antithesis and synthesis form the solution to understanding fulfilment in Matthew 5:17.
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