What sort of a thing is a ‘constraint’?

In Chaim Potok's novel My Name is Asher Lev, the young Jewish painter learns the answer after the exhibition of his sensational ‘Brooklyn Crucifixion’:

Anyone who attempts to assess Max Weber's study of ancient Judaism must adopt two stances, those of the Old Testament specialist and of the sociologist, and I shall use these two view-points to provide the main structure of this article. I hope, nevertheless, to avoid becoming completely schizophrenic by drawing the two interpretations together in a final section. I should also make it clear that the discussion is based mainly upon those essays which were translated by Gerth and Martindale as Ancient Judaism, although these by no means exhaust the studies which Weber made of Hebrew religion.

In the introduction to his helpful edition of selected writings from Ernst Bloch, Hans Heinz Holz recognises that Christian theologians feel themselves drawn towards Bloch's philosophy, and have in fact ‘appropriated it (and obviously also his person, as the Festschrift for his eightieth birthday shows)’. The theologians in question are principally Jürgen Moltmann, J. B. Metz, W.-D. Marsch and Gerhard Sauter. Of these Moltmann and Metz were among the contributors to the Festschrift, Ernst Bloch Zu ehren. These theologians, Holz complains, by their ‘inadequate reception’ and ‘incorrect interpretation’ of Bloch's Marxist thought have ‘falsified’ his intention. In this article I want to consider that verdict, putting three questions. What is the particular form of Marxism that Bloch sets before us? How have these theologians found his thought relevant and helpful? In their use of Bloch do they in fact incorrectly interpret and falsify his intention? I am not concerned here to ask whether the account of Christianity put before us by Moltmann and the others is acceptable or not.

Through more than forty years of his career, Paul Tillich painstakingly developed a vision of an ontological conflict between space and time. In developing this vision, Tillich proceeds from an existential and phenomenological perspective. An entire doctrine of reality is presupposed and time is conceived of as temporality and is ontologically identified with the primordial ‘depth’ or inner infinity of all being and reality. Such time is in some sense subjective, intuitively known, and immediately given.

There is no particular problem with using ‘metaphorical’ language where God is concerned. In Metaphorical Theology Sallie McFague offers a lengthy analysis to show us that metaphorical language is legitimate for theological discourse. This should come as no surprise to anyone except positivists or other stringent empiricists who accept nothing but direct evidence for any discourse. Traditional theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, have long held that no discussion of God directly qualifies divinity. Mystics, as McFague acknowledges, have in fact been shocked at the idea of speaking about God directly. What, then, is McFague's point in reminding us of the necessary indirection of all speaking about God? She is attempting to curb the increasing agnosticism, if not skepticism, among contemporary theologians, by speaking to what she considers to be ‘the contemporary sensibility’.

‘It becomes theologians to be cautious in accepting the gifts of the Greeks.’ It is the conviction of the present writer that Christian theology as a whole, and the doctrine of God in particular, have suffered because of the lack of caution which theologians in every age have shown in their too ready acceptance of the gifts which the Greeks have brought. Of no age is this more true than of that which witnessed the formalisation and systematisation of the Christian doctrine of the Godhead, namely, the second, third and fourth Christian centuries, during which ‘theologizing’ was for the most part in the hands of men who had been trained in the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic world, and who refused to do intellectually what Justin Martyr had refused to do literally, refused, that is, to doff the academic dress of the philosopher. But it is still true that philosophical theologians today, in their desire to interpret the Christian faith in modern philosophical terms, tend to be too ready to accept as gifts the presuppositions of some modern philosophical school, and in doing so to give away much that is vital to the faith which they are seeking to interpret.

Central to the whole of Thomas Forsyth Torrance's theology is the μοοΣιον between the incarnate Logos and the eternal God, or the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. The immense significance of this Nicene μοοΣιον is best understood against the background of the axiomatic χωριΣμΣ which lies at the heart of Hellenism, Gnosticism and Arianism. Once such a radical separation between τ νοητ and τ αἰΣθητ is posited, there arise the inevitable questions: (a) How do we regard the biblical statements of the eternal God within the history of the Jewish people in the realm of τ αἰΣθητ (b) On which side of the demarcation does the Logos of the eternal God belong? For the dualist thinkers, the dilemma is — How can the eternal God who is impassible and changeless be thought of as actually entering the spatiotemporal history of this changing and decaying world, and alas, even living within our creaturely and contingent order? To be sure, the biblical notion of a Creator who actively and creatively interacts with his creation is incompatible with the prevailing Hellenic thought-form and secular culture of the early Church. It was as unthinkable and unintelligible to them as it is to Bultmann and the myth-of-God-incarnate theologians of our day.

The dissimilarity test is one of the more important criteria used in the revived quest for the historical Jesus. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the dissimilarity test, and to reconsider some aspects of its use.

To speak, in general terms, of trends in modern biblical study is often to over-simplify; and certainly to claim that there has been, in recent years, a trend away from the traditional classicist or ‘hellenist’ approach to New Testament problems towards a more Hebraic or semitic-centred approach would be to be guilty of the same exaggeration as E. C. Hoskyns in 1930: ‘(There are) grounds for supposing no further progress in the understanding of … Christianity to be possible unless the ark of New Testament exegesis be recovered from its wanderings in the land of the Philistines (sic) and be led back not merely to Jerusalem, for that might mean contemporary Judaism, but to its home in the midst of the classical Old Testament Scriptures — to the Law and the Prophets.’ There is, nevertheless, some truth in A. M. Hunter's later statement: ‘After ransacking all sorts of sources, Jewish and Greek (and, we may add, starting all sorts of “hares”, some of which have not run very well), (scholars) are discovering the truth of Augustine's dictum, “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old is made plain in the New”’ (Novum Testamentum in vetere latet, vetus in novo patet).

One of the analogies used by the Cappadocian Fathers and other early theologians to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity was the social analogy in which Father, Son and Spirit were likened to three human persons. Beginning with Augustine however, Christian Theology, particularly in the Western Church, shifted away from the social to the psychological analogy. Augustine found analogies to the Trinity in all of creation but the clearest analogy to the Trinity, in fact its unique image, was the human soul. The divine image was not found in the union of three persons but in the unity of three activities, remembering, knowing, willing in the individual human soul. The social analogy reappeared in the twelfth century in Richard of St Victor's argument for the existence of three persons in God based on the premise that supreme charity required shared interpersonal love. Though some of Richard's insights were taken up by Bonaventura, the impact of his trinitarian theology was overshadowed by the dominant influence of Thomas Aquinas with his masterful use of the psychological analogy to probe and illuminate the inner being of the divine Trinity. Following Aquinas's further development of Augustine's psychological analogy, the interpersonal approach of the social analogy all but disappeared from subsequent trinitarian theology. Even with a later shift away from the Augustinian-Thomistic model, modern theology retained its unipersonal image of the trinitarian God.

More scholarly lances have been broken, with apparently less conclusiveness over Isa. 40–55, the so-called Second Isaiah, than over any comparable section of the Old Testament. Ever since B. Duhm1 published towards the end of last century his epoch-making commentary, two interrelated problems have been at the centre of scholarly discussion.

Irenaeus constantly spoke of the presbyters who possess the succession from the Apostles; those who, together with the succession of the Episcopate, have received the certain gift of truth. For him the importance of the presbyter was based on apostolic succession: the presbyter was a teacher, and teaching determines faith; it is the means by which the faith is preserved and transmitted. The presbyter is a link in the long line of tradition; tradition which disciplines the faithful and determines the future of the church. For this reason alone the presbyter is important for Irenaeus. And this is the basis for the distinct way in which Irenaeus treats him. The presbyter is the primary minister, yet not necessarily a bishop. He is a leader of the Christian community assigned the task of preserving the faith, teaching it and making sure to defend it against error. He holds the chief seat in the administration of the Christian community, and is always associated with the episcopos or bishop. In the writings of Irenaeus there is no clear distinction made between these two terms.

We must keep in mind that Christianity began as a movement, not as an established system or institution. The early Christians were all Jews and the authorised Jewish minister was the rabbi (presbyter). From the very beginning the apostles founded new communities and directed them. After particular communities were founded a need arose to select local leaders or administrators for each of these communities. We know from the New Testament that in the various local communities different names were given to these men: in Rome they were called presidents, in Corinth they were called governors, in Ephesus the name given to them was shepherds and in Phillipi they were known as caretakers and ministers. It is only in the Pastoral Epistles and in the Acts of the Apostles that we find these administrators called presbyters, episcopoi. Irenaeus adds further information to the development to the Christian hierarchy by expressing his views on the presbyter as servant of the community. In short the role or task of the presbyter was one of service to the Christian community.

Many Christians in the Western tradition would find the idea of salvation as the deification of man alien because the concept of justification by faith has played such a central and influential role in Western soteriologies. There is, however, a renaissance of the concept of deification or theosis in contemporary theology even outside its traditional home in Eastern Orthodoxy. Many Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians have discovered that although the two metaphors, justification and deification, emphasise different aspects of salvation, they are not incompatible with each other. In addition, theologians in the Western tradition are arguing that although the forensic and declarative aspect of justification is important, justification also has a transformative aspect. An exploration of the transformative aspect of justification has resulted in the discovery of interesting ways in which this concept can be brought closer to that of theosis in the Eastern tradition.

‘The Holy Scriptures teach ethics, or the theory of duties, far better than any Ciceros or Aristotles’, claimed Luther, comparing the Bible with the standard ethical handbooks of antiquity, both Latin (Cicero's De Officiis) and Greek (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics). Luther had in fact lectured on Aristotle's Ethics in 1508/9, a few years before he received the degree of ‘Doctor in Biblia’. It was as a Professor of Bible, mainly of the OT, that Luther earned his living for over thirty years, and Calvin too expended a large proportion of his efforts as preacher, commentator and lecturer on the OT. Comparisons of their use of the OT have tended to concentrate on the law and to a lesser extent on Christological (Christocentric) hermeneutics. This essay will endeavour to cast the net more widely and to broach the question of the law as it arises within a broader context.

Art is part of the history of the church, and relates to spirituality and to the practical expression of Christian faith. It illustrates theological loci and biblical themes. Often, the art which fulfils this function does so with the conscious intent of the artist; sometimes not. Attempts have been made, however, to argue that art not only illustrates theology, but also contributes to it. Even so, systematic theologians and biblical scholars — when they do talk to each other — still converse on the basis of largely word-centred approaches to their tasks. I am neither systematic theologian nor biblical scholar, precisely because I attempt to keep a foot in both camps. I am even less of an art critic. Yet it is clear that in the world of art there is a whole area of exploration yet to be ventured into not only historically (have we really sufficiently explored how biblical interpretation and doctrinal theology have been influenced by art?) but also from the perspective of constructive theology (what contribution can art past and present make to the very reformulation and expansion of Christian doctrine?). This paper offers a brief reading of three paintings by Rembrandt, of the Emmaus Road story in Luke 24.13–35. The theological significance of the changing interpretations of the passage is drawn out and the implications of the use of the paintings, in terms of the creative use of the Bible in Christian theology.

Among the reforms needed for a relevant Christian theology today is a capacity for discovery. One of the chief powers of modern science is its ability to discover hidden areas of reality and bring them to our understanding. Science by its success in continually finding new levels and dimensions in nature testifies regularly that life is interesting and dynamic. The example of science has yet to be followed in theology which may explain why the layman today does not really expect much from theologians except the trite clichés of the past.

This paper provides a reading of the late Augustine which supports the hypothesis that, while the early Augustine believed that pride is the basic sin, he changes his views during the Pelagian controversies, and advocates instead (contra Pelagius) the thesis that sin, post-fall, does not take on any one form. Augustine makes some key, though rarely discussed, statements about the nature of sin that, particularly when his views are put into perspective within his larger doctrine of sin, indicate that Augustine does not think all sin can be reduced to pride. Indeed, Augustine's controversial views about original sin incline him to believe that, far from being self-aggrandising, sin often takes the form of (and is often a sign and result of) ignorance and weakness. Thus, a careful reading of Augustine's doctrine of sin shows that he has significant commonalities with his feminist critics, precisely at one of the points on which he has been most criticised.

Sometimes exegetes differ from one another not so much because they have seen different data but because they are in fact looking for different types of ‘meaning’. For this reason, it is useful to classify different types of analysis of a text, and different types of ‘meaning’ resulting from such analysis.

The need for such classification has increased with the progress of biblical scholarship. Biblical exegetes and theologians have long had to deal with questions like ‘What is the meaning of this word of Scripture?’ and ‘What is the meaning of this verse, paragraph, section, or book?’ The intrinsic difficulties of recovering meaning from dead languages and sometimes unfamiliar cultural settings are often challenge enough. But, as increasing refinement and exactitude are sought, another kind of difficulty can arise, namely a difficulty with kinds of ‘meaning’. Is it indeed true that there is always only one meaning which is the meaning of a text? Is this the case even in poetic passages that may suggest or allude to new perspectives and comparisons without explicitly teaching them?1 Moreover, supposing that someone has arrived at ‘the meaning’ of a text, how is he to communicate this to someone else? In a commentary? In a sermon? In a form like Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament? Or perhaps even in the form of a painting or a new social and political organisation?

Those who oppose the use of the biblical account of creation in classes in science often do so in the spirit with which the great formalist, Hilbert, sundered pure and applied mathematics. One day he was asked to substitute in a class at a nearby technical school for his colleague, Felix Klein, where Klein used his intuitive approach to mathematics to obtain practical applications. Hilbert said to the engineers, ‘I understand that there are those.who feel there is some conflict between pure and applied mathematics. But this cannot be. Sie haben nichts mit einander zu tun.’