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Articles
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Written by Henry Wansbrough OSB
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Thursday, 01 July 2010 17:34 |
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Henry Wansbrough is a monk of Ampleforth. He has been Chairman of the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University, and served on the Pope’s Biblical Commission for eleven years. He is General Editor of The New Jerusalem Bible, and has written a number of books on biblical subjects.
In this year when we are awaiting the beatification of Cardinal Newman it is appropriate to reflect on his contributions to scripture scholarship. He was, of course, primarily a patristic rather than a scripture scholar. However, despite a difficulty in reading German, it is striking to see from his Oxford lectures how familiar he was with the innovative German biblical scholarship of the day. Nevertheless, at least two of his important contributions remain interesting and relevant at the present day, namely his views on the interrelationship of scripture and tradition, and his reflections on the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. The former nexus of questions has its focus during the period when Newman was working his way towards the Catholic Church, the latter when he was already within it.
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Written by Ian Boxall
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Thursday, 01 July 2010 17:31 |
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Ian Boxall teaches New Testament at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, where he is also Senior Tutor. He is the editor of Scripture Bulletin, and the author of the volume on Luke’s Gospel in the Take and Read series (Alive Publishing).
The tasks confronting the preacher in this liturgical year of Luke are complex and manifold. Some of these tasks are general issues relating to the interpretation of the biblical text, such as the relationship between the parts and the whole – an issue highlighted by more holistic approaches to the gospels such as narrative criticism. Others are more specifically related to the interpretation of Luke’s Gospel, such as ongoing questions of genre, or consideration of the precise relationship between the Gospel and Acts, with some recent appeals for ‘loosing the hyphen’ in the widely-used phrase ‘Luke-Acts’. Still others are concerned with the ministry of preaching. How does one make the move as it were from the text – or the text in the study – to the pulpit, from interpretation to application? Or does such an articulation of the preacher’s task betray a misunderstanding of the complex processes at work both in exegesis and in homiletics, by treating application as a mere ‘add-on’ to a prior hermeneutical task? Recent trends in biblical scholarship, meanwhile, with their turn towards, on the one hand, bold theological readings of scriptural texts, and on the other, a renewed emphasis on the history of a text’s reception, seem only to compound the difficulties further.
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Written by Timothy Ashworth
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Thursday, 01 July 2010 17:18 |
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Timothy Ashworth is Biblical Studies Tutor at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham. He is author of Paul’s Necessary Sin: the Experience of Liberation, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) from which the central argument of this article is taken.
I come to the writing of this article having just led a course on Galatians for a group of Quakers. The Quaker tradition rejects law as its organising principle; instead it has a set of structures for discerning the present guidance of the Spirit for the individual and community. In the 1660s, the time of religious upheaval in which they emerged, Quakers had to distinguish themselves as a group from Ranters, whose rejection of law led to gross indulgence. So, from then on, throughout Quaker history there has been an emphasis on faithful and tested responsiveness to guidance by the Spirit. Direction and discipline there has been but always with a concern not to allow these to become an external imposition. Paul had a similar problem in presenting his gospel: how do I affirm continuing moral discipline alongside the radical nature of freedom in the Spirit?
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Written by Mary Mills SHCJ
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Friday, 01 January 2010 00:00 |
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 Mary Mills is Professor and Head of Department of Theology, Religious Studies at Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Catholic Biblical Association.
Creation and Evolution are two serious concepts for addressing the key issues of how the world came to be. At the simplest level this is a matter of mechanics, the ways in which material substances develop into planet earth. At a deeper level, however, it is an ontological issue, the question of how Being itself comes into existence; for the bottom line is not matter as such but how inert materials acquire energy to grow and change and make new forms. In this area of enquiry, which is foundational for the human condition, religion and science act as parallel explanatory tools and, most recently, have been set up as opposing and mutually exclusive approaches – creationism versus evolutionary theory.
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Written by Peter Anthony
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Friday, 01 January 2010 00:00 |
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Peter Anthony is currently engaged in postgraduate studies on Luke-Acts at the University of Oxford. He is Junior Dean at St Stephen’s House.
Scholarly discussion of Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles in recent years has displayed some of the astonishing breadth of opinion and originality of approaches which have characterized other areas of New Testament Studies. Indeed, van Unnik went as far as to describe Luke-Acts in 1966 as being a “storm centre in contemporary scholarship.” The eclipse of the historical critical method as a universally accepted paradigm for study, and the emergence of literary, narrative, rhetorical, social-scientific, feminist, and canonical approaches has led to an explosion of hermeneutical perspectives. Along with much flux, however, certain consensuses have also arisen on a number of critical questions. In addition, however, not a few Lucan scholarly taboos concerning assumptions which cannot be questioned can be seen still to be very firmly in place, and not to have been affected at all by the past fifty years or so of scholarship.
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Written by Ian Boxall
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Friday, 01 January 2010 00:00 |
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 Ian Boxall is Tutor in New Testament and Senior Tutor at St Stephen’s House,
Oxford, and member of the Theology Faculty in the University of Oxford. He is also Editor of Scripture Bulletin. His most recent book on the Apocalypse is The Revelation of St John in the Black’s New Testament Commentary series
Using the Imagination
The ruined Greek and Roman cities of Asia Minor have played a crucial role in the scholarly interpretation of the Apocalypse for well over a century. No serious commentator on the book can afford to ignore the monumental studies of Sir William Ramsay and Colin Hemer even if one wishes to dissent from aspects of their readings. Nor is the usefulness of the seven cities confined to stones, artifacts and inscriptions. What one might call the ‘imaginative landscape’ also comes into play: the ability to visualise, for example, the sheer magnificence of Pergamum’s acropolis, looming like Satan’s throne over the surrounding plain, or the gleaming white marble of Ephesus’ Temple of Artemis, dominating the approach from the sea. Or in more recent writing, use of the imagination has also been called for to appreciate the symbolic world such cities evoke (Steven Friesen’s splendid book John’s Apocalypse and the Imperial Cults, significantly subtitled ‘Reading Revelation among the Ruins’, is a fine example of the latter).
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Written by Michael Tait
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Wednesday, 01 July 2009 00:00 |
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 Michael Tait holds the Licence in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the PhD from the University of Manchester
Popularised by Prudentius, the traditional threefold significance of the gifts of the Magi has a long history going back at least as far as Irenaeus. But does it go back to Matthew? His Infancy Narrative is pervaded with quotations from and allusions to the Old Testament. Yet the latter never shows any interest in the funerary significance of myrrh. Rather it shows myrrh as a commodity so precious that it is frequently associated with royalty. This fits in with the emphasis in Matthew 1-2 on Jesus as the 'king of the Jews'. However, the Old Testament also shows myrrh being used in sacral and erotic contexts. Under the ruling significance of kingship, therefore, the gifts may have other levels of meaning: priest, God, and, in the case of myrrh, lover.
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