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The believer's oneness with Christ creates profound roots within the believer's soul. This union undergirds the believer's spiritual life as he or she prays the Psalms. This essay explores the theological realities that explain the spiritual resonance Christians experience when praying the Psalms. I propose that as believers pray the Psalms in union with Christ, their souls resonate with the Spirit of Christ, the sonship of Christ, the sufferings of Christ, the body of Christ, and the intercession of Christ. Believers share this salvific oneness with Christ by faith, so that they share in his life, death, resurrection, ascension, inheritance, and beloved status as God's righteous son. In praying the Psalms, believers echo the Spirit of Christ, sense the sonship of Christ, taste the sufferings of Christ, harmonize with the body of Christ, and join in the intercessions of Christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of good and evil and human responsibility is a central theme in the novel Die wêreld van Charlie Oeng (The World of Charlie Oeng) by Etienne van Heerden (2017). The eponymous protagonist in the novel commits various murders, ostensibly due to his circumstances. The author confronts the reader with the question: could Charlie Oeng have done anything to avoid his crimes? To address this question, Ifirstly engage the genre of the novel itself. The novel is regarded as a magical-realistic novel, a genre within which the line between reality and the magical is often blurred. Many challenging aspects of life in this magical reality are discussed in this novel. Charlie Oeng remains a challenging character who embodies evil. He can be described as a human being who struggles to come to grips with his humanity and is often misled to commit murders. As Charlie Oeng is increasingly led astray and drawn into a life of evil, the theme of being misled becomes more prevalent. As such, the author's question becomes more urgent: could Oeng have rejected this life of his own accord or was he preconditioned to accept it? Are his deeds a result of the eternal struggle between good and evil or his own (lack of) responsibility? Linked to the theme of being misled and choice vs. predestination is the character of Ouma Ogies, the blind woman, who enters into dialogue with God. Due to her unfortunate fate and God's rule, she challenges God during this dialogue and also wants to challenge God in court because of her unfortunate circumstances. She was also, in her opinion, misled by God. Various challenging questions are raised by this character as well as several other characters. The novel recounts the overarching question of God's rule and how humans react to it by investigating the issue through the experiences and narrations of various characters. Tian, the character through whose eyes the story is told, grapples with understanding how evil is possible when his parents are murdered. Cor van Gogh, who carries with him a painting of Vincent van Gogh, is a redheaded Dutchman ill-suited to life in South Africa. His anger leads to murder. This novel speaks to commonalities in Van Heerden's oeuvre and his earlier works. Aspects of good and evil and the rule of God play an important role in, for example, his novels Toorberg (1986), Die swye van Mario Salviati (2000), 30 nagte in Amsterdam (2008), and the recent Gebeente (2023). The author also engages Etienne Leroux's novels, such as Sewe dae by die Silbersteins (1964). In this regard, the deep psychological aspects of violence are revisited. An analysis of novels such as these allows one access to general views on good and evil while also enabling an investigation of the significance of the interaction/intersection between theology and literature. Such interactions/intersections are often significant and can lead to deeper insights into literature and theology. The question of good and evil in reality has been discussed in theology and philosophy. Augustine, Calvin, Paul, and other theologians and philosophers such as Aristotle, Derrida, Hegel, and Kant have written extensively on this matter. The classical Christian view is that God's creation of the world was good, but that human beings fell into sin and needed redemption through Christ. Evil is then the result of sin and human beings should be held accountable in this regard. There are, however, many other views, such as that evil is part of this reality and that it was part and parcel of evolutionary development. The question of human responsibility is crucial and it is clear that the different characters in this particular novel by Etienne van Heerden under consideration struggle with the question of good and evil and human responsibility. Ultimately, this narrative also symbolises a struggle with God. The novel leaves one with many questions regarding good and evil and human responsibility, as well as the theological implications thereof. Although no clear solution is given at the end of the novel, the questions posed by the author remain salient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of their interests and methodologies, Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac seem at first blush to be incommensurable worlds apart. Closer examination shows their basic positions on the theology of history to be not only compatible but also complementary. Both place Christ's redemptive act as the constitutive meaning of history, with all that follows as the expansion of this act through Christ's Mystical Body. De Lubac's account of Christ as the bestower of novel meaning provides a more intensive christological focus to Lonergan's construal of the unified continuity of human agency. Lonergan, in turn, provides greater theoretical controls of meaning to the Lubacian account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the story of the adulterous woman, Jesus is remembered to have saved a woman's life by writing on the ground. What he wrote, however, is not preserved in any tradition. That hasn't stopped commentators from imagining what he might have written. But why imagine he wrote at all? Why imagine there's "content" there to be interpreted? Perhaps when confronted with an ethical dilemma he wanted no part of, Jesus simply bent down and began to doodle. If so, then what matters is the fact that he doodled, the shapes and the size and the squiggly lines of his doodling. In this article, I want to offer a reading of John 7:53-8:11 that engages with the very act of Jesus's wordless doodling. I then want to try and tease out a few ethical principles from this doodling. By focusing on a story where Jesus was remembered primarily for his gestures and not simply his speech, and by reimagining a Christian ethics that emerges from the space opened up by those gestures, we are keeping front and center the conviction that Christian ethics is a matter of style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In proposing a parallel between the early disciples' initial misrecognition of the resurrected Jesus and contemporary conservative churches' condemnation of Gender Affirmation Surgery, I argue in this article that a hermeneutic of the risen Christ can suggest reasons behind conservative Malaysian churches' transnegative attitudes towards surgical modification and serve as an alternative interpretive lens to remap more affirming theopastoral strategies for transgender Christians. To this end, I highlight and elucidate cisheteronormative elements in the theological discourses of three Malaysian Christian leaders and showcase counterarguments from transgender theologians before I engage with analogous interpretations of the risen Christ's appearances and the bodies of transgender women. I suggest that akin to the early disciples' re-recognition of Jesus which enabled them to witness unprecedented divine marvels, contemporary churches' re-recognition of trans-modified bodies can allow them to experience God's own sense of justice, inclusion, and creativity in hitherto unfamiliar ways, reappreciate creation as a collaborative human-divine process, and respectfully value human persons as the ultimate authorities of their own lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In AH 2,13,2 Irenaeus describes the activity of the mind as unfolding in a five-stage process, with each stage having a distinct name: ennoia, enthymēsis, phronēsis, boulē, and dialogismos. His account manifestly draws on philosophical psychology and epistemology, which has led scholars to assume he is using a source written by a member of one of the classical schools, a Stoic, Platonist, etc., whence he also derives his terms for the mind's activity. This article argues to the contrary that Irenaeus drew the terminology for the five stages of the mind's movement from his opponents. The terms themselves better fit a Jewish or Christian milieu than as technical terms of philosophical psychology. Such was the milieu of Irenaeus' opponents, and indeed, nearly identical psychologies appear in cognate Nag Hammadi texts as well as later Christian texts, such as the Acts of Thomas, and as the Manichaean five-powers tradition. It is possible to arrange these sources so as to explain the presence of the five-powers tradition in each, including Irenaeus, without appealing to an unknown philosophical antecedent. Having established this, the article concludes by answering objections to the thesis and offering a prospectus for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many seminaries aim to provide students with a theological education designed to gain a greater understanding of God and His Word. This article argues that to the same extent that students need biblical and theological knowledge, they also need knowledge of how to apply the information to mature in Christ. The research presents an educational and biblical rationale for incorporating key aspects of spiritual formation into a curricular design. The intent is to introduce readers to these aspects, alongside andrological strategies and methods, to produce students who develop lifelong learning skills that will deepen and mature them in Christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to be a contribution not to studies on how women have been written out of history, but on how they were written into history, especially in the Spanish visual arts. The galleries of Spanish religious art in the Prado – and other Spanish museums – have been hung with what amounts to the theocratic diktats of what 'Woman' should be and do, and what 'her' natural place in the world is, mainly through the example of the mother of the 'Son of Man'. The article goes on to consider some aspects of how the clerical–political caste's impositions frayed in the post-National Catholicism years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic romance that deals with the conflict of ownership and inheritance in a uniquely American setting of New England. This paper argues that The House of the Seven Gables' happy marriage of Phoebe Pyncheon and Holgrave does not redeem the Pyncheons' sinful past and the apparent unraveling through marriage functions as an act to maintain the class distinction and to present ownership as an Eden-like and natural state of affairs. Discussed in a religious context, the Gothic modes in the novel, though secularized to an extent, completely conform to this prevalent interpretation. The subversion of the Puritan Calvinist theology and entailed predestination and its containment in liberal theology allows the present generation to redefine their condition by their own will. This new, semi-Jeffersonian world of the present leaves the conflict of ownership unresolved; questions about the lawful and just rights of property and inheritance are too readily overshadowed by the optimistic and lightsome ending of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the potential of boredom has been part of the Christian tradition from its very beginning, the experience of boredom among adult believers has often been stigmatized or silenced. In this paper I explore the 'politics of boredom', suggesting that the experience of boredom within faith communities may be a form of minority stress, indicating that sub-groups do not find themselves represented in the shared narrative and practice. I argue that while many disciplines, including psychology and theology, have a tendency to problematise those who are bored, it may be more fruitful to change this scope and investigate the boring. As an example I explore a feeling I call 'Jesus fatigue'; the sense of being tired with the repetitive narrative investment in Jesus as a figure of inclusion, while actual inclusion is continuously postponed. I then discuss the subversive potential of 'the yawn', the open display of boredom, as a possible theological intervention that confronts tradition with its implicit exclusionary tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has traditionally been thought that in the discourse of John 15 Jesus identifies himself as the vine and his followers as branches. Recently a different interpretation, in which Jesus is the vineyard and his disciples the vines, has begun to catch on. This article investigates the arguments of its original advocate, Chrys Caragounis, and finds them wanting. It shows that the new interpretation fails to appreciate that, whatever the evidence from more popular sources, any shifts of meaning for the two Greek terms involved cannot be clearly demonstrated from the LXX. Indeed, this critique demonstrates that the new proposal fails to identify correctly the LXX source of the imagery in John 15 and to acknowledge the significance of the evidence for an unbroken chain of interpretation of the two terms that runs from its source in Ezekiel through John 15 to the major Christian writers of the early centuries CE. It also refutes the alleged difficulties for traditional exegesis brought forward in the case for a shift of meaning and concludes that there is no convincing reason for abandoning the more appropriate reading of Jesus as the vine and his followers as branches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses a ninth‐century copy of the Liber monstrorum from St Gall in which the first monster, a 'human of both sexes', speaks in the first person. The scribe also put the Liber monstrorum into dialogue with Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, in which Isidore argued that monsters were not 'contrary to nature'. Combined with an ambiguously gendered depiction of Christ added to the Liber monstrorum by a later user, this suggests that there were some in early medieval St Gall who saw being 'of both sexes' – which could be interpreted to reflect same‐sex attraction, and/or non‐binary, intersex, and trans identities – as natural, even potentially Christ‐like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prefixed verb superaedificare , which is a calque of ἐποικοδοµέω , governs prepositional phrases and plain cases in the Latin New Testament Epistles. The Vulgate and Old Latin manuscripts feature constructions of superaedificare in agreement with the Greek source text. However, alternative translations are attested when the biblical text is cited by early Christian writers. In citations where the biblical passage is included in the author's text, aedificare is frequently used instead of superaedificare. By contrast, when the biblical text is quoted for the first time and its source is acknowledged, superaedificare is employed and its construction matches that of the Greek text. These citation habits show that the construction of superaedificare is a syntactical calque of the Greek source text, which is attested when the citations are marked as such but is not used when the biblical text is embedded in the patristic text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Dialogue 4, Justin changes his mind on two specific tenets of Platonic philosophy: the idea that the soul can see God, and the doctrine of transmigration. The Platonic anthropology rejected by Justin happens to be foundational to the theological systems of his Christian demiurgical opponents: Simon and Helen, Basilides, and Carpocrates (who are likely discussed and refuted in Justin's now-lost Syntagma Against all the Heresies). In this paper, I argue that this is not coincidental, and that Justin's problem with Platonic anthropology is bound up with his broader heresiological concerns. By rejecting these two doctrines, Justin was able to define Christianity on his own terms while effectively undermining the teachings of his religious rivals. This further explains the specificity of Justin's problem with Platonism, which should not be read as a wholesale rejection of Platonic philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I will examine the functions of oaths in narratives of encounter, confrontation and polemic between religious communities in late antiquity, especially Jews and Christians. Through an analysis of these narratives, I hope to show that oaths had several functions: specific oath formulae were strongly associated with specific religious identities, and as such could be used to highlight distance between religious groups. However, oaths could be used to demonstrate the permeability of religious boundaries, or even be deployed cunningly to conceal one's identity or subvert expectations of its performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an exercise in gospel contextualization, not for a particular cultural group but for people working in the business sector. It applies 'root cause analysis', a well-known tool in business quality development, to answer the question of why Christ had to die. In this way, it offers both solid biblical interpretation and a creative approach to apologetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Casiodoro de Reina, a 16th-century Spanish Reformation scholar, wrote a confession of faith, influential in its time but largely forgotten today, that uniquely unites Christian doctrine and practice in terms of obedience to Christ's triple office as prophet, priest and king. This article presents Reina, his confession and its continuing relevance today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the 1589–92 "Martin Marprelate" controversy—a battle of pamphlets, sermons, and plays which translated academic debates regarding the best way to govern the Church of England into a remarkably lowbrow register. I argue that the polemical centerpiece of this debate was the stock figure of a wicked prelate, drawn from a long history of popular religious performance reaching back to medieval passion plays depicting the persecution of Christ by the Jewish authorities. The pseudonymous presbyterian pamphleteer "Martin" and his anti-Puritan opponents like John Lyly and Thomas Nashe wrestled for control of this figure, seeking to cast each other's clerical heroes as the tyrannical high priest Caiaphas of the gospels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a rhetorical and ideological analysis of the birth of Jesus. Topics discussed include differences in the accounts of Jesus' birth in the gospels of Luke and Matthew motivated by theological considerations and political conditions facing the Christian community, geographical conundrum about Jesus' birth in Bethlehem and settlement in Nazareth, the Virgin Birth, and messianic claims of Christianity portraying Jesus as descendant and successor of King David.

Abstract This article is the result of research concerning the effort to dialogically bring about an encounter about the fundamental content of Christian faith in the Lord God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as inherited by Halmahera Christians from delegates of the Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging (UZV) with belief in Giki/Gikiri, Gòmánga, Jou, Ngomasa as the content of Halmahera religiosity before Islam and Christian. This effort uses the theological method of translation, anthropology, and praxis from Stephen B. Bevans by considering the soteriological meaning of the psycholinguistic meaning of the word diai in the vocabulary of three Halmahera subethnic groups (Galela, Tobelo, Loloda). Dialogical encounter is an effort to develop doing theology, Christology, and pneumatology with the religiosity of the Halmahera people which results in a new understanding of the character of the content of the Halmahera Christian faith about the Lord God in the form of diai theology, Jesus Christ in the form diai Christology, and the Holy Spirit in the form diai pneumatology which are more sensitive to structural injustice, both economic and political as well as gender and cultural-religious. Abstrak Artikel ini merupakan hasil penelitian tentang bagaimana upaya memperjumpakan secara dialogis isi iman Kristen fundamental kepada Tuhan Allah, Yesus Kristus, dan Roh Kudus sebagaimana diwarisi oleh orang-orang Kristen Halmahera dari para utusan Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging (UZV) dengan kepercayaan kepada Giki/Gikiri, Gòmánga, Jou, Ngomasa sebagai isi religiositas orang Halmahera sebelum Islam dan Kristen. Usaha ini menggunakan metode berteologi terjemahan, antropologis, dan praksis dari Stephen B. Bevans dengan mempertimbangkan makna soteriologis dari makna psikolinguistik kata diai dalam kosakata tiga subetnis Halmahera (Galela, Tobelo, Loloda). Perjumpaan dialogis merupakan usaha mengembangkan berteologi, berkristologi, dan berpneumatologi dengan religiositas orang Halmahera yang menghasilkan pemahaman baru isi iman Kristen khas ke-Halmahera-an tentang Tuhan Allah dalam bentuk teologi diai, Yesus Kristus dalam bentuk kristologi diai, dan Roh Kudus dalam pneumatologi diai yang lebih peka terhadap ketidakadilan struktural, baik dalam bentuk ketidakadilan ekonomi dan politik maupun gender dan budaya-agama.

There is a longstanding debate on whether the Heidelberg Catechism favors the imputation of the active obedience of Christ (IAOC). In this article, I argue that the IAOC is not present in the Catechism, not even latently. The main authors of the Catechism, Olevianus and Ursinus, denied the IAOC. Additionally, what the Catechism teaches about the interrelations between obedience, punishment and merit, makes clear that the IAOC does not fit in its theological structure. Therefore, a historically sensitive interpretation of the Catechism leads to the recognition that the Catechism leaves no room for the IAOC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr, the divine Persons eternally pray to each other. According to Thomas Aquinas, they do not. Thomas allows for ways in which the divine Persons worship, glorify, contemplate, and give thanks to each other. Yet he defines prayer as petition, and he teaches that the divine Persons cannot petition each other—which means that They cannot pray to each other. For Thomas, however, Christ's prayer reveals His eternal sonship, and certain terms in which Thomas casts divine sonship recall those in which he casts prayer. Thomas, therefore, can open up certain avenues towards the conclusion that the petitionary prayer, which is limited to creatures, resembles and is rooted in the Son's eternal sonship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosopological exegesis was integral to the trinitarian theology of several second- and early third-century Christian theologians who argued that the different divine personae or prosōpa that speak in biblical texts were distinct from one another in reality. Unlike these predecessors, Origen's use of prosopological exegesis in the Psalms occurs in a less polemical context and gravitates towards Christology and ecclesiology rather than trinitarian theology. In his homilies on Psalm 15 (16), Origen identifies the soul of Jesus as a speaking prosōpon distinct from, and acted upon by, the divine Word. This instance of prosopological exegesis highlights the distinctiveness of Origen's theological use of this literary practice. In particular, I argue that Origen draws conclusions of soteriological and ecclesiological relevance from his notion of the speaking prosōpon of Jesus' soul, which mediates a kind of communicatio idiomatum between the human Christ and the Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have approached the Gerasene Demoniac pericope (Mark 5:1–20; = GDP) in light of various traditions, such as the Homeric parallels, the Watcher (i.e. Enochic) story, the scapegoat motif, and imperial-critical and gendered perspectives. Without denying the validity of these attempts, I suggest that there is still an important—but largely ignored—set of traditions that deserves our attention: the Seth-Typhon traditions. Based on an audience-critical perspective, this article suggests that several elements in GDP could allude to the Seth-Typhon traditions in the minds of the Greco-Roman audience of Mark. The strength of this method is twofold. First, it accounts for the close relationship between GDP and its preceding pericope (i.e. the Storm-Stilling pericope; Mark 4:35–41). Second, it coherently explains multiple critical motifs—the crossing of the sea, the sleeping Jesus, the attempt to drown Jesus, the sea-storm, the foreign area, the legion of demons, and the death of the pigs—featured in Mark 4:35–5:20. According to this approach, Jesus in Mark 4:35–5:20 can be read as a divine warrior who outshines his pagan counterparts (i.e. Zeus and Osiris) as he battles against the cosmic forces of evil and eventually conquers them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Charity" highlights the importance of charity in the Christian life, analyzing the work of Professor Pérez-Soba on the subject. It focuses on the relationship of charity with friendship with Christ, the reception of divine love, and the integration of charity into virtues. The need for a personal relationship with Christ is emphasized, and the duality in love is explored from a theological perspective. [Extracted from the article]