Search Results (238)

This article re-examines scenes of anagnorisis (recognition) in the Fourth Gospel by expanding upon established literary and semiotic models. While existing scholarship successfully identifies these scenes as formal tools mapping Jesus’ identity, it leaves crucial textual variations and the underlying cognitive mechanisms unresolved. To address these gaps, this study proposes a revised theoretical framework based on three integrated criteria: narrative criticism, hierarchy of compositional models, and interpretive semiotics. This threefold approach is applied to the representative analysis of John 1:19–34 and 20:1–10. The study demonstrates that textual variations from the standard type scene are deliberate adaptations driven by Johannine theological and narrative demands. Furthermore, this paper argues that Johannine anagnorisis is not of a simplistic or material kind in response to a sign. Instead, it is a profoundly relational event and a moment of mutual self-disclosure between the revealing God and the receptive interpreter. Full article

This article is structured in two parts. The first presents an overview of late-medieval female Marian devotion and spirituality, outlining the principal interpretative approaches developed in recent scholarship. The second examines Book VII of the Revelationes of Bridget of Sweden, which is constructed as a true “Gospel of Mary.” Through the visionary reconstruction of Christ’s life and Passion, narrated in the first person by the Virgin, Bridget reshapes the apocryphal tradition and transfers authority from apostolic memory to contemporary revelation. The narrative transforms the pilgrimage to the Holy Land into a Eucharistic and prophetic space, develops an innovative and politically charged Mariology, and presents Mary as both witness of the Incarnation and guardian of a Church in crisis. By integrating theology, narrative, and embodied visionary experience, the article argues that Bridget’s Marian Gospel represents one of the most daring and enduring expressions of female spiritual authority in the transmission of Christian truth. Full article

The biblical commentaries of Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444) represent a major contribution to the development of patristic exegesis. His Commentary on the Gospel of John demonstrates the close interaction between Christological theology, allegorical interpretation, and ecclesial polemic within late antique biblical interpretation. While Cyril’s exegesis has often been praised for its theological sophistication, modern scholarship increasingly recognizes that his interpretive framework also contains a pronounced anti-Judaic dimension. This study examines several key passages from Cyril’s Commentary on the Gospel of John in order to analyse how typology, supersessionist theology, and polemical rhetoric function together in his interpretation. Particular attention is given to Cyril’s portrayal of Jewish ignorance, his attribution of responsibility for the death of Christ, and his typological reinterpretation of Jewish law and history. The analysis demonstrates that Cyril integrates anti-Jewish rhetoric into a broader theological system in which the Mosaic law is presented as a provisional anticipation fulfilled in Christ and realized in the Christian Church. Full article

The Gospel of John’s engagement with the Book of Exodus has been interpreted primarily through Moses–Christ typology: Jesus as the new Moses who surpasses his predecessor. This study proposes a different reading. The governing principle of John’s Exodus hermeneutics is not Moses–Christ correspondence but YHWH–Christ identification: in each major Exodus correspondence, Jesus occupies the structural position Exodus assigns to YHWH, not Moses. The study proposes the term mnemosynic identification for this hermeneutical move, derived from μνημόσυνον (Exod 12:14 LXX), the word designating the Passover as Israel’s perpetual memorial. John does not cite Exodus as a prophetic text pointing forward to Jesus; within the community’s living re-enactment of Exodus, he discloses the identity of the divine protagonist at its centre. This identification is ontological, grounded in the pre-existence established by the Prologue, but its disclosure is sequential, enacted across the ministry and reaching its fulfilment in the glorification. Correspondences are established by three criteria: narrative position, role distribution, and lexical precision. They run from the Prologue to the resurrection commission, encompassing the Passover framework, wilderness episodes, and Sinai covenant. Throughout, Moses appears as mediator and witness but never as the figure whose position Jesus assumes. That position belongs to God. Full article

This article offers a rhetorical close reading of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. While the report presents itself as an institutional reckoning with a legacy of slavery, racism, and white supremacy, this analysis argues that its rhetoric simultaneously minimizes the significance of those injustices. Three recurring rhetorical moves structure this dynamic. First, the report centers the experiences and dilemmas of the seminary’s white leadership, producing narrative empathy for institutional actors while decentering the experiences of those harmed by the institution’s history. Second, it employs subtly pejorative characterizations of external critics and other historical actors, reinforcing an evangelical “embattled identity.” Third, the report rhetorically constructs the concept of the “gospel” in a manner that separates core Christian doctrine from concerns of racial justice. Drawing on agenda-setting theory, this study introduces the concept of religious agenda-setting to describe how religious leaders rhetorically prioritize certain moral concerns while marginalizing others. Together, these strategies allow for the report to confess historical wrongdoing while simultaneously preserving institutional legitimacy and authority. Full article

This article examines the emergence of Jamaican Dancehall Gospel (JDG)—a genre that fuses Christian-themed lyrics with dancehall rhythms—during its formative years (1998–2006). Despite its religious content, JDG artists expressed that they were often rejected in religious spaces and their music was excluded from worship spaces, based on debates between gatekeeping religious actors and the artists about the music’s appropriateness and authenticity. Using Koskoff’s concept of musical canon as a framework, the study explores why JDG failed to embody the “philosophical and aesthetic principles” of many ecclesial institutions. Drawing on media discourse, artist interviews, and observations, the analysis addresses four contested elements: artists, music, language, and dance. Findings reveal that resistance stemmed from JDG’s association with secular dancehall culture, its use of Jamaican patois, and its incorporation of dance—practices historically stigmatized as “low class” and incompatible with sacred spaces. While proponents argued for cultural relevance and the neutrality of musical forms, critics viewed JDG as a threat to traditional worship norms and moral order. The paper situates these tensions within broader struggles over identity, authenticity, and cultural hierarchy, highlighting the persistence of colonial attitudes privileging Euro-American aesthetics over indigenous expressions. Ultimately, JDG’s gradual acceptance—facilitated by international recognition and generational shifts—underscores the dynamic interplay between religion, popular culture, and identity politics in Jamaica. This study contributes to scholarship on Caribbean sacred music by documenting the sociocultural negotiations surrounding JDG’s emergence and its implications for redefining worship practices in postcolonial contexts. Full article

For many Christians, the Gospel has nothing to do with socio-political issues. It is a “spiritual” matter. However, this is an unbiblical understanding of Christian faith. It is too a misunderstanding of what authentic spirituality is and the implications it entails. There is false piety which resulted in a faith and a spirituality divorced from the real world. This study focuses on the ethical implications of spirituality and explores its deep connection with the mission of the Church in the struggle for justice and peace and the quest for reconciliation. It argues that the South African experience can help us to a better understanding of true spirituality and the ethical implications of Christian faith. In the context of apartheid, many Christians understood that their faith compelled them to develop a “mystique of action,” involving themselves in the struggle against injustice and engaging in the search for reconciliation. The South African experience shows us that reconciliation is not a private affair between God and the individual; it has far-reaching social and political implications. Full article

Although Meister Eckhart is frequently regarded as a speculative mystic, his practical teachings, particularly concerning love, are often overlooked. This study explores the practical consequences of his statements on neighborly love in order to demonstrate his concrete contributions to ethics. Our research reveals that Eckhart views true love as a Trinitarian act of grace where humans participate in God’s love. Through pure, selfless love, human beings become inhabited by the Holy Spirit, loving their neighbors universally and equally as themselves. These findings are drawn from a textual analysis of Eckhart’s Latin commentaries on the Gospel of John and his German sermons, focusing on his Trinitarian theology and doctrine of virtues. Ultimately, love is identified as the central divine virtue that unifies the soul with God. When individuals love without seeking their own interest, their actions are simultaneously human and divine works. Thus, Eckhart’s profound theology offers a highly practical framework where perfect love radically transforms ethical action. Full article

Drawing an analogy to the 5th century heresy of Nestorianism, this paper argues that the separation of life from faith in the modern era constitutes a kind of functional Nestorianism, that negates the universality of the Christian claim and renders such a claim. The paper argues that, in their form and function, many Catholic educational institutions unwittingly adopt this functional Nestorianism by means of a structural compartmentalisation of the faith into confined spaces within the curriculum and within the institutional imagination and that in doing so, such institutions risk mirroring—at the level of educational practice—and thus perpetuating, what Pope Paul VI referred to as ‘the drama of our time’, that being, ‘the split between the Gospel and culture’. The paper concludes by offering six Christocentric principles to guide curriculum development and implementation in Catholic educational institutions. Full article

This article reexamines Paul’s use of athletic imagery in 1 Corinthians 9:24–27 within the broader argument of chapters 8–10. Against readings that treat the passage as a call to individual moral striving or competition for salvation, this study situates Paul’s metaphor within the honor–shame dynamics of Greco-Roman Corinth and his own defense of apostolic self-restraint. Paul’s “race” and “imperishable wreath” do not exhort believers to outperform one another but dramatize the paradox of freedom expressed through voluntary limitation. Drawing on insights from social-scientific and rhetorical criticism, the essay demonstrates that Paul’s imagery functions as the rhetorical climax of the section, translating his ethical argument into the moral grammar of the agon. By reconfiguring the contest from rivalry to service, Paul transforms the competitive ethos of Corinth into a vision of communal flourishing in which believers “compete” for the good of others. The passage thus offers a distinctly Pauline theology of self-control as the discipline of love, turning the agonistic spirit of the games into an image of the gospel itself. Full article

Modern, post-Scaliger expectations for constructing an absolute chronology out of ancient biblical narratives introduce a fallacy of assumed time that distorts the reading of these narratives. While absolute chronology undergirds historical-critical interpretation from Spinoza and Reimarus to twentieth-century scholarship, the more recent “temporal turn” in philosophy, historiography, and literary theory aligns with a renewed attention to narrative time and ancient temporal consciousness. Focusing on 2 Maccabees and the Gospel of John as historiographical narratives reveals how both texts configure events through relative temporal devices—such as temporal markers and temporal process verbs—rather than through absolute calendrical dating, even when coordinates appear in 2 Maccabees’ embedded letters. Building on this comparison allows for a dimensional model of time that respects these configurational strategies and avoids obscuring how these texts construct theological and historical meaning within their own narrative worlds. Full article

The present article discusses why the study of Christian Apocrypha and Parabiblical Traditions is crucial not only for the understanding of early Christian History but also for the theological field of New Testament Exegesis. It starts with the author’s definition of Christian Apocrypha and Parabiblica and offers examples for the heuristic value of such an understanding. It discusses the impact of apocryphal writings and parabiblical traditions for the reception history of the New Testament and for the understanding of the history, understanding and development of genres of ancient Christian writings like apocalypses and Gospels. After this it develops and discusses three major theses about the impact of Christian Apocrypha for the understanding of the New Testament canon, its fundamental openness and history even after its formal closure. Finally, it offers opportunities of inter-theological interdisciplinary dialogue. Full article

Since the 19th century, Protestant missionaries in Guangdong have extensively engaged in the translation and publication of religious texts, employing localized strategies in the illustration of Christian novels. Within the local cultural context of late Qing Guangdong, missionaries collaborated with local scholars, used Cantonese for writing, and designed novel illustrations to overcome barriers in doctrinal dissemination, thereby facilitating the spread of Christianity. The illustrations in missionary-published novels, such as The Pilgrim’s Progress in Vernacular and The Spiritual Warfare in Vernacular, adopted the stylistic features of Ming and Qing novel woodcuts in terms of lines, composition, character attire, and settings. Furthermore, they skillfully incorporated the Confucian moral framework of loyalty, filial piety, chastity, and righteousness, as represented in the Sacred Edict, into their narrative ethics, while integrating elements such as Buddhist causality and Daoist imagery into a “didactic” system. This localization strategy, combined with a “trinity” reading guidance model comprising images, text, and biblical annotations, visually elucidated the tenets of the Bible and encouraged the public to embrace Christianity. The localized practice of missionary novel illustrations served as a conscious and effective visual strategy aimed at bridging cultural divides and promoting the dissemination of the Gospel. It profoundly reflects the visual agency in modern Sino–Western cultural exchanges and significantly advanced the propagation of Christianity. Full article

Migration is as old as human history. Over the centuries, there was never a time when migration stopped. The nineteenth century was characterised by the migration of Europeans to Africa. These movements were attributed to colonisation, commerce, and Christianisation. Christianity was used as a conduit of colonisation and the deculturation of the recipients of the missionary gospel. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there was a significant influx of Africans migrating to Europe. Among these migrants were worshippers from the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Zimbabwe (WMCZ). Using a missiological framework, this paper employs a qualitative research methodology to argue that the establishment of the WMCZ Fellowship, grounded in the mission and ecclesiology of the home church in the United Kingdom, is both a reverse and distant mission. To achieve this aim, this paper unpacks the methodology and the theoretical framework. It will also trace the development of the WMCZ in the United Kingdom (UK), discuss the hybridisation of Christianity, and justify the notion that the Fellowship is both a reverse and distant mission. The study makes recommendations that support the growth of the Fellowship. It concludes by arguing that the development of migrant churches in the UK can turn the MCB into a church with a white history, a black/multiracial face, and a white head that will eventually use a multiracial mind to survive in a white historical ecclesiology. Full article

This essay considers the theological implications of “audience criticism,” the widely held hypothesis that the Gospel of Mark was written to address the needs of a specific audience, and not, as Richard Bauckham has argued, with a general audience of all “Christians” in mind. The “all-Christians” hypothesis has generally been embraced by evangelical scholars, but less so by non-evangelicals. In agreement with Adele Reinhartz, I find an unstated theological premise underlying Bauckham’s argument, which is that the focus on Gospel audiences detracts from their witness to Christ. After consideration of references to the Marcan audience within the text and scholarly reconstructions of the Marcan community in space and time, I consider the theological implications of audience in light of the ancient doctrine of the communion of saints, with particular reference to the so-called “minor characters” of the gospel, some of whom, I cautiously suggest, were modeled on members of the Marcan community/communion. Full article