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This volume brings together contributions from the ongoing conversation among New Testament scholars from the Nordic Countries, namely Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The aim is to challenge the New Testament texts and their interpretations but also to be challenged by these texts and interpretation, i.e., how to read, interpret and contextualize the impact of these texts, and how to conceptualize the power and authority attributed to them.As neighbours in peripheral Europe, partly sharing language and history, scholars of this region also aim to participatie in the broader international discourse. The fact that their common academic language is English begs the question whether many of the current essays could have been written in different settings, since they do not explicitly reflect on contextual issues. Or is this the case?What characterizes that part of the world are social democracies with relatively high standards of living, a strong protestant past but an increasing multicultural population, public welfare systems, and gender equality. Public universities still have money and can prioritize mobility and internationalisation; accordingly, although few people live in the Nordic countries relatively many biblical scholars have roots there.

Petrus van Mastricht (16301706): Text, Context, and Interpretation is not just a statement of the state of the art on Mastricht studies. It also points the way forward for further exploration of Mastrichts thought and the history of Reformed Orthodoxy in general from the Preface by Carl R. Trueman.This volume presents collected essays from scholars around the world on various aspects of Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706) theology, philosophy, and reception in the context of the challenges of orthodoxy in his day. This book, then, locates Mastrichts ideas in the context of the theological and philosophical currents of his day. The pre-Revolutionary status of theology and philosophy in the wake of the Enlightenment had many of the same problems we see in theology today as relating to the use and appropriation of classical theology in a 21st-century context. Ideas about the necessity of classical primary sources of Christianity in sustaining Reformed theology are once again becoming important, and Mastricht has many insights in this area. The last thirty years have witnessed a remarkable revolution in the study of Reformed Orthodoxy, that broad movement of theological consolidation which took place in the two centuries between the early breakthroughs of the Reformation and the reorganization of intellectual disciplines within the university world heralded by the arrival of the various intellectual and cultural developments known collectively as the Enlightenment. The old models which tended to prioritize one or two figures in the Reformation. In place of this older scholarship, we now have a growing number of studies which seek to place Reformed thinkers of the period in a much wider context. One of the results of this is that serious scholarly attention is now being directed at figures who were previously neglected, such as Petrus van Mastricht, a German-Dutch theologian, who has emerged as significant voices in shaping the Christianity of his day. He was the author of a major system of divinity. This work is in the process of being translated into English (two volumes are available at the time of writing). Mastricht is also the subject of a growing body of literature in English, of which this volume is a fine example. The essays contained in book work represent precisely the range of scholarly interests that the new approach to Reformed Orthodoxy has come to embody. Dealing specifically with the areas of theology, philosophy, and reception, this book points toward three critical areas of study.

For more than forty years now there has been a steady stream of interest in Richard Hooker. This renaissance in Hooker Studies began with the publication of the Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker. With this renaissance has come a growing recognition that it is anachronistic to classify Hooker simply as an Anglican thinker, but as yet, no generally agreed-upon alternative label, or context for his thought, has replaced this older conception; in particular, the question of Hookers Reformed identity remains hotly contested.Given the relatively limited engagement of Hooker scholarship with other branches of Reformation and early modern scholarship to date, there is a growing recognition that Hooker must be evaluated not only against the context of English puritanism and conformism but also in light of his broad international Reformed context. At the same time, it has become clear that, if this is so, scholars of continental Reformed orthodoxy must take stock of Hookers work as one of the landmark theological achievements of the era.This volume aims to facilitate this long-needed conversation, bringing together a wide range of scholars to consider Richard Hookers theology within the full context of late 16th- and early 17th-century Reformed orthodoxy, both in England and on the Continent. The essays seek to bring Hooker into conversation not merely with contemporaries familiar to Hooker scholarship, such as William Perkins, but also with such contemporaries as Jerome Zanchi and Franciscus Junius, predecessors such as Heinrich Bullinger, and successors such as John Davenant, John Owen, and Hugo Grotius. In considering how these successors of Hooker identified themselves in relation to his theology, these essays will also shed light on how Hooker was perceived within 17th-century Reformed circles. The theological topics touched on in the course of these essays include such central issues as the doctrine of Scripture, predestination, Christology, soteriology, the sacraments, and law. It is hoped that these essays will continue to stimulate further research on these important questions among a wide community of scholars.

This study of the Isaianic Denkschrift (Isaiah 6:1-9:6) is both a traditional and an innovative one. It defends the integrity of the Denkschrift, yet on grounds wholly other than those outlined by the early proponents of the unity of the composition. The present work is founded on an inquiry into the ideological matrix of the composition on one hand and, on the other, on the understanding of the activity of mantic (prophetic) figures in the Near East during the early first millennium BCE that has emerged in recent scholarship. The presentation of Yahweh as a royal character in the Denkschrift is interpreted as an integral part of the symbolic universe promoted by the composition. Several levels of social discourse of the Denkschrift are identified: the author(s) is simultaneously engaged in the creation of Judaean autonomous cultural identity, in polemical activity with the rival Yahwist community (the North, or Samaria) and in the safeguarding of the privileged position of the former Babylonian exiles among the community of Jerusalem and Judah. Two interrelated hypotheses are developed in the book: regarding the historical milieu in which the Denkschrift was composed and regarding the place of the composition in the formation of First Isaiah. As for the first, Prokhorov proposes that the early second-temple community of Yehud matches the profile of a society whose problems the Denkschrift is addressing and reflecting. As for the second, the author maintains the view that the Denkschrift marks one of the final stages of the creation of First Isaiah whose original nucleus consisted of the Hezekiah narrative (now found in chapters 36-39 of Isaiah), which, in turn, modified the respective Deuteronomistic material.

This volume of collected essays focuses on the relationship between the different texts within Isaiah 4066. It reinvestigates and challenges the traditional division between chapters 4055 and 5666 and explores new ways of reading the last 27 chapters of the book of Isaiah. Each article examines Isaiah 4055 and/or Isaiah 5666 and highlights continuity and discontinuity within this material.Some contributions belong to the tradition of historical-critical research. They examine existing models of textual development of Isa 4066 and offer new suggestions. They also explore the interplay between the historical development of the text and its thematic continuity and discontinuity. Is the consistent use of a theme a sign of single authorship? Alternatively, are changes in the way a given issue is treated a sign of multiple authorship? Other contributions explore the final form of Isa 4066 and suggest reading strategies that do justice to the message of the extant text. Yet other articles make case studies of specific elements of Isa 4066. What is the significance of these texts for the theological development of the ancient Israelite religion? Further, how do they interact with and transform other texts in the Hebrew Bible?

This collection of essays examines important twentieth-century Lutheran theologians, including European and North American voices. Each essay provides an overview of the life and thought of important confessional Lutherans who shaped theology with an ecumenical, world-wide impact. The focus here is not on later twentieth-century figures but earlier ones, selected similar to the spirit manifest in Karl Barths contention lest we forget where contemporary theology came from (Protestant Theology From Rousseau to Ritschl). The essays composed over the last five years were initiated by Lutheran Quarterly in order to assess our recent past as we move into a new millennium. The goal of each author, each a leading theologian, has been to describe each thinkers life and vocation and how each thinkers work continues to impact theology today.

The intertextuality research of antique texts and their reception in Medieval and modern times is the subject of this volume: (1) What is a text and what is an intertext? This concerns the various different forms of text and how they present themselves in architecture, iconography, lexicography, the study of lists, etc. (2) Forms of intertextuality on the relationship between writtenness and oralness, how oral texts are objectified during textualisation and become fixed acts of speech (K. Ehlich), how especially antique texts were shaped by the continual interconnectedness of oral and written traditions. (3) What is understood in ancient Oriental and antique literature by "tradition" and "transmission"? To this end, the research includes languages, historical reality and antique thought structures, making clear that the transferral of tradition occurs not only within a close cultural circle, but in the exchange with neighbouring cultures over large distances and geographic boundaries. (4) On the relationship between intertextuality and canon. A number of contributions study this aspect of ongoing historical debate as it often found for culturally definitive and canonised texts a necessary part of the their rejuvination process. Contributions by M. Bauks, A. Lange / Z. Plese, Ph. Alexandre, S. Aufrere, M. Oeming, K. Davidowicz, A. Wagner, G. Selz, M.F. Meyer, L. Roig Lanzillotta, M. Dimitrova, F. Waldman, W. Horowitz, M. Risch, J. van Ruiten, L. Bormann, A. Miltenova, J. Taschner, G. Brooke, G. Dorival, A. Harder and S. Alkier.

Abi T. Ngunga explores the theme of messianism in the entire corpus of the Old Greek of Isaiah (LXX-Isaiah). This is done through the lens of an intertextual hermeneutic employed by the Isaiah translator as a mode of reading this text.Its introductory chapter looks at the need in scholarship to investigate the topic of messianism in the Greek Bible in general, and in the whole of the LXX-Isaiah in particular. After dealing with a few issues related to the LXX-Isaiah as a translation, Ngunga also surveys thoroughly the topic of intertextuality from its inception to its use in biblical studies including LXX research. Particular attention is given to its application in research done, to date, on the Greek text of Isaiah.Chapter two re-examines a few arguments pertinent to the scholarly opinion that messianic hopes were not prominent among the Alexandrian Jews in comparison to their co-religionists in Palestine. It also explores the relationships between the non-Jewish citizens of the Ptolemaic kingdom and the Alexandrian Jews, with the aim to ascertain the legitimacy of investigating the theme of messianism in a piece of Jewish literature such as the LXX-Isaiah authored in the Hellenistic period. Chapter three analyses in-depth nine selected messianic passages within the LXX-Isaiah (7:1017; 9:17(8:239:6); 11:110; 16:15; 19:1625; 31:9b32:8; 42:14; 52:1353:12; and 61:13a). The study concludes by highlighting the detected particular messianic imprints left on the LXX-Isaiah. Given the results, the study dismisses any doubt concerning the contention that there is a dynamic messianic thought running through the whole of the Greek Isaiah. It also sheds some light on the understanding of some of the messianic beliefs later echoed in early Christianity.

Bennie H. Reynolds analyzes of the language (poetics) of ancient Jewish historical apocalypses. He investigates how the dramatis personae, i.e., deities, angels/demons, and humans are described in the Book of Daniel (chapters 2, 7, 8, and 1012) the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 8590), 4QFourKingdoms(a-b) ar, the Book of the Words of Noah (1QapGen 5 2918?), the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C, and 4QPseudo-Daniel(a-b) ar. The primary methodologies for this study are linguistic- and motif-historical analysis and the theoretical framework is informed by a wide range of ancient and modern thinkers including Artemidorus of Daldis, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Peirce, Leo Oppenheim, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Umberto Eco. The most basic contention of this study is that the data now available from the Dead Sea Scrolls significantly alter how one should conceive of the genre apocalypse in the Hellenistic Period. This basic contention is borne out by five primary conclusions. For example, while some apocalypses employ symbolic language to describe the actors in their historical reviews, others use non-symbolic language. Some texts, especially from the Book of Daniel, are mixed cases. Among the apocalypses that use symbolic language, a limited and stable repertoire of symbols obtain across the genre and bear witness to a series of conventional associations. While several apocalypses do not use symbolic ciphers to encode their historical actors, they often use cryptic language that may have functioned as a group-specific language. The language of apocalypses indicates that these texts were not the domain of only one social group or even one type or size of social group.

Robert McKelvey argues that John Bunyan wrote The Holy War as a warfare allegory symbolizing the salvation history of Scripture from a Calvinistic-covenantal perspective. In this cosmic drama of redemption, the "Histories That Mansoul, and her Wars Anatomize" include the individual-soteric-microcosmic level or ordo salutis unfolding analogous to the redemptive-historical-macrocosmic level or historia salutis. The eternal covenant of redemption provides the foundation for this history of salvation, which progresses from creation to the anticipation of consummation. This scheme finds its roots in the Puritan philosophy of "universal history" which sees all historical events serving Gods redemptive purposes. The individual, through union with Christ founded on election, participates in the drama by inclusion within the trans-historical covenant of grace. As a depiction of cosmic war, The Holy War sets forth the enmity between the church and Antichrist, which is representative of the greater battle between Christ and the devil from Genesis to Revelation. As a pastoral guide to persecuted saints, Bunyan retrospectively rehearses the history of redemption to grant comfort. In addition, he prospectively reveals the consummation of redemption to encourage perseverance and instil eschatological hope. This thesis is substantiated contextually through Bunyans life and writings, historiographically by surveying the history of Holy War interpretation, pre-textually by examining the introduction to the allegory, and textually by analyzing the allegory itself.

Arnold Huijgen analyses und assesses the idea of divine accommodation in John Calvins theology. He proves that Calvins idea of accommodation was terminologically influenced by Erasmus, while its content originated in patristic theology. Though Calvins idea of accommodation is multifaceted, Huijgen subsumes and analyzes it in the light of the two main perspectives of pedagogy and revelation. The pedagogical aspect relates to Calvins understanding of salvation history, and the relation between the Old and the New Testament. In this perspective Christ as the mediator holds a central position. The aspect of revelation focuses on Calvins comprehension of Gods nature which for him is behind Gods revelation. Calvins understanding of accommodation implies a distinct dynamic to revelation, which is disrupted by its static, hierarchical ontology. Huijgen points out the weaknesses of Calvins idea of accommodation on the basis of modern critiques by Karl Barth, Isaak August Dorner, and Harry M. Kuitert; he also explores the viable points for present day theology.

Guy Williams beleuchtet die Rolle der Geistwesen in den echten paulinischen Briefen. Entgegen der weit verbreiteten Ansicht, Geister und spirituelle Wesen seien fur Paulus unbedeutend und trivial gewesen, vertritt Williams die These, dass diese inharente Merkmale der Briefe darstellten. Die Berucksichtigung ihres historischen und kulturellen Hintergrundes zeigt, dass die Vorstellung von den Einwohnern der paulinischen Geistwelt, den Engeln, Damonen, Kraften und Satan, denen des allgemeinen Gedankenguts entspricht.Schlielich bezieht Williams die Ergebnisse seiner Untersuchung auf drei Bereiche: Paulus Christologie, seine Soteriologie und seine Vorstellung von Gemeinschaft. Sein Ansatz erlaubt einen frischen Blick auf Ort und Bedeutung von spirituellen Wesen bei Paulus, nicht im Sinne einer neuen Doktrin, aber als allgemeines und kulturelles Idiom der paulinischen Texte.

Calvin hatte groes Interesse daran, was die Bibel uber den Menschen lehrt, wer er ist, was er tut, was seine Rolle und Verantwortung in der Welt ist. Vom Gottesverstandnis, so Johannes Calvin, lasse sich auf ein adaquates Verstandnis des Menschen schlieen, denn dieser sei in Gottes Ebenbild geschaffen. Geht man Calvins Verstandnis von Gott naher auf den Grund, darf eine Berucksichtigung des historischen Kontextes, in dessen Rahmen sein imago Dei entstanden ist, nicht fehlen. Jason Van Vliet bettet seine Uberlegungen in die stark humanistisch gepragte Denkweise der Renaissance, seine Interaktion mit Philipp Melanchthon und seine Auseinandersetzung mit Andreas Osiander ein und kommt schlielich zu einer genauen Profilierung des imago Dei des Johannes Calvin.

The volume focuses on the various representations of the Beyond in later Antiquity, a period of intense interaction and competition between various religious traditions and ideals of education. The concepts and images clustering around the Beyond form a crucial focal point for understanding the dynamics of religion and education in later Antiquity. Although Christianity gradually supersedes the pagan traditions, the literary representations of the Beyond derived from classical literature and transmitted through the texts read at school show a remarkable persistence: they influence Christian late antique writers and are still alive in medieval literature of the East and West. A specifically Christian Beyond develops only gradually, and coexists subsequently with pagan ideas, which in turn vary according to the respective literary and philosophical contexts. Thus, the various conceptualisations of the great existential unknown, serves here as a point of reference for mirroring the changes and continuities in Imperial and Late Antique religion, education, and culture, and opening up further perspectives into the Medieval world.

Sara Mannen in her book rejects the notion that Karl Barths theology makes God in the image of the modern autonomous subject and argues that his concept of divine personhood is best understood when reframed through the intellectual context that resulted from the Pantheism Controversy, which explicitly revolved around issues of the knowledge and nature of God and divine personhood. The work of Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Fichte, Herder, and Schelling created an environment that necessitated theologians address the concepts of divine personhood, divine absoluteness, and modern questions of theological epistemology. Mannen argues that Barths distinctly modern conception of divine personhood reflects and responds to this environment by providing the necessary divine ontological foundation that establishes God is capable of self-revelation without detriment to Gods absoluteness and that Barths motivation for the occasional use of counterfactual language is to maintain Gods personal nature and identity.

Calls for reformation were widespread across the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but few were as nuanced or philosophically rich as the lifelong work of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (14011464). Cusa centralized the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, in our knowledge of God and the mystical institution of the Church. In his book, Michael R. Kearney traces Cusas historical impact on philosophy of communication and communication ethics with an eye toward the health of institutions in a postmodern moment of cynicism and decline. Cusa loved the church and fought passionately for its reform, energized by the "clouded vision" of a God who is beyond opposites. This champion of dialogic reformation offers churches and communities an unfinished task with a unity of contraries at its heart: upholding local narrative ground with tenacious loyalty while working in an increasingly large world.

The collective book by Lithuanian researchers presents research conducted in Lithuania on the historical and socio-cultural contexts of the Bible and the ways in which it functioned in Lithuanian writing from its beginning to the 18th century. The ways of religious communication, the dissemination of religious and social ideas in the works of theologians, the functioning of biblical texts and the ways of their transmission are shown. The articles review the problems of translating the Bible into Lithuanian and Slavic languages, consider the influence of other languages and cultures on the formation of the Lithuanian language in its early development, and address issues of editing and publishing religious writings.

This volume explores the patristic treatment of biblical characters and character. Patristic authors interpret the Bible and use it in the development of their theology and in debates on theological, Christological and ecclesiological issues.The individual contributions deal with the view of the Church Fathers on the person of Moses, with Maximus Confessors depiction of King Hezekiah, with the interpretation of the texts on the daughters of Zelophehad, with the theological interpretation of the story of Elijah on Mount Horeb, with the spiritual interpretation of the Psalms in Jeromes letters, the significance of the Psalms for the Christological argumentation in Cassiodorus, the interpretation of the Book of Job in various commentaries, the Christological interpretation of the Twelve Prophets and the understanding of the nation angels in John Chrysostom. The volume concludes with a summarising response.

King Manasseh of Judah is one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible. 2 Kings presents him as the wickedest of monarchs. In 2Kgs 24:34, he is accused of having provoked God to destroy Judah on account of the innocent blood he had shed in Jerusalem (cf. 2Kgs 21:16). In his study Krzysztof Kinowski investigates this accusation, viewing it against the biblical and ancient Near East backgrounds, and casts a new light upon Manassehs role in the fall of Jerusalem. The mention of bloodshed in this affair appears to be the outcome of a process of scapegoating of Manasseh, ongoing in 2 Kings and reflecting both the legal and the cultic paradigms governing the biblical historiography. The link between Manassehs bloodshed and the destruction of Judah on account of the cultic lands blood-defilement points towards a group of priestly scribes involved in the production of the 2Kgs 21 and 24 narratives. This assumption lies behind the scholarly discussion about the Priestly-like strata and priestly touches in the Books of Kings.

Kowalski addresses the Pauline understanding of S/spirit in Romans 8, as compared to the Stoic idea of pneuma. The author first analyzes the Stoic views on pneuma perceived in a variety of life-giving, cognitive-ethical, unifying, reproductive and inspiring functions. The aforementioned features are taken as a starting point for the comparison with Paul to which, however, the third element is added, the Jewish texts of the Second Temple period. These include the Old Testament but also The Book of Enoch, The Book of Jubilees, Qumran, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, The Psalms of Solomon, Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus, LAB, Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Book of Ezra and 2 Book of Baruch. Such a rich comparative material contributes to the novelty of the book and enables the reader to discover both the similarities and differences between Paul, Greco-Roman and Jewish authors. The study analyzes Romans 8 in its rhetorical context and brings to light the novelty of the Pauline view of the Spirit. The apostle portrays it in its primary cognitive-ethical and communitarian function of making the believers similar to Christ and inculcating in them the Lords mindset and attitudes. Paul presents the Spirit as dwelling within a person, similarly to God inhabiting the Jerusalem temple, and as the mediator of the resurrected life. In the original Pauline take the Spirit enables a close union between God and human beings in which the latter keep their freedom and distinctive personal traits.