How to Do Things With Words

this article presents a student’s perspective on Jewish studies in Sweden over the past ten years. By identifying the milestones of her own educational and professional path, the author discusses three questions of particular interest for a student wanting to pursue any kind of Jewish studies in a Nordic country, using Sweden as an example, namely: 1) How to compose a curriculum that leads to doctoral studies? 2) What can be said about the ‘identity’ of Jewish studies in Sweden? 3) Can a degree in the subject field of choice also lead to a career outside the academic framework?

A guide for the perplexed.

Hans Frei's book deserves much more attention than it has yet received in historical, philosophical and literary circles. His text is the best historical study we have in English of developments from Post-Renaissance hermeneutics to the modern hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Hegel. Frei's fascinating interpretation is intertwined with a complex argument regarding the problematic status of modern theological discourse. This argument rests upon conceiving \"the Bible as writing,\" which thereby requires appropriate literary critical tools. Frei's philosophical perspective is inspired by Karl Barth and indebted to Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson and Stuart Hampshire. His literary critical approach is guided by the monumental achievement of Erich Auerbach. And Frei's historical interpretation is wholly original an imaginative reshaping of the terrain of early modern interpretation theory. Frei's fresh interpretation demonstrates the specific ways in which forms of supernaturalism, historicism, classicism, moralism and positivism have imposed debilitating constraints on the emergence of modern hermeneutics. These constraints resulted in a discursive closure which prohibited the development of a perspective which viewed Biblical texts as literary texts depicting unique characters and personages. Instead, early modern hermeneutical discourse conceived such texts as manifestations of divine presence, sources for historical reconstruction, articulations of the inner existential anxieties of its authors, bases for moral imperatives or candidates for verifiable claims. In a painstaking and often persuasive manner, Frei examines the \"precritical\" (a self-serving adjective coined by modern hermeneutical thinkers) interpretive procedures of Luther and Calvin, the pietistic viewpoint represented by Johann Jacob Rambach, the rationalistic approach of Spinoza and the proto-heilsgeschichtliche outlook of Johannes Cocceius.

The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics@@@The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology

Desinng the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. By James K. A. Smith. Cultural Liturgies series, vol. 1. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009. 238 pp. $21.99 (paper). It may be an understatement to say that Anglicans do not look first to the Reformed tradition for insight and edification in regard to liturgical theology and proposals for liturgical renewal. In fact this book - exceptional in every sense of the word - was not even slated for review in this journal until, in the midst of an engaged reading, I successfully appealed to the editor for a hearing. The author is a Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Congregational and Ministry Studies of Calvin College, an increasingly significant center in the aforementioned tradition for liturgical studies and renewal of worship. Smith projects three volumes in this Cultural Liturgies series. Of this first he says, "The genesis of the project was a desire to communicate to students (and faculty) a vision of what authentic, integral Christian learning looks like, emphasizing how learning is connected to worship and how, together, these constitute practices of formation and discipleship. Instead of focusing on what Christians think, distilling Christian faith into an intellectual summary formula ( a 'worldview'), this book focuses on what Christians do, articulating the shape of a Christian 'social imaginary' as it is embedded in the practices of Christian worship" (p. 11). This work is seen, then, as laying the foundation for a second piece centered on philosophical anthropology and a third volume addressing current debates in political theology. At least three things stand out in regard to this first volume: a newold reconstruction of anthropology, the eschatological focus at the center of Smith's argument, and his creative juxtaposition of the classic elements of Christian worship to the subtle and not so subtle liturgies of mall (the consumer culture), nation (the sports / military culture), and university (a culture producing self-consistent worldviews that are nonetheless disparate). All these compete for our ultimate allegiances in one way or another - sometimes congruent, sometimes not. Smith brings a wide range of scholarship and insight to bear in trenchant analyses of these other liturgical constructions that promise salvation in one way or another. In regard to anthropology, the thesis is advanced that human beings are not primarily thinking or believing beings, but only secondarily so. What is first is desire. With humans as first and foremost desiring creatures, the questions surrounding the ordering of our precognitive and prereflective loves are paramount. In other words, he investigates those seminal practices that willy nilly form us into some vision of human flourishing (the kingdom). It is the dimensions of such kingdoms ("social imaginaries" rather than "worldviews") that give both metaphorical and literal direction to our choices in life. In some ways this is, for Christians at least, as old as Augustine, as lasting as Dante's effoliation of it, and as recent as Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World, but it is given fresh and significant exegesis and application by Smith. The argument of the volume is set forth in two parts of three chapters each, following an extensive introduction that is focused on (1) the phenomenology of cultural liturgies; (2) a restatement of the necessary but often unperceived relationship between education and worship; and (3) a consideration of the elements for a theology of culture (with a focus on pedagogy, liturgy, and ecclesia). …

Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

The relevance of the beautiful and other essays

SCRIPTURE IN HISTORY: A SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE Joseph K. Gordon, B.A., M.Div. Marquette University This work utilizes advances in philosophical hermeneutics, the historical study of Christian Scripture, and traditional theological resources to articulate a systematic theology of the Christian Bible. Chapter one introduces the challenges of the contemporary ecclesial and academic situations of Christian Scripture and invokes and explains a functional notion of systematic theology as a resource for meeting those challenges. Chapter two examines the use of the rule of faith by Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine to locate the emergence of Christian Scripture within the faith of early Christian churches. It shows that structured, intelligible Christian belief and thought are developing and operative in Christian communities and that such faith guided engagement with Christian Scripture. Chapter three summarizes the judgments of the previous chapter, invokes the doctrines of the Nicene Creed as a rule of faith for locating Scripture within the economic work of the Triune God, and supplements the Creed with judgments and hypotheses regarding divine and human freedom and action and the missions of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit in human history. Such resources provide heuristics of the divine contexts of Christian Scripture. Since Christian Scripture bears the influence of its human transmitters and serves distinctive human purposes, chapter four articulates a philosophical and theological anthropology as an account of the human context of Christian Scripture. Chapters five and six explain the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture within the divine and human contexts of the previous two chapters. The former offers a historical overview and theological evaluation of the material history and diversity of Christian Scripture. The latter provides an account of the unity of Christian Scripture. Scripture is one, despite its diversity, because of the unified work of the Holy Spirit in inspiring and illuminating it in Christian community, because of the unity of its reference to the revelatory work of the Triune God centering on Jesus Christ, and finally because of its usefulness for bearing witness to and facilitating the work of the Holy Spirit and the Son of God in history.

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Joseph K. Gordon

Papers

Scripture in History: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible