Sensing the Scriptures


Book Description

This book explores the ways that Christians, from the period of late antiquity through the Protestant Reformation, interpreted the Bible according to its several levels of meaning. Using the five bodily senses as an organizing principle, Karlfried Froehlich probes key theological developments, traditions, and approaches across this broad period, culminating in a consideration of the implications of this historical development for the contemporary church. Distinguishing between "principles" and "rules" of interpretation, Froehlich offers a clear and useful way of discerning the fundamental difference between interpretive methods (rules) and the overarching spiritual goals (principles) that must guide biblical interpretation. As a study of roots and reasons as well as the role of imagination in the development of biblical interpretation, Sensing the Scriptures reminds us how intellectually and spiritually relevant the pursuit of a historical perspective is for Christian faith and life today.




Sensing Jesus


Book Description

This is a book about the behind-the-scenes reality of a life in ministry. It tells you what Zack Eswine wishes somebody else would’ve told him. With over 20 years of experience in ministry, Zack shares with incredible honesty about his own failures, burnout, and pain, all the while addressing the complexities of leadership decisions, church discipline, family dynamics, and so on. Presenting sound pastoral theology couched in autobiographical musings and powerful prose, this book offers a fresh and biblically faithful approach to the care of souls, including your own.




Sensing Sacred Texts


Book Description

All the human senses become engaged in ritualizing sacred texts. These essays focus especially on ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts through the senses of sight, touch, kiss, and taste, both directly and in the imagination. Ritualized display of books engages the sense of sight very differently than does reading. Touching gets associated with reading scriptures, but touching also enables using the scripture as an amulet. Eating and consuming texts is a ubiquitous analogy for internalizing the contents of texts by reading and memorization. The idea of textual consumption reflects a widespread tendency to equate humans and written texts by their interiority and exteriority: books and people both have material bodies, yet both seem to contain immaterial ideas. Books thus physically incarnate cultural and religious values, doctrines, beliefs, and ideas. These essays bring theories of comparative scriptures and affect theory to bear on the topic as well as rich ethnographic descriptions of scriptural practices with Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and modern art and historical accounts of changing practices with sacred texts in ancient and medieval China and Korea, and in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures.




Sensing God


Book Description

"Sensing God is a discovery of Jesus in all of the sensory points embedded into each of us. It shows how the holiest acts in our daily lives are often the simplest: reveling in the beauty of nature; listening to our favorite music; eating a nourishing meal with family. These are potentially heartbeats of a living faith, and when we learn to recognize and respond to God’s goodness in them, it draws us into redemptive participation with Him, the source of all beauty"--Amazon.com.




Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church


Book Description

Covers the emergence of hermeneutical questions in the patristic period.




Justifying Christian Aramaism


Book Description

In Justifying Christian Aramaism Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman explores how Christian scholars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century justify their study of the Targums, the Jewish Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible. She focuses on the four polyglot Bibles – Complutum, Antwerp, Paris, and London –, and describes these books in the scholarly world of those days. It appears that quite a few scholars, Roman-Catholic, protestant, and Anglican, edited Targumic books and translated these into Latin. The book reveals a stimulating and conflicting period of the Targum reception history and is therefore relevant for Targum scholars and historians interested in the history of Judaism, Church history, the history of the book, and the history of Jewish-Christian relationships.




The Bible in Photography


Book Description

Sheona Beaumont addresses the untold story of biblical subjects in photography. She argues that stories, characters, and symbols from the Bible are found to pervade photographic practices and ideas, across the worlds of advertising and reportage, the book and the gallery, in theoretical discourse and in the words of photographers themselves. Beaumont engages interpretative tools from biblical reception studies, art history, and visual culture criticism in order to present four terms for describing photography's latent spirituality: the index, the icon, the tableau, and the vision. Throughout her journey she includes lively discussion of selected fine art photography dealing with the Bible in surprising ways, from images by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 19th century to David Mach in the 21st. Far from telling a secular story, photography and the conditions of its representations are exposed in theological depth.; Beaumont skillfully interweaves discussion of the images and theology, arguing for the dynamic and potent voice of the Bible in photography and enriching visual culture criticism with a renewed religious understanding.




40 Questions About Typology and Allegory


Book Description

A survey of two literary devices that are indispensable for understanding salvation history A biblical type is a person, place, or thing in salvation history that corresponds to a later person, place, or thing in the scriptural text. An allegory is a passage that says one thing in order to say something else. Both are common literary devices in the Bible that are vital for understanding truths about Jesus Christ found nowhere else. In 40 Questions About Typology and Allegory, Mitchell Chase provides a thorough introduction to both devices, showing where they appear throughout Scripture and the historical roles they have played in biblical interpretation. In a convenient question-and-answer format, Chase answers key questions such as: • Why should interpreters care about typology and allegory? • How do we identify types? • What are the theological assumptions of typology? • Do all types lead to Christ? • What is allegorical interpretation? • How was allegory practiced in the early church? • How should we practice allegorical interpretation? Situating typology and allegory within salvation history, Chase shows how these devices reveal the interconnectedness of Scripture and commonly overlooked aspects of Christ's person and work. Scholars, Bible teachers, and preachers will find this an essential resource for interpreting Scripture more comprehensively.




The Letter and Spirit of Biblical Interpretation


Book Description

For the better part of fifteen centuries, Christians read Scripture on two complementary levels, the literal and the spiritual. In the modern period, the spiritual sense gradually became marginalized in favor of the literal sense. The Bible came to be read and interpreted like any other book. This brief, accessible introduction to the history of biblical interpretation examines key turning points and figures and argues for a retrieval of the premodern spiritual habits of reading Scripture.




God and Galileo


Book Description

"A devastating attack upon the dominance of atheism in science today." Giovanni Fazio, Senior Physicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics The debate over the ultimate source of truth in our world often pits science against faith. In fact, some high-profile scientists today would have us abandon God entirely as a source of truth about the universe. In this book, two professional astronomers push back against this notion, arguing that the science of today is not in a position to pronounce on the existence of God—rather, our notion of truth must include both the physical and spiritual domains. Incorporating excerpts from a letter written in 1615 by famed astronomer Galileo Galilei, the authors explore the relationship between science and faith, critiquing atheistic and secular understandings of science while reminding believers that science is an important source of truth about the physical world that God created.