57 research outputs found
Living Word: Sharper Than Any Two-Edged Sword
(Excerpt)
The theme for this year\u27s Institute on liturgical Studies- Grace Upon Grace: Living Word. -describes what should enliven and move every action among God\u27s people. Not only doxological actions, but didactic, kerygmatic, evangelistic, parenetic-you name it, every thought and action should live in and arise out of the living word.l But just what is that living word? The adjective is striking, not the one we usually attach to the term word in either its garden variety meaning or its theological sense. Where do you find a living word? The classical answer for many is obvious: in the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures. And there is a great truth in that. As Luke Timothy Johnson recently put it
Christianity\u27s Boundary-Making Bath: The New Testament Meaning of Baptism, the Sacrament of Unity
(Excerpt)
Baptism puts us squarely into the significance of Easter, Christ, and the Christian life. When I spoke to you a year ago on the Lord\u27s Supper in the New Testament, it was possible for me to deal at length with every passage in the New Testament that mentions the Lordly Meal. It is quite different with baptism. It is found frequently in New Testament texts-many of them. Indeed, one can say that baptism is more significant to the New Testament church than is the Lord\u27s Supper. We can almost set up a proportion: Baptism is to the early church as the Lord\u27s Supper is to today\u27s church
The Lord\u27s Banquet: Resources, Problems and Perspectives from the New Testament
(Excerpt)
The New Testament provides the fundamental basis for the church\u27s celebration of the Lord\u27s Supper and, at the same time, the major source from which to critique aspects of the church\u27s Eucharistic practice today. It is important to hear the New Testament as carefully as possible, in all its variety, in order to understand the New Testament elements that go to make up contemporary Eucharistic practice and theology. In what I do today I will carry out my role as a New Testament scholar: to hear the New Testament in all its variety and diversity as an aid in understanding the earliest church and as a guide to appropriating that diversity today
Lukan Easter Formation: Living out the Resurrection
(Excerpt)
We will discuss two types of Easter formation in the early church, with Acts and Luke as guides to our Easter mystagogy. The topic is in one sense natural for a New Testament scholar, since all writers of the New Testament begin theologically from the resurrected Christ, because a Christian\u27s life-style (to use a modem shibboleth) is formed in the New Testament from the event of baptism, and because early Christian parenesis is essentially a realization of life under the Lordship of the Resurrected One. But it also brings some problems
A Survey of Trends and Problems in Biblical Interpretation
Any man fool enough to accept the assignment described in the title above deserves his fate. He is like the mythological traveler approaching ancient Thebes. To go forward means to meet the Sphinx and her dread riddle; to miss the answer means to be thrown headlong down a precipitous cliff and face destruction. Yet the possibility that one may deprive Oedipus of his glory by answering the riddle leads one to trudge along the dusty path under the hot sun
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