SHORT NOTICES

Short Notices:
Mary E. Mills, Images of God in the Old Testament
Tod Linafelt and Timothy K. Beal, God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann
Kari Latvus, God, Anger and Ideology: The Anger of God in Joshua and Judges in Relation to Deuteronomy amd the Priestly Writings (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 279)
Edwin D. Freed, The Stories of Jesus' Birth: A Critical Introduction (The Biblical Seminar 72)
David B. Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul's Christology (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament. 2 Reihe, 47)
Gerard O'Daly, Platonism Pagan and Christian: Studies in Plotinus and Augustine
Alistair McFayden and Marcel Sarot, Forgiveness and Truth: Explorations in Contemporary Theology     

THE POLITICS OF YHWH: John Howard Yoder's Old Testament Narration and Its Implications for Social Ethics

The apparent tension between the moral codes of the Old and New Testaments constitutes a perennial problem for Christian ethics. Scholars who have taken this problem seriously have often done so in ways that presume sharp discontinuity between the Testaments. They then proceed to devise a system for identifying what is or is not relevant today, or what pertains to this or that particular social sphere. John Howard Yoder brings fresh perspectives to this perennial problem by refuting the presumption of intratestamental discontinuity. Throughout multiple scattered works on the Old Testament, Yoder offers a coherent and provocative narration that culminates in the way of Christ and establishes the ethical continuity of the entire biblical canon. This essay presents the basic parameters of Yoder's Old Testament narration, suggests points where revision is needed, and highlights several implications for social ethics.     

Jerusalem in Athens: On the Biblical Epigraphs to Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History

The Old Testament epigraphs used by Leo Strauss for his study Natural Right and History tend invariably to vex his readers. In the book itself and in other of his writings, Strauss explicitly states that the Old Testament tradition does not know ‘nature’ in the philosophical sense, and hence the concept of ‘natural right’ is unknown or alien to that tradition. Another, more obvious problem they present has been seemingly universally passed over by commentators: neither epigraph tells the reader anything explicitly about right, natural or otherwise. One cannot claim them to contain lessons about right, because such lessons are not directly extractable from the epigraphs as they stand. Here I wish to argue that Strauss's choice of epigraph does two things: first, it points to the fact that Old Testament stories can be given a political reading, or used to illustrate political lessons. In implying this, Strauss is following Machiavelli, who is the most important figure in Natural Right and History. Second, the epigraphs point to the deeply problematic nature of the concept of natural right, primarily the equivocal nature of the term, a difficulty never made explicit by Strauss but the awareness of which permeates his study.     

Church and State After Christendom

Abstract

At a time when traditional markers of Christian identity are in decline, renewed attention has been devoted to the relationship of the church to state and society. In particular, there has been a marked rise in counter-cultural ecclesiologies stressing the distinctiveness of the church over against its host society. The article argues that there is a rich resource of Scriptural and traditional materials for fruitful reflection upon the political nature of the Christian community and its relationship to the state and civil society. Particular attention is devoted to the kingship of Yahweh in the Old Testament, the ministry of Jesus, and several leading writers of the early church. It is claimed that these historical attempts to express a positive account of stratified citizenship are significant for the increasingly post-Christendom context of Western churches.     

Traces of the Trinity in the Old Testament: From Individual Texts to the Nature of Revelation

This article uncovers traces of the Trinity in the Old Testament. Different from traditional exegesis, it is argued that alleged allusions to God's plurality in specific texts, and examples of personified agents such as the Angel of the Lord, are less important and often inconclusive. The nature of Old Testament ‘monotheism’, however, supports trinitarian logic, and important traces of the Trinity are demonstrated in in‐depth structures of Old Testament theology: the anthropomorphic character of revelation, the second commandment, God's name as narrative self‐identification and the tendency of God's coming to his people.     

The Renaissance Ethics of Music: Singing,Contemplation and Musica Humana

Abstract

This article considers Calvin's late work, the Harmony of the Pentateuch (1563). It takes account of previous attempts to illuminate Calvin's purpose in this production by De Boer, Blacketer, Thiel, Wright and Balserak. There follows a consideration of Calvin's view of the ceremonial law for Christians, and a distinction is drawn between the Old Testament cult and the Old Testament law concerning that cult. It finally takes soundings from the work itself to argue that for Calvin, the timeless spirit of worship could be understood behind its outward expression. What matters is that God is seen to call believers out of the flow of everyday occurrence into worship.     

Who is God in the Old Testament? Retrieving Aquinas after Rahner's Answer

Karl Rahner adamantly argued that the God of the Old Testament is the unoriginate Person of the Father. This forms the bedrock of his trinitarian theology, often credited as renewing Christian appreciation for the Trinity. However, his position that the Old Testament God must be identified as the Father contradicts much of the Christian tradition, including strands of Greek theology whose emphasis on the Father he claimed to restore to the West. This article retrieves the theology of Thomas Aquinas after Rahner in order to correct the imbalance of Rahner's position with greater nuance in appreciating the mystery of God in the Old Testament.     

The Character of Yhwh and the Ethics of the Old Testament: is Imitatio Dei Appropriate?

The aim is to examine the character of the God of the Old Testament,principally in the Pentateuch, to discover whether it providesan appropriate basis for the imitatio dei that a number of writershave argued is prominent in Old Testament ethics. The articlebegins with a survey of this literature and opposing arguments.Texts then, first, that explicitly recommend the imitation ofGod are studied, then ones that imply it, mainly concerningdistributive justice. It is shown that the moral role of YHWHmay reflect one of two roles in human society, as king (of theworld) or as patron (of Israel), thus providing models for humanbeings playing such roles. A discussion of Exod. 34:5–6shows that forgiveness is for human beings as for God a rightrather than an obligation in the Old Testament. It is finallyshown that YHWH behaves in the story of the Exodus in ways which,whether justifiable (in the role of king) or not, would be inappropriatefor imitation. It is concluded that while YHWH may often beunderstood as offering a role for imitation, imitatio dei isnot the key to all Old Testament ethics.     

THEOPHANY AND INDICATION: RECONCILING AUGUSTINIAN AND PALAMITE AESTHETICS1

Based on an analysis of certain theophanic narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures (Exodus 3 and 19, 1 Kings 19), this article poses the question of their Christian exegesis: which of the Persons of the Holy Trinity appeared to the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament and how? This seemingly trivial question has become a decisive and controversial topic in the formation of two distinct theological aesthetics: one influenced by Augustine in the West and another that finds its culmination with Gregory Palamas in the East. The aim of this article is to reconcile the polemical interpretations of Old Testament theophanies by employing a Christological understanding of aesthetics as developed by Hans Urs von Balthasar (in his Herrlichkeit) and a more nuanced understanding of signification as developed by Husserl and Merleau‐Ponty under the concept of indication.     

The Familiar Made Strange: An Orientation to Biblical Study in Vancouver

Abstract. This paper originated in a Wabash‐funded colloquium organized by Richard Ascough and Leif Vaage, on the theme: “Teaching the Bible for Leadership in the United Church of Canada.” Professors teaching biblical studies at United Church seminaries and theological schools met over three years to share pedagogy, things that have worked and not worked in the classroom, changes in teaching Bible over the years, and the role of context in shaping teaching. In the final year they presented their philosophy of teaching to one another; this paper arose from that meeting. The paper describes an orientation to teaching New Testament Studies at Vancouver School of Theology, a theologically liberal school in the context of Vancouver, Canada – paradoxically one of the most secular and multi‐religious cities in the world. Guided by Denise Levertov's poem, “Overland to the Islands,” it explores the promises and challenges of biblical study grounded in the material reality of the world, amidst older students who bear the marks of secularity, who are impatient with traditional orthodoxies, and who long more for life before the grave than after it. Adopting ideas from Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva, it explores teaching the Bible in a way that promotes the polyvalence, strangeness, and irreducibility of biblical texts, in order to move students away from exegetical and hermeneutical theories content with recovering authorial intent and reconstructing historical origins as the primary tasks of biblical study. The paper describes a model of teaching that celebrates the materiality of the New Testament together with its textual, social, theological, and historical complexity, as well as a tradition‐constituted means of apprehending the world, and which treasures students as living texts who in the course of interpretation awaken ever‐fresh meanings relevant to their own communal and personal identities.     

Bullinger's Defence of the Old Faith

Abstract

Bullinger regarded the evangelical faith and the evangelical churches as old and the papal faith and church as new. He was convinced that the evangelical faith was continuous with that of Scripture and the catholic church. In 1537 against the charge of being new or heretical, he went behind the New Testament to the Old, appealing to the faith of Adam and the prophets in Christ. In 1549 against the charge of separating from the church with the succession of bishops as a mark of the apostolic church, he appealed to the succession in apostolic teaching. Against further charges he appealed to the ancient Roman Church against the new Roman Church, and to the true church cleaving to Christ against the false church persecuting those who believe in Christ. Against charges of heresy and schism, he affirmed the orthodoxy and catholicity of the evangelical churches. Against the charge of disunity among evangelicals he appealed to the New Testament and the early church with their differences in minor matters. He used the concept of Satan being bound a thousand years to explain the growth thereafter of papal error, but he also named people who had challenged that error.     

Mental images: Specific or general,personal or impersonal?

In three experiments the relation between visual images classified in terms of the four categories of personal, impersonal, specific, and general images was explored. The results showed that subjects were able to generate all types of images, with personal images being the easiest to recall. Personal images, together with general images, were the image types being easiest to integrate with one another. Overall, the observations suggested the existence of two imagery dimensions: specific-general, and personal-impersonal. Memory was found to be best for personal images. Personal images turned out to be easier to integrate in memory than specific images. The findings were discussed in terms of different image generation models.     

The Persuasive Effects of Emotive Visual Imagery: Superficial Manipulation or the Product of Passionate Reason?

This study reevaluates the persuasive impact of emotional visual appeals within politics and examines two different explanations for their effects. One possibility is that the effects of emotive visual images are essentially superficial in nature, consistent with the view that feelings aroused by an affective image are transferred somewhat mechanically to a political candidate or cause with which it is paired. This transfer-of-affect explanation suggests that emotional appeals may work best among the least informed voters or those paying the least attention to a persuasive political message. The second possibility is that emotional appeals work via passionate reason, in which affective responses to an emotive image are integrated with, and potentially bias, reasoned thought about the accompanying message. This integrated approach leads to the counterintuitive prediction that individuals who are most highly involved in an issue (and who know the most about it) are most influenced by emotional imagery. This prediction arises from growing evidence that people highly involved in value-laden social issues generate the strongest emotional responses to issue-related persuasive appeals. These two models were tested in a study in which undergraduate students were presented with a picture of a cute or an ugly animal and a flyer from an organization advocating a pro- or anti-environment stance with respect to preserving the animal's habitat. The responses showed that emotive imagery was most persuasive among the most involved environment supporters, providing clear evidence of passionate reasoning.     

The Brest Bible and other Polish translations of the Bible in the poetical works of Erazm Otwinowski

Abstract

Polish antitrinitarians of the sixteenth century (also known as Polish Brethren and later as Socinians) rejected some of the most fundamental dogmatic beliefs of traditional Christianity. However, while their Church emerged as the result of a split in the Reformed Church, they still used the Brest Bible to read not only the Old Testament (the antitrinitarian translation of Szymon Budny was controversial and rarely accepted by the Brethren), but also the New Testament. This situation is discussed here using the example of Erazm Otwinowski, a major antitrinitarian poet. His two major poetical works are based on various biblical passages. In his Parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ there is considerable evidence that he used both the Brest Bible and the first edition of the New Testament translated by his antitrinitarian friend, Marcin Czechowic. However, it is also possible that he used Jakub Wujek's Catholic version, even if strongly contested in Czechowic's polemical works.     

Individual differences of visual imagery ability in the benefit of a survival judgment task

This study investigated whether or not visual imagery ability affected the benefit of a survival judgment task. Based on the median split of their VVIQ score, 92 undergraduate students were classified as either high imagers (n = 46) or low imagers (n = 46). In the survival task, participants were requested to judge whether an item presented in the form of two Chinese characters was necessary or not in a survival situation. In the image judgment task, participants were requested to judge whether an item presented in the form of two Chinese characters arouses mental images or not. Participants were presented 18 concrete nouns at 4 s intervals in each condition. In both the survival judgment and the image judgment tasks, high imagers recalled more words than low imagers did. This result showed that imagery ability influenced the benefit of the survival judgment task. These results were discussed from the functional perspective of memory. Finally, we proposed the combination hypothesis, which combined elaboration and functional perspectives to explain the benefit of the survival judgment task.     

Falling into language life: a montage of pre‐faces in search of a text‐ual body

Clinical work, as all of consciousness, is steeped in and emerges out of language. Language is the medium of our knowing, and knowing the medium of our relating. Language has us; words dream us. For the mythical Navajo as for John of the New Testament, in the Beginning was the Word. Before any kind of distinction of thought, feeling, sensation or intuition comes language – language, not as ‘just words’, but as image. Words are images, and images as encompassing worlds present themselves as and through language. As a determinant of identity, language undermines all cues as to individual subjectivity, Yahweh's ‘I am here’ rendering time and place relative, and subjectivity co‐constituted. This paper is a meditation on language for clinicians in the form that language presents itself, as a meandering flow of consciousness with associations and signposts leading onward.     

Intuitions and introspections about imagery: the role of imagery experience in shaping an investigator's theoretical views

Early in a scientific debate, before much evidence has accumulated, why are some scientists inclined toward one position and other scientists toward the opposite position? We explore this issue with a focus on scientists' views of the ‘imagery debate’ that unfolded in Cognitive Science during the late 1970s and early 1980s. We examine the possibility that, during the early years of this debate, researchers' views were shaped by their own conscious experiences with imagery. Consistent with this suggestion, a survey of 150 psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists showed that those who experienced their own visual imagery as vivid and picture‐like recall being more sympathetic in 1980 to the view that, in general, images are picture‐like. Similarly, those who have vivid images and who regularly use their images in cognition were more inclined to believe that issues of image vividness deserve more research. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Image Attributions and Smoking Intentions Among Seventh Grade Students

Previous research has indicated that adolescents who intend to smoke differ from those who do not intend to smoke in the imagery they associate with smoking. The present study examined relationships among self-image, ideal self-image, image of smokers in general and image of models in cigarette ads for seventh-grade students. The strongest finding was a positive correspondence of smokers image to self-image in predicting intention to smoke cigarettes. This correspondence between smokers image and self-image derived from a relative depression of self-image in combination with a relative elevation of smokers image for youth who were more likely to report intentions to smoke. There was also a trend for the ideal self-image of youth with greater intentions to smoke to be similarly depressed. It is suggested that when both self-concept and aspirations for self-improvement are diminished, smoking may seem particularly desirable as a means of enhancing identity.