NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 45, Issue 2, 1991

The words of the ‘wise women’ in 2 Samuel 14 and 20 represent a stereotype discourse which stresses additional values and, through this merit, is capable of reprimanding even the powerful and mighty with impunity. In 2 Samuel 14 the woman’s intervention serves to resolve King David’s dilemma between his duties as a monarch and his fear of loosing his children (and perhaps his fatherly affections for Absalom as well). The woman’s intervention enables the king, through an analogy with a fictious case she presented to him, to let Absalom return to Jerusalem safely without David suffering further damage to his pride and reputation.

The validity of the textcritical maxim to weigh witnesses and not to count hem, appears from the tradition of I Cor. 11:24 and Luk. 22:43-44. Large numbers of variants can be shown to have arisen from the Byzantine liturgy and therefore carry much less weight. When attention is paid to the very many ‘liturgical’ readings in minuscules and lectionaries it is clear that in many cases the champions of the so-called Majority Text, who often prefer an early Byzantine text, are forced to abandon their guiding principle of counting manuscripts.

Apart from all his other activities, the Dutch humanist Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522-1590) turns out to have been a theologian who, as such, deserves much more attention than he is given nowadays. This point has become clear by an analysis of some passages from Coornhert’s main theological work Vande Predestinatie. In particular, his theories of free will versus necessity and of divine permission are explained. The latter is shown to be standing in the medieval scholastic tradition.

In this article the central position of the concept of mystery in Eberhard Jiingel’s theology is discussed. The word is used by Jiingel in an explicitly anti-agnostic sense. Because of God’s identification with the Crucified Christ, His being can be ontologically thought of as ‘more than necessary’ and His presence as lying beyond the everyday interpretation of being present or absent. Notions such as God’s absence or His being hidden specify the concept of revelation. Critical attention is paid to Jiingel’s tendency to speculative thought.