NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 58, Issue 2, 2004

A recently discovered Byzantine Greek document presents 25 questions meant to serve Christians as arguments in debates with Jews on the interpretation of the Bible. The document is here translated into Dutch, with an introduction and comments.

Immink’s work sharply formulates some fundamental questions for practical theology, among which questions in relation to the knowledge of God, especially from the perspective of ‘classical reformation theology’. From this perspective Immink evaluates hermeneutics within practical theology negatively, because it is does not satisfy the epistemological criteria of ‘external realism’. The author counters this criticism from three different issues referring to the interaction between subject and object in knowledge, the criteria of correspondence and coherence of knowledge, and the fallibility in knowledge, and asks the question to what extent ‘classical reformation theology’ is still relevant for churches in modern society.

The priority of God in the encounter between God and the human being does not extinguish our human subjectivity in the act of faith. In the Reformed tradition the divine initiative, as it is expressed in the iustificatio dei, is best understood as a performative act in the human mind that evokes our human awareness of God. Likewise, it is unnecessary to construe a contradiction between human experiences of God and the true God. Under certain conditions human experiences can be such that they unite us with God and consequently reveal the real God.

In this article, an overview is presented of the research about God images which have been done in North America and Western Europe during the last forty years. Both the results and methodological matters come up for discussion. The literature is described in the light of Rizzuto’s object-relational theory about images of God.

In this article we introduce and discuss the Russian-Orthodox and Russian religious-philosophical view on the relation between man and nature. There is a special focus on the work of the economist, philosopher and theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944). It is concluded that Bulgakovs thought can renew and inspire Western theological and philosophical discussions on man’s relation with nature, although his one-sided focus on the ethos of society, does not do justice to the importance of structural reforms of social life.