NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 62, Issue 2, 2008

Since the Romantic period, painters have no longer made use of traditional Christian iconography to express religious transcendence. Taking their cue from Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion, painters have sought for new, personal ways to express religious transcendence. One example is Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Monk by the Sea’. Rosenblum argues, in his Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, that there is a parallel between Friedrich and the abstract expressionist Rothko with respect to the expression to religious transcendence. In this article I investigate how the experience of transcendence that Rothko’s paintings want to evoke is to be described. Is it an experience of the sublime in the Romantic tradition? Is it the evocation of the ultimate in accordance with Tillich’s broad concept of religion? Does it display affinity between Rothko and the postmodern sublime of Lyotard? Or is it a transcendent experience that cannot be situated so easily within the options supplied? After determining Rothko’s understanding of transcendence, some issues will be brought up that could be fruitful for Christian theology.

In post-Old Testament Jewish literature both a zealot and an anti-zealot Elijah tradition emerge. Particularly in Luke, but also in Mark and John, the miracle stories of Elijah and Elisha function as models for the miracles that are told about Jesus. In the Synoptics we find a reframing of the Elijah tradition: only the miracles with a positive outcome are used and zealot features are rejected. Together with other New Testament data (for example from Paul’s writings) this leads to the conclusion that this reinterpretation goes back to Jesus himself. This means that he is the first whose message clearly indicates an anti-zealot reframing of the Elijah texts.

In his book God is so great that He doesn’t have to exist, Gerrit Manenschijn claims that God exists in language. Religious language consists of metaphors and has a performative rather than a descriptive nature. Since religious reality is an invention rather than a discovery we cannot make truth-claims about God and other religious entities. Although Manenschijn claims that moral reality takes shape in the same way, there is a difference on the level of their foundations: religious reality rests on existential questions, whereas moral reality rests on moral sentiments. This enables morality to make truth-claims. When altered in such a way that his view on the foundation of moral reality matches the foundation of religious reality, Manenschijn’s theory not only becomes coherent but also provides us with a persuasive theory of Christian theology and morality which is in accordance with influential contemporary views on language and epistemology.

This article reviews eschatological interpretations of Isaiah, Psalms, and Daniel in the New Testament in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Q 7:18-23 and 4Q521 attest to a horizon of expectation that an anointed messenger (Isa. 61:1) and divine miracles (e.g. Isa. 26:19) confirm hope in the Lord – hope that the Jesus-movement identified with Jesus as Lord. The Davidic messianism that exegesis of Ps. 110:1 in Mrk. 12:35-37a par. counters is partly informed by accents of Davidic messianism in 11QPs^a. Mark 13:26-27 par., that alludes to Dan. 7:13-14, shares with 4QpsDan^a ar 24 2 the motif of the gathering of the elect.