NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 76, Issue 2, 2022

James M. Gustafson, who died in 2021, has influenced generations of theologians and ethicists. After providing a short biography, the present article highlights some of Gustafson’s most influential contributions to theological ethics: his rejection of anthropocentrism in theology, the way in which he connects Bible and tradition with science, philosophy, and human experience into one comprehensive theory, and the central role of piety in his theology. Each of his contributions merit attention in theological education.

Between Awakening and Mediation: Dutch Encounters with the Theology of August Tholuck

The prominent German theologian August Tholuck (1799–1877) stood in close contact with several leading persons in the Dutch nineteenth-century religious, theological, and ecclesiastical field. However, recent historiography has hardly paid any attention to the relation between Tholuck’s theology and the Dutch situation. This article discusses how Tholuck’s theology functioned in the context of Dutch theological debates on rationalism and biblical and religious authority. The article thereby, on the one hand, shows how in Tholuck’s theology the dialectic between subjective religious experience and objective religious truth was mediated. On the other, it analyses how nineteenth-century theology was internationally connected.

Combining review and critical discussion, the article begins by summarising the successive chapters of Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (2018). The book traces the development of the phrase goy from its meaning of “nation” in the Old Testament to the meaning of “non-Jew” in rabbinic literature. The apostle Paul is given a singular importance, as he was the first to use the Greek term ethnē in the singular to denote non-Jews, prefiguring rabbinic usage. The two main genres of rabbinic literature are thought to operate in tandem: while in halakhah, goy has an abstract, non-descript profile, aggadah provides it with colour and value, often in a very negative way. In reaction, the article posits that both Paul and the rabbis must be read in their historical context, where social polarisation linked with violence and war played a major role. Paul did not “invent” the goy but used the existing term ethnē in his dispute over the admissibility of gentile Christians in the 50s CE. As to the rabbis, the successive revolts against Rome seem to have gone along with a polarisation process which radicalised the antithetical sense of goy.

As part of NTT JTSR’s series on Key Texts, the present article discusses the influence of Harald Weinrich’s classic work Tempus: besprochene und erzählte Welt (1964) on biblical studies. It describes Harald Weinrich’s position in the field of text linguistics which emerged in the 1960s and explores its introduction into Biblical Hebrew studies in the 1970s and its remarkable lasting influence in the field of Biblical scholarship, which appears to be more pervasive than in other fields of linguistics and textual scholarship.