European Journal of Theology - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2022

The Book of Joshua, especially its introductory passage, clearly presents itself as a sequel to Deuteronomy. As one reads further into Joshua, however, several elements in this book become problematic. As a result, readers of Joshua are pushed back to re-read Deuteronomy after their reading of Joshua. Do the treaties with Rahab and with the Gibeonites contravene the commands in Deuteronomy? Is Joshua 11:15 a correct verdict? The article argues that Joshua enjoys considerable freedom in carrying out commands from Yahweh which do not specify his required behaviour in detail. It then argues that the book makes clever use of anachrony, especially in the form of analepsis, which means that the narrator omits information until a later point in the narrative, encouraging readers to re-read, and perhaps re-interpret, parts of the story already narrated. When they do so, they see that divine commands in Joshua leave space for human variation and that the Book of the Torah does not address all possible issues.

Roberto Bellarmino was the defender of Roman Catholic orthodoxy as it was re-affirmed at the Council of Trent over against the critical claims made by the various strands of the Protestant Reformation. This paper will provide a brief introduction to Bellarmine’s life, especially as far as his early engagements with Protestantism are concerned. Then it will sketch the apologetic import of his critical interaction with Protestant theology as it is presented in his magnum opus, namely the Controversies. The question will be asked if, and in which ways, articles 9 and 10 of the Apostles’ Creed are the central points of conflict between Rome and the Reformation. Until now this issue has not received sufficient attention and the present paper will try to address it. Bellarmine worked hard to achieve his objectives by way of winning the ‘war’ with theological arguments. For him it was either Rome or the Reformation (aut-aut).

As a result of the process of secularisation, Christians in Europe are increasingly becoming a minority. Therefore, European churches are challenged to develop appropriate innovative models of contextualisation for the gospel instead of swerving into nostalgic retrospection or uncritically adopting theological approaches from other continents. This article presents the contextual pole of such a model, which consists of three areas: aesthetics, ethics and ecclesiology; they match people's aesthetic and ethical needs, and their desire for truth, manifested in the search for the legitimacy of one's actions in a group. Each area is assigned an adequate theological source that enables contextual correlation: aesthetics, the ambiguous imagery from Revelation; ethics, the theology of mission of the First Letter of Peter; and ecclesiology, the call to the disciples in Matthew 5 to ‘be salt and light’. This ideal-typical model perceives the increasing aestheticisation of society as a dominant cultural feature and uses it as a starting point for a process of contextualisation. The context pole is determined by the anthropological dynamic which leads from the ‘beautiful’ to the ‘good’ and from the ‘good’ to the ‘true.

Partnership in mission is not a matter of efficiency so much as a matter of theology. Mutuality in God’s mission is far more than ‘doing things together’. Before we become engaged in mission projects with partners in a different cultural context, it is important to reflect on the principles that God has revealed to us, primarily that mission is His; it is missio Dei. Out of that realisation we begin to ask what our role is and what mutuality means when it comes to different partners joining in what God is doing already.

The present article focuses on the importance of a theological approach when Christians from different social and cultural contexts are in mission together. After a word on missio Dei, it emphasizes the value of identifying the God-given assets that each participant (be it individual, a group, a church, etc.) can bring into the mutual mission engagement. Subsequently, the article argues that all mission partners have to share their views on interpreting the missional needs. For a true mutuality in mission we not only need each other’s gifts, we also need each other’s insights. No-one has the monopoly of truth when partners engage in God’s mission. The ‘locals’ may know certain things better, but the view of the ‘foreigner’ is needed just as well.

This article discusses the relationship between national legislation and local politics in Norway with regard to religious freedom and religious policies. The material investigated consists of a new (1 January 2021) Norwegian law on religious and life stance communities, and the ongoing public discourse which followed it. The first part of the article introduces the historical development of Norwegian religiosity and religious policy. The second part analyses the new Norwegian legislation and gives four examples of how this is being received in local politics. The third part of the article investigates the differences between the various responses in view of theories on religious freedom and religious policies. The article argues that the national legislation and the local politics operate with common terms to describe their ideals and that the tensions between both are the result of different understandings of these ideals. The observations made in this investigation are likely to have clear relevance for other European countries.