NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 50, Issue 4, 1996

There are only a few traces of the famous story about the fall of Jericho (Jos.6) outside the book of Joshua. The narrative has its own important, but isolated place. The historical-critical interpretation discovered several layers in the text but there are only a few interpretations which explain the structure of the final text. The article shows the relevance of both approaches, the synchronic and the diachronic one. In the diachronic analysis the earliest stratum proofs to be a miracle story. There is no secular conquest of Jericho. The final text stresses the exemplary role of Rachab and Achan in connection with the overall theme of Joshua 2-11. The reason to choose Jericho as a background for this theological theme was not military, not historical, but topographical.

Paulus Tosari, the spiritual leader of the Javanese christians in Majawarna, possibly in 1857 wrote a christian tract about vows as a reaction to a dance party (tayuban), which had been held by an important member of the congregation in fulfilment of a vow. Tosari’s tract is cast in Javanese verse forms (tembang macapat) and was meant for sung performance. The text is here transliterated and translated in full. It is suggested that the only surviving copy of the text was an example of ‘clever’ missionary literature.

For more than a century, the relationship of the Reformation to subsequent developments in Protestant thought, particulary to the ‘scholastic’ or ‘orthodox’ theology of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century, has been a subject of study by historians and theologians. In this paper a survey of the (widely) divergent theories of older and recent scholarship regarding the continuity or discontinuity between the theology of the Reformers and the doctrine of their successors is presented. In conclusion some proposals are made for future research. The basic assumption of this paper is that the term ‘Reformed Scholasticism’ should not be used pejoratively, or in a laudatory sense: it should be used purely descriptive, to indicates a methodological approach to theological questions.

In the first part of this article, a survey is given of feminist criticisms of traditional conceptualizations of evil. In the second part, the author argues that on the basis of these criticisms, the project of theodicy should not be rejected. He argues, moreover, that the feminist proposal of conceptualizing evil in ‘tragic’ terms might help theodicists to meet the criticisms brought up against the project of theodicy both by feminists and antitheodicists.