NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 74, Issue 1, 2020

In 2013 the World Council of Churches adopted the pilgrimage theme for its policy in the coming years. In this article the implications of the WCC’s use of the pilgrim metaphor is explored and analyzed. It is argued that, in order to present themselves credibly as involved in a Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace, Christian faith communities should embody – at least – the demanding virtues of hope, humility, and the relativization of self-identity.

This article discusses Jewish travellers in the Roman Empire. After a short survey of practical aspects of Jewish travel in the Roman world I will zoom in on two Jewish authors who wrote about journeys: Philo of Alexandria and the author of Luke-Acts. I intend to show that Jewish experiences with travel in the Roman Empire often manifest a tension between participating in the global possibilities for travel the empire had to offer and a local interest in maintaining one’s own distinctive tradition and identity.

The central question in this article is: ‘Are committed young Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and humanists in the Netherlands and Flanders intolerant towards other groups?’ To answer this question, we analyse survey data and interviews collected in this research population. We first look at intergroup attitudes, which mainly show a pluralist approach towards the plurality of worldviews. Subsequently, we discuss the levels of religiocentrism and perceived intergroup threat among these young people. Finally, we search the interviews for practical examples concerning interviewees’ willingness to accept a plurality of worldviews in the public square. Although liberal values are dominant, much depends on the specific topic and how it is presented in the media. Generally, interviewees are tolerant towards other worldviews.

In the perspective of the forthcoming English translation of K.H. Miskotte’s Biblical ABC’s and therewith its foreseeable renewed appropriation, some aspects of this classical document in the Dutch history of theology deserve reconsideration. These aspects are successively: 1. Its genesis in a course for leaders of biblical reading groups in neighbourhoods all over the city of Amsterdam (1941), of which Miskotte himself afterwards didn’t have a correct recollection; 2. Its background both in the method of the discovery of the Leitwortstil (M. Buber) or the Formgeheimnis of Biblical narratives (F. Rosenzweig) and in the, at least in Miskotte’s perception, ‘Israelitish’ tendency of K. Barth’s doctrine of the divine perfections (1940); 3. Its earliest reception, in which J. Koopmans remarkably noticed, that ‘now’ (i.e. under the German occupation of the Netherlands) ‘we don’t have a Church anymore, apart from the form, in which she can be found in the Bible’; 4. Some characteristics of its post-war edition of 1966, revised by Miskotte himself, added utterances on new frontiers (e.g. questioning all authority, the ‘death of God’). With such a multi-layered text as its result, one can understand why the English translators return to the more unequivocal edition of 1941.