Author: Moshe Halbertal
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827965
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes. Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition? Halbertal concludes that, through the medium of the concealed, Jewish thinkers integrated into the heart of the Jewish tradition diverse cultural influences such as Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticisims. And the creation of an added concealed layer, unregulated and open-ended, became the source of the most daring and radical interpretations of the tradition.
Author: Saeed Hamid-Khani
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725291576
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 601
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Book Description
The elusive disposition of John's language has been noted by biblical scholars throughout the history of New Testament studies. The Fourth Gospel is seen as so simple to grasp and yet often pointing beyond itself and beckoning the reader to read deeper. Various socio-linguistic studies have explained this feature as the reflection of the sectarian tendencies in the Johannine Christianity. In his study Saeed Hamid-Khani questions these approaches as inadequate. In turn, he examines John's language within an exegetical and theological framework. He argues that the Sitz im Leben of Johannine language was an environment in which the Hebrew Scriptures were the dominant conceptual force for both the Jews and the Christians. In this context he argues that the essential function of John's enigmatic language is wedded to the Evangelist's purpose in writing the Gospel: namely a steadfast focus upon setting forth that Jesus is the Christ according to the witness of Israel's Scriptures. It is here in these echoes and thematic allusions to the Scriptures that we find the answer to the function and significance of John's unique language: i.e., Jesus is the Messiah, the Saviour of the world, and he is the visible image of the invisible God, the embodiment of the self-revelation of God according to the Scriptures. However, these truths are concealed from the undiscerning and are only revealed by the spirit of God to those who are born of God.
Author: April D DeConick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134935994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
In Western religious traditions, God is conventionally conceived as a humanlike creator, lawgiver, and king, a being both accessible and actively present in history. Yet there is a concurrent and strong tradition of a God who actively hides. The two traditions have led to a tension between a God who is simultaneously accessible to humanity and yet inaccessible, a God who is both immanent and transcendent, present and absent. Western Gnostic, esoteric, and mystical thinking capitalizes on the hidden and hiding God. He becomes the hallmark of the mystics, Gnostics, sages, and artists who attempt to make accessible to humans the God who is secreted away. 'Histories of the Hidden God' explores this tradition from antiquity to today. The essays focus on three essential themes: the concealment of the hidden God; the human quest for the hidden God, and revelations of the hidden God.
Author: Birgit Meyer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804744645
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
This is the first book to explore comparatively how magic—usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern—is also at home in modernity.
Author: Sissela Bok
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030776172X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The author of Lying shows how the ethical issues raised by secrets and secrecy in our careers or private lives take us to the heart of the critical questions of private and public morality.
Author: Heikki Räisänen
Publisher: Bloomsbury T&T Clark
ISBN: 9780567292537
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Räisänen offers a new perspective on the composition and meaning of the collection of motifs in Mark known as the 'messianic secret'.
Author: Moshe Halbertal
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842352
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147
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Book Description
The idea and practice of sacrifice play a profound role in religion, ethics, and politics. In this brief book, philosopher Moshe Halbertal explores the meaning and implications of sacrifice, developing a theory of sacrifice as an offering and examining the relationship between sacrifice, ritual, violence, and love. On Sacrifice also looks at the place of self-sacrifice within ethical life and at the complex role of sacrifice as both a noble and destructive political ideal. In the religious domain, Halbertal argues, sacrifice is an offering, a gift given in the context of a hierarchical relationship. As such it is vulnerable to rejection, a trauma at the root of both ritual and violence. An offering is also an ambiguous gesture torn between a genuine expression of gratitude and love and an instrument of exchange, a tension that haunts the practice of sacrifice. In the moral and political domains, sacrifice is tied to the idea of self-transcendence, in which an individual sacrifices his or her self-interest for the sake of higher values and commitments. While self-sacrifice has great potential moral value, it can also be used to justify the most brutal acts. Halbertal attempts to unravel the relationship between self-sacrifice and violence, arguing that misguided self-sacrifice is far more problematic than exaggerated self-love. In his exploration of the positive and negative dimensions of self-sacrifice, Halbertal also addresses the role of past sacrifice in obligating future generations and in creating a bond for political associations, and considers the function of the modern state as a sacrificial community.
Author: William Wrede
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 0227176839
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
William Wrede was among the first to recognise the creative contribution of the Gospel writers. His work thus laid the foundation for the work of the Form Critics, Redaction Critics and Literary Critics whose scholarship dominated New Testament studies during the twentieth century. This highly influential work was throughout this period the departure point for all studies in the Gospel of Mark and in the literary methods of the evangelists. It remains highly relevant for its ground-breaking approach to the classically complicated question of whether Jesus saw himself and represented himself as the Messiah.
Author: J. Sidlow Baxter
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310871395
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1846
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Book Description
Explore the Book is not a commentary with verse-by-verse annotations. Neither is it just a series of analyses and outlines. Rather, it is a complete Bible survey course. No one can finish this series of studies and remain unchanged. The reader will receive lifelong benefit and be enriched by these practical and understandable studies. Exposition, commentary, and practical application of the meaning and message of the Bible will be found throughout this giant volume. Bible students without any background in Bible study will find this book of immense help as will those who have spent much time studying the Scriptures, including pastors and teachers. Explore the Book is the result and culmination of a lifetime of dedicated Bible study and exposition on the part of Dr. Baxter. It shows throughout a deep awareness and appreciation of the grand themes of the gospel, as found from the opening book of the Bible through Revelation.
Author: Benjamin A. Saltzman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812296842
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
How beliefs about human and divine secrets informed medieval ideas about the mind and shaped the practices of literary interpretations What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period during which the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knew all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remained unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and the world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes, in the early Middle Ages a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God's constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue. Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God's omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual's belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past.
