AT 2013 Supplementum 17

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Browsing AT 2013 Supplementum 17 by Subject "Biblical spirituality"

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    Catherine of Siena's wisdom on discernment and het reception of scripture
    (Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State, 2013) Villegas, Diana L.
    Catherine of Siena’s wisdom on discernment represents a significant development in the history of this essential Christian theme. Her teaching is the fruit of personal wisdom rather than formal study as she was an uneducated lay woman in fourteenth century Italy. In this article I show how Scripture was central to Catherine’s wisdom. First I show that she was exposed to Scripture primarily orally and that she assimilated what she heard through her life of prayer and relationship with God. I describe the central biblical themes at the heart of her teaching on discernment, namely growth in charity and capacity for truth, and I show how these are related to her wisdom on discernment. I then examine how Catherine applied her teaching through an analysis of a letter to Pope Gregory XI. In this article I will show that central New Testament themes are at the heart of Catherine of Siena’s teaching on discernment and I will describe how the knowledge of Scripture that suffused her teaching was not internalized as a result of formal study, but rather as a result of her experience of God in prayer and of her personal reflection. Her oral reception of Scripture became transformed through her mystical experience into wisdom that has become a major Christian classic; indeed Catherine is one of only three women named Doctor of the Church in the Catholic tradition.
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    Discernment and biblical spirituality: an overview and evaluation of recent research
    (Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State, 2013) Waaijman, Kees
    This article briefly and very generally explores some of the developments in the field of biblical spirituality over the past six decades by analysing and discussing some seminal publications on the theme of discernment. It begins the overview with the articles on discernment and discretion in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité (1957) and then focuses on publications of the past twenty years. It discusses how discernment has moved beyond uncritically assumed dichotomies, beyond the separation of discernment and discretion, and the division between the Bible and philosophy. It also points out how recent publications emphasised for the first time the importance of communal discernment and thus overcame the untenable dualism between personal and communal discernment.
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    Discernment in 1 Kings 19:1-18: biblical spirituality in works of art
    (Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State, 2013) Bos, Anne-Marie
    This article examines the story of 1 Kings 19:1-18 as a story of discernment. It is a story about a divine-human relational process of Elijah and his God, but also a story that draws the reader into a divine-human relational process. The article discerns a fundamental element of this relational process: a perspective change. This aspect of discernment is indicated in the text along the detour of looking at two works of visual art that refer to the biblical story.
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    God's Holy Spirit: a back-story from the Joseph narrative (Genesis 37-50)
    (Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State, 2013) Green, Barbara
    The story of Judah within the longer Joseph story (Genesis 37-50) provides an apt place for readers to discern the work of the Holy Spirit and what is recognized in spirituality as the work of discernment. The character goes from venal and crass to empathetic and self-giving, and the question is how the narrative shows evidence of that process. With the help of the philosopher/theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the narrated experience of the character in seven scenes is examined for evidence of Judah’s journey of transformation – presumably guided by God’s widening and inspiring Spirit, with special attention given to the scene (Genesis 44) where Judah must persuade his (unrecognized) brother Joseph, serving as Viceroy of Egypt, to allow Judah to take punishment in place of their brother Benjamin for the sake of their father. The larger Holy Spirit and discernment context of the story is the dreams of Joseph.
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    A hermeneutic of justice. Justice as discernment in Matthew
    (Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State, 2013) Welzen, Huub
    In some important dictionaries for the study of the New Testament, δικαιοσύνη has two meanings: justice in the sense of distributive justice and righteousness as a relational notion. In Matthew, we discover that the word concerns a threefold loyalty: loyalty to the law, loyalty to fellow people, and loyalty to the will of God. In the Sermon of the Mount, the word is used in a polemical context. Δικαιοσύνη is the congruency of the explanation of the law and doing the law. It is the opposite of ὑπόκρισις which is the incongruence of explanation and doing. Δικαιοσύνη is an eschatological reality. This means that it is a result of the coming of the kingdom of God in history. This coming is thought to occur at the end of time, but it is also a reality in the present. One can observe it at work in the conduct of people. It is a criterion in the discernment of the correct explanation of the law, and it is a criterion in the discernment of the correct doing.