My friend Roar Sørensen has added a comment to some comments on the blog. Thank you! I think it is very important, and today not very controversial, to state that “Jesus fit within the Judaism of his day.” Even though I think this statement should be further qualified, this represents quite a broad consensus. In [...]
My longest trip this fall was first three days in Dresden, then another four teaching in Moscow, plus three days travel… Ten days. Wearying, but interesting.
The Dresden symposium was held at Hannah-Arendt-Institut-für-Totalitarismusforschung at the TU Dresden. Around fifteen scholars, all but myself from Germany, read papers over the theme. ‘Voelkisch’ religion is difficult to delimit. [...]
My friend David Nyström has commented (see comment) on my previous post on Israel and the Church, and I think his question is so important that I put the answer into an own post.
However, his question is a difficult one. David writes about supersessionism, and adds:
I’m also not very convinced by its most powerful alternatives [...]
In his book The Body of Faith, a fascinating account of classical Judaism in the clothes of modern theological and philosophical discourse, the Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod writes:
The circumcised body of Israel is the […] carnal presence through which the redemption makes its way in history. Salvation is of the Jews because the flesh of [...]
Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
These were the words of Adolf Hitler as he motivated his plans for a genocide on a far larger scale, that on the Jews:
Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them [...]
As I mentioned in my latest post, some perspectives fundamental in the Bible are almost always missing in ‘systematic theologies’. Like in chemistry it makes a tremendous difference if we add a certain substance or not, or if we miss a catalyst. I do believe Israelology is a key issue in Christian theology, which is [...]
One of the more important books I have ever read is R. Kendall Soulen. The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. In this book he discusses the place of Israel in Christian theology. When I made a survey over so-called Systematic Theologies (Protestant and Catholic), I recognised that that place almost [...]
To explore the roots of theological anti-Semitism is an important project, far from finished. In a comment to an earlier blogpost, Kevin Edgecomb has made some important comments not so much to my own writing, as to David Robles’ comment (see Anti-Semitism in Eastern and Western theology). I have no special insights into the question [...]
A quite common misunderstanding among some Protestant Christians is that first there was a New Testament, then, after a few hundred years doctrine was construed to meet resistance against the truth. However, the opposite seems to be the case. Early Christianity read the Jewish Bible as its own, and I am fascinated by Birger Gerhardsson’s [...]
Rom 11:17, rendered correctly, is a key for understanding Romans, and especially Romans 9–11. But of course this ‘verse’ (Paul never wrote a single verse—they were created much later) is a part of the whole. A letter like Romans truly is as fabric, with a warp of ideas and thoughts, and then the weft, containing [...]