Search

his paper illustrates how Psalm 137 is used to address the question of suffering by Jews and Christians during various crises of faith. In Jewish tradition, the psalm has a “meta-narrative” which meant reading it as a story set in poetry, speaking to the people as a whole not only emotionally but also materially. Only in later Christian reception does the engagement with this psalm become more obviously physical; Christians tend to avoid seeing the psalm as a meta-narrative and instead select single verses or phrases from it in order to teach spiritual lessons, often through the use of “allegory”, where different words are used to speak to more individual concerns. A selective survey of Jewish and Christian approaches to suffering in the reception of Psalm 137 suggests that the Christian reception of Psalm 137 in times of suffering is distinct from the Jewish one. Whereas early Jewish readings had a more corporate and physical emphasis, as crisis after crisis threatened the identity of the Jews as a people, early Christian readings are more personal and spiritualised, heightened through the use of allegory. https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2019/v32n2a11

The whole Psalter could be seen as a second Torah, whose five books are witness to the making, dissolution and renewal of the covenant with David. This article looks at Book Four of that story (Psalms 90–106), where the figure of Moses and the traditions of the Exodus are prominent and create an alternative vision to the covenant with David which is under threat (Psalm 89). These seventeen psalms comprise four collections (90–92, 93–100, 101–103, 104–106). By focusing on later Jewish and Christian reception of each psalm, the article shows how Jewish tradition maintains the earlier emphases on Moses and pre-Davidic traditions, whilst Christian tradition interprets them after the time of David, through the person of Christ. However, the article demonstrates that each tradition also recognizes a universal theology throughout Book Four: God as refuge in 90–92, God's cosmic rule in 93–100, God's mercy in suffering in 101–103, and God as Creator and Redeemer in 104–106.

The paper highlights the enduring influence of Gunkel and Mowinckel throughout the twentieth century, but its main focus is from the 1980s when there was a notable change of emphasis from historically orientated works to studies of a more literary nature (noting here the roles of Wilson, Westermann and Brueggemann). Edited works from SBL in America (1993) and in Germany (1994) are seen as landmark publications. The paper also notes more collaborative works involving Jews and Christians — in the poetry of the psalms, in Qumran studies, and in the reception history of psalmody. The paper concludes by assessing the prospects of psalm studies in these relatively new areas.

It is impossible to read the first fifteen chapters of Exodus alongside the royal psalms and Zion hymns in the Psalter without noticing that very different perceptions of Israel's beginnings co-existed in the pre-exilic period. The Moses-Egypt tradition is about a wandering people, deprived of land and status, living under the promise of the protection offered by a nomadic clan-god; whilst the David-Zion tradition, fundamental to so many psalmists, concerns an established nation, a royal state cult which ratifies claims to land and status through its deity ‘housed’ in a Temple. And yet the Exodus tradition is used in a handful of psalms: the question thus arises — what purpose does it serve? Furthermore, why should the psalmists use such an anomalous tradition in this way?

The paper focuses on two individuals who have each made a seminal contribution to the debates between theology and the sciences in Oxford - Charles Darwin (in the mid�19th century), and Richard Dawkins (from the 1990s to the present day). It introduces Darwin by way of a more personal and visual view from Worcester College Chapel. The restoration of the chapel took place at about the same time as the debates between Huxley and Wilberforce in the Oxford University Museum over Charles Darwin�s On the Origin of the Species. The first part of the paper then traces these debates back: first to an earlier period of disputation represented by Galileo Galilei (c. 1564�1642), and then to a period of greater accommodation represented by Isaac Newton (1643�1727). Darwin represents a third, more controversial, stage. The paper then looks at a fourth period, from the mid�20th century onwards, which is marked by more eirenical attempts to demarcate science and theology by seeing the former again as asking the �how� questions and the latter, the �why� questions. It then focuses on a fifth, more disputatious stage, which was initiated by Richard Dawkins, professor in the Public Understanding of Science until 2008. Professor Dawkins challenges the idea that theology cannot be studied, because its focus is a non-existent object, �God�.The second part of the paper looks at various Oxford projects and Oxford theologians who have risen to this contemporary challenge. They include the work of the Ian Ramsey Centre; Justin Barret�s and John Trigg�s joint � 2 million project, supported by the John Templeton foundation, which examines scientific ideas about religion and the mind; Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006, who has conducted a number of media interviews with Richard Dawkins; Keith Ward, who has written several books engaging not only with Dawkins but is also the Cambridge Professor of Mathematics, Stephen Hawking; and Alistair McGrath, who has a doctorate in both science and theology, and who has similarly written and entered into public debates challenging Dawkin�s ideas.The paper ends by referring to John Barton, Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford, who argues that provided that theology is a subject which is properly critical, open to alien truth and combines both intellectual and emotional modes of perception, it can set an example for almost any academic discipline, both in the humanities and the sciences. The conclusion is therefore that, far from theology having to become more like another science, the sciences might be challenged to become more like theology.

This paper has been the result of teaching and comparing two very different Old Testament texts, both of which are concerned with the relationship between God and the created order. One is Genesis 1, with its priestly concerns for harmony within the created order; the other is the book of Amos, where one encounters a profoundly pessimistic view of the coming disorder throughout the natural world. In making associations between these two texts, one cannot help but ask why the earlier reflections in Amos offer such aradical and developed understandingof God's relationship with creation — quite distinct from the view of God evidenced in the first chapter of Genesis.