Articles varia
- LACOCQUE André - Le grand cri de Jésus dans Matthieu 27/50
- PRIGENT Pierre - L’interprétation de l’Apocalypse en débat
- COTTRET Bernard - Le paradigme perdu. Le Great Awakening, entre la faute et l’innocence
- VINCENT Jean Marcel - « Visionnaire, va-t’en ! » Interprétation d’Amos 7/10-17 dans son contexte
- CAUSSE Jean-Daniel - Eloge de l’avant-dernier
According to Matthew, Jesus with his last breath on the cross shouts something unspecified but which provokes a series of apocalyptic phenomena. One of the most characteristic is the tearing of the temple veil, which used to restrict the domain of God’s presence. Jesus’s cry, it is here argued, is itself apocalyptic. A strong Jewish tradition has it that the martyrs by the hands of the Romans uttered highly significant last words. Jesus’s Great Cry, it is suggested, was the utterance of the Tetragrammaton.
For the last two decades, exegetical literature about the Book of Revelation has undergone remarkable change. It was initially thought that generic analysis was the most appropriate method. As the limits of the method became apparent, it has been replaced by narrative analysis enriched by an intertextual approach. The literature on Revelation was further marked by the major commentary of D. E. Aune. Pierre Prigent offers an interpretation of this evolution.
Paradigm Lost : the Great Awakening, from sin to innocence. The great American revival of the mid eighteenth-century was marked by renewed emphasis on original sin and transgression. Guilt, fear, repent and conversion are the ingredients of that religious correctness which challenged the authority of well established ministers. Taking as a reference J. Edwards’Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758), the author examines the interplay between guilt and innocence, knowledge and experience in the age of the Enlightenment, a few decades before the American revolution. Taking up the opposition between Old and New Testament, and raising wild millenial expectations, the American Great Awakening is largely an interpretative myth, emphasizing the missionary role of the New World and its manifest destiny. Though they disagreed on the universality of salvation, George Whitefield, and to a lesser degree John Wesley, the English founders of methodism, were influenced by the new evangelical spirit. Tocqueville himself in his seminal study of democracy showed how the new Homo Americanus was another Adam revisited.
The narrative about the encounter between the prophet Amos and Amatsia, the priest of the royal sanctuary of Bethel, interrupts the autobiographic cycle of visions (7/1-8 and 8/1-3). This insertion raises some questions. Is it due to some clumpsiness or even some error of transmission ? A closer look at the redactionnal logic of the writing of Amos, the study of the lexical and syntactical links between the narrative and both visions that frame it, and a particular attention to the rhetorical phenomenon of repetition lead to a different conclusion : the interlacing of the narrative with the visions is intentional and highly significant. It gives to the narrative an emblematic quality.
By means of the concept of « penultimate reality », Jean-Daniel Causse adresses notions of existence and world in relation to the ultimate or the eschaton. Reinterpreting Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling he defines the human subject as grounded in the ultimate movement of faith. He shows how the courage to act finds its source in ethical views that are broken and reconstructed by faith. Eventually, he finds in the mystical tradition an understanding of the eschaton which prevents the closure of the world and incorporates existence into the penultimate space of a fruitful insatisfaction.