Articles varia
- BAUKS Michaela - Le Shabbat : un temple dans le temps
- CAMPBELL Gordon - Un procédé de composition négligé de l’Apocalypse de Jean : repérage, caractéristiques et cas témoin d’une approche parodique
- GRAPPE Christian - L’apport de l’essénisme à la compréhension du christianisme naissant (Une perspective historique)
- TEULIÉ Gilles - L’Église réformée hollandaise d’Afrique du Sud : une histoire du calvinisme afrikaner, 1652-2002
In the Sacerdotal Works, the Sabbath is regarded as the seventh day that has come to replace the old festival celebrating the full moon, since the days of exile. Such a shift in meaning appears to have occurred for the first time in this very work. It becomes rather striking if one compares it with the Book of Ezekiel chere the Sabbath remains mostly secondary. Ezekiel himself may have regarded the Sabbath as a full moon festival and the occurrences of weekly Sabbaths in his Book were presumably the result of later rewritings. According to Michaela Bauks, the Sacerdotal Works established the weekly celebration of the Sabbath at the time of exile.
Today, the Book of Revelation is generally taken to be the complex narrative unity which E.-B Allo argued it was in 1933. Allo recognised that one compositional factor contributing to this unity is the extensive use made of carefully worked antithetical parallelism, what Jürgen Roloff in 1987 called a parody approach. Both Allo and Roloff, however, underestimated the scope and significance of the phenomenon, and scholarship has never advanced very far along the track they proposed. Based on an in-depth study of the literary deployment of extensive parodic materials in the text, this article goes on to provide a synthesis delineating the various traits which characterise parody in Revelation and, as a control, conducts a sample exegesis of Rev.13/1 14/5 (studied in mutual relation to other related textual data in the book), a segment in which these features find a particularly clear illustration. Finally, as an extension of the trajectory followed here, certain foreseeable directions in which exegesis of Revelation could profitably move are suggested.
Taking into account the Essenian movement and its writings is essential in order to get a better understanding of the early Christian movement. Christian Grappe substantiates his thesis by tackling first the large fields where such similitudes occur : ecclesiology, the interpretation of Scripture, Messianic representations. Starting from a comparison of the lay-out of the Jerusalem primitive community with the Essenian pattern, the author then proceeds with reconstructing the history of Essenian influences upon the dawning Christian movement.
Since the first permanent settlement of a white colony in 1652, the history of South Africa is undistinguishable from that of the Dutch Reformed Church established by the first Calvinist settlers. This Church, perhaps more than anywhere else, has played a vital role in the development of the country. Its influence on the mentalities was not only spiritual, but it also contributed in a decisive way to the political life. It is therefore through the theological developments of that Church that one can understand the attitude of the Afrikaners and what prompted them to institute and then reject apartheid in the XXth century. It is this long path through history which linked both the Afrikaner people and its Reformed Church(es) which is at stake here, as we celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Calvinist landing in Southern Africa.