Articles varia
- CUVILLIER Élian - Obéissance à la loi et radicalisation dans le premier Evangile. Contribution à la question du lien entre Matthieu et le judaïsme du premier siècle
This essay analyses the tensions which can be traced in some passages of Matthew’s Gospel between obedience to commandments within the framework of the law and the radicalization of the latter suggested by the Matthean Jesus. First, Élian Cuvillier closely examines Matt. 5:17-20, and proposes a detailed exegesis of the pericope. Next, he focuses on three specific episodes where such tensions are particularly apparent: (1) antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount, (2) the controversy about divorce (19:1-19), (3) the rich young man episode (19:16-22). Then he checks how far these three passages are coherent with what Jesus declares in Matt. 23:2-3. Eventually, and as a conclusion, he ventures some reflections about Matthew’s relationships to late-first-century Judaism.
Dossier
- CAUSSE Jean-Daniel, BOSS Marc - Don, grâce et participation (Introduction)
- NAULT François - La grâce du don ou l’horizon théologique de la déconstruction (Mauss, Derrida, Hénaff)
- JOBIN Guy - Quand la faiblesse est donnée… Kénose et participation au temps du nihilisme
- ZORN Jean-François - Participation et individuation. Maurice Leenhardt (1878-1954) à la croisée des chemins de l’ethnologie et de la missiologie
- CAUSSE Jean-Daniel - Il n’y a de grâce qu’insensée
- BOSS Marc - Chorismos, methexis et coïncidence des opposés. Ernst Cassirer interprète du platonisme de Nicolas de Cues
François Nault asks about the existence of a Christian tradition of deconstruction by scrutinising the notions of gift and grace. Focusing on Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don and on the deconstructive reading it undergoes in Jacques Derrida’s essay Donner le temps, he discusses various blames addressed to Derrida in regard to the relationship between deconstruction and Christianity.
In this essay, Guy Jobin considers kenosis as a modality of the gift. He first outlines a historical and topical approach of theological talks about kenosis. Then he focuses on Gianni Vatimo’s philosophical ethics of kenosis and comments the various theological critiques it has aroused. He eventually examines the conceptual shift imposed upon the notion of participation by contemporary discussions of kenosis.
A protestant missionary in New Caledonia (Grande Terre) from 1902 to 1962, Maurice Leenhardt became at the same time an influential scholar by his pioneering work as an on-the-ground-ethnologist. Through his observation of the Kanak culture, he no more construes participation as a way of being peculiar to « non civilized » people, but as the expression of a mythical thought out of which emerges the Kanak as a person. Jean-François Zorn suggests that this process of individuation is correlated to the process of Christian conversion.
Jean-Daniel Causse’s essay focuses on the relationship between grace and participation. After a brief historical survey of the discussions generated by this topic, he shows that Christian grace is characterized by a qualitative, not quantitative, excess. What makes the excess of grace specific is that it empowers human beings to refuse any identification with what they know about themselves or with the place they have been assigned to. Grace breaks thereby with the world of meaning before reopening its potentialities. The story of the adulterous woman in the New Testament (John 8:1-11), in which Jesus twice writes on the ground with his finger, serves as an illustration to this understanding of grace.
In his historical studies on Renaissance thought, Ernst Cassirer construes Nicolaus Cusanus’s retrieval of Platonism as a foreshadowing of Kant’s critical philosophy. Marc Boss argues that far from reducing Cusanus’s philosophy to its sole theory of knowledge, this Neokantian historiography underscores its speculative and theological implications by interpreting the « coincidence of the opposites » in the light of Plato’s dialectic between separation (chorismos) and participation (methexis).