Articles varia
- BENETREAU Samuel - Le symbolisme dans l’Épître aux Hébreux. Images et métaphores
- VOUGA François - La promesse de l’invisibilité : le paradoxe de la révélation visible du Dieu invisible
- ANTIER Guilhen - Luther par Luther. Du péché à la justice, l’expérience de la foi
- KRAEGE Jean-Denis - La théologie comme interprétation existentiale
The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews is considered a skilled rhetorician. Long lists of rhetorical figures in the book have been established. As early as Antiquity, rhetoricians have made room for « ornementation » and the question was raised: are the figures of speech there only to ornate the discourse, to please the public by elegant oration, or to strengthen the performance, to have a part in the process of persuasion? Putting aside the many figures taken from the pilgrimage and the cult of ancient Israël, the present article examines images and metaphors from common life and its surroundings. They are not numerous, but the question may be asked of their place and their function.
Is God invisible? Building upon Paul’s theological and anthropological thinking, François Vouga argues that the event of the Cross suspends the history of human thinking about a visible and rational revelation of God. Thus God, as invisible transcendance, provides the very basis for the invisible inner self that holds the identity of each person. If God is the very truth of reality as it is interpreted by art, science and the Gospel, as opposed to a god that would be the puppet of some religion, then God is necessarily invisible.
Luther’s thought is deeply related to his life. His work as a Reformer of the Church has its roots in his personal experience of the Gospel reforming the subjectivity of the believer to be understood as a word-related event realizing the justification of the human being in front of God sola fide. Written from a systematic point of view, this article proposes to dive into the heart of Luther’s spiritual experience in order to explain how this experience produces a change of paradigm that leads to a reconfiguration of his theology. Anticipating the jubilee of the Reformation in 2017, the basic concepts of Lutheran theology such as justice, faith, sin, conscience and work are made explicit and redeployed in their coherence and relevance.
The purpose is here to reexamine Rudolf Bultmann’s idea of existential interpretation, to suggest a new definition of self-understanding based on Husserlian rather than Heideggerian philosophy, and to show how the entire domain of theology – and not only the interpretation of Scripture – can be understood as an existential interpretation.
Dossier
- PRUNIER Jean-Louis - Avant-propos Hymnologie et identité méthodiste
- BORM Jan - L’hymnologie morave ou le cantique comme témoignage de la foi
- COTTRET Bernard - Pourquoi Wesley ? Wesley pour quoi ?
- VAN NOPPEN Jean-Pierre - Les hymnes dans le discours méthodiste
You must make your heart sing. This is how one could define one of the key notes of Moravian fervour. Many visitors have been deeply moved by the hymns of a congregation that seemed to have found a way of rendering its faith manifest through song, as John Wesley notably was during his stay at Herrnhut in the year of his own awakening, or Goethe. Taking their lead from the hymns of the Czech Brethren, the Moravians considered daily practice of singing as an evident sign of authentic faith. Even if the style of some early hymns may have seemed somewhat excessive, too Baroque or Rococo for some, hymns have played a central role in the lives of Moravians, a practice that has left a clear imprint on countless hymn books, up to the present day.
The history of Protestantism has tended to over-emphasize the role of the sixteenth century usually regarded as the century of the Reformation par excellence. In his Histoire de la Réforme protestante, first published in 2001, Bernard Cottret chose to add the name of John Wesley to those of Luther and Calvin among the founding fathers of the Reformation. He thereby stressed the seminal role of revivals and “great awakenings”, from the eighteenth century onwards, up to present-day Protestantism.
The pragmastylistic approach to Wesleyean hymns is part of a larger study seeking to exonerate methodist discourse from charges of manipulation of the working class by industrial capitalism through religion. The hymns that methodism produced in their thousands « gave wings to the doctrines of the revival » and added to the methodist message a remarkable emotive and mnemonic effect regardless of the lack of literacy of the initial target audiences. They helped spread the Gospel of love and hope more efficiently than any other (spoken or printed) medium. A statistical study of the lexis shows that the charges brought against those hymns by the marxist camp are most often based on isolated facts which were neither as systematically combined nor as representative of methodist discourse as those critics suggest.
Position de thèse
- ROLLAND Jean-Luc - Genèse et filiations du fondamentalisme protestant (1910-1925)
From the late 1860s to the mid-1920s, American Protestantism saw the rise of an anti-Modern theological trend. At the end of this period, its adherents chose to call themselves Fundamentalists. This reaction was not totally unprecedented : it was a resurgence of the most conservative tendencies, not only from the United States, but also from Europe. In many ways, it is not an isolated phenomenon ; and therefore not limited to Protestantism.