[Luke Timothy Johnson] ☆ Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Studies [Philosophy Book] PDF Â Read Online eBook or Kindle ePUB
Book religious experience in earliest christianity summary
Reflect lives caught up in and defined by a power not in their control but engenedered instead by the crucified and raised Messiah Jesus Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity A Missing Dimension in New Testament StudiesLuke Timothy Johnson is an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity He is the Robert W Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. EPub Religious Experience in Earliest christianity Johnsons research interests encompass the Jewish and Greco Roman contexts of early Christianity particularly moral discourse.
EPub Religious Experience in Earliest christianity
I haven t read this yet but I ve listened to Johnson s Teaching Company course Early Christianity The Experience of the Divine which covers much of the same material it was excellent 0800631293 Religion as a personal experience of power rather than as history or theology Too academic 0800631293 I love that Luke Timothy Johnson is investing his time studying religious experience a topic too often dismissed among New Testament scholars Love it 0800631293 Johnson s main thesis that the historical critical approach to religions is inherently reductionist and that a phenomenological approach is wanting in scholarship is probably as true now as it was back in 1998 While I agree with his analysis however I don t think his arguments would be compelling to one who did not already agree with him He moves too quickly through is arguments in the first two chapters though his case studies are a bit fleshed out But the book did get me thinking in many different ways about both the early Christian canonical and non canonical texts In the end however Johnson s argument is good if we want to understand any religion we have to understand how that religion is experienced Otherwise we re not studying religion. Religious experience in earliest christianityy beliefs I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in early Christianity particularly those who have found mere comparison to be wanting as a investigative mode of religion 0800631293 This book which originated from the author s guest lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary was interesting and informative not only about the subject but also about other scholarship on the subject It will help me take a critical view of similar studies quickly assessing an author s bias whether historical theological or from the perspective of religious studies The author makes a strong case for the the latter method closing with this thought Christianity came to birth because certain people were convinced that they had experienced God s transforming power through the resurrection of Jesus A scholarship based not on this fact but on its denial may be a study of something or other in antiquity but is certainly not the study of early Christianity Though I was easily convinced in this regard I had to step back from saying I REALLY liked this book to simply liking it because of the super intellectual language Nonetheless I look forward to reading other books by this prolific author 0800631293 Decent book but overstates its case and is fairly dated now I m not sure that his complaints about JZ Smith get him all that far but it is useful to remember that JZS is taking a pretty strong position about the nature of the endeavor of religious studies 0800631293 In this compact essay Luke Timothy Johnson argues that a phenomenological approach to the history of earliest Christianity taking note of the religious experience of its adherents can offer new insights to complement and in some cases challenge those of the historical critical approach that has dominated New Testament studies for the last century Taking issue with many of the presuppositions of historical critical method especially its tendency to limit historical reality to textuality and its penchant for a divide and conquer mentality with regard to the diversity of earliest Christian movements Johnson suggests a fresh view based on the insights of religious studies scholarship in what is often called the phenomenology of religions loosely the old Chicago School as opposed to the various social scientifically oriented approaches that have been in the ascendancy recently However Johnson is not prepared to grant this methodology carte blanche either much of the book is taken up with his criticism of Chicago s Jonathan Z Smith who while emerging from a Chicago style phenomenological background has in Johnson s view used his prodigious learning in the history of religions to question the authenticity of religious experience itself Johnson by contrast wishes to steer a middle path avoiding both the crypto theological approach of an Eliade which seems to predicate that the religious experience was necessarily the experience of real something outside of human subjectivity and the reductionist approaches of both Smith and the historical critical scholars who in their eagerness to remain scientific and historical refuse even to acknowledge the experience of human subjects as a legitimate concern for religion scholarship. Pdf religious experience in earliest christianity summary It must be said that Johnson s essay is only partially successful The first two chapters in which he lays out the contours of his theoretical stance are frequently riveting and should expand the audience for this book well beyond those whose interests are in early Christianity to anyone with an interest in religious studies methodology and theory The chapter Ritual Imprinting and the Politics of Perfection dealing with the experience of primitive Christian baptism and initiation brilliantly situates it in the context of late Roman religiosity the conflicts dealt with in the letters to the Galatians and to the Colossians are fruitfully interpreted in light of cultural expectations as to initiation through various levels of enlightenment and mystagogy expectations which may have run afoul of Pauline Christianity and its emphasis on being baptized once for all into the death of Christ Jesus The next chapter Glossolalia and the Embarrassments of Experience includes a very good overview of the confused nature of the New Testament sources on primitive Christian glossolalia and comparisons to recent psychological studies on the experience in modern contexts However some of Johnson s conclusions here seem much speculative his linking of Paul s ambivalence toward glossolalia and toward women speaking in the assembly with concerns about sexuality and gender politics in the Hellenistic world draws substantially on the work of contemporary feminist theologians and on studies like Lewis s Ecstatic Religion that are only tangentially related to Christian glossolalia and for that reason is less persuasive than much of what Johnson has to say in the previous chapter where the sources are grounded in scholarship specifically about the cultural milieu. Religious experience in earliest christianityy beliefs Ironically the chapter which ought to have been the centerpiece of the book Meals are Where the Magic Is about the Christian agape and Eucharistic meals is actually the least interesting The problem here is that Johnson seems to abandon his program of dealing with experience and to retreat into ideas he says a great deal about what the Eucharist meant at the level of ideas and symbols to earliest Christians but not much about the actual religious experience that attended on Christian and other sacred meals in late antiquity. Religious experience in earliest christianity kindle unlimited Johnson s wide reading is impressively on display throughout the thoroughly footnoted volume I found myself repeatedly remarking on interesting lines of study suggested by his notes There is much to be learned in these pages even if they are ultimately revelatory of disagreements over method and theory within religious studies than they are of the experiential world of the first Christians at what became their chief act of worship 0800631293 Going to take this slowwe are reading this in JGS Bookclub This has footnotes than text Now have finished this and it is a good approach to investigating the religious experiences of the new testament using the phenomenological approach rather than just using form criticism to analyze Discusses baptism tongues and the eucharist A very interesting approach I liked it 0800631293
Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Studies By Luke Timothy Johnson |
0800631293 |
9780800631291 |
English |
199 |
Paperback |
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