Paper: Spirituality and Culture in Interaction: The Illustrative Recurring Debate on the Role of the Oldest Testament in Christian Theology and Broader Culture, by Christo Lombaard

Christo Lombaard‘s paper was presented at the inaugural Lumen Research InstituteConference held at Excelsia College, Sydney, on 4th and 5th October 2016. According to the Foreword in the conference proceedings, “The conference considered a broad range of theory, scholarship and research at the interface of theology, spirituality, culture and well-being with a core emphasis on how theology and spirituality can contribute to a richer understanding of culture and well-being – and vice versa.” Here is the abstract for Christo’s paper:

During the past two years, an ancient controversy – running from the first to second century theologian Marcion via, in more modern times, for instance contemporaries Adolf von Harnack’s culture-critical theology and Friedrich Delitzsch’s Babel-Bibel oppositioning, to Zimbabwean theologian-politician Canaan Banana’s call for an Africanized Bible, to British rationalist Richard Dawkins and others – has resurfaced anew with the Berlin theologian Notger Slenczka: that the Old Testament in/and the Christian canon is reconsidered. The options proposed range from excluding the Old Testament from the canon to altering its scope to revising its contents. These proposals and some of the culturally related reasons for them are in this contribution taken into review. Is it however not perhaps precisely the “non-harmonious” characteristics of the Hebrew Bible, and by extension the Christian Bible, which have contributed to the resilience of the Jewish faith, to the influence of the Old Testament in Christianity, and to the intellectual-cultural contributions of these texts in the Judean-Christian spheres of influence across two millennia?

SSCS members may obtain a copy of the PDF version of the Proceedings of the Spirituality, Culture and Well-Being Conference by e-mailing the CSS moderator.