A Word to Live By (Church's Teachings for a Changing World) - Softcover

Winner, Lauren F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 089869258X ISBN 13: 9780898692587

Verlag: Church Publishing, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

• Next generation of the classic Episcopal Teaching Series
• Accessible and engaging enough for newcomers and adult learners; full of content for church leaders and seminarians
• Filled with interactive study materials

The New Church’s Teaching series has been one of the most recognizable and useful sets of books in the Episcopal Church. With the launch of the Church’s Teachings for a Changing World series, visionary Episcopal thinkers and leaders have teamed up to write a new set of books, grounded and thoughtful enough for seminarians and leaders, concise and accessible enough for newcomers, with a host of discussion resources that help readers to dig deep. In this seventh volume, bestselling author, scholar, and priest Lauren Winner introduces the story behind the Scriptures and invites readers to engage the Word of God with curiosity and confidence. Rich with content and grounded in Episcopal tradition, A Word to Live By is filled with Winner’s trademark combination of humor, authenticity, and rich insight.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lauren F. Winner is Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School and Vicar of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Louisburg, North Carolina. She is the author of several books, including Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Still, and Wearing God.

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A Word to Live By

Volume 7 in the Church's Teachings for a Changing World series

By Lauren F. Winner

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2017 Lauren F. Winner
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-89869-258-7

Contents

Preface: An Acquired Taste, 
Chapter 1: What Are We Talking about When We Talk about "The Bible"?, 
Chapter 2: Digesting Scripture, 
Chapter 3: On Genres, 
Chapter 4: The Liturgy of the Word, 
Chapter 5: Praying the Scriptures, 
Chapter 6: Life, Death, and Everything in Between, 
Chapter 7: Swimming in Scripture, 
Conclusion: Abundant, Inexhaustible, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

What Are We Talking about When We Talk about "The Bible"?

At any Episcopal worship service, you will hear passages from the Bible. What, exactly, is the text from which we read in church? In this chapter, I'll try to answer that question by walking backwards, charting in reverse order the history of the biblical text.

When you hear the Bible read in an Episcopal church, you're usually hearing passages from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (often called, simply, the NRSV). That's a recent English translation of texts originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The NRSV was published in 1989; it was produced by a group of scholars — mostly members of Protestant churches, though there were a few Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and one Jew. Their task was to update a 1952 translation of the Bible, the Revised Standard Version (RSV). In their work, which began in 1974, the NRSV translators set out to draw on the latest in biblical scholarship. They also wanted to update any passages that, because American idiomatic English had changed so much since 1952, sounded stilted to the 1970s ear, and they wanted to get rid of unnecessary masculine pronouns and to eliminate the words "man" and "men," if the Greek or Hebrew versions of those words didn't actually appear in the original (so the RSV's rendering of Matthew 6:30, "O men of little faith," became "you of little faith," and the RSV's "Man does not live by bread alone" in Matthew 4:4 became "One does not live by bread alone").

Every new Bible translation has disgruntled critics. When the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published in 1952, one minister in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, deemed the new translation "a heretical, communist-inspired Bible." He burned a copy with a blowtorch and sent the ashes to Luther Weigle, who'd chaired the translation committee.

The NRSV is by no means the only English translation of the Bible; on my bookshelf, I have nine different English translations, and even that is a small fraction of what's available. The Episcopal Church has authorized fourteen different translations for use in our worship services, but typically we read the NRSV. Most of the translations that Episcopalians can use in corporate worship were published in the last sixty years, but one is much older: the King James Version of the Bible (KJV), which was first printed in 1611, and which in some way stands behind all subsequent English translations. The King James was not the first English Bible — it was in part because there were so many different Bible translations floating around England at the beginning of the seventeenth century that James called for a new translation. (James hoped the new translation would be authoritative; he also hoped it would replace the popular Geneva Bible, whose interpretative notes contained anti-monarchical sentiments.) It took several decades for the KJV to become established as the principal Bible in England; once it had, the KJV also began to predominate in the English colonies in North America.

So, we have a range of English translations — of what? Just what are these English texts, from the King James to the New Revised Standard Version, versions of?

The book known as the "the Bible"' is in fact a collection of over sixty books, which were themselves written over the course of perhaps one thousand years. We know with some confidence who wrote some of them (Paul's letter to the Galatians), and we don't know the authorship of others (the Psalms). It's long been thought that some material in the Bible was in circulation orally for many years before being written down; other biblical material was, in its first instantiation, a written text. By "books," I mean literary works with notional independence. A given biblical book was not necessarily written by one person, or even written at one time (Dorothy Sayers's novel Thrones, Dominations was completed after Sayers's death by Jill Patton Walsh; thus it has two authors, but it is one coherent work).

Over several centuries, early Christians discerned which books would constitute, and hold the authority of, sacred Scripture. The earliest Christians inherited — and continued to study and read in worship — Israel's Scripture, which comprised three sections: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.

• The Torah — the five books of Moses — tells the story of the creation of the world, and God's relationship with humanity, focusing in particular on God's relationship with the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. The Torah follows those descendants, the people of Israel, into and out of slavery, and through a forty-year period in which they wandered in the desert, received a revelation of law from God, and made their way to the edge of the land of Canaan.

• The Prophets are collections of oral declamations by people chosen by God to speak to the people of Israel, to interpret their present to them, to remind them to keep God's law, and to chart a vision for their future.

• The Writings encompass poems, prayers, proverbs, narratives about individual men and women's faith lives, and histories.

The Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings were originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic. By the time Jesus was born, various Jewish communities had translated the Hebrew and Aramaic texts into Greek, the dominant language of politics, trade, and learning in much of the Mediterranean world. The earliest Christians read these Greek translations alongside Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Jewish scriptures, especially as the church spread among Jews and Gentiles for whom Greek was a mother tongue. (By custom, these various Greek translations of scriptural books are referred to as the Septuagint. The term "Septuagint" comes from the Latin for "seventy"; the term was applied to the Greek Jewish scriptures because it was thought that 70 Jewish scholars translated the books of Moses into Greek in Alexandria some time in the third century BCE.)

As the first Christians were continuing to read and study Israel's Scripture, they were also producing their own literature and reading it in church. Letters of theological instruction and practical counsel, written by Paul of Tarsus, circulated throughout the churches, and Gospels (accounts of the events leading up to and following the death of Jesus of Nazareth) began circulating, and other texts circulated, too. By the middle of the second century CE, Christians began discerning with focused intentionality which of these new texts should be read in church worship and studied in church. They were trying to clarify which letters and Gospels Christians absolutely needed to read, which texts Christians urgently needed to converse with, and which texts could confidently be known to convey the words of God to God's people.

That...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Church Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 089869258X
• ISBN 13: 9780898692587
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 96
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar