Search results for ""Author Jan Stievermann""

Jan Stievermann's pioneering study of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana examines this Puritan scholar's engagement with the Hebrew Bible as Old Testament. The author focuses specifically on Mather's struggle to uphold or modify traditional typological and allegorical readings in the face of a growing awareness of the historicity of Scriptures. Other key issues include Mather's interventions in the contemporary debates over the legitimacy of Christian interpretations of the prophets, as well as over the authorship, provenance, genre, and spiritual import of texts such as Ecclesiastes and Canticles. Stievermann's book yields fascinating insights into an underappreciated phase of exegesis that was at once traditionalist and innovative, apologetically oriented, pious, and open to new modes of historical-textual criticism. Moreover, it shows how Mather's biblical exegesis fits into the broader development of Puritan theology and identity.

Read more less

This volume of the Biblia Americana (1693-1728) contains Cotton Mather's annotations on Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, and Revelation, as well as two series of essays on various matters of biblical interpretation. A mixture of pious explications and historical-textual criticism, the annotations are a treasure-trove for scholars interested in the development of Reformed theology and biblical exegesis during a decisive period of intellectual change in the early modern Atlantic world. Mather, an apologetically oriented but deeply learned scholar, confronts the early Enlightenment challenges to the authority of the Bible and core doctrines like the Trinity. He discusses problems of translation, textual variants (e.g., the Johannine comma), but also authorship and canonicity, especially with a view to the so-called Catholic Letters and James. The extensive annotations on Revelation offer a window into the development of Mather's millennialism and, more specifically, his changing interpretations of hotly-debated issues such as the eschatological conversion of the Jews, the expected date for the return of Christ and the nature of His kingdom. In the appended essays, Mather, in conversation with German Pietism, develops a biblical hermeneutic that emphasizes an experiential approach and the need for spiritual illumination. He also engages with antiquarian scholarship on the Scriptures, their original contexts, provenance, and transmission, as well as with literature that situates Judaism and Christianity in a larger history of ancient religions and cultures.

Read more less

This volume serves as a companion piece to the ongoing edition of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (1693-1728), the first comprehensive Bible commentary composed in British North America. Written by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, the essays in this collection offer original in-depth studies of Mather and his hitherto unpublished scriptural interpretations in the historical context of the Early Enlightenment, and the rise of Pietism. Transcending the pejorative image of the Puritan witch-doctor, Mather emerges from these essays as an erudite scholar and cosmopolitan theologian who was fully immersed in the rising developments of biblical exegesis around the turn of the eighteenth century. In facing the challenge of historical criticism or in examining the meaning of race and gender in the Bible, Mather wrestled with religious questions that are still relevant today.

Read more less

Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.

Read more less

This volume explores the inherent pluralism of the Reformation and its manifold legacies from an ecumenical and interdisciplinary point of view. The essays shed new light on several key questions: How do we interpret and assess the Reformation as a historical and theological event, as a historiographic category, and as a cultural myth? What are the long-term global consequences of the Reformation period as manifest in the rise of competing confessional cultures and distinct Christian world religions, producing different types of modernities? How did these confessional cultures interact with the development of empires and nation-states, with the emergence of the sciences, as well as with divergent legal cultures and traditions in education and social welfare? What kind of modalities emerged in these confessional cultures for engaging with the humanistic study of the Bible and, later on, Higher Criticism?

Read more less