Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The first point to be made in considering New Testament spirituality is that the New Testament is more than a document of the first century. Since the nineteenth century. New Testament scholarship has been dominated by approaches that view the text exclusively as text, without reference to the experiences that gave rise to it. Such scholarship emphasizes lexical and grammatical studies, form, redaction, and source criticisms, and historical and sociological analyses of the text. The unspoken assumption is that the New Testament is an artifact of history. Little attempt is made to understand the experience of those who produced it or the influence it continues to exert on those who view it as authoritative. As Luke Timothy Johnson observed in Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity (1998: 3), such a bias in favor of the “textually defined and the theologically correct” has led scholars to ignore the very thing that the earliest Christian texts talk about.What the New Testament “talks about” is the human experience of God mediated by the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Any study of New Testament spirituality must begin with the fact that the texts are a record of human experience. In any age, but especially at its origins, Christianity revolves around the distinctive experience of the person of Jesus Christ, and any study of the New Testament without reference to the experience ... log in or subscribe to read full text