Love as Agape
The Early Christian Concept and Modern Discourse
By (author) Oda Wischmeyer
Hardback (Published)
(August 2021)
ISBN: 9783161609084
6.3 x 9.25 inches
Price: $96.00
On back order
In our fraught global environment, when political and ideological lines are drawn ever sharper and old allegiances are increasingly strained, love for neighbor as both individual and societal obligation needs to be thematized and justified anew. At the same time, the New Testament call to love one’s enemies forms a sharp point of contrast to the current non-culture of hatred for all things different and foreign.
Oda Wischmeyer aims to bring the New Testament concept of love into conversation with the current discussion about love. She investigates the commandment tradition of love for God and for neighbor, the ways in which the Septuagint and Plutarch speak of love, and the innovative concepts of love developed by Paul and John. She also presents an exegetically informed construction of the New Testament concept of love that is sharpened through a penetrating comparison with counter-, parallel, and alternative concepts from the ancient world. The book brings this holistic biblical vision forward into critical and constructive dialogue with key contemporary visions of love, including those of Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum, Pope Benedict XVI, and Simon May. The tension that emerges stresses the need for fresh conceptualizations of ancient Jewish-Christian understandings, giving rise to the concluding question of the profile, limits, and impulses of the agape ἀγάπη concept for present challenges.
Through this academically rigorous and pastorally sensitive exploration, Oda Wischmeyer points to the great love story between God and humanity, which realizes itself in the figure of Jesus Christ. This divine romance places love as the most intense, affirming, and life-creating relationship in God’s own self, a relationship into which human beings are drawn and by which they obtain special dignity when God’s love becomes their life.
Geboren 1944; 1993-2009 Professorin für Neues Testament an der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen mit den Forschungsschwerpunkten Neutestamentliche Hermeneutik, Leben und Werk des Paulus, das Markus-Evangelium, der Jakobusbrief, und die Literatur des antiken Judentums, insbesondere Ben Sira.
- By (author) Oda Wischmeyer
Other Titles in this Series
Similar Books
Apocrypha, Magic, Liturgy
The Multiple Identities of Coptic Prayers in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt
Athanasius of Alexandria, Epistula ad episcopos Aegypti et Libyae
Old Slavonic Version and English Translation
Volume 261
Contesting Labeled Identities
The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literature
Cyril of Alexandria’s Christological Exegesis
Explorations of Partitive Exegesis in the Dialogues on the Trinity
Volume 70
Epiphanies of the Divine in the Septuagint and the New Testament
Fifth International Symposium of the Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti (CJHNT), 14-17 May 2015, Nottingham
Extracanonical Traditions and the Holy Land
Texts, Rituals, and Material Culture in Late Antique Palestine
From Joseph to Jesus
The Joseph Narrative as a Compositional Template from Old Greek Esther to the Gospel of Luke
Volume 125
Nicholas of Lyra’s Commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
Franciscan Exegesis in a Time of Crisis
Paradise Lost in Transmission
The Return to Eden in the Apocalypse of Peter within Its Ethiopic and Early Christian Contexts
Punning in Odd or Elegant Constructions in Jeremiah
The Convergence of Linguistics, Rhetoric, and Textuality in the Hebrew Text of Jeremiah
Reformed Covenantal Eudaimonism
Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711) on Highest Good, Virtue, and Law
Volume 87