Habilitationsschrift (Teil 2)--Universitat des Saarlandes.

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This dissertation emphasizes the need for spirituality studies and practical theology to enter into robust scholarly engagement with dream studies. The study of lived experience and an interdisciplinary approach are key characteristics in all three areas of inquiry. Interconnecting these areas of inquiry opens new lenses for understanding how people experience, remember, interpret, and find meaning within daily experience. Chapter One outlines current trajectories of research in dream studies and highlights gaps in current scholarship regarding the relationship between dreams and Christian spirituality. A proposed framework for dialogue among these three areas of inquiry addresses these scholarly gaps throughout the dissertation. Chapter Two presents key aspects of the physiology of sleep and dreams while also describing prevalent American cultural attitudes towards sleep, rest, and work and their impact on attitudes towards dreaming. Holy Rest is proposed as a contemporary Christian practice with potential to recalibrate unbalanced preferences for productivity and waking experience over sleep and dreaming experience. Chapter Three asserts dreams are meaningful experiences which are potentially spiritually formative and thus require theological consideration. As such, dreamwork can be understood as a spiritual practice. Chapter Four positions dream reports in dialogue with theoretical literature on spiritual life writing as narrative, hermeneutical practices that create habits of recalling memories primarily via writing and using root metaphor. Chapter Five discusses pedagogical implications of research on dreamwork and summarizes common trajectories for research in practical theology, Christian spirituality, and dream studies. Specifically, this dissertation asserts that time imbalances between sleep, rest, and work pose spiritual as well as physiological concerns that impact theological meaning-making in daily life. It locates dreaming experiences as spiritually and theologically relevant and queries the lack of attention to Christian spirituality in contemporary dream studies discourse. It also proposes a means to examine how individuals’ memories may create communal practices of theological reflection based on shared narrative practices of dreamwork and spiritual life writing. This exploration of the hermeneutical, spiritual, and pedagogical significance of dreams and dreamwork suggests the merit of further scholarly examination of other undervalued and unnoticed experiences of daily life.

This thesis demonstrates both the legitimacy and the suitability of the sabbath as a symbol of the eschatological age. Chapter one introduces the topic and hermeneutic of this thesis. In particular, it approaches the text in its final form, and with a background of postmodern influence. An overview of the sabbath in Jewish and Christian tradition in chapter two shows that the history of these traditions contains numerous concepts of the sabbath and how it is to be observed. A similar diversity of opinion is also found among contemporary scholars as to the origin and nature of the sabbath in the Hebrew Scriptures and in ancient Israel. Chapter three compares and contrasts the sabbath with other holy festivals. While the sabbath shares with these festivals the connection with the number seven, the proscription against work and even the title 'sabbath', it is unique in that it is connected with the attributes of blessedness, rest and holiness, and is presented as a memorial of creation and as a sign of the covenant between God and Israel. The connection with the concept of 'remembrance' is also confined to the sabbath and to the passover alone. Chapter four makes a more detailed examination of the sabbath passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, paying special attention to the topics of scholarly debate concerning the sabbath that were identified in chapter two. From these Scriptures, the sabbath may be legitimately interpreted as both a day of rest and a day of worship. The sabbath is also primarily presented as a Mosaic institution rather than a creation institution, and the Hebrew Scriptures contain no reference to its observance by foreigners outside of Yahweh worship in Israel. Nor is there any explicit indication that sabbath was a monthly institution, or that it had relatively little prominence during this time. An examination of the seventh-year festivals and the jubilee supports this understanding of the seventh-day sabbath. The concept of the eschatological age as a state of eternal sabbath also contains within it the implicit concept of holiness as a universal state. Chapter five investigates the legitimacy of viewing holiness in the Hebrew Scriptures as both perpetual and universal. While the Hebrew Scriptures contain mixed attitudes to the foreign nations, it does envision them as sharing in Israelite's salvation; and thus anticipates a state of universal holiness. Using the results of chapters two to five to demonstrate the legitimacy of this thesis' concept of the sabbath, the legitimacy of using this concept of the sabbath as a symbol of the eschatological age is also demonstrated. Drawing heavily on Gowan's work Eschatology in the Old Testament, chapter six identifies the primary themes of the eschatological age to be the end of sin, the presence of God, spiritual transformation, social transformation and the transformation of nature. It then examines how these themes are also found in connection with the sabbath, and shows that the nature of the sabbath is in many respects similar to the nature of the eschatological age. This makes the sabbath an especially suitable symbol of this eschatological age. Chapter seven explores what attributes of the sabbath may have made it an especially suitable symbol of the eschatological age in later Jewish and Christian traditions. In doing so, part one focuses on those unique attributes of the sabbath that were identified in chapter three; holiness, blessedness, rest, remembrance, creation and a covenant symbol. These attributes are then used to develop the sabbath as a symbol of creation and recreation. Part two then examines how Christian tradition developed new layers meaning for this symbol. In conclusion, chapter eight notes that the use of one or more of these attributes has been a frequent aspect of interpretations of the sabbath and eschatology. It is this thesis' presentation of all of these attributes together, however, as well as its identification of the uniqueness of these attributes to the sabbath, which demonstrates so strongly the suitability of the sabbath as a symbol of the eschatological age.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century a wide cross-section of British society had strongly correlated the notions of ‘civilization’ and ‘true religion’ with the accurate measurement and profitable use of time. Their specific experience of time, however, was not a human universal but a cultural construct, deeply embedded within the clock-governed milieu of industrial-capitalist and Christian society. Consequently, in the British colonies, the portrayal of indigenous societies as being ‘time-less’ (i.e.: culturally lacking regularity, order and uniformity) came to operate as a means of constructing an inferior, ‘irregular other’. By way of two case-studies – located in the 19th-century British settler-colonies of Victoria (Australia) and the Cape Colony (South Africa) – this thesis documents the manner in which nineteenth-century British missionary and settler-colonial discourse constructed the notion of ‘time-less’ indigenous cultures. Such apparent inferiority, this thesis argues, bolstered the depiction of indigenous societies as culturally inadequate – a representation that helped to rationalize and justify settler-colonialism’s claims upon indigenous land. / The negative portrayals of ‘Aboriginal time’ and ‘African time’ also helped to cast these societies as particularly in need of temporal reform. Indeed the latter were considered to be not only out of place but also ‘out of time’ within the timescape of Christian/capitalist rituals and routines. This study highlights some of the everyday means by which British settler-colonists and Protestant missionaries sought to reform the time-orientation and rhythms of indigenous societies. The evidence provided suggests that cultural colonization in the British settler-colonies was configured – to a greater extent than previous understandings allow – by an attack on non-capitalist and non-Christian attitudes to time. Christianizing and ‘civilizing’ meant imposing – coercively and ideologically – the temporal rituals and routines of British middle-class society. / Although the universalizing will of nineteenth-century European cultural expansion was reflected in its attempt to impose a specifically western view of time upon the world, the process of temporal colonization was neither homogeneous throughout the colonies, nor uncontested by indigenous societies. On the one hand, settler-colonialism’s diverging economic objectives in the Cape and Victoria – shaped as they were by economic land/labour requirements, demographics, and localized visions of race – defined the various manners in which Europeans viewed, and sought to colonize ‘indigenous time’. On the other hand, indigenous people in both settings often successfully managed either to defy the imposition of clock-governed culture, to establish compromises between the new and old rhythms, or to exploit the temporal discourses of their self-styled reformers. This suggests that time in the colonial context may be seen as a two-edged sword: not only as an instrument of colonial power, but also as a medium for anti-colonial resistance. / By analysing the discursive constructions of a temporal other, and by documenting the everyday struggles over the dominant tempo of society, this thesis highlights time’s central role in the colonial encounter and seeks to further our understandings of the process and implications of settler-colonization and Christianization.

Est-ce-que le sabbat est d'origine hébraïque ? Quand est né le dimanche ? Est-ce que Paul est l'inventeur du christianisme ? Comment expliquer la position des chrétiens sabbataires aujourd'hui ? Is the sabbath from hebrew origin ? When the Sunday is "born" ? Was Paul the inventor of christianism ? How to explain the position of the sabbatarien christians ?

By the beginning of the nineteenth century a wide cross-section of British society had strongly correlated the notions of ‘civilization’ and ‘true religion’ with the accurate measurement and profitable use of time. Their specific experience of time, however, was not a human universal but a cultural construct, deeply embedded within the clock-governed milieu of industrial-capitalist and Christian society. Consequently, in the British colonies, the portrayal of indigenous societies as being ‘time-less’ (i.e.: culturally lacking regularity, order and uniformity) came to operate as a means of constructing an inferior, ‘irregular other’. By way of two case-studies – located in the 19th-century British settler-colonies of Victoria (Australia) and the Cape Colony (South Africa) – this thesis documents the manner in which nineteenth-century British missionary and settler-colonial discourse constructed the notion of ‘time-less’ indigenous cultures. Such apparent inferiority, this thesis argues, bolstered the depiction of indigenous societies as culturally inadequate – a representation that helped to rationalize and justify settler-colonialism’s claims upon indigenous land. / The negative portrayals of ‘Aboriginal time’ and ‘African time’ also helped to cast these societies as particularly in need of temporal reform. Indeed the latter were considered to be not only out of place but also ‘out of time’ within the timescape of Christian/capitalist rituals and routines. This study highlights some of the everyday means by which British settler-colonists and Protestant missionaries sought to reform the time-orientation and rhythms of indigenous societies. The evidence provided suggests that cultural colonization in the British settler-colonies was configured – to a greater extent than previous understandings allow – by an attack on non-capitalist and non-Christian attitudes to time. Christianizing and ‘civilizing’ meant imposing – coercively and ideologically – the temporal rituals and routines of British middle-class society. / Although the universalizing will of nineteenth-century European cultural expansion was reflected in its attempt to impose a specifically western view of time upon the world, the process of temporal colonization was neither homogeneous throughout the colonies, nor uncontested by indigenous societies. On the one hand, settler-colonialism’s diverging economic objectives in the Cape and Victoria – shaped as they were by economic land/labour requirements, demographics, and localized visions of race – defined the various manners in which Europeans viewed, and sought to colonize ‘indigenous time’. On the other hand, indigenous people in both settings often successfully managed either to defy the imposition of clock-governed culture, to establish compromises between the new and old rhythms, or to exploit the temporal discourses of their self-styled reformers. This suggests that time in the colonial context may be seen as a two-edged sword: not only as an instrument of colonial power, but also as a medium for anti-colonial resistance. / By analysing the discursive constructions of a temporal other, and by documenting the everyday struggles over the dominant tempo of society, this thesis highlights time’s central role in the colonial encounter and seeks to further our understandings of the process and implications of settler-colonization and Christianization.

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-187).

Thesis (D.W.S.)--Robert E. Webber Institute of Worship Studies, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-166).

Thesis (D.W.S.)--Robert E. Webber Institute of Worship Studies, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-166).