NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 51, Issue 3, 1997

This article discusses the ideas which African Christians have of their Western counter-parts, notably in Western Europe, where African immigrants have recently founded congregations. African views of Christianity contain certain characteristics which Westerners tend to associate with traditional African religious beliefs. Western commentators often interpret the continuity between tradition and modernity in the spirituality of African Christians as a sign of fundamentalism. African Christians, in turn, are determined to evangelise Europe in order to turn what many see as the ‘valley of dry bones’ into a fertile garden.

The article describes the history of Jan Nat’s Hebrew grammar from the first (1936) till the tenth (1996) edition. The revisions by Nat himself, Koopmans, Lettinga and Muraoka reflect the developments that took place in the study of Hebrew in the course of this century. These include the dominance and subsequent decline of the historical-comparative method of Bauer-Leander and Brockelmann, the discovery of new material (Ugarit, Qumran) and the attempts of Meyer and others to incorporate it into the description of Hebrew, and the application of new insights from general linguistics and comparative Semitics to Hebrew grammar. The substantial changes made in the new, tenth edition in relation to the ninth are also illustrated.

Between 1910 and 1924 Van Eeden and Buber disagreed about the realisation of their socio-religious ideas. Inspired by a universal ideal of oneness Van Eeden, with kindred spirits, wanted to animate humanity. Averse to dogmatism he ended up in the Roman Catholic Church via platonic, oriental and signific avenues. Buber wished to actualize God in the community in an undogmatic, Nietzschean way. His permanent Zionist orientation became entangled with German nationalism between 1914 and 1916. Buber’s mystical war experience got him into conflict with the antimilitarist Van Eeden, so that their elite, the Forte-Kreis, which had a international brotherhood in mind, disintegrated.