When Action Collides with Meaning: Ritual, Biblical Theology, and the New Testament’s Lord’s Supper

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Keywords

Lord's Supper, Theology, Ritual, Bible

Abstract

This study highlights the contribution of current scholarship focusing on ritual studies and its impact on biblical studies. Ritual is not just useful to discover activities, patterns, and the interaction of key elements of religious practice and textual worlds (including, among others, time, space, participants, objects, sounds, language, and action), but it also offers a helpful way of understanding the text’s talking about God, or biblical theology. The three-step from ritual to interpretation to integration of the data into the big picture of theology (or ideology) is seldom done consistently and requires a methodological reset. Finally, a brief look at the New Testament Lord’s Supper within this framework is attempted, demonstrating the potential of such an approach.

Journal Title

Neotestamentica

Volume

50

Issue

2

First Page

423

Last Page

439

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1353/neo.2016.0053

First Department

Old Testament

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