Bücher der Reihe Theologische Interventionen

The Bible, and the Old Testament in particular, has often been used to justify unequal gender relations, restrictive sexual morality, and the prohibition of same-sex relationships. In an easy-to-read form that nevertheless stays close to the text, this book presents the Hebrew Bible=s many statements about sexuality: from the creation narratives to legal regulations of sexuality, love songs that fill an entire book, and descriptions of the happiness and travails of sexual relationships, through to unbearable texts about sexual violence that present even God as an accomplice. In the face of recent appalling cases of abuse, readers are enabled to articulate and discover the dimensions of meaning that lie in biblical texts for societies in which gender democracy exists.

Inspired by R. Bultmann=s program of demythologization, this text inquires into the truth of mythical images in the Bible. It examines the various ways in which the Bible talks about God: narratively, dialogically, and doxologically, as well as ethically, mystically, and metaphysically. The Bible interprets Christological imagery as a kerygmatic message that leads to confrontation with God, as poetic imagination that seeks existential fulfilment, as a world of social symbols that creates sacred communal spaces. The ?demythologization= of this symbolic world starts with faith in the Holy Spirit: the cross reveals our distance from God, and the mystery of Easter renews God=s nearness to us as a resonance in human beings through the Spirit. After 80 years, Bultmann=s programme of demythologization is in this way renewed and continued kerygmatically and poetically, existentially and socially, cosmically and mystically. The concern remains the same: to decipher the message of the Bible through its mythical images.