Love Commands in the New Testament

by Pheme Perkins

this book developed out of the Bible lectures, which I was invited to give. They can now see why I was always rushing to get all the material in during each lecture This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809124505
• ISBN13: 9780809124503
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Paulist Press
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Dr. PERKINS BRINGS HOME THE CENTRAL TEACHINGS AND COMMISSIONINGS OF JESUS CHRIST: LOVE ONE ANOTHER!

Dr. Pheme Perkins (PhD. in New Testament and Christian Origins from Harvard) and the Professor of Theology at the Jesuit Boston College, also wrote the standard text "Reading the New Testament" which I, like so any others, studied in junior seminary many years ago. In this present volume, Dr. Perkins in her always lucid yet comprehensive and profound scholarly manner explains the central teaching of Jesus Christ, to love one another, and explores several aspects of that historical and theological phenomenom. She sets the historical and sociological context in which such commands emerge, and she discovers such a commandment and commissioning not so unusual in the time and place of Jesus, as it draws not only form the Old Testament, including the decalogue, but also from the hellenistic code of ethics widespread across the eastern Mediterranean, including the region of the childhood home of Jesus in northern Israel. We today now find it most odd and unheard of that Jesus commands us to love one another, including loving our own enemies and doing good to those who harm and insult us. It strikes us as oddly as reading the Bill of Rights as a central document of our government. But indeed the central comandment of our faith is to Love one another, including our own enemies. Dr. Perkins in fact dedicates a chapter in this learned book to Love of Enemy. SHe also discusses at length the love experienced by the prodigal son and shown by the good samaritan, who did not allow his status as "enemy" to hold him from loving a stranger at great expense and risk to his own life. She discusses well the metaphors for love used in the New Testament, and devotes several chapters to every aspect of this love, all while clinging closely to the scriptural sources and avoiding any kind of specific "relevance" to the political and social phenomena of twenty five years ago, when this excellent text was written as a series of sermons to Mennonites, the masters of dedicated peaceful service in Gospel love. Please read this book just as soon as you can, which rings more urgently now than ever, as a clarion cry calling us back to the central meaning of the Gospel and its constant commandment to love.