| dc.description.abstract | The imprecatory psalms contain some of the most violent and, particularly to modern sensibilities, disturbing images in all of Scripture, prayers for divine judgment against enemies that seem to contravene Christ’s command for enemy love. Drawing together the resources of redemptive-historical biblical theology and narrative ethics, Cursing with God argues that prayerful performance of the imprecatory psalms is an ethically permissible, even ethically obligatory, means by which the Christian church faithfully enacts her God-given calling as a royal priesthood within God’s ethically determinative narrative of the world. This examination of the ethics of Christian enactment of the imprecatory psalms begins with an evaluation of the ethics of the imprecatory psalms within their intertextually constructed narrative world, contending that these psalms’ petitions are the morally legitimate prayers of the royal-priestly son of God against the serpentine enemies of God’s temple-kingdom, pleas that align with the petitioner’s vocation in God’s redemptive-historical narrative. Turning to the New Testament’s intertextual and thematic interaction with the imprecatory psalms, the study investigates how the New Testament narrates God’s works, reflects upon God’s action, and depicts various players in the Christian-era scene of redemptive history—not least Jesus himself—with reference to the inhabiting figures and constitutive theological structures of the imprecatory psalms, and the resultant narrative framework generates a reading of the New Testament’s several imprecatory speech acts as the ethically faithful petitions of the royal-priestly sons and daughters of God. Receiving the redemptive-historical narrative of Scripture as the governing story within which the Christian church dwells and acts, the dissertation culminates with a proposal for Christian performance of the imprecatory psalms that coheres with her royal-priestly vocation and inter-advent location in God’s teleologically-oriented narrative and further contends that Christian performance of the imprecatory psalms in union with the polyvalent Christ to whom they bear witness has the dynamic capacity to stimulate the affective dispositions of faith, hope, and love that make for ethical imprecatory enactment. | en_GB |
