The “God-Fearers” in Luke have been thought of as gentile sympathizers. In the context of ancient Israel, “Fear of YHWH” was strongly connected with Israelite observance of the Law of YHWH. How did such an important concept in the piety of Israel and Jewish identity come to describe gentile believers? Investigation of the interpretation of this phrase in the Second Temple period gives us an important clue. In the Second Temple period there seems to have been a consensus that love of God was superior to fear of God. From the examples in the Second Temple period, there must have been a common understanding of “God-Fearers” as referring to gentile believers before Luke. But it appears that in Acts, Luke deliberately put “God-Fearer” and “God-Worshiper” in the story as a literary strategy, using the sense of “God-Fearers” as connoting religious piety continuing from ancient Israel, to mitigate the peripherality of gentile believers.

In dieser Abhandlung, die ursprünglich von meiner ethischen Forschung in Bezug auf F.D.E.Schleiermacher stammt, geht es um das Wesen der (vor allem christlichen) Religion in seiner „Reden über die Religion“ (1799). In der Forschungsgeschichte wurde und wird sie so verstanden, dass seine Definition der Religion als „die Anschauung des Universums“ eine Art der Naturreligion sei, mit der er jede positive Religion niedrig schätze. Aber in der fünften Rede über die R. stellt er fest, dass die Positivität jeder Religion in der Tat die Anschauung (des U.) ermöglicht und verwirklicht. Die Wertung mit der kategorialen Vokabel wäre folgendermaßen möglich: Seine Achtung vor der Positivität jeder Religion steht im Gegensatz zur Meinung, dass das Allgemeine der Religion, das durch die Abstraktion von der Geschichtlichkeit der wirklichen Religionen gewonnen wird, der eigentliche Zweck der Forschung der Religion(-en) sei. Die Zugehörigkeit des Individuellen zu einer Gattung bedeutet―jetzt allgemein, nicht nur bezüglich der Religion―kein Verlieren der Eigentümlichkeit des Individuellen.

Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, in his response to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit Und Methode, challenged his hermeneutics by noting the following two things. First, Gadamer discusses the “speculative element” of language, emphasizing “the infinity of what is not said” behind words, and in doing so, according to Pannenberg, disregards the “statement” (Aussage) as a form of language, which enables a sentence to unequivocally designate and describe an objective state of affairs. Although this criticism itself is valid, this is not a problem of “either/ or”. The two aspects of language they put forward should be in a reciprocal relationship. Second, Pannenberg argued that Gadamer’s hermeneutics and his concept of a “fusion of horizons” necessarily merge into Pannenberg’s own theological program, namely universal history. Being convinced that history should always include the horizon of the future, this philosopher could not agree to the theologian’s program, perhaps because it presupposes the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as an objective historical fact.