Resilience and the formation of religious meaning: The Psalms of Thanksgiving and the Passion Narratives of the Gospels as resilience forming Narratives in a Biblical Perspective

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Christine Gerber; Professorin Dr. Judith Gärtner
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548844072

This project explores resilience as a religious process of meaning-making in the biblical narratives of the Old Testament Psalms of thanksgiving and the New Testament Passion narratives. Resilience is defined as a permanently relevant strategy of coping with a crisis between the modes of destructiveness, ambivalence and hope. Resilience, understood in this sense, serves as a heuristic concept for the analysis and interpretation of the biblical tradition. The project will examine biblical texts that can be read as meaningful for resilience: these texts not only depict experiences of suffering and death, they also interpret them. The texts form a retrospective narrative that reflects the inevitability of suffering while at the same time preserving the relationship to God. In dealing with suffering, perspectives of hope can emerge out of the retrospective of an overcome crisis. Exemplary texts are the Psalm literature of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms of thanksgiving, as well as texts of the New Testament, first and foremost the Passion narratives of the Gospels, which interpret Jesus’ suffering and death. These collections of texts, which have eminently impacted Judaism (the Psalms of thanksgiving) and Christianity (both the Psalms and the Passion narratives), address experiences of suffering under different cultural conditions and in different genres. Here they are interpreted as testimonies of experiences, which by their specific retrospective narrative setting, that is, by their vantage point from an experience of salvation, offer meaning, enable a change of perspective on the crisis and thus gradually enable resilience. The analysis focuses on how the texts deal with tolerance of ambiguity, the struggle with destructiveness, and solidarity in suffering within the horizon of faith in God in such a way that they reveal themselves as meaningful narratives of resilience-relevant reception. This gives rise to coping strategies that integrate the experience of the negative. For the purpose of this analysis, the texts will be interpreted semiotically and reception-oriented to examine the potentials of overarching biblical perspectives: methodologically, the project explores the possibilities of a comparative cross-canonical exegesis which surveys commonalities, resonances and differences of the texts and thus contributes to an overarching biblical hermeneutics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants