Jesus and nostalgia: A nostalgia construction of ‘ho theos tōn paterōn – ὁ θεὸς τῶν πατέρων’ for facing an identity crisis (Mt 22:32)

Abstract

Several theologians unanimously accorded well with the notion that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew was a pastoral theologian. Nevertheless, the pastoral dimension of Matthew 22:32 has not been subjected to much scrutiny. In the text, Jesus celebrated the tradition of calling the God as the ‘God of the Fathers’. The tradition revealed that Jesus adapted the pastoral approach, which is termed as nostalgia in psychology. In empirical psychology researches, utilising nostalgia provides many positive benefits for people who have psychological problems, including an identity crisis. By using a psychological text to sharpen the understanding of the biblical text, this research showed the nostalgic construction in the tradition as a pastoral approach to the readers who were in a situation of a major crisis.

Contribution: By using the nostalgia as a psychological text, this article attempts to explore the pastoral dimension of Matthew 22:32, which seems absent in the study of Matthew 22:32.