While recent decades have shown interest in early Christian hermeneutics for scripture, application – and even understanding of – those hermeneutics has been complicated by a pattern of suspicion characterizing the modern world when it considers its ancient counterpart, notably the prejudice that ancient Christian interpretation is relatively unconcerned for history and the (putative) literal sense. This dissertation proposes that that modern legacy deserves to be revised for a postmodern environment both out of concern for properly historical concerns and as a theolegoumenon for the postmodern scene. Specifically, once the ethos and theology of reading in the early Church is explored as the backdrop against which ancient interpretations were regarded as plausible and compelling, its interpretive priorities turn out to be less implausible to the modern world than they have seemed to be. Related to this, once the emerging, postmodern world is, also, explored, it seems possible and productive to translate or recontextualize into our setting the pre-understandings of early Christians regarding books generally and holy writ specifically, particularly their ontology of scripture that related it dialectically to the Church's consciousness of its Rule of Faith and discernment of God's ongoing epic of salvation. A conclusion suggests ways in which this “translation” might be pursued.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:642960 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Bell, Matthew Timothy |
| Publisher | Durham University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11012/ |
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