How Our Life Rewrites Our God : A Study in Rewritten Bible as a Hermeneutical Tool in the Framework of Stanley Hauerwas’s Narrative Ethics
Kössi, Elisa (2022)
2022
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2022051435489
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2022051435489
Tiivistelmä
In the 1970-80s, Stanley Hauerwas became known for his narrative ethics which advocated Christian pacifism. In 1960s, Geza Vermes coined the concept of Rewritten Bible to understand early Jewish literature on Scripture. However, no one has yet investigated what could be won if the concepts were combined. This thesis brings these two perspectives together to explore ways of telling the Bible in the lives of religious communities.
My comparison of Hauerwas’s narrative ethics and the different approaches to Rewritten Bible is completed using close reading of my source material and a thematic analysis of the key points found. In both Hauerwas and the Rewritten Bible discourse, authority of the stories considered as holy Scripture by the religious communities is central and the main motivation of telling them. The authoritative role of these stories then obligates their readers to make sense of what they read in their specific historical and cultural context, their lives. Rewritten Bible, in that sense, can be understood as the process of rereading translated to a lived reality, which can take the specific form of a literary work but not exclusively. To investigate these rereadings further could clarify how the concept of God itself shifts focus when given witness to through the lives of new generations of believers. I also argue that a suitable approach for this purpose in a Hauerwasian framework can be found in the methodological scepticism of Koskenniemi & Lindqvist suggested in the Rewritten Bible related publication Rewritten Bible Reconsidered: Proceedings of the Conference in Karkku, Finland August 24-26 2006. With an open-ended approach to rewritten stories like theirs it is possible to explore them and make them fruitful for systematic theology in its search for appropriate ways of talking about God.
Ultimately, the purpose of this thesis is to point a direction where the structures of variation in the concept of God that can be seen in the lives of religious communities can be explored. The results of this exploration could further be used in systematic theology to negotiate what God is and how he should be spoken of.
My comparison of Hauerwas’s narrative ethics and the different approaches to Rewritten Bible is completed using close reading of my source material and a thematic analysis of the key points found. In both Hauerwas and the Rewritten Bible discourse, authority of the stories considered as holy Scripture by the religious communities is central and the main motivation of telling them. The authoritative role of these stories then obligates their readers to make sense of what they read in their specific historical and cultural context, their lives. Rewritten Bible, in that sense, can be understood as the process of rereading translated to a lived reality, which can take the specific form of a literary work but not exclusively. To investigate these rereadings further could clarify how the concept of God itself shifts focus when given witness to through the lives of new generations of believers. I also argue that a suitable approach for this purpose in a Hauerwasian framework can be found in the methodological scepticism of Koskenniemi & Lindqvist suggested in the Rewritten Bible related publication Rewritten Bible Reconsidered: Proceedings of the Conference in Karkku, Finland August 24-26 2006. With an open-ended approach to rewritten stories like theirs it is possible to explore them and make them fruitful for systematic theology in its search for appropriate ways of talking about God.
Ultimately, the purpose of this thesis is to point a direction where the structures of variation in the concept of God that can be seen in the lives of religious communities can be explored. The results of this exploration could further be used in systematic theology to negotiate what God is and how he should be spoken of.
Kokoelmat
- 614 Teologia [63]