This book challenges standard accounts of early Christian exegesis of the Bible. Professor Young sets the interpretation of the Bible in the context of the Graeco-Roman world - the dissemination of books and learning, the way texts were received and read, the function of literature in shaping not only a culture but a moral universe. For the earliest Christians, the adoption of the Jewish scriptures constituted a supersessionary claim in relation to Hellenism as well as Judaism. Yet the debt owed to the practice of exegesis in the grammatical and rhetorical schools is of overriding significance. Methods were philological and deductive, and the usual analysis according to 'literal', 'typological' and 'allegorical' is inadequate to describe questions of reference and issues of religious language. The biblical texts shaped a 'totalizing discourse' which by the fifth century was giving identity, morality and meaning to a new Christian culture.
Confrontation with our culture has recently been put on the agenda by Lesslie Newbigin, in Beyond 1984 and Foolishness to the Greeks. Broadly speaking his position theology has sold out to Western culture, and the opposing perceptions of the Gospel need to be reclaimed and affirmed against prevailing assumptions.
We come together to honour, in the sight of God, the life and work of the Revd Professor Daniel Wayne Hardy -Dan to those who knew and loved him. And we do so in the context of worship, where we have heard from the word of God, and will participate in the Eucharist -nothing could be more appropriate to the person we remember. Not only was his whole life theo-centric -a pointing away from himself to God -but also his commitment to the life of the mind, indeed his epistemology, was shaped by doxology: he found access to the truth in praise of the God of all creation; in worship he discerned 'the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ'.The last time I met him, last summer, there was a glow in his face, as he spoke of a special experience of light during a visit to the Holy Land. Already his brain tumour had been diagnosed, but 'seeing the glory of the Lord' -his face reflected it -he surely was in process of transformation from glory to glory . . . By all accounts Dan's passing could be described as a 'good death' -a rare thing these days! It's not difficult to imagine him in the temple, saying with Symeon, Lord, now let your servant depart in peace; Your Word has been fulfilled. My own eyes have seen the salvation, Which you have prepared in the sight of all people; A light to reveal you to the nations, And the glory of your people Israel.
ticulating that faith and acting it out in ritual and ethics in quite different fashions» 1. «Heresy» indeed usually appears in quotation marks-except in the volume on the years 1815-1914 where one of the editors dispenses with the quotation marks when describing some branches of Catholic Modernism as heretical 2. In most of the volumes, movements branded as heretical receive sympathetic treatment. And the use of «World» reflects another leitmotiv, namely an emphasis on Christianity's global reach and regional diversity. Inevitably the volume on the 20 th century includes two chapters devoted exclusively to Latin America, one to the Caribbean, six to Africa and Asia, and one to Oceania, as well as the six devoted exclusively to Europe and North America. But the volume on the years c.300-600 emphasises the fact that Christianity reached as far east as China and as far south as Ethiopia in that period. Editors were also required to focus on the experiences of the «ordinary Christian» and to consider the social and cultural impact of Christianity as broadly as possible. Another required field was the relationship of Christianity with other faiths or, in more recent times, with secularism and atheism. One major strategic decision by the steering group was to treat Eastern Christianity from the 12 th century to the present day in a separate volume, while the other volumes covering this period would concentrate on Western Christianity and those forms of Christianity stemming from it. Within this general framework editors were free to decide which themes to highlight and which kinds of historian to choose as collaborators. Margaret Mitchell and Frances Young in Origins to Constantine gave more space than the other editors to theology, a major part of the volume being entitled «The Shaping of Christian Theology». Frederick Norris and Augustine Casiday edited Constantine to c.600. They placed special emphasis on the geographical spread of Christianity in that period and on the gradualness of the process by which what became «Christendom» was christianised. Early Medieval Christianity, c.600-c.1100, edited by Julia Smith and Thomas Noble, gave special attention to «Christianity as Lived Experience», including «Birth and Death», «Last Things» and «Gender and the Body». This volume benefited from the fact that Noble, who is based at Notre Dame, the famous Catholic university in Indiana, was able to obtain funding from his university for a conference of his authors, whereas contributors to the other volumes were to a large degree working on their own. Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100-c.1500, edited by Miri Rubin and Walter Simon, highlighted «The Erection of Boundaries», including those between men and women and between heaven and hell, but more especially between Catholic Christianity and those outside, in
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