7AATC415 The Christian Text
Credit value: 20
Module tutor: Professor Oliver Davies
Assessment: one x 5,000-word essay (100%)
Teaching pattern: one two-hour weekly class over ten weeks
This module engages with a series of literary texts across historical periods from the perspective of both their theological content and contexts. It therefore offers an analytical, hermeneutical approach to both the history of theological literature (Augustine, Eckhart, Dante), and to theologically related literatures (Hölderlin, Paul Celan and Yves Bonnefoy), as well as to the hermeneutics of language use in specifically theological frameworks (Pauline texts). In this module we will further the study of both the implicit and explicit understandings of language, its possibilities and limitations, in different theological contexts and genres.
Module aims
-
The module examines various theological approaches to literature and textuality through examples taken across a range of genres, cultures and historical periods.
-
The module draws out what is distinctive about Christian hermeneutics and literature while noting also the extensive continuities between these and other, non-Christian approaches.
-
The module invites students to think more deeply about the nature of the ‘Christian’ text and its presuppositions, locating it both in its own historical context and also within the horizons of distinctively theological modes of interpretation, reception and understanding.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will have have gained the following intellectual and practical skills, appropriate to a level 7 module:
Generic skills
-
To engage competently and critically with primary and secondary sources.
-
To present ideas in both written and oral form.
-
To demonstrate the capacity to conduct research at a level appropriate to an MA course.
Module specific skills
-
To develop critical skills for identifying the specifically theological coordinates of literary works of art.
-
To gain a better understanding of distinctively Christian hermeneutical approaches.
-
To come to an informed understanding of the relation between Christian hermeneutics and literature in various historical periods.
-
To reach a better understanding of the place of textuality in theological development and expression.
Preliminary reading
-
Davies, Oliver, ‘Soundings: towards a Theological Poetics of Silence’, in O. Davies and D. Turner, eds., Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 201-22.
-
The Creativity of God. World, Eucharist, Reason, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
-
‘Hermeneutics’, in Catherine Tanner and John Webster, eds., Oxford Handbook to Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 494-510.
-
Jeanrond, Werner G., Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance, London: SCM Press, 1994.
-
Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Towards a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, in The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 70, No. 1/2 (Jan-Apr 1977), pp. 1-37.