Christian theological interpretation of Scripture is a practice that brings together both trained biblical scholars as well as theologians of various types. In recent years this has enabled the importance of some foundational theological questions about scriptural interpretation to come to the forefront. This chapter both highlights the importance of addressing these questions and how the practice of theological interpretation might move forward in the future.

Although the motif of the book of nature is an ancient one, it continues to shape our cultural imagination in important ways, not least with respect to how we understand the relationship of science and religion and how we comport ourselves to questions of environmental ethics. Until its early modern transposition into the language of mathematics, the book of nature or liber naturae tradition formed the dominant approach to the interpretation of nature and creation within premodern Christian traditions. At the heart of the premodern idea of the book of nature stood a recognition of the entwined relationship between interpretive practices for the contemplative reading of sacred texts and those for making sense of nature. While this contemplative dimension falls to the wayside in many prominent modern appeals to the book of nature, especially those we associate with early modern science, it later reappears in popular transatlantic forms Christian piety, Romanticism, and nature writing, and arguably plays a significant role in the mediation of the novel moral intuitions about nature we associate with modern environmentalism.

This essay considers the implied self-portrait of the Christian scholar that Origen offers in his response to Celsus. That self-portrait both shows the Christian scholar to be one whose panoply of skills should be recognized as the equal of the non-Christian scholar, and yet also the Christian scholar claims a place within a community of those – including the martyrs – who can only but seem irrational and quintessentially unscholarly to Celsus.

This chapter argues that composing and singing plainchant for the medieval liturgy was enhanced by the creative practice of intertextuality, the citation and referencing of other textual and musical sources. For Hildegard of Bingen, one of the few medieval composers whose plainchants are firmly attributable, this was no exception. This chapter contextualizes the use of her musical compositions in medieval liturgical practice and establishes their interconnectedness with her own works and those of others. The author compares manuscript layout, presentation, and ordering of her plainchants with standard presentations of music in medieval liturgical manuscripts and discusses their liturgical function. Hildegard’s writings about music are considered, in terms of crossover of musical texts and themes within her output as well as her intertextual use of other sources, including biblical passages and Boethius’ De Institutione Musica. Finally, this chapter examines Hildegard’s practice of musical intertextuality through quotation and referencing in her compositions of her own plainchants as well as melodic material from chants commonly used in Office feasts.

This chapter discusses a series of high-profile cases in which significant disputes arose involving the application of ecclesiastical law. It begins with Parliament’s debates on its role and authority in this area as it attempted more than once to frame legislation for clergy discipline and the discussions in Convocation. It considers the Gompertz case, raising questions about the role of the bishop; the contrasting churchmanships of Evangelicals and Tractarians; and the controversy about biblical interpretation prompted by the publication of Essays and Reviews. The case of James Shore tested the law on the effect of a clergyman’s finding his opinions had changed to such an extent that he was no longer a member of the Church of England, while still effectively retaining his Anglican priesthood. The chapter also covers the cases of William Bennett and the ‘real presence’, and George Denison’s lengthy dispute with the Bishop of Exeter on the effect of baptism. It ends with the case of Alexander Mackonochie and controversy over the regulation of public worship.

This chapter explores theology as an answer to the question of how to preserve a Chinese way of thinking while entering into conversation with other world systems of thought. It looks at how theology necessitates an interdisciplinary approach in engagement with literature, especially the study of the classics/scriptures. It interrogates the translation of Western poetry into Chinese as a process accelerating the loss of distinction between “shi” (poetry) and “jing” (scripture). This loss will alter our late modern understanding of the sacred as something that is both poetic and scriptural. The chapter explores the implications this notion of the sacred has for the distinctions made within “religion” itself. If those in the West often feel confused at the notion of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism as three religions in one, and fail to recognize that the Chinese do not perceive these three religions as alternatives, so too poetry and scripture, or art and theology, could be seen as “interpenetrating fields of force” (Hick). The chapter ends by reflecting on the significance such interpenetrating fields might have for a “non-religious Christianity” and even an “atheist theology”.

Dante’s vision presents the letters of Scripture as the speech of God. In Dante’s text, speaking (favellare) is presented as sparking (sfavillare), which makes it a kind of writing, a communication through a contingent, combustible, material medium. Speech, as the immediate communication of intention, is unmasked by Dante, long before Derrida, as grounded in the mediations of writing, with all the latter’s materiality and contingency. Dante explores the implications of the medium of writing as itself supremely significant, thereby opening a vista reaching all the way to modern and contemporary art. Dante’s text, in effect, performs the miracle of making the invisible God to be seen by deconstructing the sign as signifying a definable intention and opening signification infinitely, instead, to the immediate and infinite presence of the medium. This highlights the immediacy of the divine presence in writing. Its written medium is key to achieving the immediacy that characterizes Dante’s vision and makes it God’s “speech.” Speaking, as a sort of sparking, makes divine revelation in the Word of Scripture, as seen by human understanding, the revelation of an unpredictable indeterminacy. The spectacle of written letters of Scripture as sparking in heaven concretely presents what nevertheless remains an incommunicable transcendence of all that can be intentionally articulated in finite, human language. Randomness and absolute contingency are the hallmarks of a speech that is not merely human and guided by definable intentions, but a communication of the transcendent.

Dante’s divine vision is, in principle, impossible. The transcendent divinity, strictly speaking, is not to be seen. Only the mediation of Scripture enables humans to have some inkling of the divine. Yet Dante’s presentation of Scripture in the Heaven of Jupiter insists on the immediacy of its appearing before him as a vivid, animated spectacle of sound and light, son et lumière, a sort of fireworks in the firmament. The immediacy of writing as a visible medium is highlighted to such an extent and with such intensity that writing no longer serves simply as a medium but shows up, instead, as a concrete realization of divine presence. The immediacy of writing as a medium becomes a metaphor for divine immediacy. This exaltation of the letter invites comparison with the visions of the Jewish Kabbalah. It is further analyzed in light of Christian theologies of revelation by the incarnate Word and in Scripture, with attention to the materiality of the written medium of the letter. This vision is further focused theoretically through the lenses of media studies and of multi-media spectacles in popular and visual culture.

Books and boxes were found in close proximity; before bookshelves, chests were the most obvious place to store books, and the physical features of a bound book often made it visually analogous to a box. The material and tactile connections between book and box play into common metaphors of the book as a receptacle for textual riches, and the chapter brings together responses to the book as box-like object from Erasmus to early seventeenth-century English Protestants, from humanist treatises to portraits. In considering literary and visual encounters with the codex, discussion focuses on the significance of external surfaces, such as gold, blackness, and embroidery, in the fashioning of these inherently box-like objects. While reformers insisted on the Word of God as the only vehicle of truth, they could not escape the fact that it had to be contained in books, unavoidably material receptacles with insides and outsides that could shape and inscribe each other. Protestants remained sensitive to the metaphorical potential of an object with insides and outsides, and this chapter demonstrates that the identity of the ‘book’ was more complex than 'sola scriptura' suggested.

Looks forwards to the shipping container, a universally recognisable box crucial to the networks and infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. This ubiquitous object, a box with a standardised form, has transformed the global movement of stuff. The box of all boxes, this icon of modernity is a reminder that the way we live continues to be constrained by material things. Summarises how the book as a whole has told the story of the early modern precursors to this object, a dynamic range of boxes that enfranchised ways of being, thinking, and writing.

Describes the key issue of translation in religious discourse, including not only the translation of religious texts, but other important documents for the development of doctrine, touching on issues of grammar, lexis, and socio-historical context.

Introduces the key concept of sacred texts and their role in religious belief and practice, focusing specifically on how the reading of sacred texts can create a spatial and temporal experience of the divine for readers.

Christians have wrestled with conscience from Christianity’s beginning to the present. Does it exist? Do religious and nonreligious people have it? Is conscience a subjective or objective reality? Christians have asked if it is God’s voice, human beings’ own voice, or the voice of the community. Is conscience found in natural law? Is it a combination of the mind, will, heart, and/or the soul? Is it a divine judgment or a self-evaluation? What are the consequences of following an erroneous conscience? Lately, questions have arisen about conscience in a pluralistic society. What ought to be the relationship between conscience and law? Commentators also struggle with questions about accommodating institutions’ conscience claims. Which institutions might qualify and why? Lawmakers also contend over conscience claims made by individuals concerning military service, or over state laws about family matters increasingly at odds with Christian commitments. This book explores sources having lasting influence upon questions about conscience, including the New Testament, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Roger Williams, US federal and state constitutions, and Pope Benedict XVI, among many others.

This chapter focuses on the formation of the Christian canon, including the methodological challenges facing historians in reconstructing this history.