Future of the Word
Subtitle: An Eschatology of Reading
Publisher: 1517 Media
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 326
ISBN-13: 9781451470321
Subjects: Eschatology, biblical teaching
Description: In scripture, Jesus promises a future that potentially infuses all texts: "my words will not pass away"(Matt 24:28). This book argues that texts--even literary texts--, have an eschatology, too, a part in God's purpose for the cosmos. They, with all creation, move toward participation in the new creation, in the Trinity's expanding, creative love. This eschatological future for texts impacts how we understand meaning making, from the level of semiology to that of hermeneutics. This book tells the story of how readers participate in the future of the word, the eschatology of texts. If texts have a future in the kingdom of God, then readers' engagements with them--everything from preservation and utterance to translation, criticism, and call and response--can cultivate those futures in the love of the Trinity. Kriner explores how the fallenness and failures of texts, alongside readers' own failures, while seeming to challenge the future of the word, ultimately point to reading as a posture of reconciliation, in which reader and text meet in the Maranatha of all text.