"David Dawson's "Christian Figural Reading "is an elegant, deeply important and wonderfully complex book. Interweaving themes from early Christian scholarship, literary theory, and contemporary Christian thought, the text offers a challenge to scholars across a number of currently contested and fast-moving fields, demanding of us all that we rethink Biblical interpretation as 'the principal site of the tension between past and future.' The hero of the book is Origen: Dawson shows how the continual transformation of identity ...
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"David Dawson's "Christian Figural Reading "is an elegant, deeply important and wonderfully complex book. Interweaving themes from early Christian scholarship, literary theory, and contemporary Christian thought, the text offers a challenge to scholars across a number of currently contested and fast-moving fields, demanding of us all that we rethink Biblical interpretation as 'the principal site of the tension between past and future.' The hero of the book is Origen: Dawson shows how the continual transformation of identity in the light of constant attention to the mysterious 'performance' of the divine in history is at the center of Origen's method. In the book's key twist Dawson argues that this Origenist process of figural reading can serve to reshape Christiansi understanding of their own engagement with Israel. Here Origen the promoter of fanciful and supercessionist Christian reading becomes the resource, beyond even Boyarin, Auerbach and Frei, for rethinking this most dangerous of intercultural engagements. Early Christian scholars, theologians, literary theorists, all will need to attend to Dawson's argument."--Lewis Ayres, Candler School of Theology, Emory University.
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