Christian Semiotics and the Language of Faith

Christian Semiotics and the Language of Faith
Author: Alex Scott
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780595424092

What is the relation between language and religious faith? To what extent do we depend on the use of language in order to express our religious feelings and beliefs? Semiotics is a field of study that seeks to answer these questions by investigating the meaning of religious symbols and by examining their uses, purposes, and functions. Christian Semiotics and the Language of Faith discusses the work of a number of important thinkers in semiotics, including Saussure, Peirce, Morris, Barthes, Hjelmslev, and Eco. The work of these writers provides insight into many aspects of religious symbolism, including the relation between signs and their referents, the iconicity of signs and symbols, the nature of "meaning" and signification, and the function of signs as signifiers of the sacred. Author Alex Scott discusses the writings of Todorov, Greimas, Foucault, Bakhtin, and others, describing the applications of discourse analysis to theological and literary study. He also examines the usefulness of discourse analysis as a method of studying biblical and liturgical language. Christian Semiotics and the Language of Faith embraces a variety of disciplines, including semiotics, the philosophy of language, ethics, religion and literature, and theology. This multidisciplinary approach can provide us with a means of understanding the symbolic importance of many aspects of religious faith.

Semiotics of the Christian Imagination

Semiotics of the Christian Imagination
Author: Domenico Pietropaolo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350064130

The semiotics of the Christian imagination describes the repository of signs and the logic of signification through which a community of faith envisions spiritual truths. This book analyses various examples in text, images, music, art and scientific treatise of the imaginative semiotisation of the fall of Man and the Church's semiotic perception of the Divine plan for Redemption. The book includes a chapter detailing the theory of signs, based on a close reading of primary sources, and has nine further chapters on the meaning-making inherent in ideas of the Fall and Redemption of mankind. These are filtered through and given material representation by the semiotic paradigms of various cultural fields, including philology, verbal arts and science. Central to this practice - and to the book's message - are two themes of theological semiotics fundamental to man's understanding of himself in the larger scheme of things. Two of these include the theology of the Fall and a sacramental theory of signs. The theory is grounded in the doctrine of analogy, and this is the only reliable cognitive link between the immanence of the thinking subject and the transcendence that is the object of thought.

Changing Signs of Truth

Changing Signs of Truth
Author: Crystal L. Downing
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 083086685X

Crystal Downing brings the postmodern theory of semiotics within reach for today's evangelists. Following the idea of the sign through Scripture, church history and the academy, Downing shows you how signs work and how sensitivity to their dynamics can make or break an attempt to communicate truth.

Semiotics of Religion

Semiotics of Religion
Author: Robert Yelle
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012-12-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1441104194

Integrates structural and historical perspectives on the semiotics of religion and gives an account of the distinctive features of religious language and symbolism.

Acts of Interpretation

Acts of Interpretation
Author: Naomi Janowitz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2022-05-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110768607

Ancient authors debated proper verbal and non-verbal signs as representations of divinity. These understanding of signs were based on ideas drawn from language and thus limited due to a their partial understanding of the multi-functionality of signs. Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics, as adapted by anthropological linguists including Michael Silverstein, better explains the contextual linkages ("performativity") of ancient religious signs such as divine names. Sign meaning is always dependent on processes of interpretation and is always open to reinterpretation. Focusing on these processes permits a more detailed analysis of the ancient evidence. Examples are drawn from ancient Israelite verbal and non-verbal divine representation, the apostle Paul’s linguistic letter/spirit model, Christian debates about the limits of language to best represent the deity, Josephus’ aniconic advertisement of Jewish rites, the multi-layered divine representations in the Dura-Europos synagogue, the diverse "performativity" of Jewish ascent liturgies, and—the single modern example—the role of art at Burning Man. Divine representation is the basis for ritual efficacy even as sign meaning is a constant source of contention.

God in the Labyrinth

God in the Labyrinth
Author: Andrew Hollingsworth
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2019-10-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 153267984X

In God in the Labyrinth, Andrew Hollingsworth uses Umberto Eco’s semiotic concept of the model encyclopedia as the basis for a new model and approach to systematic theology. Following an in-depth analysis of the model encyclopedia in Eco’s semiotics, he demonstrates the implications this model has for epistemology, hermeneutics, and doctrinal development. This work aims to bridge the unfortunate gap in research that exists between the fields of systematic theology and semiotics by demonstrating semiotic insights for theological method.

The Analogy of Signs

The Analogy of Signs
Author: Rory Misiewicz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-02-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1978710038

The longstanding debate over how God-talk is intelligible gravitates around how we should understand the putative answer, “by analogy.” For some contemporary Christian theologians, analogy involves an ontological claim about creaturely and divine being (i.e., an analogy of being). For others, it involves a semantic or syntactical structure that legitimates the linguistic performances associated with analogy (i.e., a grammatical analogy). Still others appeal to faith in God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ (i.e., an analogy of faith). Rory Misiewicz argues that all of these approaches fall flat in their explanatory efforts. He draws upon the work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce to rethink the relation between God and human beings. He argues that Christian theologians may view that relation as being established by an “analogy of signs”: both God and human beings are univocally involved in semiosis, or sign-process, and the confirmation of God’s semiotic identity is found in the revelation of God in the person of Jesus, the incarnate Son of God. Therefore, ordinary analogical language is intelligible, for divine signs are commensurate with human signs.

Semiotic Approach to the Theology of Inculturation

Semiotic Approach to the Theology of Inculturation
Author: Cyril Orji
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-08-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0227906357

A Semiotic Approach to the Theology of Inculturation argues that though it is a difficult and delicate task, inculturation is still a requisite demand of a World Church and that without it the Church is unrecognisable and unsustainable. The book also suggests that the past failures of inculturation experiments in Africa can be overcome only by critically applying the science of semiotics, which can serve as an antidote to the nature of human knowing and reductionism that characterised earlier attempts to make Christianity African to the African. Drawing from the semiotic works of C.S. Peirce, Clifford Geertz, and Bernard Lonergan, Cyril Orji shows why semiotics is best suited to an African theology of inculturation and offers ten pinpointed precepts, identified as 'Habits', which underline the attentiveness, reasonableness, and responsibility required in a semiotic approach to a theology of inculturation. The 'Habits' are also akin to the imperatives inherent in the notion of catholicity - that catholicity is not identified with uniformity but with reconciled diversity, and also that catholicity demands different forms in different places, times, and cultural settings.

Sign, Text, Scripture

Sign, Text, Scripture
Author: George Aichele
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 172
Release: 1997-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781850756910

This book is an introduction to the field of semiotics specifically directed to students of the Bible as well as to biblical scholars trained in other methodologies. The primary focus is on what semiotics is now-how contemporary scholars actually approach the Bible semiotically. Attention is given to the history and varieties of semiotic theory, because as it has influenced the work of more recent thinkers, and because postmodern reappraisals of semiotics call for rereading of biblical texts. The book is organized according to topics ('Sign', 'Message', 'Text', etc.), which provide a way to interrogate semiotics as a system. This stimulating account also includes, for good measure, reflections on what theology has become, for believer and unbeliever alike, in a post-Nietzschean, post-Heideggerian world: What does it mean to see theology as 'ideology'-a complex and never wholly conscious network of understandings, preconceptions, and expectations about 'the way things are'.

A Semiotic Christology

A Semiotic Christology
Author: Cyril Orji
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2021-03-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725269171

This book details how semiotics furthers an understanding of the science of Christology. In the light of the trend towards evolutionary worldview, the book goes beyond description and critically engages the sign system of C. S. Peirce, which it sees as a conceptual tool and method for a better understanding of some of the basic issues in Christology.