Metanarrative Collapse: Has the Christian Cosmology Invented by St. Augustine of Hippo Stood the Test of Time? Part One

Introduction
From its beginnings in the first century A.D. Christianity anchored its cosmology in the Bible. But what is the Bible? As a book in hand, of course, it is a collection of ancient texts, the product of the religious history of a remarkably durable and professedly holy ethno-nation in the ancient Near East. One might well ask, therefore, just what spiritual truths or religious guidance could, or should such a book convey to people like me, specifically, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants living in the twenty-first century? Is the Holy Bible just another “social construct,” a mere cultural artefact, or is it instead the literal Word of God?
Intellectual heavyweights among mainline Anglo-European Protestants such as Karl Barth concede that the Bible is indeed a “humanly composed and selected” collection of “human words” while professing a neo-orthodox faith that scripture remains “the witness of divine revelation”.[1] But how should faithful Christians interpret the testimony of that witness? Or, should we say “witnesses”? After all, Protestants differ with Catholics as to whether this or that ancient Hebrew or Jewish text should be included in the biblical canon. At the end of the day, however, even if all churches somehow settle upon on a single, canonical corpus of antique texts, the theological significance of the biblical metanarrative, from Genesis to Revelation, will remain open to competing interpretations—as it always has been.
The difficulty of distinguishing heresy from orthodoxy forced the early church to master the art of theological hermeneutics. The church fathers expounded the Word of God using a bewildering variety of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical (mystical) methods of biblical interpretation. In quick succession, rival camps staked out their respective claims to the true or most useful understanding of the Bible story. First in were the mostly Hebrew and Jewish authors and participant observers responsible for the original texts of both the Old and New Testaments. Marinated in Scripture, the Mosaic law, and the prophetic tradition, they read and told their stories of the creation, fall, and redemption of Old Covenant Israel through an ethnocentrically thickened, Hebraic hermeneutic lens. Their insider’s view of the Hebrew religious culture revolving around the Jerusalem Temple was far removed from the cosmopolitan, Hellenic, or Greco-Roman presuppositions underlying the Christian tale of two cities told several centuries later by Augustine (354–430 AD), the bishop of Hippo in North Africa. Read more














