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author: Kseniia Trofymchuk


Urgency of the research. Theopoetics begins as a dialogue around the problems and challenges of modern society, namely how to find words that will reach a society that has experienced a crisis of faith and the shaking of the foundations of human values in the experience of world wars and other socio-political upheavals. Theopoetics is the desire to involve society in transformative meanings and to find new hopes where the logic and rationalist language of dogmatics have no power.

Target setting. Theology, with this approach, becomes important as a platform for relations and the exchange of experiences, which recognizes certain linguistic conventions rather than fixed propositions about God. In addition, theopoetics opens the methodological ways for Ukrainian theology, hidden in the great heritage of national literature, where literature can meet theology and openly reveal its often hidden wealth.

Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. The article studies the works of Amos Niven Wilder and Stanley Romaine Hopper, as well as the works of his student, in which attention was paid to the topic of theopoetics. The study was based on the research of Kellid Kitt-Perry in his work Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer, which for the first time comprehensively, albeit briefly, describes the main philosophical and theological preconditions of theopoetics, as well as outlines the main theopoetic trends of the XX century.

The research objective. The purpose of the study is to investigate the context and reasons (social, philosophical, theological) of the origin of theopoetic discourse, as well as to trace the peculiarity of theopoetic proposal in the light of its opposition to classical theology. Achieving the goal of this work requires outlining the historical, philosophical and theological changes in the origin and formation of theopoetics, as well as the implementation of philosophical and theological study of theopoetic approaches of S. Hopper and A. Wilder as a response to modern challenges.

The statement of basic materials. Interpretations of biblical texts, with regard to the mythopoetic biblical worldview, can reveal greater social, political, cultural potential to find answers to challenges of modern society. Therefore, theopoetics becomes a desire to rethink traditional theology, which was able to hear everyone, and radically different one, where the building of confessional walls between church and society will become a platform for dialogue without fixed and ultimate truths available to knowledge or faith of individual denominations. But despite the solutions to the problems that theopoetics may offer, both Hopper and Wilder ask what tools can help us to work with such complex texts in order to obtain the most adequate interpretations, avoiding errors that only weaken Christian messages.

Conclusions. For Hopper and Wilder, the understanding of theopoetics was consistent with mythopoetics, which sought not only to revive classical theology, but also to establish a connection with the new sensitivity of modern contexts, their images and cults, namely to bring theology closer to the problems of modern human: social, ethical, moral, racial, gender issues to which traditional theology could not find relevant answers.

Keywords: theopoetics, hermeneutics, literary criticism, myth, biblical symbolism, demythologization, mythopoetics.


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