Faith Living Understanding

Stephen Stringer was awarded PhD for his work on ‘Faith Living Understanding: Towards a Theatrical Model for Oral Theologizing’. In this thesis, Stephen explores Vanhoozer’s model using a tripartite structure of orality – dramatic epistemology, embodied rationality, and communal hermeneutics it explore a framework for an oral theology. He also explores real-life implications for the model using vignettes from his own work and shows how the communal nature of oral theology might enrich Vanhoozer’s model. Beyond illustrating that Vanhoozer’s model is an adequate framework for oral theology, this work suggest that oral theology might be considered the proper domain for Vanhoozer’s theodramatic theology in that it moves beyond the written word to embodied action in the real world. Such a theology is faith living understanding – faithfully, contextually, creatively, and communally.