ABSTRACT
The previous chapter’s presentation of a logic of the resurrection also serves to justify raising queries about whether or not we should allow an ancient set of narratives to be logically and metaphysically isolated from more recent approaches to theory, in the sense that we all have a tendency to suppose – rightly at some levels – that progress has been made in the evolution of human consciousness and its effects. At some levels, however, the aesthetic problem of either cyclicity, or development of artistic endeavour over large diachronic slices of history, obtrudes onto assessment of an ancient literature that participates and contributes, even obliquely, to broadening and challenging human perception of the meaning of life. In a poststructuralist framework quite different from the present one, Richard Rorty1 makes a helpful analysis pointing up the importance of grounding a research theory’s measuring terms in the object language literature that it targets. This involves discovering how and to what degree the terms in the original literature can themselves be used to generate the theory and/or assess its functional viability within the original literature. This implements the approach that some applied linguistic analysis should be an internal component of a philosophy of language. Given the vexed history of the relations between the literatures that performed as the source of Christianity respecting the use of terms matched with ‘God’, it is a worthwhile exercise to implement this sort of proposal.
