Machtworte

Sacred text is a key phenomenon of both historical and contemporary religion. The conventional argument for its normative status lies in the text's genesis: its perception as »revelation«, as a message from transcendent entities. Against this background Andreas Mauz focuses strictly on the text-immanent account of such revelatory incidents. He establishes a poetological notion of 'sacred text' based on the text's self-description as being revealed. Drawing on theoretical sources from literary and media studies, the author offers a detailed vocabulary for describing the phenomena in question - e.g. the relation of the 'sanctifying' and the 'sanctified' text, the revelation narrative, the scene of writing. Beyond the interest in text analysis the author also pursues a theological aim. The poetics of 'sacred text' refer to a sensitive intersection between biblical studies and dogmatics: what does the fact of the pluralistic genetic self-description of certain biblical texts mean in terms of a normative dogmatic description of the one Scripture?