Christian culture and Germanic tradition in Old English literature : a syncretic approach to reconciling faith and culture.

Abstract

Many conservative or 'traditional' Christians today contend that some modern churches, in an effort to engage with contemporary culture, adapt the values and practices of the secular world to too great a degree in order to seem relevant to contemporary audiences. We do, however, live in a particular place and time, one defined by a multitude of interlocking cultural contexts, and a degree of application or contextualization of Christian scripture, theology, and worship style may be inevitable to promote a greater understanding or awareness of faith. This thesis proposes that this debate constitutes a particularly significant point of intersection between Old English literature and today's culture. Many Old English texts engage Anglo-Saxon culture by combining a Germanic heroic vernacular tradition with the Christian tradition. This thesis analyzes the strategies by which Old English authors engage in syncretism, and it discusses its implications for and effects on Anglo-Saxon readers. Special attention is paid to the ways in which Anglo-Saxon writers voice, integrate, and fuse their religious ideas with the specific culture around them in order to demonstrate that the syncretic practices of the first English Christians, in a culture still filled with pre-Christian beliefs, practices, and images, anticipate (and might in fact have something to contribute to) the responses, equally syncretic but expressed using different materials, of contemporary Christian authors to an increasingly post-Christian cultural milieu.