Glossary

Faithfulness to a person

A form of scholarship where classification of the genres of texts is used to trace the evolution of literary units back from their present written form to their original form – usually an oral proclamation – in order to identify their original life situations and social contexts.

An approach to the Scriptures that presumes that every thing in the Bible is literally and exactly true as stated. This is not the position of the Catholic Church nor of most other Christian groups.

In a broader context fundamentalism is also a movement. It began in the late nineteenth century in UK and USA, when a few Protestant preachers/writers sought to reduce Christianity to a small number of ‘fundamental’ beliefs. One of these was the literal interpretation of the Bible already mentioned.