At the threshold of american personalism: providing the personal access to God’s Word in Elizabethan Bible translations

Abstract

The article is aimed at defining the ways to the exposure of theistic basis of personhood which were paved by the personalist philosophy founded in the USA in the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries. Having become an initiator of historical-philosophical reconstructing the genesis of American personalism in Ukraine, the author actualizes the problem of perceiving the Scripture text by the personalistic trend sprung from the Protestant soil in North America. The article substantiates the approach to reflecting this process based upon the meta-ontology of personality expounded by patristic trinitology at the turn of Antiquity and the Middle Ages and disclosed for rational consciousness of the modern era by the personalistic mode of thinking appealed to Orthodox theology. Prepared by the previous results of the author’s elaboration of the actualized problematics (represented in his publications in Ukrainian and foreign periodical scientific editions) the article focuses on the theological foundations of the personalist philosophy of the USA connecting its unsteadiness with the departure of Protestantism from Christian dogmata affirming personal principle of being, Absolute Personality of God and godlikeness of the human person uncovered by the Revelation. Correlating horizons of personalistic perception of God Breathed Book with reconstructions of the Bible topology of personhood which were performed in the Scripture translations providing the personal access to God’s Word, the author analyzes the transmission of Biblical concepts of personal being in English Scripture versions appeared during the reign of Elizabeth I (the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible), initially accepted by the Protestant denominations of North America and formed the Biblical background of personalistic thinking in the New World. The study reveals the premises of reducing the spiritual source of personality to personalized ratio in the doctrine of the classical American personalism clarifying the perspective of its further investigation.