The image of the "tower": A study on the soteriology in the Shepherd of Hermas

Shepherd of Hermas had been a popular scripture in the early Christian Church for more than three centuries and was all but classified among the Canon. After being translated into Latin, the book gained widespread fame in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and influenced important persons, such as Boethius, Dante and the author of Piers Plowman. Meanwhile, this book has also been regarded as a riddle for generations since it is difficult to interpret its mixed problems of culture and theology. Since the 20th century, several studies on this book have been published. However, they did not pay enough attention to the key puzzle in this text, namely, the central image of the "tower". The literary narrative of Shepherd of Hermas is constituted by the linguistic clan of the "tower". By focusing on the image of the "tower", this article analyses how Hermas claimed Christian Church as a tower that is just reversed to the Babel Tower. It concluses that, by gathering and concentrating the images of the "tower" in the Bible to a linguistic clan with the combination of both Hebrew and Greek thoughts, the author succeeded in deducing the virtues of life and interpreting on the spatial continuity of the "tower". Furthermore, this article argues that the eschatological freedom, which is manifested in the spatial image, became the essential expression of the early Christian soteriology.