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Michael Cameron PhD

Theology, Emeritus Professor

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Michael Cameron taught at the University of Portland from 2002 - 2022. He taught the basic course in biblical study for the sake of theology, and courses in the History Christianity. He specializes in the thought of the 4th century bishop and thinker, Saint Augustine of Hippo. In 2012, Oxford University Press, New York, published Michael's book, Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine's Early Figurative Exegesis. In 2015 New City Press, New York, published an anthology of Augustine's extensive detailed expositions of the Psalms Enarrationes in psalmos, for which he wrote an extended introduction. Also in 2015 Michael's book Unfolding Sacred Scripture: How Catholics Read the Bible, was published by Liturgy Training Publications, Chicago. Michael has published numerous articles in scholar and popular journals, and serves on the editorial board of Augustinian Studies and the Augustus-Lexikon. From 2006 to 2017 he served as the editor for patristic and early medieval Latin Christianity for the multi-volume reference work published by Walter De Gruyter, Berlin, entitled The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. Michael is married to Lorie Simmons, and is the father of two grown sons, Erik and Matthew.

Education

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Chicago Divinity School
Master of Divinity, Bethany Theological Seminary
Bachelor of Arts, Central Bible College

Recent Work

"Augustine's Earliest Readings of Genesis," for the International Conference on Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram, held at Universität Tübingen in October 2017.

Synopsis

Augustine wrote works commenting on the first three chapters of Genesis at least five times in his career: in two early works, Genesis against there Manicheans, and the incomplete Literal Commentary on Genesis, an Unfinished Book, then in Books 11-13 of Confessions, and the great work in twelve books, the Literal Commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram), finally he returns to Genesis 1-3 in and section of Book 14 of The City of God. I read a paper at a conference devoted to De Genesi ad Litteram that treated works on Genesis prior to the great commentary. The paper noted Augustine's increasing g concern for the literal historical quality of events to which the text of Genesis referred. His concern was a less a fundamentalistic defense of Scripture's reliability than preserving more protection from Manichean denials about Scripture's stories that he increasingly based on the physical reality of the bodies of Adam and Eve as carriers of sin, as a protection for the idea of Christ whose actual body physically carried out the redemption of the human race.

Curriculum Vitae