Text and Context

Vernacular Approaches to the Bible in Global Christianity

Melanie Baffes

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781532643408, 9781532643415
• eBook ISBN: 9781532643422
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

As biblical hermeneutics moves increasingly toward the inclusion of vernacular approaches to the text--understandings of the Bible based on culture, context, and human experience--many communities of faith around the world are contributing their voices to the conversation of global Christianity. This volume explores reading methods and text interpretations of believers in South Africa, the Caribbean, Spain, the Netherlands, the United States, India, Kenya, Fiji, Japan, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Nigeria--revealing the ways various faith communities read the Bible contextually. Essays in this volume also illustrate the impact of the biblical text in people's lives--on their understandings of oppression, identity, the plight of refugees, decline and loss, the relationship between church and society, imperialism, homelessness, restorative justice, bodily experiences of the Holy Spirit, and time and the future. Together, these writings provide an in-depth sense of how global Christians read the Bible through the lens of their own tradition or culture, as well as how the Bible informs all aspects of their lives as they read the world biblically.

Part I

Reading the Bible Contextually

1

Defining a Pentecostal Hermeneutic for Africa

Marius Nel

Introduction

Underlying each different theological tradition is a specific way of reading and interpreting the Bible (hermeneutics), serving as a rationale for traditions distinguishing themselves from others in the broader Christian family. Conversely, these different traditions also have been shaped by their specific ways of reading and interpreting the Bible, because the interpretation of biblical texts leads to “sense-making with existential consequences,”1 resulting in different theologies informing the different denominations.

Hermeneutics is the unavoidable activity of interpretation, an intellectual quest to discover meaning that is driven by a governing question: “What does the process of interpretation involve, and can it even uncover a conclusive meaning?”2 The term hermeneuein was deployed by the Greeks to refer to three basic activities: a) to express aloud in words or vocalize; b) to explain; and c) to translate. Palmer argues that in all three cases, something foreign, strange, and separated in time, space, or experience is made familiar and comprehensible.3 It is interpreted and explained in such a way that the unfamiliar becomes familiar.4

Hermeneutical Problem

A wide variety of theoretical approaches characterize the modern hermeneutical debate,5 summarized by Thiselton as: the hermeneutics of understanding; the hermeneutics of self-involvement; the hermeneutics of metacriticism and the foundations of knowledge; the hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval; the hermeneutics of socio-critical theory; the hermeneutics of liberation theologies and feminist theologies; the hermeneutics of reading in the context of literary theory; and the hermeneutics of reading in reader-response theories of literary meaning.6 In discussing a Pentecostal hermeneutic, it is best classified in Thiselton’s terms as a hermeneutics of metacriticism, where the foundations of knowledge, the basis of understanding the biblical text, and modern readers’ possible relationship to the text’s message are addressed.7

A Pentecostal hermeneutic emphasizes three elements: the interrelationship between the Holy Spirit as the One animating Scripture and empowering the believing community8 for the purpose of equipping members for ministry and witness in culturally appropriate ways.9 In the rest of this article, these three elements—the Holy Spirit, Scripture, and the believing community—will be explored to identify the way in which Pentecostals interpret the Bible.

The hermeneutical challenge can be described in this way. While the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) demanded that understanding be objective and proposed that truth could be found through rigorous methodical exercises, modern consensus holds that all understanding is necessarily based on preconceptions or presuppositions determined by prior understanding that emerges from engagement with the matter involved.10 Readers’ prior experiences and presuppositions are part of the horizon within which they will interpret what they read, with the latter influencing the present horizon. Lategan calls this the reader’s “personal backpack,” which comprises an individual’s past experiences, preconceived ideas, an understanding of how the world works, personal prejudices, fears, and expectations.11 It is important to know the role played by pre-understanding, although it is not necessary (or possible) to rid oneself of one’s past experiences or prejudices before one can participate in the act of understanding. What is necessary is rather to take the prejudices into account and place them in balance, leading to the conscious act of a fusion of horizons.12 To understand is, according to Gadamer, to confront the text with the conscious awareness of one’s pre-understandings or one’s own “horizon of expectation”13 in order to validate or correct one’s pre-understandings through the text.14 “The ongoing cyclic process of pre-understanding—challenge—rejection or acceptance—adjustment—new self-understanding—new pre-understanding is what is understood as the ‘hermeneutical circle’”15

A precondition to understanding is the consciousness of one’s participation in the effective histories of the text—where the different variations of historical criticism (text criticism, source criticism, form criticism, tradition criticism, and later variations such as redaction criticism) can help to explain the origins of phenomena and plot their development.16 Bultmann already emphasized that understanding implies a living relationship between the interpreter and the text based on “fore-understanding,”17 because it is presupposed already and not attained through the process of understanding. When reading the Bible, the Christian believer utilizes necessarily a Christian existential fore-understanding,18 because the New Testament originated within and was specifically intended for the Christian community.19

The Bible cannot be understood adequately in terms of an individual’s self-understanding only, based on his or her participation in the world, but also must be understood from faith’s self-understanding, determined by the fact that faith is a gracious act of God that happens to the one who has faith.20 Faith is a pneumatological reality21 and, from a Pentecostal perspective, the Bible is interpreted as the product of an experience with the Spirit that the Bible describes in phenomenological language,22 and leading to the expectation by modern-day Pentecostals that the Spirit would apply biblical truth and promises to their everyday experiences and circumstances. “The experience of the presence and involvement of the Spirit in the believer’s life enables one to come to terms with the apostolic witness in a truly existential manner,”23 leading to a continuity with the original faith community for whom the epistle or gospel was intended, as well as the modern-day community.

The results of a Pentecostal encounter with the Bible are: a) a deepening respect for the witness of the Scriptures and especially the apostolic witnesses concerning Jesus contained in it;24 b) a denial that all passages should be read and interpreted literally as though the truths contained in the passage is transferred in a mechanistic or automatic way; and c) interpretation of the biblical text within the pneumatic continuity of the faith community through all ages.25 The community is defined in terms of being Spirit-driven, Spirit-led, and Spirit-empowered to accomplish God’s purposes for and through the community, a community that is to be Spirit-governed, Spirit-supported, and Spirit-propagated.26

If understanding is defined as the fusion of horizons conditioned by effective historical criticism, the important question remains: how does one validate one’s experience with the text? Ricoeur was concerned about text comprehension and showed that the relationship between interpreter and text should be approached methodically in a critically accountable way.27 The interpretive process is dialectical, progressing from an initial naive understanding to an explanation of the text, and a deeper understanding of the text and a methodological validation of the results of the first or naive understanding.28

True understanding always includes the act of application.29 The text that is understood historically always is forced to abandon its claim that it is uttering something true, argues Gadamer, and the acknowledgment of the otherne...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Reading the Bible Contextually
• Part II: Reading the World Biblically