FOUNDATIONS OF BIBLE STUDY

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FOUNDATIONS OF BIBLE STUDY

• Recent Contemporary
• Hermeneutical Method

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Recent Contemporary Hermeneutical Method

• Where should we expect to find the locus of
  meaning?
• Is it in the authors intention?
• Is it in the text itself perhaps apart from
  what the author may have intended?
• Is it to be found in what the reader brings to
  the text?

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Recent Contemporary Hermeneutical Method

• We may speak of interpretation that is
• author-centered
• text-centered
• reader-centered

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Recent Contemporary Hermeneutical Method

• These three approaches have their roots in the
  contemporary analysis of literature and
  hermeneutical method.

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Author-centered interpretation

• The author conveys what he intends to communicate
• The reader seeks to discover that meaning
• Investigation of the author and his world is
  important to understand the authors perspective.
• Background studies help us to enter into the
  cultural, literary, and ideological world of the
  author.
• Knowledge of the authors circumstances is
  important.
• Source, form, and redaction criticisms are called
  into service to ascertain an authors viewpoint,
  as in historical criticism.

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Author-centered interpretation

• Authorial intention is thus the key to
  understanding a given text.
• Analysis of the text may reveal repeated ideas
  and other clues which point us to what the author
  intends to convey in what is written.

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Author-centered interpretation

• Walter Kaiser represents this more traditional
  understanding when he writes The authors
  intended meaning is what the text means.
• The is a difference between meaning (what the
  author intended to convey) and significance
  (the relationship between the meaning and someone
  or something else).

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Text-centered interpretation

• This approach
• has seen the text as having a meaning of its own,
  independent of authorial intent.
• Focuses on linguistics and semantics.
• May divorces meaning from a texts origin
• Historical background studies often lose much of
  their importance in a thorough-going
  text-centered approach.

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Text-centered interpretation

• More attention is given to analyzing the text
  than was often given when trying to ascertain the
  historical reality behind the text.
• Focus is simply on what the author has produced.
• Analysis of words and phrases and of sentences
  and sequences of sentences.

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Reader-Centered Interpretation

• The reader creates the meaning of the text.
• This has been called reader-response criticism
• This reading of the text allows those with
  ideological agendas to find support in the
  biblical text, for example those promoting
  liberation or feminists theologies

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Reader-Centered Interpretation

• More force is given to the meaning within the
  text
• Attention is also directed to what the reader
  brings to the text as he reads it.
• The modern interpreter is conditioned by his own
  place in history and tradition.

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Conclusion

• These three methods of interpretation often
  overlap to some extent as they are variously
  applied by scholars.
• Neither the text-centered nor reader-centered
  approaches necessarily discard attention to the
  author and attendant background considerations.

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Conclusion

• If our theological starting point is that God has
  communicated His message through chosen
  individuals at various points in redemptive
  history, then we will want to do all we can to
  understand these inspired authors and their times
  and cultures which have influenced the way they
  have conveyed for us the divine message.
• Ultimately it is the text with which we are
  concerned, when it comes to exegesis.

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Conclusion

• The text-centered approach should remind us of
  the latent possibilities in the text which the
  author may or may not have had in mind when
  writing.
• When acknowledging the sensus plenor (the fuller
  sense) in an Old Testament text, we would have to
  say that the ultimate meaning is beyond what the
  author had in mind.

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Conclusion

• If we are to consider the implications of what we
  observe in a text, we cannot assume that the
  author had all such implications in mind when
  recording his message.
• A text-centered approach is helpful to determine
  the overall thrust or interpretive point of a
  passage and perhaps the best approach everything
  considered.

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Conclusion

• The authors intent should help us to understand
  a given text, but not necessarily exhaust its
  meaning.
• A reader-centered tack tells us that the text is
  more than a relic from the past. It is meant to
  inform us.

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Conclusion

• We should both interpret the text properly and
  also allow the text to interpret us.
• It is vitally important that we move from being
  informed to being transformed.