(Southern) African Anglican Biblical Interpretation: A Postcolonial Project

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald West
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Archaeological Analysis

AbstractThis article argues that context is an important fourth factor, alongside the more familiar three, in understanding Anglicanism in (Southern) Africa. As imperialism was an important part of the early context of the Bible’s presence within Southern African Anglicanism, the bulk of the present article charts the contours of imperial Southern African Anglicanism. Having mapped this territory, the article then probes what a postcolonial analysis of Southern African Anglican biblical interpretation might look like, outlining two related components: a descriptive component and an interventionist component. The descriptive task asks how Southern African Anglicans have read the Scriptures, and the interventionist task asks how Southern African Anglicans should read the Scriptures. The former requires a careful Foucault-like ‘archaeological’ analysis and the latter a recognition of the contextually-related resources of African biblical scholarship.

The Authority of Antiquity: England and the Protestant Latin Bible

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Biblical Translation

This chapter provides a complex narrative of biblical translation in Protestant scholarship. It draws attention to Protestant efforts to produce a universal Latin translation as an intermediary between the original languages of Scripture and the vernacular. Despite the tendency to associate Protestantism with personal reading of Scripture, the multiple levels involved in biblical interpretation complicate any straightforward relationship between reformation, text, and individual reader. The Latin Bible translation also held the potential of unifying Protestants by becoming the basis of all vernacular translations. The attempt to harmonise Protestant theology through a single Latin translation, however, ultimately exposed deep divisions in Protestant biblical scholarship. The chapter also notes that Archbishop Cranmer not only extended hospitality to continental scholars fleeing from the restoration of Catholic worship under the Augsburg Interim, but solicited their work on the Latin Bible translation and laboured to bridge divisions between them.

Afterword: Pushing the Boundaries of Biblical Interpretation

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-110
Author(s):  
Callie Callon
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Classical Studies

This afterword draws several conclusions about the implications of the essays in this special issue individually as well as discusses the merits of utilizing an interdisciplinary method more generally. The first encourages critical biblical scholarship to engage classical studies in light of the shared geographical, temporal, and cultural context of their ancient subjects. The second proposes that biblical studies embrace a fuller range of evidence by removing the unfortunate interpretative divide often separating “canonical,” “patristic,” and “apocryphal” material into different disciplinary fields.


Pour Une Lecture «Catholique» De La Bible

1997 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean L'Hour
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Biblical Interpretation

AbstractL'arrivée sur la scène internationale de la revue Biblical Interpretation marque un tournant dans l'histoire de l'exégèse. Au plan de la recherche biblique, elle reflète un nouveau positionnement du christianisme dans le concert mondial des cultures, des religions, mais aussi de la modernité. En effet, l'objectif que s'est donné cette revue d'une interprétation des Ecritures chrétiennes en dialogue avec les autres religions et, plus largement, avec le monde moderne, n'est pas sans poser un certain nombre de questions au christianisme et à ses églises. L'Eglise Catholique, en raison de sa fermeté doctrinale, nous paraît particulièrement interpellée. Jusqu'où cette Eglise peut-elle aller dans le dialogue sans mettre en péril sa doctrine touchant à la révélation, au canon des Ecritures, à la christologie, sans renoncer à la conception qu'elle a d'elle-même, de son universalisme, de sa mission? Les exégètes catholiques engagés dans ce dialogue font figure de francs-tireurs et l'articulation de leur recherche avec la doctrine catholique est pour le moins malaisée. Le présent article a pour ambition, d'une part, de prendre la mesure des difficultés qui sembleraient compromettre un dialogue à parité avec les autres religions et avec la modernité souvent athée, et, d'autre part, de dégager les ouvertures possibles en vue d'un tel dialogue.

Returning To China: Biblical Interpretation in Postcolonial Hong Kong

1999 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Archie C.C. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Hybrid Identity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
New Framework

AbstractThe paper aims to construct a new framework for biblical studies from the context of postcolonial Hong Kong. While present biblical scholarship has largely depended on historical-critical exegesis, biblical scholars of Asia have begun to conceive a different approach to the Bible, because of not only a new context of reading, but also a radically different cultural-political location of the reader. This location, as it is now being formulated, is a reading between East and West, between the dominant interpretation and scholarship of the formerly colonial and Western cultures and the newly arising consciousness of emerging postcolonial identities in the histories and cultures of Asia. After about some 150 years of British colonial rule, the identity of being a people of Hong Kong is highly hybridised. It is a hybrid identity of being cultural Chinese and yet pragmatically British, both a strong sense of identification with China and an unexplainable fear of being national Chinese. Such location of a reader transforms one's understanding of a biblical text such as Isaiah 56-66 and sheds a new light on the meaning of the return in some of its major passages.

scholarly journals The legacy of Circle women�s engagement with the Bible: Reflections from an African male biblical scholar

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lovemore Togarasei
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
African Women ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Biblical Scholar

The entry of women into religious and theological studies has revolutionised the modus operandi of these disciplines. Especially with the formation of the Circle of Concerned Women Theologians, the study of these disciplines has never been the same. In this article, an attempt is made to consider the legacy of women theologians in the area of biblical interpretation. Specifically, the article looks at how members of the Circle have interpreted the Bible in their quest for a theology that responds to African women�s experiences. The article discusses Circle biblical scholars� methods of interpreting the Bible, what they have managed to achieve, as well as pointing out areas that still call for attention. It concludes that Circle biblical scholars, like all African Biblical Interpretation, are engaged scholars who serve both the need for intellectual growth as well as solving the pressing needs of their societies.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article primarily focuses on how members of the Circle of Concerned Women Theologians have interpreted the Bible in their quest for justice. It therefore engages several disciplines: biblical interpretation, theology, gender, politics, health, and so on.Keywords: African Biblical interpretation; Women theologians; Bible; legacy;engaged Biblical Scholarship

scholarly journals CROSSING BOUNDARIES. THE TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL OF INTERCULTURAL BIBLE READING IN SECULAR / POST-SECULAR CONTEXTS

Scriptura ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Louis Jonker
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Bible Reading

Intercultural biblical hermeneutics is a fairly recent development in biblical scholarship in general. It emphasises that biblical interpretation almost always takes place in contexts where an array of cultural values and beliefs determine the outcome of the interpretative process. Although this branch of biblical hermeneutics emerged from the need to reflect theoretically on how Christians from different socio-cultural and socio-economic contexts engage the biblical texts, and one another on account of those texts, this approach may also be widened to include the interpretation of the Bible in non-Christian contexts (including the contexts of other religions and secular contexts) or even to engage in discourse on the interpretation of authoritative texts of different traditions (such as the Qur’an in Islam, in addition to the Tenakh of Judaism, and the Old and New Testament of Christianity). In research on intercultural biblical hermeneutics, it has been noticed that intercultural interpretation holds enormous transformative potential. My paper will examine how this could be of use in engagements between religious, secular and post-secular contexts.

scholarly journals Biblical Interpretation in the Russian Orthodox Church: An historical and hermeneutical perspective

2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-365
Author(s):  
A. Negrov
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Russian Orthodox Church ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Biblical Interpretation

for an understanding of biblical interpretation within the Russian Orthodox Church. Its purpose is not to advocate pro or contra Russian biblical scholarship, but to place the emphasis on the history of biblical interpretation in the Russian Orthodox Church and on Orthodox biblical hermeneutics. Two considerations are specifically pertinent to the study of this topic. First, the history of biblical interpretation is surveyed from a sole and specific perspective - from within a· historico-dogmatic development of the Russian Orthodox Church from the Kiev period of its history (9_13th century) till the Synodal period (1721-1917). Second, it is true that once originated, the Biblical Study in Russian Orthodoxy went its own way and developed its own fundamental principles of interpretation. Although many principles correlated and corresponded with general principles of biblical interpretation, in essence they form "Russian Orthodox Hermeneutics". This paper seeks to establish an outline of the essential elements of Orthodox biblical hermeneutics as they developed in the history of interpretation.

River and Ocean

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-184
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The One

This chapter looks at Scriptures, whose ambiguity is seen both as a difficulty to shake people out of exegetical complacency and as an inspired involution of multiple meanings on the page. These meanings are not only allegorical, mystical, or typological, but also literal, according to a widespread Catholic idea neglected by previous historians of biblical scholarship. The doctrine of multiple literal senses marked yet another battleground between the company of two armies, Protestant and Catholic—barring two or three defections—in the early seventeenth century. It encapsulated a profound distinction between two views of Scripture: the one a river to be cleansed and traced to the source, the other an ocean in which to swim, even to abandon oneself. Why, then, has this controversy been entirely ignored by scholarship? As modernity encroached, the doctrine became an embarrassment to Catholics, and in 1845 a professor of theology at Louvain, Jan-Theodor Beelen, wrote a treatise against it. But there are deeper reasons for the neglect. The history of biblical hermeneutics as written to date is more than usually Whiggish, seeking the precursors to Schleiermacher and Gadamer; the German and Lutheran backstory has therefore seemed inevitable, and from this perspective Catholic hermeneutics since Luther and Erasmus has been an irrelevance. Subsequently, the occlusion of the Catholic voice was attended by a narrowing of the possibilities of what biblical interpretation could be.

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