Eastern Region Ministry Course

This book defends the claims of historical-critical research into the New Testament as necessary for theological interpretation.Presenting an interdisciplinary study about the nature of theological language, this book considers the modern debate in theological hermeneutics beginning with the Barth-Bultmann debate and moving towards a theory of language which brings together historical-critical and theological interpretation. These insights are then applied to the exegesis of theologically significant texts of the Gospel of John in the light of the hermeneutical discussion. Drawing together the German and Anglo-American hermeneutical traditions, and discussing issues related to postmodern hermeneutical theories, this book develops a view of the New Testament as the reflection of a struggle for language in which the early Church worked to bring about a language through which the new faith could be understood

This article gives a historical overview of the main issues and problems facing Christian interpreters of the Bible. The Christian understanding of the Bible is influenced by two main factors. On the one hand, Christians believe that God revealed himself and was present in the life, ministry, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, Jesus is the one Word of God. On the other hand, Christians believe that the Bible is inspired Holy Scripture, containing the revelation of God. There is a tension between these two approaches, as one locates the divine revelation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the other in the Holy Book. The article argues that this tension has been a major creative driving force in the history of Christian biblical interpretation. It traces the main strategies with which Christian interpreters have approached the Bible in order to reconcile these two elements, or in which they have allowed one to overrule the other. This will provide an introduction to the key approaches and methods in Christian biblical interpretation.

Since Hans-Georg Gadamer’s remark to Jean Grondin that the universality of hermeneutics is based on Augustine’s inner word Gadamer’s use of Augustine’s theology of the incarnation has been widely and critically discussed. This paper maps Gadamer’s hermeneu-tics against Augustine’s theology. This direct comparison will establish that Gadamer differs from Augustine insofar as he rejects Augustine’s notion that the inner word is pre-lingual. This difference is the crucial factor that makes Gadamer’s use of theological concepts without God is viable; it is precisely because Gadamer does not assume a pre-lingual inner word that his proposal works.
This assumption also the basis for the universality of hermeneutics: because humans are temporal and therefore can understand themselves and their own world only sequentially and incompletely the hermeneutic task is universal.

The Hebrew language of remembering is complex and theologically interesting. The effective, relational, actualising aspects of zkr are particularly evident in language of prayer, especially in Psalm texts. Prayer is a remembering of God, a reminding of God, and a call to remember the pray-er herself, and such performative illocutions are addressed to both human and divine audience alike. The texts become not only present acts of remembering, but also means by which future acts of remembering are to be performed. Questions in Psalms criticism, of public or private Sitz-im-Leben, of form classification, and the ongoing debate about which critical methods to bring to Psalms scholarship, are brought together in an attempt to answer how remembering in prayer works in the Psalms. By employing hermeneutics informed by linguistics, not only the semantic field of zkr may be studied, but also pragmatic questions appropriately tackled. Thus the potential contributions of speech-act theory and ...