Intercultural and Cross-Cultural Biblical Interpretation

Abstract

Abstract This chapter surveys three related approaches within Intercultural Biblical Interpretation, all centring around the ‘encounter’, which engages four methodological aspects: collaboration with grassroots interpreters, highlighting the influence of local context on interpretations, celebrating the potential of contextual interpretations to highlight the contextuality of the intercultural biblical interpretation scholar themselves, and, lastly, recognizing the potential for intellectual transformation and/or social change through conducting such work. Contextual Bible Study is explored as an ‘implicitly intercultural’ approach, in that it explores contextual interpretations in (naturally) heterogenous geographical contexts, as well as effecting border-crossing between academic and grassroots interpreters. The Intercultural Bible Reading project is explored as an explicitly intercultural approach, encouraging as it does interpretative conversations across cultural and geographical boundaries. Finally, this chapter introduces Cross-Cultural Biblical Interpretation Groups, which was specifically developed to analyse contextual, grassroots interpretations alongside relevant ethnographic studies and bring the doubly contextualized interpretations into conversation with professional biblical scholarship.