Locating ‘Contextual Bible Study’ within biblical liberation hermeneutics and intercultural biblical hermeneutics

Gerald O West

doi:10.4102/hts.v70i1.2641

Abstract

This article uses the occasion of the 70th anniversary of HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies to reflect on a particular form of liberation hermeneutics that emerged in the 1980s in South Africa. ‘Contextual Bible Study’ is briefly defined, but its precise contours are explored by locating this form of liberation hermeneutics within liberation hermeneutics more generally and then intercultural biblical hermeneutics more specifically. The article sets up a dialogue amongst these practices, examining both their family resemblances and their distinctive features.

Highlights

Ordinary readers of the Bible have always hovered on the edges of academic biblical studies, but within biblical liberation hermeneutics, they have found a more central and integral place
This article charts the emergence of a particular form of their presence, offering a historical and hermeneutical account of what has come to be called ‘Contextual Bible Study’
Given the importance of Marxist categories and concepts in the historical formation of liberation hermeneutics as well as the ongoing neo-colonial economic profile of our globalised world with South Africa itself trapped within economically driven processes of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation (Hart 2013), South African Contextual Bible Study asks whether it is not important to hold onto a fundamental economic-political orientation in our work (Míguez-Bonino 2006), even though we recognise that we have to ‘re-translate’ Marx and related economic resources in terms of our current realities and their intersected marginalisations

Summary

Introduction

Ordinary readers of the Bible have always hovered on the edges of academic biblical studies, but within biblical liberation hermeneutics, they have found a more central and integral place. As indicated in the very first paragraph, Contextual Bible Study shares with other forms of liberation hermeneutics the inclusion of so-called ‘ordinary’ readers of the Bible, privileging both the non-scholarly dimensions of ordinary readers and the contexts of a particular sector of ordinary readers, the poor and marginalised.

Results

Conclusion