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‘Reading Scripture in Congregations: Towards an Ordinary Hermeneutics’
I’ve belonged to ten evangelical churches so far, ranging from very charismatic to not-at-all (and still belong to the tenth). I’ve been hearing ‘what the Bible says’ for a long time. Studying biblical hermeneutics in an academic context made me curious about ‘how the Bible says’ for most of its readers. Eventually this led to research in a local charismatic evangelical church (‘The Fellowship’) looking at how members of that congregation came to understand the scriptures – what I’ve called ‘ordinary hermeneutics’. The chapter in the book includes a summary of ordinary hermeneutics in the Fellowship, and then draws out points of wider relevance for deep church.The deep church issue that emerged from this case study was the role of church tradition in reading Scripture. For many evangelicals ‘tradition’ is a boo word. As a member of another congregation said to me ‘I choose scripture over tradition… we are trying to get rid of tradition here’. It doesn’t help that tradition is quite a slippery term and can mean many things. I use it in the essay to refer to a church’s body of beliefs (belief tradition) and a church’s hermeneutical characteristics (hermeneutical tradition). read on…
