From Exegesis to Contextualization

1. From Exegesis to Contextualization

2. Contextualizing Meaning Goal: • To strive for adequate continuity between meaning and its recontextualization in another context • “To avoid hanging applicational elephants from interpretive threads…” • [Hendricks]

3. “Recontextualizing” Meaning • Recontextualization: Recognizes that Scriptural meaning is already a contextualized meaning • E.g., Habakkuk speaks into a context of growing injustice in the southern country of Judah in late 7th century B.C.E. Our questions about applying Habakkuk’s message to a contemporary context is really an issue of recontextualizing that message

4. How to Recontextualize? • Typical methodology in evangelical circles has been a kind of principlizing approach (e.g., Osborne)

5. Principlizing (Osborne, 337) What it Meant What it Means Surface Meaning Specific Context Deep Structure Principle General Context Original Situation Parallel Situation [using analogy]

6. Recent Additional Proposals • Greater sensitivity to genres of texts (Doriani: different kinds of texts generate application in different ways) • Paradigmatic Application (C. Wright on OT ethics: God’s word to Israel is paradigmatic for the church, though not always with 1:1 correspondence) • Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic (Webb: On a particular ethical issue, which direction do the biblical writers move in relation to their own cultural context?) • Theodramatic Contextualization (Vanhoozer: living out the final act of God’s redemptive story, with the script for the first four acts provided in Scripture) • Purpose-Guided Contextualization (Brown: reflecting on the purposes of original contextualization in order to recontextualize in line with those purposes)

7. Purpose-Guided Contextualization • Draws on Hirsch’s two questions for valid implications of a text • Continuity (Is there significant continuity between meaning and proposed contextualization?) • Purpose (Does the possible recontextualization fit the purposes of the author’s original meaning?)

8. Purpose-Guided Contextualization • May use various ‘tools’ of contextualization including… • Generalizing (principlizing) • Particularizing • Analogy • Paradigm

9. Purpose-Guided Contextualization • Tends to avoid • Abstraction of ‘meaning’ • Contextualizing too small of a text • Tends to honor • Cultural and temporal distance between text and reader • Holistic meaning (cognitive + non-cognitive perlocutionary intentions)

10. Moving from Biblical Texts to Contemporary Theology/Ethics: 2 Major Movements • Need to move from exegesis of individual texts to a synthesis of relevant texts on a specific theological or ethical topic (Hays: synthetic movement) • Need to move from the cultural context of the biblical texts to contemporary contexts (Hays: hermeneutical movement)

11. A Four-fold description of the Theological Task (Richard Hays) 1.     The Descriptive task: doing exegesis of texts 2.     The Synthetic task: placing texts in their canonical context 3. The Hermeneutical task: relating the text to our own situation 4. The Pragmatic Task: living the text

12. Complexity of Contextualization Canonical Level Utterance Level Contemporary Setting Original Setting

13. C. Final Admonition “[T]he ultimate aim of exegesis…is to produce in our lives and the lives of others true Spirituality, in which God’s people live in faithful fellowship both with one another and with the eternal and living God and thus in keeping with God’s own purposes in the world. In order to do this effectively…true “Spirituality” must precede exegesis as well as be the final result of it. We must begin as we would conclude, standing under the text, not over it with all of our scholarly arrogance intact.”