Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2012, Page 19

the original communication situation to our situation of today, it exposes
important elements in the interpretation process, it offers different possibili-
ties of interpretations, it gives us new knowledge about men and societies
of other times and cultures, and it increases our insights about ourselves,
as interpreters and as human beings. Reception history has to be a part of
our future biblical scholarship.
Faith as a requisite, or a result, or a part of a theological herme-
neutic
What about faith in all this? Now we arritve at my last point. The topic
of this one day seminar to honor Doc. Rev. Kristján Búason is “Faith as a
prerequisite for exegesis of the NewTestament”. I am here referring to faith
as Christian tradition and to faith as an individual’s belief in Jesus Christ.
How should we describe the relation between these two meanings of faith
and the interpreter or the interpretation process as we have presented it
above?
In the SBL project Romans through History and Cultures, Cristina
Grenholm and Daniel Patte present a method called Scripture criticism.
They recommend an integrated practice which takes into account: “with
contemporary biblical scholars, that different readings can be grounded
in the same text by different critical methods; with church historians and
practical theologians, that the believers’ readings interrelate biblical text and
concrete life; and with theologians, that believers read Romans as Scripture.”
Therefore, any interpretation of a scriptural text is firamed in three
ways: an analytical frame that concentrates on a study of the biblical text,
a contextual/pragmatic frame that focuses on concrete life in society and
church, and a hermeneutical frame including the tradition and praxis of
the church. You have to integrate a textual, a contextual and a theological
analysis. In this way you explicitly include faith in the third analysis and
in the interpretation process as far as it is an integrated one. Here the faith
seems to be a prerequisite to the reading of the Bible. I too have the faith
included in my theological model - not my exegetical model - when I
refer to a fourfold dialogue with the Scripture, with my experience, with
the tradition and praxis of the church and with what we know about our
world and about human beings.
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