Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2012, Side 20

E rfarenheten
(jag)
Skriften .
várlden
(vi)
Gudsfolk
Kyrkanstradition
Kristi kyrka nu
But what about the faith and the inter-
pretation of the Bible? According to
Rudolf Bultmann faith was the result
of understanding. It depends on how
we define “understanding”. Is it just to
understand the words and the clauses
and the sentences, or to catch the
message of a text, or to feel or to do
what the text aims to. Some say that
without the actual practice of the text’s
meaning, there is no real under-
standing. The aim of the Gospel of
John is to believe that Jesus is Messiah, the Son of God.
Faith and the reading of the New Testament have always been connected.
During two millenia most people have heard or read the texts with faith as
a prerequisite. They have been looking for guidance with regards to their
Christian life, and they know that their salvation is depending on what the
Bible is saying. The biblical texts are a part of the Christian canon. As such
they are addressing all people of all time, especially Christian readers. In
this way faith and interpretation are connected.
Historians want to read the texts in a more general way as sources to
reconstructions of what has happened or as literary documents. We can take
the First letter of John as an example. Irenaeus read the letter as a message
to the church of his time and its struggle with Gnostic heretics. A canonical
text functions in such a way, and most scholars follow in his steps. However,
some scholars today see the letter in an intra-Jewish perspective as a part
of a situation before the letter was canonized. The central problem is not
a Christian one (Christians who have apostatized from pure, correct disci-
pline, but a Jewish one (a Jesus-believing Jew) who have abandoned their
faith in Jesus as Messiah, the Son of God, and gone back to their previous
faith, probably as a result of external pressure). Your interpretation of the
letter is very much depending on what alternative you choose, a general
Christian perspective or an intra-Jewish perspective.
I have been editing and writing commentaries of New Testament books
and struggled with the problem of faith in such enterprises. According to
Lars Hartman, a commentary can be characterized as, “a communication
about a communication.” This is an important definition of a commentary,
18