Divinity United

Wycliffe Centre for Scripture and Theology Fall Colloquium 2013 announced . It is a geat line-up on "Reading Paul: Exegetical Method and Interpretation after the 'New Perspectives.'" ............................................................................................................................................................ Reading Paul: Exegetical Method and Interpretation After the "New Perspectives" Presentations by Dr. Ian W. Scott   (Tyndale) "Overview of the 'New Perspectives'" Author of Paul's Way of Knowing: Story, Experience, and Spirit. Baker, 2008. 9:15am Dr. Douglas Harink   (King's College) "Prolegomena to an Imagined Project: Systematic Theology as a Commentary on Romans" Author of 1 & 2 Peter. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Brazos, 2009; Paul among the Postliberals:...

An additional quote from John Webster's conclusion to his essay "Jesus Christ" in the Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology... "Christology responds to the self-communicative presence of its object in the twofold work of exegesis and dogmatics. Exegesis is not the same as study of the history of biblical literature and religion in their settings. Modern evangelicals have sometimes been bedazzled by the range and sophistication of historical procedures at their disposal, and busied themselves to master them in the hope of outbidding their opponents. But historical studies are the servant of exegesis, not its master. One thing which evangelical doctrines of the sufficiency of Scripture ought to have secured is that the ultimate resource is the text, not what can be reconstructed about what lies behind the text, for the text is an act of God's self-disclosure. The fruits of the immense labors of evangelical New Testament scholars are by no means negligibl...

Here are some comments by Graeme Goldsworthy in his book Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation . The comments come from his chapter "The Gospel and the Theological Dimension (II): Biblical and Systematic Theology." "The biblical theological dimension in hermeneutics is thus the major way of addressing the question of the gap between the text and the reader. It allows the reader to find where he or she actually fits into the totality of biblical revelation. If done with care, it will then provide the valid links between the meaning of a text in its own context and its application to the modern reader. The offending gap is the theological distance of texts from the modern reader. But, if the gap is uniformly closed by the reader to give an undifferentiated immediacy to all texts, the result is hermeneutical chaos. Some forms of pietism and 'Spirit-driven' subjective theology result in such an approach, whi...

In his book Studies on Matthew , Ulrich Luz has five essays at the end of the book that address questions of interpretation, and the primary interest with most of these is Reception History or how has the Bible been understood throughout the centuries. The following is a longer quote that I found thought-provoking from his essay entitled "The Significance of the Church Fathers for Biblical Interpretation in Western Protestant Perspective". The essay was originally published as "Die Bedeutung der Kirchenv ä ter f ü r die Auslegung der Biblel. Eine westlich protestantische Sicht", in : James D.G.d Dunn, Hans Klein, Ulrich Luz, and Vasile Mihoc (eds.), Auslegung der Bibel in orthodoxer und westlicher Perspektive , WUNT I/130 (T ü bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), pp. 29-52. "...we are reminded by the patristic interpretations that behind the plurality of voices in the Bible itself and behind all the interpretations there is an interpretative community of which we ours...