IMPLICATIONS OF CROSS-CULTURAL HERMENEUTICS FOR PREACHING
The awareness of the need to conduct this study has arisen
from the conviction that good Christian communication is not
just a matter of language. Good hermeneutics is often a
powerful means for clear and influential communication.
During the last decades a group of theologians have asked
the hermeneutical questions for preaching, namely, "how
we can build bridge between the world of the Bible and the
world of today, between the original context and the
contemporary context." One way to put this question
missiologically is: "What are the essentials of the Kingdom
of God proclamation that can be translated into the language
that even most unlearned people can understand?" Here we
need to distinguish our approach from those approaches that
simply employs the tools of systematic theology. Systematic
theology tends to provide more a prepositional statement of
doctrine. A systematic theologian does not have to ask the
question in a context. But for us, we ask the same question
in a context—in a biblical context, in a contemporary
context, and in a ministry context.
Following Anthony C. Thiselton’s work, there exist two
hermeneutic horizons for Bible interpretation—the horizon of
the original writer and that of the contemporary
interpreters. But when we understand the goal of biblical
hermeneutics as missionary proclamation, the interpreter as
a missionary preacher still finds one more cross-cultural
horizon ahead him or her—namely, the horizon of the
audience, who also have their own field of vision in which
they respond to what they read.
The
reason for the ‘cross-cultural hermeneutics for preaching’
becomes self-evident when we consider with Friedrich that
“True proclamation does not take place through Scripture
alone, but through its exposition.” God does not send books
to men; He sends messengers. Now, as Grant R. Osborne sets
forth it, “The preacher/missionary has the dual role first
as interpreter and then as Proclaimer.”
Whether he intended it or not, Osborne’s hermeneutical work
is a breakthrough toward a missiological understanding of
preaching. He incorporates missiological discoveries into
his hermeneutic method. He also helps us refresh our
missiological insights, especially in the areas of
communication, preaching, and hermeneutics.
Osborne observes that the same principles are working in
“contextualization” in the field of missiology and
“application” in the field of homiletics. He, then,
discovers that at the heart ‘contextualization’ entails
cross-cultural communication. Thus, from his hermeneutic
theory, he supports the assumption of the study that
preaching entails cross-cultural communication.
James
E. Massy indicates the cross-cultural implications of
hermeneutics when he states that hermeneutics is “that
science or methodology by which the meaning in a text is
sought, discovered, and then related and applied to one’s
own cultural context and life-setting…. Once understood,
that meaning is to be expressed and applied to teaching,
counsel or proclamation.”
For
Karl Barth cross-cultural hermeneutics is the foundation of
his theology of proclamation, and therefore, the foundation
of the whole framework of his theology. This is what he
expresses in his famous motto, namely, preaching is the Word
of God and the word of man. This implies that the preacher
should be familiar with the biblical context, as it is 'the
actual situation of the text.' The preacher also needs to
enter into the situation of his audience, as it is 'the
context to which the text is to be applied.' This is how we
find the principle of duality of exposition and application
in his hermeneutical approach.
Barth's hermeneutical approach stresses that a preacher
should connect biblical text to contemporary needs. He
says, “When preparing their sermons, preachers have to
mediate on the texts both as genuinely people of their day
but also in such a way that the text can really become a Way
to their contemporaries.” In short, each word that is to be
proclaimed to the listeners must become a word that is
specifically and decisively addressed to our own present.
Both
Barth and Osborne view the preacher as the Bible expositor
as well as cross-cultural communicator between the biblical
times and the contemporary world. He or she is a messenger
who is sent to the world to communicate the redemptive
relevance of the biblical message to modern audience. In
this sense a preacher messenger is a missionary preacher.
A
preacher as the messenger is a communication bridge between
two different cultures or sub-cultures. Again, a preacher
is a messenger who is sent out to a specific culture, to a
specific people group to communicate the redemptive
relevance of the biblical message to modern audience.
Barth’s theology of preaching confirms that there are three
horizons in our Bible interpretation for preaching. With
Barth, the preacher should be not only a reader of the
Bible, but a learner of the audience—both believing
community and unbelieving neighborhood. Surely, the
preacher’s hermeneutic task involves learning the hearers of
the message in their context of life—in their concrete
situation of lives.
Padilla and others have rightly pointed out the gap between
the biblical world and the modern world. Yet, From Van
Engen, Morgan, and Greidanus’ discussions, we infer that
what was relevant to biblical audience is also relevant to
modern audience in terms of life experiences and human
needs.
From
Karl Barth’s missiology of preaching we learn that the heart
of missionary preaching is to preach as the one who is sent
to the audience. To be sent as a preacher means more than a
mere physical presence. It means entering into the situation
of the audience in our hearts and minds, in our prayer and
Bible exposition, and in our spoken language and life
message. It means the re-reading the Bible in the situation
of the people so that the message is relevant to them in
their need of divine grace.
Gerhard Ebeling’s hermeneutic work sets forth that theology
is for proclamation. His work is a result of his struggle
to overcome the tension between the scientific theology and
church proclamation. He employs the concept of word event.
Word event is the event of interpretation taking place
through the word. He declares, ‘Proclamation that has taken
place is to become proclamation that takes place.' This
translation from text to sermon is a transition from
Scripture to the spoken word. This task consists in making
what is written into spoken word---in letting the text
become God’s word again.
With
Ebeling, the sermon is 'execution' (or implementation) of
the text. It carries into execution the aim of the text.
It is proclamation of what the text has proclaimed.
Whereas Ebeling describes the hermeneutical problem for
preaching as “the tension between scientific theology and
church proclamation,” Ian Pitt-Watson puts it as “the
tension between ‘the original language of the text’ and ‘the
meaning which are possible within our culture.’”
David
S. Dockery’s work is a demonstration that cross-cultural
study has become an essence of hermeneutics. He suggests
that textual inquiry should begin with the questions: “What
is the author’s historical situation?” and “What is the
cultural context out of which the author wrote?” He
believes that interpretation is the most important step in
seeking the textual meaning from an author-oriented
perspective. The question to be asked is, therefore, What
did the text mean in its historical setting to the initial
readers?
What
follows interpretation is to determine the theological
significance of the passage by posing the questions: (1)
What does the text mean to contemporary readers? (2) What
cultural factors need to be contextualized or retranslated?
Sidney Greidanus, however, discovers that there is a
continuity between biblical and modern life experiences. He
suggests, therefore, the holistic interpretation in order to
address the issue of relevant contemporary application. His
point is that we today live---albeit at a different stage—in
the same history as did the Israelites of old. He
maintains, “there is not an unbridgeable gap between then
and now but a definite continuity: the Ancient Israelites
were involved in the same struggle for the coming of God’s
kingdom as we are today; their needs and obligations were
very similar to ours.”
A
recent development of interaction between missiology and
homiletics is conspicuously observed in the work of Leonora
Tubbs Tisdale (1997), who maintains that, in a respect,
every preaching is a cross-cultural communication. A
preacher. therefore, needs to be sensitive to the peculiar
subculture of his or her audience. She believes that
theology needs to be contextualized for local congregation.
Tisdale’s work is an attempt to develop the ‘holistic
preaching’ model. She views preaching as folk art. What she
means by it is that preaching may needs different modes
depends on the subcultures of the audience. While one group
of the audience can be reached by the good logic of
preaching, the other group will be more responsive to the
relevant stories that touch their heart and emotion.
Tisdale even takes a step further to suggest for a
multi-faces exegetical method, describing the pastor as
ethnographer. She believes that if preachers are to achieve
the theological contextualization and effect in our sermons
a fresh hearing of the gospel for a particular people, then,
it is essential that we engage in interpretive activities
that not only give access to the worlds revealed in biblical
texts, but also give access to the subcultural worlds in
which our congregations live.
James
Barr, Eugines A. Nida, and Anthony Thiselton are among those
who insist to respect the particularity of the text. Their
discussion is a response to the conventional hermeneutics
based on etymology because they see that the etymology of a
word is not a statement about its meaning, but about its
history, and that words do not carry with them all the
meanings which they may have in other sets of
co-occurrences. Thiselton argue, therefore, that “The
interpreter of the New Testament must respect distinctive
particularity of meaning conveyed by individual passage, and
resist the temptation to interpret them wholly in the light
of pre-understanding already decisively shaped by the
interpretation of other passages.”
Lesslie Newbigin’s hermeneutic approach is a result of his
effort to re-evangelize the secularized Western society by
overcoming the limitations imposed by post-Enlightenment
definitions of truth. He maintains that the job of the
missionary to both the East and the West is to challenge the
"reigning plausibility structure" by examining it in light
of the revealed purposes of God contained in the biblical
narrative.
Newbigin is a preacher of holistic mission. With him, the
hermeneutical task involves recognition of God's revelation
both in the past and in the present time through the life of
the community of faith. Especially vital to the revelation
of "present truth" is the involvement of the Church in the
public sphere. As believers live out their faith in their
secular environments, they show that because Christ's
reigning kingdom is both present and future, they can
meaningfully participate in challenging evil in the public
sphere while affirming that the goal of history lies beyond
the horizon of death.
René
Padilla advocates what he calls ‘contextual hermeneutics’
because the approach addresses the mission communication
issue: “How can the chasm between the past and the present
be bridged?” It, therefore, seeks to interpret both the
context of the ancient text and the context of the modern
reader. As Padilla puts it, “the contextual approach
recognizes both the role of the ancient world in shaping the
original text and the role of today’s world in conditioning
the way contemporary readers are likely to ‘hear’ and
understand the text” (Padilla 1981:18).
Barth (1963), Ebeling (1966), Pitt-Watson (1986),
and many others have rightly pointed out that there is a
tension between theology and proclamation. While the task
of theology is to serve church proclamation, Scientific
theology (or systematic theology) is accessible to only
limited audience. What happened was that while theological
libraries is growing, the gospel remained unheard to the
majority of the mass. Narrative theology has emerged as a
group of theologians reflected and responded to this
hermeneutic issue.
Osborne points out that narrative criticism was a response
to the failure of form and redaction criticism. This
failure is due to fragmentizing the biblical text and
failing to see the manning in the whole story. As Osborne
observes it, "The tendency to break the text into isolated
units is widely perceived as counter productive, and so
scholars turned to the much more literarily aware field of
narrative criticism to breach the gap". Thus, narrative
approach to hermeneutics recognize that meaning is found in
a text as a whole rather than in isolated segments.
Charles Van Engen’s recent discussion (1996) is a
rediscovery of the significance of narrative theology to
address the hermeneutical issues missiologically. He
advocates the need to develop an evangelically reshaped
narrative theology as a way to draw most richly from both
the wrap of the contextual particularity of God’s revelation
at specific times and places, and the woof of the temporal
universality of the mission of God.
Van
Engen expounds narrative theology embedded in biblical
stories. For instance, we need to allow our theology to
emerge from the entire narrative of Abraham's life (Gen.
11:27-25:11) so as to understand God's covenantal
relationship with him.
Biblical narrative is a theology that has audience in a
concrete historical and cultural context, and that has
missionary message to the audience, and that has message
accessible even to the most unlearned in the audience.
Biblical narrative as a theology has the redemptive message
which touches even the felt-needs of non-Christian's heart.
Van
Engen notes that the biblical narrative intends to teach
those inside and outside the community the nature, acts, and
purpose of Israel's God. While systematic theology engages
the intellect, storytelling engages the heart and indeed the
whole person.
Don
M. Wagner, Charles Van Engen, and a group of narrative
theologians have observed the abuse of theological method of
Bible interpretation, especially in using Scripture
fragments out of context. In this regard, the study
presents a case study in G. Compbell Morgan’s ‘contextual
principle of Bible interpretation.’
Morgan’s expository method is ‘interpretation in the
context’—the synthesis of biblical text into its historical
and literacy context. The essential characteristic of his
method is the application of the context principle of Bible
Study. Each verse of Scripture cut out of its setting must
first be understood in relation to what immediately precedes
and follows, before one can properly evaluate its relation
to theological subject.
Contextual principle is the interpretation of a given
passage in the light of the text which surround it,
diminishing in importance as one proceeds from the near to
the far context—Two fundamental processes are involved in
putting this context principle to work; they are analysis
and synthesis. Analysis takes apart and classifies or
describes each other; synthesis assembles the part in a
logical order. The important fundamental process,
therefore, is the correlation of parts to a whole.
Morgan’s expository method stresses the Bible’s
correspondence to human needs. The expositor of the Bible
acts as an intermediary between the wells of truth and the
thirsty multitude. Without the water’s suiting and
satisfying that thirst, there would be no need for the
bucket to draw it. This correspondence of the Bible is first
to the need of the race, lost in sin, and even more to the
regenerated soul.
Historically, in English Puritanism we find a classical
example of preaching to the human need. Their anthropology
accented man’s total depravity. Ever since Adam, all the
Puritans proclaimed, man has been a slave to sin. Adam's sin
left man’s nature died. This, however, did not destroy
man’s rational and volitional faculties. In these God’s
image remains imprinted. To men’s natural faculty God
addresses himself in the book of nature and of Scripture.
The
significance of Gustaf Wingren’s hermeneutic approach is its
re-illumination that missionary proclamation is relevant to
human needs. He perceives that the Word of God is in
dynamic relationship to human needs. He asserts that
preaching is not preaching aimed at self-sufficient human
life seeking to add something religious or spiritual to it.
We come to God’s Word as found and conquered human beings in
order to hear the word which sets humanity free. We come to
hear the word that gives us our human existence. To
be human is to hear God’s Word that creates us, recreates
us, and sets us free for human life.
In
sum, all of these these discussions point out that there are
implications of cross-cultural hermeneutics for preaching.
In asking, "How can a preacher be a person of deep
understanding in Scripture, and still use easy language for
audience?", we cannot but come to see that sermon
preparation has three levels of hermeneutical work. First,
we read the bible for our own personal revelation, for our
own personal encounter with God. The second step is that we
meet our audience, as they are in their real situation— in
their life experience, in their historical and sociological
situation, and in their faith pilgrimage. The preacher,
then, reads the Bible again in the situation of his audience
in order to get fresh for them—whether we call it adaptation
or contextualization.
[3] In this case, mission theologians are using the term ‘hermeneutics’ in a broader sense than biblical theologians do.
 ©
This article is originally an excerpt from Dae Ryeong Kim's paper, "Hermeneutics for Missionary Preaching."
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