Global Hermeneutics? - International Voices in Biblical Studies ...

86 GLOBAL HERMENEUTICS?
“GLOBALIZATION” AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION
There is reason to assume, I think, that contemporary biblical interpretation is
part of the modern globalization project from at least two perspectives. First, in the
first decade of the twenty-first century, we face a global distribution of
communities that interpret the Bible. Historically speaking, the development of
Christianity into a de facto global religion took place in parallel with—and was in
several ways an important exponent of—the Western expansionism towards the end
of the second millennium. Nevertheless, whatever the historical causes were, the
result was that Christianity throughout the twentieth century changed from being a
predominantly Western religion to becoming a global religion, with adherents in
nearly “every nation, tribe, people and language.” 1 Admittedly, the global
distribution of Christian communities is not necessarily identical with the
distribution of (lay and professional) interpretative communities for the Bible, as
examples of the Bible being embraced and interpreted outside the realms and
influences of the church (and synagogue) are gradually being identified. 2
Nevertheless, as far as numbers and general influence are concerned, there is no
doubt that biblical interpretation is an activity that predominantly characterizes
religious and academic communities related to Christianity.
Second, contemporary biblical interpretation is also part of the modern
globalization project in the sense that the mainstream approaches to the Bible that
are attested within these globally distributed interpretative communities tend to
prolong the traditionally Western hegemony of theological (to some extent) and
exegetical (to a larger extent) biblical interpretation. The concepts of biblical
interpretation that have been developed throughout the history of church and
academia in the West were (and are) consciously and unconsciously exported to
their younger counterparts in the rest of the world. Moreover, church and academia
in the West are still in the position of having the economic and institutional power
to define proper interpretation of the Bible, as the following anecdote may
illustrate. Once in the mid-1990s I visited a graduate school of theology in Nigeria.
The school had inherited the complete library of a theological seminary that had
recently been closed down somewhere in the United States: the books, the card
catalogue, and even the book shelves and pictures used to decorate the library in the
American seminary. The positive effect of this “gift from heaven” (as they saw it)
1 For statistics and references, see my essay in the beginning of this essay collection:
“Geographical and institutional aspects of global Old Testament studies”.
2 Cf. G. O. West, “Mapping African biblical interpretation: A tentative sketch,” in G.
O. West and M. W. Dube (eds.), The Bible in Africa: Transactions, Trajectories and Trends
(Leiden: Brill, 2000), 29–53; idem, “Early encounters with the Bible among the Batlhaping:
Historical and Hermeneutical signs”, Biblical Interpretation 12 (2004), 251–281; G.
Razafindrakoto, “The Old Testament outside the realm of the church: A case from
Madagascar,” in Let My People Stay! Researching the Old Testament in Africa (ed. K.
Holter; Nairobi: Acton, 2006), 97–110.