Phillip A. Davis, Jr. | Daniel Lanzinger | Matthew Ryan Robinson (Eds.): What Does Theology Do, Actually? (Leseprobe)

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Cover: Zacharias Bähring, Leipzig
Cover Photographs: „Psalm 103“ (2023) © Matthew Ryan Robinson; „Social Media‘s Bible“
(2023) © Johannes Fröh; „De toren van Babel Liber Genesis“ (1612) Crispijn van de Passe I
(public domain); „A Just and Lasting Peace“ © (2022) Jaazeal Jakosalem
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Note on the Cover Photographs
The cover of this book features four photographs. Choosing the photographs
prompted some discussion concerning the nature and purpose of cover artwork.
What does it say? Who or what does it represent, and who has a say in this? How
can method and interpretational diversity be accounted for or responsibly reflected?
Art does not trade in the syllogistic logics of linear argumentation. As
such, works of art remain open to interpretation. And yet, the curatorial choice
for these photographs, once made, is final. There is no opportunity, in the case of
cover artwork, to develop a critical discussion; ongoing dialogue is silenced.
What is an appropriate balance, then, between saying too much and not enough?
Recognizing that, while they invoke associations, the images are not selfinterpreting,
the following notes are meant to stimulate reflection on their meanings
individually and corporately. Positioned under the title, being the statement
of the question, ‘‘What does theology do, actually?’’, the photographs presented,
viewed from left to right, might be seen as providing four reflections on things
exegesis has done, does, and might do.
Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible. The first image fulfills stereotypical expectations
concerning what exegesis does. Exegetes read and interpret the Bible in its
original languages, study its history of reception, produce critical-textual editions,
and the like.
The Digital as Exegetical Space? The second image experiments with the idea of
scholarship, biblical languages, and programming languages. The image thus
queries what kind of things exegesis will do, what questions it will ask, how
knowledge will relate to data, and how much knowledge production will depend
on access to technological resources in the future.
The Tower of Babel. The third image problematizes the layering of pasts and presents
in biblical exegesis by layering the world of the historical text with the
history of the text in the world. Babel can be regarded as a multilayered exegetical
metaphor. Babel is in one sense an etiology of hermeneutics as starting with

6
Note on the Cover Photographs
miscommunication. Babel is also a byword for state totalitarianism, cultural
hegemony, and colonization. Babel combines history and philosophy, critical
theory and political commentary. To what extent can exegesis do the same?
A Just and Lasting Peace. The fourth image combines the stained-glass motif of
liturgical space with themes of modern war and violence. The image constitutes
yet another form of exegetical practice --- namely, protest --- serving as a reminder
that this volume, too, has been produced in an age of religious and political contest
and calling for ever-new critical attention to what responsible scholarship
looks like.

The What Does Theology Do,
Actually? Project
The What Does Theology Do, Actually? project aims not to do theology, but to
observe what theologies do, around the world today, in and for the communities
in which they circulate and hold meaning. How is theology understood and practiced
as a semantics of global society? What kinds of problems do theologies
solve and how? These questions are pursued, moreover, with specific attention
given to the ‘‘transcultural’’. Much might be learned both about the role of Christian
religion in public life and about evolving trends in theological understanding
or praxis by examining comparatively the ways Christian communities encode
transcultural experiences of irritation coming from the social environment
(for example, climate change, protest movements, digitalization, mass migration,
or global pandemics) into their self-understanding (for example, in engagement
with received tradition) and self-formation (for example, in liturgy and community
ethics).
This requires theoretical open mindedness and methodological agility. The
project therefore follows a two-step logic. First, the project seeks to observe theological
work as itself a set of social discourses or objects contingently particular
to certain contexts. A focus on answering the question ‘‘What is theology?’’ privileges
those who already possess the resources and power to shape what counts
as being ‘‘really’’ theology or not. By contrast, the descriptive approach preferred
by the question ‘‘What does theology do?’’ objectifies ‘‘theologies’’ as a kind of
social artifact and recognizes a variety of reflected religious communications as
communicating theology. Second, in this way, the project aims to disrupt dominant
paradigms in academic theological research, to expand the category of theological
work(s) beyond textual formats and classroom or conference situations to
include a variety of spaces, symbols, practices, and artifacts that function as
transmitters of reflected religious communications, and to contribute to work
diversifying theological methodologies to include empirical, qualitative, and
quantitative research methods.
The What Does Theology Do, Actually? project consists of symposia and a
limited book series. An international, interdisciplinary community of scholars

8
The What Does Theology Do, Actually? Project
and practitioners, from widely differing contexts, and at all career stages are
invited to disruptive dialogue with one another in the context of symposia devoted
to comparative study of theological production and communication systems.
The inaugural symposium called into question such basic issues as what a context
is, what counts as a theological work, and what publics theologies inevitably
address and how. It addressed these questions with Protestant, Pentecostal, and
Roman Catholic theological interventions from Ethiopia, Nigeria, the Philippines,
Argentina, Hong Kong, the USA, and Germany. Subsequent symposia and volumes
in the series continue to apply this same approach, each with a focus on a
theological sub-discipline.

Contents
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. 13
Phillip Andrew Davis, Jr. (USA / Germany); Daniel Lanzinger (Germany);
Matthew Ryan Robinson (USA / Germany)
Introduction .............................................................................................................. 15
Part 1
The Bible between Academy, Religious Communities, and Society
Tahina Rahandrifenosoa (Madagascar)
Online Exegetical Teaching
Responses Among Malagasy People and Churches ........................................... 27
Anja Block (Germany)
Speaking Responsibly about Biblical Texts
Historical-Critical Exegesis as (more than) a Translation ................................. 39
Athalya Brenner-Idan (Israel / the Netherlands)
Plague, Pandemic, Divine/Human Interactions, Communities, and
Beliefs
Some Reflections in Times of Corona ................................................................... 53
Part 2
Academy: Parsing the Study of Bible by Institutional Context
Jeremy Punt (South Africa)
Bible and Method
Perennial Questions, Useful Stratagems, and Scholarly Homes ...................... 71
Dogara Ishaya Manomi (Nigeria)
Is it in the Bible?
Re-Negotiating Five Biblical Interpretive Boundaries ....................................... 89
Amy-Jill Levine (USA)
Jesus and the Liberal Academy
From First Century Jew to Twenty-First Century Anti-Fascist ...................... 105

10
Contents
C.I. David Joy (India)
Postcolonial Exegesis: A Perspective or Bias? ............................................... 121
Part 3
Religious Communities: On Confessional Constructions of the
Bible
Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger (Austria)
The Catholic Understanding of Scripture ....................................................... 135
Ivana Noble (Czech Republic)
Contemplative Reading of the Scriptures in the Context of
Ecumenical Retreats ............................................................................................ 145
Part 4
Society: Scientific Transfer and Exegetical Knowledge for
Whom and for What?
Andrea Pichlmeier (Germany)
In Search of Theophilus
Reading the Bible in Twenty-First Century Germany ..................................... 165
Jonathan W. Lo (Hong Kong / Canada)
From the Streets to the Scriptures
‘‘Liberating Exegesis’’ in Hong Kong .................................................................. 179
Moritz Gräper (Germany)
White Privilege in Biblical Scholarship and Church
A First Critical Exploration................................................................................... 205
Part 5
Possible Futures: What will Bible Do between Academy,
Religious Communities, and Society?
Sharon Padilla (Mexico)
Towards Marginality and Transversality
On the Challenges of Biblical Studies in Latin America ................................. 217
Michael Wandusim (Ghana)
The Bible and Its Interpreters
Assessing the Future of Biblical Interpretation from a West African
Context ..................................................................................................................... 233

Contents 11
Søren Lorenzen (Denmark)
Navigating Exegetical Plurality
The Pursuit of Philosophical Themes in the Hebrew Bible ............................. 251
Mirjam Jekel (Germany)
So What?
On Hermeneutics, Perspectives, and Questioning the Self-Evident .............. 269
Contributors ............................................................................................................ 287

Acknowledgements
This volume grows out of work done at a conference of the same title held from 9-
10 July 2021, hosted by the What Does Theology Do, Actually? Project at the University
of Bonn and conducted digitally. The last couple of years have presented all
of us with new challenges. One ongoing consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic
seems to be that the pace and volume of work not only did not decrease and slow
down, but, to the contrary, increased and sped up. How much more thankful are
we then, as an editorial team, for the many hands who have carried the load in
bringing this second volume of the WDTD series across the finish line.
We would like to thank the University of Bonn and the Catholic and
Protestant Theological Faculties, in particular, for providing the infrastructure
and logistical support necessary for holding a digital conference in a professional
manner. Further thanks are due to ‘‘Transdisciplinary Research Area 4: Individuals,
Institutions and Societies’’ and to the Federal Ministry of Education and
Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North
Rhine-Westphalia (MKW) within the framework of the Excellence Strategy of the
Federal and State Governments for financial support.
More personally, we would like to thank a number of individuals in our research
team for their dependability and excellence in project support: Miriam
Dorlaß organized communications and PR via social media, while Saskia Held
coordinated logistical communications with speakers. Together with Lani Anaya-
Ghebrai they ran the digital conference behind the scenes during the conference
itself, providing a professional and comfortable experience for all of our speakers
and other participants. Jan Thelen and Max Wenner provided tremendous support
in the editing and formatting of this volume.
Finally, we would also like to thank the publisher, specifically, Tilman
Meckel and Christina Wollesky, who patiently and supportively accompanied
this project all the way to publication.
Bonn, December 2022
Phillip Andrew Davis, Jr.
Daniel Lanzinger
Matthew Ryan Robinson

Phillip Andrew Davis, Jr. (USA / Germany); Daniel Lanzinger (Germany);
Matthew Ryan Robinson (USA / Germany)
Introduction
The WDTD Project
Central to the purposes of the What Does Theology Do, Actually? (hereafter,
WDTD) project is to observe, document, describe, and compare the functions of
theological knowledge production and communication as that knowledge and
those communications are experienced, cultivated, and used around the world
today. Additionally, the project is interested in the ways the cultivation of theological
practice is routinized and normativized by means of organizing and institutionalization,
whether in theological faculties at universities, in confessional
and ecumenical seminaries, in church offices and denominations, and also in
forms of church-society transfer such as institutes and think tanks but no less
NGOs or even protest movements. WDTD seeks not to do theology but to observe
what theology does.
In its Introduction, the first volume of WDTD situated the work of WDTD
within a transcultural framework. The focus lay on the ‘‘flows’’ of theological
language as this language is deployed from and for local places, by particular
Christian churches and groups, but in their efforts to address themselves to locality-transcending,
indeed, global challenges. And in this interaction of the local
and the global, the question arises to what extent global discourses using the
language of Christian theology influence the interpretation and self-understanding
of Christian churches and groups in particular places, and to what extent
particular interpretive appropriations of the language of Christian theology,
in speaking to the world via addressing global challenges, influence contextoverarching
usage and understandings of that very language. This focus remains
central to the project overall. It is a driving interest of the project to look for any
patterns or trends that might be identifiable in the use of Christian-theological
language world-wide. How might such language be involved in the transcultural
dynamic of particular communities and traditions negotiating the encounter with
problems that they face in common? The questions are, what do Christian theologies
do in helping conduct these negotiations, and what changes in Christian

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Phillip Andrew Davis, Jr.; Daniel Lanzinger; Matthew Ryan Robinson
theological practices, on a more or less global scale, might be observed to be
taking place along the way?
As one practical logic for structuring the approach to this set of questions,
WDTD is organized as a series of symposia and accompanying volumes devoted
to the ‘‘traditional’’ theological subdisciplines: the exegetical disciplines, the
history of Christianity, and systematic and practical theology. After the inaugural
symposium was held in 2019, the second symposium, ‘‘Exegeting Exegesis’’ was
held in 2021, while the third, devoted to the work of church history, ‘‘The Unity
of the Church and its Histories’’, was held in 2022.
It is important to place the word ‘‘traditional’’ in quotation marks when referring
to the ‘‘traditional’’ theological subdisciplines because the present conceptual
and institutionalized division of theological subdisciplines is of course a
modern development. Moreover, it is a product of the modern West, and the
reproduction and further reiterations of current disciplinary divisions in theological
institutions throughout the majority world must be viewed through a postcolonial
lens. That is not to call into question the agency and self-determination
of any churches or theological schools in the majority world who find this conjugation
of disciplines suitable for their own situation. Rather, it is simply taken,
within the context of WDTD, as a sober reminder that the forms of theological
work, as reflection upon and communication about the Christian religion, are
historically contingent and mutable. They have continuously evolved over the
centuries, and they will continue to do so.
WDTD pursues an expressly descriptive and non-normative interest in theological
work. But it is not an attempt to do theology from nowhere. The project is
descriptive, but this should not be taken to imply that it aims to be neutral, objective,
or disinterested. If the WDTD series were a series of single-author monographs
that attempted such a description, the risk would be greater that the
resulting descriptions were portending to take on the posture of a view from
nowhere, even if unintentionally and even if the presentations took pains to be
reasonably representative.
In order to counteract, or at least to cultivate awareness of this risk, the
symposia instead bring together scholars in those disciplines from different
global regions and national contexts, diverse Christian (and, in the case of this
volume, also Jewish) religious perspectives, and different institutional or organizational
locations that combine research and practice in various ways. In this
way, experts with a depth of experience and knowledge of both particular regional-religious-institutional
settings and of context-overarching discussions in
the subdiscipline in question can gather in true symposium style to describe the
ways that discipline is understood and practiced by and for whom and why in
the settings where they are active. By means of a reciprocal exchange of perspectives
and responses, underwritten by commitments to mutuality and voluntariness
in participation, and with no other purpose than the exchange itself, emerging
trends in theological communication might be observed and trajectories for
research identified.

Introduction 17
1. The Many Contours of Exegetical Work and its
Institutionalizations
The fields of ‘‘Exegesis’’ have long been characterized by broad disciplinary diversity,
but also ambiguity, combining biblical studies, exegesis, early Jewish
studies, early Christian studies, Ancient Near Eastern studies, and classical studies
in various ways. This is to say nothing of the development of contextual and
engaged exegesis informed by critical-theoretical insights in the twentieth and
twenty-first century as reflected, for example, in feminist, liberation, postcolonial,
and queer Biblical exegesis. How and why scholars study the Bible varies, not
only across confessional or cultural contexts, but across institutional-academic
contexts. Given the overarching interest of the WDTD project in observing theology
sociologically in the various global contexts in which it is practiced, how can
the diversity of understandings and practices of exegetical work be organized in
a way that is helpful for prompting critical self-reflection on the field as a whole?
A few options were discussed in designing the present contribution to the
series. The work could have started by asking about the relationship of exegesis
to the other theological disciplines. However, not only is this question one that
has been much discussed and for a long time --- one thinks, for example, of Johann
Philipp Gabler’s 1787 lecture, ‘‘De justo discrimine theologiae biblicae et
dogmaticae regundisque recte utriusque finibus’’ --- but it is also narrow in its
scope, for the interpretation of the Bible often takes place far from the contexts of
academic theology with its various subdivisions.
A second possibility would have been to focus on methodological considerations
in more detail. After all, critical reflection on one’s own methods is part of
everyday exegetical life. But this very fact spoke against it, because methodological
plurality is already a regular topic at meetings and conferences and increasingly
in classrooms as well. Moreover, focusing the volume on methods would
have run the risk of creating a conversation that remained at a distance from the
overarching question, namely, what does exegesis do, actually?
Therefore, a different approach seemed advisable, one that scrapes a bit
deeper at the foundations of what ‘‘exegesis’’ is, without ignoring the above debates,
but positioning them in relation to the different ‘‘places’’ in which biblical
interpretation actually takes place. This volume seeks not to evaluate or resolve
the ambiguities that persist throughout the field, but to approach them diagonally
via sociological questions about the ways in which context, institutions, and
knowledge production are interrelated and the significance of these interrelationships
for scholarship, for religious communities, and for society. The conference
from which the chapters of the present volume were brought together was
thus structured around six thematic clusters, which were so designed as to encourage
reflection on a certain aspect or a certain combination of aspects of what
exegesis does vis-à-vis three social fields of practice: science and the academy,
religious communities, and the civic or public sphere.

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Phillip Andrew Davis, Jr.; Daniel Lanzinger; Matthew Ryan Robinson
A first thematization of the task at hand concerned cultivation of an understanding
of Christianity --- and thus of exegesis in relation to academy, religious
community and the public sphere --- as a geographically and socially polycentric
phenomenon, with multiple ‘‘centers’’ globally. It belongs to the architecture of
WDTD to bring together theologians from different geographical regions and
socio-political contexts where Christianity has a significant history and / or
where the Christian faith holds ongoing significance. It is with this understanding
that the volume’s authors take up the questions, each with respect to his or
her own settings: Why do we study the Bible academically? How does this help
us? What challenges, tensions, or problems does academic study of the Bible
create ecclesiologically, socially, or academically in my situation?
The volume then turns to reflect on the fields of academy, religious community,
and the public sphere, each in their turn. The second thematic focus of the
volume is on the systemic and institutional contexts in which exegetical work is
conducted. Scholarly exegesis of the Bible takes place in a variety of such contexts
--- from research universities to denominational seminaries to pastoral letters
and confessional statements, to name but a few --- each of which operates on
the basis of presuppositions that affect the way the biblical texts are handled.
The chapters gathered here seek to make these implicit, often impervious backgrounds
explicit in order to understand the socio-institutional conditions in
which exegesis is undertaken in academic systems around the world. More concretely
it is asked, in what sorts of institutions is exegesis practiced and taught?
How do these institutions relate to other academic institutions or disciplines? Is
exegesis practiced and taught at religious or secular institutions? If religious,
which religious confessions are represented, and how do they interact? How are
these institutions regulated legally, and how is the academic-cultural position of
exegesis negotiated politically? What is the historical background to the sociopolitical
and institutional position of exegesis in that context? And finally, in
what concrete ways have exegetical debates or exegetical questions been influenced
by this contextualization?
Third, the chapters of this volume engage with the confessional construction
of the biblical texts in relation to settings with a more explicit self-understanding
as being religiously oriented and practicing. Exegesis deals with the Bible. But
what exactly is a Bible? How does our concept of ‘‘Bible’’ impact our way of reading
and interpreting it? It seems obvious that answers to these questions will
vary according to ecclesial or denominational context. There is no consensus on
what is meant by canonicity and how this concept is best negotiated, no agreement
on the extent of the canon among Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox
readers, and no end in sight of discussions concerning what it means theologically
for the texts to be ‘‘sacred’’ or ‘‘Scripture’’. This lack of finality may lead
one to wonder how ‘‘Jewish’’, ‘‘Catholic’’, ‘‘Protestant’’, or ‘‘Orthodox’’ exegesis
might be described. On the other hand, it is worth asking to what extent these
respective approaches to the biblical texts also depend on ethno-linguistic and
socio-political backgrounds: If we ask how, when, by whom, and with what inten-

Introduction 19
tions the Bible is read, the answers might differ significantly from one context
(however demographically demarcated) to another. But then, again, they might
coincide to a much greater extent than expected, too. Referring recursively to the
previous paragraph, it can also be asked from within explicitly confessional
contexts in what ways exegesis is understood to be an academic discipline or
not. To what extent are academic and spiritual reading practices thought to stand
in tension with one another, and to what extent are they regarded as mutually
enriching?
Fourth, exegesis in public and civic spaces is a topic that receives rather extensive
attention in several chapters. Reflecting on the interaction of academic
research and social change raises a number of challenging questions, especially
when it comes to religious themes. Biblical exegesis in particular may encounter
various receptions in church and society, whether it is given pride of place in
doing theology, its historical claims are received as harmful to faith, its contemporary
societal relevance is doubted, or whether biblical interpretation is put to
political use. Biblical exegesis is situated in relation to academia and religious
community in different societies in different ways, and what it communicates, to
whom, and how vary accordingly. This attention to exegesis in relation to public
and civic settings is approached from a variety of angles, including with a focus
on inner-theological discourses, the spaces and methods of communication, on
the ways the Bible permeates society implicitly and explicitly, and who communicates
this knowledge and in what contexts.
Fifth, there is the question of method. From academy to religious community
to public and civic settings, in all of these places the use of both well-established
as well as emerging methods of research, study, and presentation may be observed.
It is a truism to say that there is a wide range of methods in exegesis:
The ‘‘classical’’ canon of historical-critical methods is nowadays joined by many
engaged and context-oriented approaches such as African, post-colonial, feminist,
queer, or ecological hermeneutics. The overall impression created has
sometimes been that these approaches rather coexist than really cooperate. Probing
why and to what extent this is actually the case leads the authors gathered
here to address a number of questions such as: To what extent are methods culturally
bound and / or products of specific socio-historical developments? Or,
more concretely, if historical-critical methods are a European invention, how are
they and how ought they to be received in non-Western cultures, or is it even
necessary at all? What is the status of contextual and post-colonial interpretations
within the field of exegesis, and what exactly can historical-critical perspectives
learn from them? In a kind of meta-reflection on this phenomenon,
several of the chapters in this volume, on the one hand, consider the reasons
why this may be the case and what we can do about it, while, on the other hand,
other authors also argue that this tension is much less pronounced nowadays,
seeing instead potential for, again, mutual enrichment in the combination of
historical-critical and critical-theoretical methodological approaches.

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Phillip Andrew Davis, Jr.; Daniel Lanzinger; Matthew Ryan Robinson
Finally, sixth, it is a core concern of this volume, as of the whole WDTD project,
to look toward the possible futures of work in the fields associated with
biblical exegesis. The volume thus features a number of future-oriented reflections
in the chapters of both senior and early-career scholars. Two basic questions
--- namely, concerning why scholars continue to conduct research on the
Bible today, and why they might do so in the future --- yield in their turn more
specific questions: Will scholars who conduct research on the Bible be interested
in the Bible in and of itself (and if so, on what kind of understanding of the Bible’s
importance is this interest based)? Or will scholars increasingly become
more interested in the Bible because of how the Bible refers to or reflects on
other issues. If the latter, then what are those other issues? Are they most helpfully
described as cultural, societal, ethical, existential, or perhaps philosophical?
How are those categories constructed and ‘‘found’’ in the ancient texts of the
Bible?
In summary, with its focus on exegesis in relation to science and the academy,
religious communities, and the civic or public sphere, the volume concentrates,
in a way, on one end of the global-local spectrum of the transcultural described
at the outset: WDTD volume two aims to attend to localness, the
particularity, the contextuality, the situational specificity of all of the exegetical
work.
2. Chapter Previews
The volume’s attention to the institutionalization and particularity of exegetical
work is reflected by the various scholars and practitioners who constitute the
volume’s authors. From the volume’s several contributors several unique and,
perhaps just as interestingly, many overlapping concerns emerge. In keeping
with the WDTD program priorities, the work presented in this volume showcases
the insights of an interreligious and ecumenical group of scholars, at various
career stages, from twelve different countries, and standing in various relations
to academic and lived-religious settings on exegetical institutionalization and
practice.
Tahina Rahandrifenosoa (Madagascar), a pastor of a Reformed Protestant
church in Madagascar, opens the volume with a short dispatch from the fields of
exegetical practice, in particular describing his experience combining exegetical
work and pastoral guidance in Facebook videos for his large Malagasy audience.
Rahandrifenosoa writes as a pastor, in a pastor’s voice and with a pastor’s concerns.
As such, he is not primarily interested in biblical exegesis as a field for its
own sake. And yet, not despite but precisely from this pastoral location, he argues
for the helpfulness of careful historical-critical study of the biblical texts ---
for the individual life of faith, for church leadership, and even for community
formation. Similar dynamics come to the forefront in Anja Block’s (Germany)

Introduction 21
chapter. Starting from her academic institutional setting, but like
Rahandrifenosoa, she regards rigorous training in historical-critical exegetical
methods as of vital importance for engaging constructively with articulations of
Christian religion in her contemporary German context. She is specifically interested
in the relevance of biblical exegesis for the field of Christian religious education
in schools at a time when both biblical illiteracy and biblical literalisms ---
and both of these all over the political landscape --- are on the rise.
Already in these opening chapters, then, several key questions and tensions
come to the forefront: What does it mean to do historical-critical research ‘‘for its
own sake’’? How theological and how connected to a church or denomination is,
can, and should exegetical work be? What are appropriate and helpful ways of
positioning the Bible in civic and public discourses in relation to social values
and norms?
A concern reappears again and again in the following chapters for an exegesis
that speaks into the present of religious persons and communities with their
respective contextual challenges and perspectives. Dogara Ishaya Manomi (Nigeria),
a Protestant New Testament scholar, notes that biblical exegesis that does
not connect interpretation of the biblical texts to the situations of Christian individuals,
communities, churches, and leaders is unthinkable in his context. This
conviction is echoed by Sharon Padilla (Mexico), a Roman Catholic New Testament
scholar who similarly writes about the necessity of addressing contextual
social challenges in interpretation of the Bible in Latin America.
Their point, however, is not simply that present-day needs and interests
should always take priority in determining whether and to what extent the Bible
is worth reading and interpreting. Rather, the point is, on the one hand, descriptive:
Trends in contemporary discourse, combined with institutionalized concentrations
of power, simply do determine what is determined by contemporary
readers to count as knowledge about the Bible or to be worth knowing about the
biblical texts --- including those who understand themselves to be interested
merely in historical scholarship as well as those whose interests in the past are
more guided by present-day social challenges. Moritz Gräper (Germany), C. I.
David Joy (India), and Mirjam Jekel (Germany) all discuss this in their chapters
in relation to the ways that perceptions of legitimacy in exegetical work worldwide
are institutionalized. Gräper examines the ways that the structures of participation,
for example, in academic societies and conference culture, in effect
give strong preference to western scholars working in wealthy institutions. Joy
engages in a postcolonial analysis, not of the biblical texts themselves, for which
is more well-known, but of publishing practices and the eclipse of majority world
publications by the systemic preference for English-language research published
by large European and North Atlantic corporations. Jekel makes a critical but
constructive approach to these issues: On the one hand, she asks who is doing
exegesis and looks within but also beyond familiar academic settings; on the
other, she asks for whom exegetical work is done and why, and here, too, she

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Phillip Andrew Davis, Jr.; Daniel Lanzinger; Matthew Ryan Robinson
seeks to highlight and thematize connections between academia and fields of
practice that have often been overlooked.
However, the concern for exegetical practices that speak from and into the
present is not treated merely descriptively. It is also a concern for being aware of
the frameworks within which one is reading and being able to embrace them
insofar as they affirm life and faith. From different confessional contexts, Ludger
Schwienhorst-Schönberger (Vienna) and Ivana Noble (Prague) outline hermeneutical
approaches in Catholic and in Protestant and Eastern Orthodox theology,
respectively, that understand the reading of the Bible as a spiritual encounter.
While this presupposes in each case a theological understanding of Scripture, it
at the same time recognizes that all reading practices are contextual and engaged,
responding to present concerns and driven by contemporary values. In
this way, more nuanced self-awareness can be cultivated of the ways that reading
in the present is also always reading for the present. Søren Lorenzen (Denmark)
writes about exegesis and its relevance in and for a largely secular society,
and argues for the ongoing development of philosophical-hermeneutical
interests in the field as a direction holding particular promise for the future.
Lorenzen’s suggestion could be a way forward, not only due to its potential to fill
the sails with fresh wind, but also for the ways it can serve as a call to return to
the over two thousand years of rich philosophical-exegetical tradition in Jewish
and Christian thought. Questions of selfhood and community and what constitutes
a good life in the world are no less historical and present in the biblical
texts for reason of their also being philosophical in orientation. And, indeed,
returning to the texts with such questions is deeply important as they help to
overcome the idea that exegetical work seeks a single ‘‘real’’ meaning, or that, in
order to understand the meaning(s) the biblical texts communicate, it would be
sufficient to find out ‘‘what really happened’’.
This does not mean, however, that the volume overall holds a sour attitude
toward historical-critical exegesis. To the contrary. The seminal insight that
there are no non-historical readings of history is by now banal, though not for
that reason any less consequential for science or society. More recent critical
turns in social-scientific and historical scholarship are not to be seen as alternatives
to or rejections of historical research, but in fact underscore its importance
and help to refine and nuance both what kinds of questions scholars in the present
direct toward the past and how the past can inform the present. As Amy-Jill
Levine (USA) argues, a ‘‘denial of history’’ is catastrophic for affirmative faith in
the present. Not only is it the case that ‘‘an a-historical Jesus is a malleable Jesus’’,
but a-historical readings have been set in totalitarian service of colonialism,
anti-Semitism, and anti-Judaism for centuries, with horrifying consequences, as
Levine soberingly reminds. Neither scientific nor religious communities nor the
public sphere have yet been able to liberate themselves from these tendencies,
and a robust commitment to critical engagement with history is vital for scholarly
and confessional practice as much today as ever. And this turns out to be a
refrain that recurs in many chapters.

Introduction 23
Several authors --- from Block to Levine to Athalya Brenner-Idan (Israel / the
Netherlands) --- express concern about political, religious, and social fundamentalisms
that creep in through irresponsible reading practices, illustrating yet
another way in which historical-critical exegesis and present-day contextualization
are seen as inseparable and, in fact, mutually important. Rahandrifenosoa,
Padilla, Manomi, Wandusim, Joy, and Jeremy Punt (South Africa) do not disagree.
One of the important accomplishments of the volume is the way it disrupts
and complicates any unreflected equivocations in opposition between historicalcritical
exegesis and contextual exegesis, liberal West and fundamentalist rest.
Michael Wandusim (Ghana) argues forcefully that the Bible ‘‘will receive increased
critical attention in the times ahead, not necessarily for its own sake, but
due to its documented influence in both religious and secular contexts in Africa.’’
In other words, Wandusim predicts scientific historical-critical exegesis will
continue to gain in importance precisely for the purposes of contextualization
and application, not despite those pressures. For those who are interested, he
also offers a short introduction to several key West African exegetes who represent
the trajectories he is describing in his chapter.
The chapter from Athalya Brenner-Idan offers a particularly fascinating case
study of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Israel and responses from
some Ultraorthodox communities. In so doing, she highlights the complex ways
scholarship and religious traditionalism and politics interact as Brenner conducts
a kind of masterclass in historical-critical, theological exegesis of the public
square, while also being very upfront about her positionality and political
leanings as a feminist, secular Jew. On the one hand, as a feminist exegetical
scholar, she represents an approach to ‘‘engaged’’ exegesis; on the other hand,
she does not resist the use of historical-critical methodologies, but rather builds
her argument on historical-critical insights concerning ‘‘plagues’’ and pandemics
in the Bible. Moreover, she seamlessly integrates her feminist lens and historical-critical
insights into a sharp critique of contemporary Israeli politics, not
rooted in but precisely opposing normative theological programs. And how does
she perform this integrated critique? Via the incorporation of discussions of the
Rabbinic period and later Jewish tradition. All of this combined becomes a fascinating
reflection on how complicated and multi-layered are the kinds of things
that exegesis and theology do --- often without it being recognized that they are
present, much less doing anything, at all.
Still, as Jeremy Punt argues, not every scholar will be able to acquire such
expansive area and methodological expertise. Punt suggests therefore that methodological
approaches should not be seen as tools that, properly applied, mechanically
produce correct interpretations, but as ‘‘scientific homes’’ that influence
both interpretations and interpreters. Exegetes thus face the task of
orienting themselves intentionally and responsibly in their own scientific-
(non)credal-civic ‘‘homes’’. Irresponsible exegesis in reaction to a push for easy
answers is an ever-present danger, as Jonathan W. Lo (Hong Kong / Canada)
shows in his chapter on opposing interpretations among Christians in Hong

24
Phillip Andrew Davis, Jr.; Daniel Lanzinger; Matthew Ryan Robinson
Kong of biblical characterizations concerning proper relationships between followers
of Jesus and the ruling authorities. As an example of such responsibility,
Andrea Pichelmeier’s call for a kind of akribeia, or ‘‘precision’’, in correlating text
to context via the fittingness of questions asked stands out; as she cautions, this
‘‘most important virtue of exegetes requires time and patience. Both have become
rare in a society which demands instant results.’’
Conclusion
What can exegetical scholars do, actually, to integrate their historical training
with responsible ways of communicating their knowledge of the biblical texts
and traditions in particular communities and in light of the certain circumstances
and needs of those communities? This is a point on which the volume has not
only descriptive but also constructive suggestions to make. Brenner-Idan, Levine,
and Jekel all offer proposals in this direction, which serve also as fitting conclusions
to this introduction. First, Brenner-Idan writes, ‘‘If, as a scholar, you wish
to be relevant in times like this, leave behind notions of non-engagement. Mine
your own knowledge, as I’ve tried to do in my own context [...]. Most religious
traditions contain possibilities for action during emergencies; those possibilities
have to be searched for and pointed out.’’ Second, this critical mining of one’s
own contexts and traditions, can be paired with critical, but sympathetic listening
to the traditions of others. Levine directs scholarly attention to a pedagogical
posture of listening and representing the positions and concerns of others in
recognizable, fair ways. Drawing on her decades of experience as a professor,
Levine paints a picture of biblical scholarship as engaging in public forums for
open dialogue and debate that can still today be structured by the mutual commitment
of participants to standards of listening and reconstructing the arguments
of others in ways they feel represent them fairly, as a baseline. Critique
and evidence are not to be given short shrift, confessional disagreements can be
maintained, and clear condemnations will at times be not only appropriate but
necessary, even in the classroom. But there is rarely warrant for beginning with
such exclusionary moves.
To conclude in Jekel’s words: ‘‘There is a great need for exegetical
knowledge, for the voices of biblical scholars to inform, to differentiate, to question
simplistic claims. And, again, that means that we must be open to these
communities, these questions, that we must be willing to communicate with
people and groups outside of our academic enclosures. Specifically, exegetes
must be public theologians (in a very broad sense of the term).’’ Surely there are
many exegetical scholars who would not describe their work in those terms. But
there are also very many who would. The formulation in any case encapsulates
well both the debates of this volume and the challenges facing those who will be
doing exegesis in the coming generations.

Part 1
The Bible between Academy,
Religious Communities, and Society

Tahina Rahandrifenosoa (Madagascar)
Online Exegetical Teaching
Responses Among Malagasy People and Churches
Introduction
It can be argued that Christianity began to maintain a presence in Madagascar
after the arrival on August 18, 1818 of two young English men named David
Jones and Thomas Bevan, who were missionaries of the London Missionary Society.
1 The way these men taught theology was so compelling that despite years of
persecution of Christians by Queen Ranavalona I, Christianity began to flourish.
William Ellis describes this progress and triumph:
We have reached the fiftieth year since Christianity first entered the capital of Madagascar,
and the results of its progress during the intervening years demand our unfeigned
thankfulness to God. Multitudes of the people have renounced their household
idols. The national idols have been removed from the palace, the priests no
longer form part of the court, and the astrologers and the diviners are no longer recognised:
some of these have since found a place in the missionaries’ Bible class, at
the Christians’ prayer meeting, or among the numbers who have, by baptism, publicly
renounced heathenism and avowed their faith in Christ. 2
Today, more than 200 years after the Gospel came to Madagascar, Christianity
occupies an important place in the life of the Malagasy society. 3 People receive
the teaching of Scripture mostly in church, on the streets, or on radios and televisions.
However, in the last five years, theological teachings transmitted on
social media have begun to gain popularity alongside the usual means of communications.
Facebook is the first among them, and I am one of those who use
this tool to teach theology, through the Facebook page called ‘‘Marka 16:15 --- Pst
Tahina’’.
1
William Ellis, History of Madagascar (London: John Snow and CO, 1870), 207.
2
William Ellis, The Martyr Church: A Narrative of the Introduction, Progress, and Triumph
of Christianity in Madagascar (London: John Snow and CO., 1870), 399.
3
Daniel Ralibera, Madagascar et le Christianisme (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1993), 7.

28
Tahina Rahandrifenosoa
I am a pastor from the Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar, a reformed
church. In 2020, I completed the Master of Arts in Ecumenical Studies at the
University of Bonn, Germany, and am currently pursuing a doctorate at the same
university, conducting research on the ‘‘Comparison of Baptismal Practices between
the Christian Religion and Traditional beliefs in Madagascar’’. In 2018, I
started the above-mentioned Facebook page ‘‘Marka 16:15 --- Pst Tahina’’. The
reason why I created this page came from the conviction of the word of God
which says, ‘‘Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation’’
(Mark 16:15, NRSV).
Social media attracts a lot of people nowadays, especially young people, and
is a very effective way to educate; its existence should be taken advantage of. My
main objectives are to teach the Bible, to build the Christian faith on solid foundations,
and to create in people a biblical mindset and way of life. I produce two
to three videos a week, and they numbered around 400 by the end of 2021. The
page had over 123,000 official followers as of the end of January 2022.
All the videos are given in Malagasy, but thanks to the help of many volunteers,
a quarter of the published videos are now subtitled in French and English.
Some of the videos have also been translated into sign language for people with
hearing impairment. The page is followed by a wide diversity of people, from
Christian to non-Christian, Catholic or Protestant, and especially evangelical
believers. According to Facebook statistics, those following the page are mostly
between twenty-five and thirty-five years old and sixty percent of them are female.
I have selected below three videos to discuss, in order to illustrate the types
of responses I have received from Malagasy followers of my page specifically to
my exegetical content.
1. First Video: Is it a Sin to Drink Alcohol? 4
This is a ten-minute exegetical video that was released on November 13, 2019.
By the end of 2021, meaning two years later, the video has had 1,000 reactions,
more than 450 comments, 3,000 shares just on Facebook, and more than
100,000 views.
This question does not even exist in Europe today, but why are Malagasy
people interested in finding the answer to the question of whether it is a sin to
drink alcohol? To understand why, let us go back in history.
At the end of the 19th century, Christian anti-drug organizations flourished
throughout the world. In 1875, for example, an American named Francis Murphy
created the first Christian anti-drug organization in the United States: ‘‘Blue
4
Marka 16: 15 --- Pst Tahina, Fahotana ve ny misotro toaka? (Facebook, November 13,
2019), https://www.facebook.com/336776300178729/videos/465689514048389.

Online Exegetical Teaching 29
Ribbon’’, or ‘‘Zioga Manga’’ in Malagasy. Also in 1877, Louis Lucien Rochat,
founded the first anti-drug organization in Switzerland, called the ‘‘Blue Cross’’. 5
All these organizations adhere to the principle of ‘‘drinking in moderation’’. In
1888, an American missionary named Mary Clement Leavitt arrived in Madagascar
and led a great campaign against drugs, and in the early twentieth century,
many Christian anti-drug organizations began to arise. In 1927, foreign missionaries,
as well as government officials and pastors met to study the fight
against drugs in Madagascar and decided that the organization should be called
‘‘Blue Cross’’ and that it should no longer support ‘‘moderate consumption’’ as in
all other countries, but ‘‘total abstinence’’ 6 which was seen as more suitable for
the Malagasy people and which many churches have continued to this day.
But many do not know this story, and the Blue Cross is still going strong today.
There are many Scriptures in the Bible that prohibit the use of alcohol, for
example, ‘‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray
by it is not wise’’ (Proverbs 20:1 NRSV) and ‘‘Ah, you who are heroes in drinking
wine and valiant at mixing drink’’ (Isaiah 5:22 NRSV). Also, ‘‘Drink no wine or
strong drink, neither you nor your sons, when you enter the tent of meeting, that
you may not die; it is a statute for ever throughout your generations’’ (Leviticus
10:9 NRSV). As a result, it has always been strongly emphasized that drinking
alcohol is also a sin: ‘‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s
Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person.
For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple’’ (1 Corinthians 3:16---17
NRSV).
Thus, I discussed alcohol in the Bible in this video, and the explanation was
based primarily on the literary context, that is, what the entire Bible says about
alcohol and not just one passage of Scripture. For example, I mentioned that
there are so many biblical passages in the Old and the New Testaments which
authorize people to consume wine, like: ‘‘spend the money for whatever you
wish --- oxen, sheep, wine, strong drink, or whatever you desire. And you shall
eat there in the presence of the Lord your God, you and your household rejoicing
together’’ (Deuteronomy 14:26 NRSV), or ‘‘No longer drink only water, but take a
little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments’’ (1 Timothy
5:23 NRSV). I also did a semantic study to consider the distinction between the
forbidding of drunkenness and the prohibition on drinking at all. The latter concerns
a few figures like the Nazirites, the descendants of the Rechabites, and
Samson. The prohibition was not for all of Israel because even Jesus turned water
5
Sophie Rossier, ‘‘La Croix-Bleue et sa Lutte Anti-alcoolique en Suisse Romande, 1877-
1910: Le Fonctionnement d’une Société de Tempérance Entre Idéaux Religieux et Aspirations
Patriotiques’’ (license dissertation, University of Fribourg, 2005), 7.
6
Maurice Rasolomanana, ‘‘Ny Dian’ny Ady amin’ny Zava-pisotro Mahamamo sy ny Mahadomelina
teto Madagasikara na ny Vokovoko Manga’’ (The Journey of the Fight Against
Alcohol and Drugs in Madagascar or the Blue Cross) (end-of-study thesis, SETELA, Faculty
of Theology Ambatonakanga, 1996), 9.

30
Tahina Rahandrifenosoa
into wine and used wine during the Lord’s Supper. So, if we look at the whole
Bible and not just one or two verses, it is clear that the Bible forbids the consumption
of alcohol to only a few people, while drunkenness is forbidden to all.
In spite of all these explanations, the message is difficult to get across, and
many opposed what I was saying as a result. The comments made by people
showed that literalism is still strong in the way people interpret the Bible. People
take only one or two passages of Scripture and interpret them immediately without
concern for the context. There are also those who follow the principles of the
church so strictly that they do not even question them, but take the decisions of
the church as the word of God. As a result, many have said that my exegetical
teachings on this topic encourage people to drink alcohol, while others say that I
am promoting the ‘‘liberal theology’’ of the West, since I studied in Europe, and
even some clergy have started to persecute me.
2. Second Video: Can Christian Women Wear Pants? 7
This question was the title of an exegetical video I shared on December 22, 2019,
and two years later, it has had 18,000 reactions, 1,000 comments, 3,000 shares
on Facebook, and over 147,000 views.
To this day, the right of women to wear pants continues to cause much controversy
among Christians in Madagascar. The Word of God says, ‘‘A woman
shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for
whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God’’ (Deuteronomy 22:5
NRSV), and this is the main reason for the controversy.
To recollect history, it is known and has been mentioned already that Christianity,
which was brought by missionaries, flourished and prospered in Madagascar
after the 1861 death of Queen Ranavalona I who hated Christianity. In
1894 in an area called Ambalavato in Fianarantsoa, God awakened the famous
sorcerer named Rainisoalambo. When he prayed, he abandoned his idols and
founded a movement called Fifohazana Soatanana (The Awakening in Soatanana),
8 in which emphasis was placed on holiness of life, especially through the
dress code, which was peculiar in that the faithful, both men and women,
dressed from top to bottom in drab white clothing called ‘‘didy mananjara’’. According
to Roger Rafanomezantsoa, ‘‘Rainisoalambo urged his followers to wear
the didy mananjara as a mark of equality between each other [...].’’ Further, ‘‘in
7
Marka 16:15 --- Pst Tahina, Mahazo manoa pataloha ve ny vehivavy Kristiana? (Facebook,
December 22, 2019), https://www.facebook.com/336776300178729/videos/568093073736140.
8
Joely Rasamoelina, Ny Tantaran’ny Fifohazana Soatanana (The History of the Fifohazana
Soatanana) (Antananarivo: Trano Printy Fiangonana Loterana Malagasy, 2001), 14.

Anja Block (Germany)
Speaking Responsibly about Biblical
Texts
Historical-Critical Exegesis as (more than) a Translation
Introduction
Translation and exegesis are inextricably linked to each other. The simple fact
that in many languages there are numerous Bible translations available shows
that translations vary. They stretch from word-for-word translations of the original
texts to those that aim to be comprehensible to modern readers. A responsible
translation is based on exegetical insights and exegesis begins and ends with
translating. Therefore, the first step of studying theology at German universities
is to learn languages. Every student of theology faces this challenge in their first
semesters. The standard period of study for the degree Magister Theologiae is
extended by two semesters just to account for learning ancient Greek, ancient
Hebrew, and Latin. 1
Theology students enrolled in this degree program learn
ancient Greek syntax and Hebrew verb forms. We learn the meaning of words
and how difficult it is to find an appropriate translation. Often, there is not one
right way to translate, and changing one word means changing the whole sentence.
2 The process of translating shows that biblical texts are ambiguous.
German Protestantism and the translation of biblical texts into a commonly
understood language belong together right from the start. Even though reformer
Martin Luther was not the first to translate the Bible into German, his translation
based on accessible sources in original languages has had a lasting impact until
today. A revised, modern version of Luther’s translation was presented and in-
1
Cf. Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, ‘‘Rahmenordnung für die Erste Theologische
Prüfung/die Prüfung zum Magister Theologiae in Evangelischer Theologie,’’ Amtsblatt der
Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland 65, no. 2 (2011): 38.
2
Of course, there are numerous examples, but the phenomenon is evident in central texts
like the Shema Israel: Learning Hebrew helps one understand that the translation in the
King James Version of Deut 6:4 ‘‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord’’ is more
accurate and therefore preferable to International Standard Version’s translation of the
same verse: ‘‘Listen, Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.’’

40
Anja Block
troduced in local churches for liturgical and personal use in 2016. 3
Moreover,
Luther insisted on bringing central points of doctrine back into focus, which can
be summarized in the so-called four soli: Humankind receives and knows about
God’s benevolence only sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus and sola scriptura.
The latter constitutes one of the main principles of Lutheran doctrine that has
shaped and continues to shape German Protestantism to this day: sola scriptura ---
only scripture is the source of faith. The great Protestant interest in researching
the biblical texts as a source of faith is thus a natural consequence of the principle
of sola scripture. Although the methods of historical-critical research were
developed in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, their foundation lies in the principle of
sola scriptura. 4
It is not surprising that the knowledge of the texts that comes with translating
them led to further research. Translating a text means to read it very closely
and to be familiar with its expressions and meanings. I cannot dive into the history
of historical-critical exegesis in this chapter, but undeniably, observations
and important remarks about the biblical texts and notes about textual history
were part of the process of the text’s transmission. One thinks, for example, of
the medieval Masoretes who noted variants in the Masorah, or of the Jewish-
Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza who was among the earliest of modern
thinkers to ask who might have been the authors of biblical texts.
Yet, it is no less surprising that birth of what we call historical-critical exegesis
occurred between the Enlightenment and Pietism. Rational thought and a
new-found appreciation for the Bible came together and let scholars ask various
questions. Often, the name of Johann Philipp Gabler (1753---1826) is mentioned
in this context, for he distinguished biblical studies from dogmatics and systematic
theology in his De justo discrimine theologiae biblicae et dogmaticae
regundisque recte utriusque finibus in 1787. 5
Following this notion, scholars
asked manifold historical and literary questions about the Bible. They searched
for answers and came up with theories about the development of the biblical text
and the canon. Scholars researched the form and function of biblical texts, historical
events, and their influence on Israelite theology and emerging Christianity.
They searched for explanations for miracles and used reason as a measure for
biblical stories.
3
Cf. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, ‘‘Die Lutherbibel und das Reformationsjubiläum,’’ in Die
Revision der Lutherbibel 2017: Hintergründe ---- Kontroversen ---- Entscheidungen, ed. Hannelore
Jahr, Christoph Kähler and Jürgen-Peter Lesch (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,
2019), 282f.
4
Cf. Hans-Joachim Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments,
3rd ed. (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1982), 8.
5
Cf. Johann Philipp Gabler, Oratio de justo discrimine theologiae biblicae et dogmaticae
regundisque recte vtriusque finibus (Altdorf: Monath, 1787).

Speaking Responsibly about Biblical Texts 41
Today, academic theology is unthinkable without the approach that is labeled
as historical-critical exegesis. 6 Studying theology at a Protestant faculty in
Germany implies learning the methods of historical-critical exegesis. It means
asking about the original meaning in its historical context, without considering
its reception history and dogmatic relevance.
The first step of working with a biblical text --- no matter in what context, be
it liturgical use, teaching it in school or for research purposes --- is a translation.
The challenging aspects of translating were already recognized in biblical and
Talmudic times. The prologue of the deuterocanonical book of Sirach reflects on
the difficulty of translating: ‘‘For what was said originally in Hebrew is not equally
effective when translated into another language. That is true not only of this
book; the Law itself, the Prophets, and the rest of the books differ no little when
they are read in original.’’ 7 Moreover, other well-known figures, such as Philo of
Alexandria, Josephus, and the Rabbis in the Mishnah and Talmud, discuss the
Septuagint in relation to its Hebrew sibling. 8 Sages in those ancient times were
aware that languages carry individual connotations, express thoughts in unique
grammatical structures and may have distinctive effects.
Working with both the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Old Testament, it is a
basic insight of exegesis that translating a text alone is never sufficient. Instead,
the context, discourses, and traditions relevant at its time of formation, literary
shape and social setting contribute to the meaning of a text and need to be considered
and reflected in a translation. Historical-critical exegesis is the way to
translate text and context.
1. The Methods of Historical-Critical Exegesis
Exegetical scholars have developed a set of methods to explore the formation of a
text and its context. Those methods ask a variety of questions and only collectively
do the methods amount to a profound historical-critical exegesis. 9
Each
6
Cf. Manfred Oeming, Biblische Hermeneutik: Eine Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 2013), 31.
7
Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira: A New Translation
with Notes. Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 131.
8
Cf. Christoph Dohmen and Günter Stemberger, Hermeneutik der Jüdischen Bibel und des
Alten Testaments (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1996), 51---55.
9
In 1982 James Barr argued for the term biblical criticism rather than speaking of the
historical-critical method, as biblical criticism according to his understanding ‘‘is a group
of methods --- or, better, […] it has used or even created a range of methods, among which
the (or a) historical method is only one particularly important one, not one that dominates
all others.’’ James Barr, ‘‘Biblical Criticism as Theological Enlightenment,’’ in Bible and
Interpretation: Collected Essays of James Barr: Volume 1 Interpretation and Theology, ed.
John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 156. [Initial publication in German

42
Anja Block
method has its own focal point and interests, even though they sometimes intersect
with each other. While some focus on synchronic observations, others have
a diachronic interest. In introductory courses to Old Testament studies --- and, as
an Old Testament scholar, I will focus my attention in the following on the Old
Testament --- and corresponding textbooks such as Uwe Becker’s Exegese des
Alten Testaments or Siegfried Kreuzer’s and Dieter Vieweger’s Proseminar Altes
Testament, the methods are taught in a similar order.
Once again, a preliminary translation, based on the Masoretic text, constitutes
the first step. Second, textual criticism forms the basis for all of the following
methods by considering variations of the transmitted text and their potential
causes, such as scribal errors or deliberate adjustments of the wording. Scholars
attempt to distinguish what changes might be earlier than others and closer to
the version of a text that stood at the beginning of its transmission. 10
Proceeding from the basis of the now established text, scholars ask about its
formation using literary and redaction criticism. They search for incoherence
and tensions within the text, look for doublets and inconsistencies and try to find
traces of the textual growth. Understanding such complex redactional processes
provides insights into the discourses that shaped the texts. Biblical texts formed
under historical conditions, when, for example, a crisis like the Babylonian exile
11 created new theological challenges for the communities for whom the texts
held importance, prompting re-readings of those texts, the generation of new
perspectives on previous certainties, and ultimately revision and growth of the
texts. Certainly, the sages and scribes did not always agree, and their disagreein:
Trutz Rendtorff, ed., Glaube und Toleranz: Das theologische Erbe der Aufklärung (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1982), 30---42. All quotes are taken from the
translation by John Barton: Barr, ‘‘Biblical Criticism as Theological Enlightenment’’].
Even before him, Martin Hengel stated: ‘‘Die Redeweise von ‘der historisch-kritischen
Methode’ ist fragwürdig. [...] In Wirklichkeit gibt es eine Vielfalt von ‘historischen Methoden’.’’
Martin Hengel, ‘‘Historische Methoden und theologische Auslegung des Neuen
Testaments,’’ Kerygma und Dogma 19 (1973): 85.
In this essay, I use the phrase ‘historical-critical exegesis’ to summarize the aforementioned
group of methods.
10
Particularly older publications describe, textual criticism as searching for the Urtext.
This description, however, is overly simplified. As Alexander A. Fischer, among others,
has pointed out, the time of a text’s composition and the time of its transmission blend
into each other and therefore, the final form of a text is rarely identical to its Urtext. Cf.
Alexander A. Fischer, Der Text des Alten Testaments: Neubearbeitung der Einführung in die
Biblia Hebraica von Ernst Würthwein (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2009), 188---
94.
11
The Babylonian Exile is one prominent catalyst among others in Israelite history.
Konrad Schmid has pointed out that similar developments in the history of Israelite theology
after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE led to important
theological transformations after the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple in 587 BCE. Cf.
Konrad Schmid, Theologie des Alten Testaments (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 184.

Athalya Brenner-Idan (Israel / the Netherlands)
Plague, Pandemic, Divine/Human
Interactions, Communities, and
Beliefs
Some Reflections in Times of Corona
Love your re‘a as yourself 1
(Leviticus 19:18; see also Mark 12:31 et al. in the New Testament)
Give the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are
God’s
(Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25)
Introduction
‘‘Speak not of the rope in the house of the hanged’’. This is a popular saying,
variations of which exist in many cultures and languages; I hereby employ it as a
cautionary note to myself. And yet, when corona is the rope in our global house,
including the bible / religion guild, it cannot and should not be ignored. Other
professional concerns certainly remain important, be they traditional / conservative
or innovative or in-between. However, in my view, the corona emergency
requires even a scholarly response. In our Jewish tradition, saving a [human] life
cancels even the commandment not to work on Shabbat (1 Maccabees 2:29---44;
see also Mishna Yoma 8; Talmud Babli Yoma 5:1---2). So, let us begin with understanding
what is considered an epidemic / pandemic or ‘‘plague’’ in the Hebrew
Bible (HB), and then take this understanding, and its influence, further in time
and scope.
1
This Hebrew word re‘a literally means ‘‘friend, colleague, other human being’’, even
‘‘lover’’ (numerous times in the Song of Songs). However, from antiquity, it has been
translated into ‘‘neighbor’’ or its equivalents. Since this seems like an inexact translation,
misleading and ideological, the Hebrew word is left in place.

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Athalya Brenner-Idan
1. Pandemic / Epidemic in the Hebrew Bible
There is no equivalent word in the HB for our ‘‘pandemic’’ or ‘‘epidemic’’. By
‘‘pandemic’’ we now mean a serious health risk, seemingly spreading ever so
quickly everywhere, uncontrollable, or almost so, which affects individuals but
also vast collectives of numerous people, potentially fatally.
In the HB, the nouns magephah or negeph 2
that are usually translated as
‘‘plague’’ or ‘‘pandemic’’ and at times ‘‘pestilence’’ derive from the verb n-g-ph qal,
‘‘to strike, hit’’ (also in war). And the plagues of Egypt (Exodus 9) are in the Hebrew
makkot, plural of makkah from n-k-h hif. etc., again ‘‘hit, strike’’.
Even though a specifically designated term is missing, this does not mean
that fatal (health) plagues / epidemics are not known in the HB. On the contrary.
For instance, the HB narrates in three places (2 Kings 18---19; Isaiah 36---37; 2
Chronicles 32) how King Sennacherib of Assyria devastated the land of Judah,
but miraculously stopped his siege of Jerusalem and returned to his country
without conquering the city. This journey of Assyrian punishment is assigned to
701 BCE and is variously witnessed also by the extrabiblical sources of the Sennacherib
Prism, archaeological findings from Lachish and Azekah, the Siloam
Inscription, Flavius Josephus, Herodotus, and Berossus. Whereas the HB and
later Jewish traditions present the sudden lifting of the siege as a divine miracle,
external contemporaneous sources mention ‘‘plagues’’ of mice or even cholera
that attacked the Assyrian troops.
This instance, again, means that --- in spite of serving as headwords in different
semantic fields --- both groups of terms, and the extra-linguistic concepts that
underline them, are somehow connected, since they appear in both contexts of
war and of epidemics. As an aside: Indeed, the exclusive specialization of
magephah as ‘‘plague’’ or ‘‘pandemic’’, as separate completely from the signification
‘‘military defeat’’, is --- according to the historical dictionary of the Academy
for the Hebrew Language --- no younger than the 18 th
century CE. And while
makkah may still signify ‘‘hit, blow’’, magephah is the modern Hebrew term used
for epidemic / pandemic and never for defeat in war (although the related verb
is).
Now, our first task will be to find out why these two clusters of n-k-h and
n-g-ph -derived terms do double duty in the HB.
2
Throughout this article, I’ve opted to use the SBL’s so-called General Purpose method
rather than the Academic method for transcribing Hebrew words (in italics), since --- in my
view --- the former better conveys the Hebrew sound sense to non-Hebrew readers.

Plague, Pandemic, Divine/Human Interactions, Communities, and Beliefs 55
2. Examples in the Hebrew Bible
The following examples are found in the HB, paraphrased from the Hebrew text
and mostly following the JPS (1985) translation. Once we’ve looked into some
relevant texts, gleaned from several chronological layers of the HB, we shall
discuss some more the Hebrew terms and their lexicological and semantic
sources and usage, the theologies and ideologies that they imply and their meaning
in their contexts, before moving on to their utilization for dealing with the
present.
• In Numbers 25:6---9, An Israelite man brings a Midianite woman to the Tent
of Meeting. Phineas the Aaronite priest kills both man and woman. The
plague, having killed 24,000 Israelites, is checked. There is more on a
‘‘plague’’ in this chapter, and its end by the Aaronite priest, who kills the
transgressors and appeases god. 3 This desert incident is mentioned further in
Joshua 22:17 and Psalm 106:29---30.
• Moving to Numbers 14:36---37, to the fate of the skeptic spies returning from
viewing Canaan after being sent there by Moses: the men who spread opposition
to entering the land die by a plague sent by god’s will.
• And in Numbers 17:8---14, on the rebellion of Korah & company, again a
priest (Aaron himself this time) helps lift the plague brought upon the congregation,
not before 14,700 die apart from the immediate Korahite rebels
themselves.
• Such passages no doubt are etiological, explaining the ascendancy of Aaron’s
priestly house; however, they serve the message that plagues come from the
divine and can be alleviated by priests according to his command. As summarized
in Numbers 8:19:
And from among the Israelites, I formally assign the Levites to Aaron and his
sons, to perform the service for the Israelites in the Tent of Meeting and to make
expiation for the Israelites, so that no plague may afflict the Israelites for coming
too near the sanctuary.
• The prophet Zechariah threatens the nations --- and their domestic animals ---
by plague, if they fight against Jerusalem. God will also punish by a plague
the Egyptian community if they decline to come on pilgrimage to Jerusalem
(Zechariah 14:12---19).
• Carelessly and directly taking a human census will, as god tells Moses, cause
a plague in the community (Exodus 30:12). See also the plague resulting from
3
This author spells references to the Hebrew/Jewish/biblical god with a lower-case initial
letter (rather than with a capital letter), unless in quotation. The same applies to ‘‘bible’’
and ‘‘the divine’’ (the latter when a reference to god).

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Athalya Brenner-Idan
King David’s census, when 70,000 Israelites die before David buys Araunah’s
threshing floor and installs a sacrificial altar there (2 Samuel 24).
• As we can see from the examples cited above and further, animal and human
health catastrophes are mixed not only with violent death as a result of military
action, but also with natural catastrophes, as in the ‘‘curses’’ chapter in
Deuteronomy 28, or in the so-called ‘‘plagues of Egypt’’. Here, in these two
sources, some details are supplied. In Deuteronomy 28:20,
The LORD will let loose against you calamity, panic, and frustration in all the enterprises
you undertake, so that you shall soon be utterly wiped out because of
your evildoing in forsaking Me.
And so on and so forth, ‘‘until you are wiped out’’ (v. 24). Similarly, in Exodus
8---11, details are given of the Egyptian Passover ‘‘plagues’’, not called
magephah in the Hebrew text, although several of those afflictions mentioned
do qualify; but see specifically in 9:14:
For this time I will send all My plagues (magephotay) upon your person, and your
courtiers, and your people, in order that you may know that there is none like Me
in all the world. 4
• In 2 Samuel 12:15 god afflicted ‘‘the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David,
and it became critically ill’’. And in 1 Samuel 25:38, in the Abigail story,
ten days after she returns from her trip to David god ‘‘struck Nabal and he
died’’. In both instances the Hebrew n-g-ph qal (cause to fall, be defeated) is
used but variously translated. Instructive is the double entendre, the verb
n-g-ph nif. and the noun magephah, in both senses of loss --- malady and loss
at war --- in 2 Samuel 18:7, when Absalom loses his war with his father David:
The men of Israel were defeated (wayinagephu) by the servants of David, and the
slaughter (hamagephah) there was great on that day, twenty thousand men
(NRSV).
3. Short Analysis of Examples and Terms
The examples briefly presented here are purposely not organized in any textual
order, since I wish to show that they, and the concepts behind them, are not
4
In the two parallel but different accounts of the Egyptian ‘‘plagues’’ in the Psalms (Ps
78:43---51; 105:26---35), magephah, n-g-ph, or makkah are not used; even the verb form
n-k-h hif., ‘‘hit, strike’’, is used only once, in the description of the firstborn ‘‘plague’’, in a
verse that is almost identical in the two texts (78:51; 105:35).

Part 2
Academy: Parsing the Study of
Bible by Institutional Context

Jeremy Punt (South Africa)
Bible and Method
Perennial Questions, Useful Stratagems, and Scholarly
Homes
Introduction
In scholarship, methodologies have always been coming and going, but in biblical
studies, they tend to stay, or maybe keep coming --- at times also when they
were expected to go. The staying power of some methodologies may exceed,
many may argue, their usefulness as reported by biblical scholars and even by
Bible users generally. So too, the arrival of methodologies at times have received
acclaim, but in the end, seem to have over-promised or maybe just underdelivered.
Metaphors of travelling and staying are useful for hermeneutical positions
and methods in biblical studies, but beyond their usefulness, they also
signal those elements that do not always receive adequate attention in biblical
hermeneutics. Travelling and staying also are valuable images to encapsulate
and model scholarly habits in biblical hermeneutics in terms of their spatiality
and temporality, even temporariness. However, the metaphors’ associated agency
is properly located in their practitioners, biblical scholars. General reluctance
by biblical scholars to be methodologically accountable, not so much in execution
as in appropriating methodology, and particularly in accounting for the
socio-political wherewithal of chosen methodologies, exacerbate the dangers of
emphasizing methodology’s rather than scholars’ agency.
This contribution will argue that biblical scholarship remains caught up in a
methodological malaise, with historical criticism still the preferred vehicle of
travel. However, since scholars and their methods are socially located and methods
are scholarly homes that create and define where and how scholars work and
inform their identity, analysis and some repositioning of methodological considerations
are appropriate and can only be in the interest of biblical scholarship in
general.

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Jeremy Punt
1. Bible and Method: Perennial Questions
Hermeneutical questions in biblical studies come with the territory, since the
quest to understand and make sense of the Bible is central in formal and informal,
academic and ‘‘ordinary’’ contexts. 1
Biblical interpreters in intellectually
driven academic contexts have formulated theoretical positions and constructed
interpretive methodologies from earliest times, albeit for different reasons ---
methodology follows in the wake of hermeneutics. In South Africa and elsewhere,
biblical scholars have devoted much energy to (the discussion of) method
in biblical studies, often to the detriment of investigating the Bible’s social role,
the contextuality of its interpretation, or theoretical reflection about the former. 2
Pleading for a re-evaluation of the use and role of high theory, or simply Theory,
some scholars claim that it has not had much uptake in biblical studies, and
where it was taken up, it was as system and method only. 3 Methodology was the
enablement as well as end-result of the relationship between the Enlightenment
Bible 4 and the endless specialization and sub-division of biblical studies. Some go
as far as saying, ‘‘What defines biblical studies is less that it possesses method
than that it is obsessed with method and as such possessed by method’’. 5
1
This is not to deny the other purposes to which the Bible is put, or other roles and functions
claimed for it; see e.g. Jeremy Punt, ‘‘The Status of the Bible in Africa: Foundational
Document or Stumbling Block?,’’ Religion & Theology 5, no. 3 (1998): 265---310. The point
is that hermeneutical considerations influence and affect even those.
2
Cf. Jeremy Punt, ‘‘‘My Kingdom for a Method’: South African New Testament Scholarship
and Methodological Preoccupation,’’ Neotestamentica 32, no. 1 (1998): 135---60; Jeremy
Punt, ‘‘New Testament Interpretation, Interpretive Interests, and Ideology: Methodological
Deficits amidst South African Methodolomania,’’ Scriptura 65, no. 2 (1998): 1---35. Although
not reflecting in the first place on South African New Testament studies’
methodolomania, a SA systematic theologian and ethicist, Piet Naude, ‘‘Can We Still Hear
Paul on the Agora? An Outsider Perspective on South African New Testament Scholarship,’’
Neotestamentica 39, no. 2 (2005): 339---58, points out that NT scholars were slow in
leaving behind a past in which NT studies disengaged from socio-political issues in SA.
Some exceptions of theoretical (rather than narrow methodological) aspects of interpretation,
include e.g. work on accounting for the relationship between texts and ‘‘reality’’
(including history) in interpretation, see Bernard C. Lategan, ‘‘Reference: Reception, Redescription
and Reality,’’ in Text and Reality: Aspects of Reference in Biblical Text, ed. Bernard
C. Lategan and Willem S. Vorster (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 67---93.
3
So, rather than theory informing biblical scholarly practice, it was instrumental to methodological
(over-)emphasis: ‘‘Theory has fuelled the biblical-scholarly susceptibility to
methodolatry and methodone addition’’. Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood, The
Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 131.
4
Cf. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007).
5
Moore and Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto, 31.

Bible and Method 73
Biblical studies’ heavy, ongoing investment in critical methodologies, its
methodolomania, 6
has attracted scrutiny for different reasons, but can also be
challenged in particular for the accompanying unacknowledged interests and
their inevitable, overt or subtle, promotion of such interests. Method is not merely
the guide showing the academic way, but conjures up scenarios within which
scholarly engagement can or cannot take place, creating structures that both
enable engagement and disable or disallow scenarios considered inapt. 7
Amid
issues pertaining to power in and of interpretation, unacknowledged interests
together with an insistence on objective, neutral interpretation amount to an
‘‘innocence syndrome’’ and has compellingly been exposed time and again as
feigned and dangerous: feigned, given interpreters’ situatedness that provides
the context from where and through which human existence for the individual
and / or groups involved, are filtered and thus defined; and dangerous, because
‘‘the myth of innocence is in itself a highly political agenda’’, 8 with the peril intensified
by attempts to disguise and sublimate it. 9
Putting innocence aside allows that the grounding of biblical interpretation
and decisions about method can be accounted for in chronological and socially
determined moments; 10
after all, both interpretive results and processes and
mechanisms of interpretation are contextual. Growing acknowledgement of the
socio-political situatedness of methodologies implies accounting for the effect of
methodologies in biblical studies by taking scholars’ (and scholarship’s) social
locations into account. Biblical scholarship that takes its social embeddedness
serious as point of departure and frame of understanding does not discount
proper and adequate historical consciousness in a zero-sum game. Bridging the
6
À la Sandmel, who coined the term parallelomania for the relentless search (claims!) for
parallels and analogies often without historical or literary basis, in biblical and related
studies; cf. Samuel Sandmel, ‘‘Parallelomania,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 2---
13. With methodolomania is meant the enchantment with methodologies for their own
sake, to the extent of replacing interest in the texts they are applied to, often with little
theoretical concern regarding the methodologies and their use, and apparently oblivious
to interpretive contexts or settings.
7
In a similar way that map is not territory (cf. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory:
Studies in the History of Religions [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1978]), method is not procedure; at least, method is not simply procedures and techniques
to be followed.
8
Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 2000), 173.
9
The post-Enlightenment historical and literary critical reader assumes a disinterested,
objective, and also apolitical stance, all of which are a myth; cf. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘‘The
Reader in New Testament Interpretation,’’ in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for
Interpretation, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids, Carlisle: Eerdmans, Paternoster, 1995),
312.
10
Cf. Joel B. Green, ed., Hearing the New Testament. Strategies for Interpretation (Grand
Rapids, Carlisle: Eerdmans, Paternoster, 1995), 6.

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Jeremy Punt
dichotomy between theory and historiography brought about by the monopoly of
historical criticism 11 does not necessitate throwing the historical baby out with
the historical-critical bathwater. New historicism, as one example, in its many
guises has shown concern for the material conditions of texts’ production, accompanied
by an examination of possible omissions, alternative explanations,
and the incorporation of other relevant material. New historicism retains a historical
focus, avoiding the poststructuralist trap of treating the Bible as simply
text. In the guise of cultural poetics (à la Greenblatt), history is respected as
much as literature, avoiding the textualizing of history. History, after all, needs
at least as much interpretation as texts. Conversely, a new historicism approach
identifies a text not as mere impartial or perspectival reflection of events of the
past, but as also having a formative relationship to their own and later times. 12
So, while history can and will remain crucial for biblical interpretation without
locking it into a particular methodology, two other factors appear to drive the
predilection for biblical scholars’ methodological engagement and quest for the
‘‘singularity of meaning and pluralism of approach’’. 13
One is biblical scholars’
anxiety to shield their work and discourse on the Bible from accusations that it
may be subjective, personal, private, pietistic, pastoral, devotional, or
homiletical, and the resultant work’s lackluster and predictable nature regularly
ends up as a validation of the work’s integrity. A second reason for the emphasis
on methodology, to muster major scholarly effort in historical or philological
areas, is related to biblical studies’ desire or inclination to avoid dealing with
uncomfortable moral questions. 14
Further explanations for it can be added, but
these two key concerns not only influence biblical studies’ methodolomania but
have become embedded in historical criticism, and its dominance in the field.
2. Bible and Method: Useful Stratagems
Amidst the traditional --- many would say, historical-critical --- stance and even
insistence on its universal and homogenised relevance within the biblical studies
guild, a growing variety of hermeneutical positions, approaches, and methods
11
Cf. Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood, ‘‘Biblical Studies ‘after’ Theory: Onwards
Towards the Past Part Three: Theory in the First and Second Waves,’’ Biblical Interpretation:
A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 18, no. 3 (2010): 41, https://doi.org/
10.1163/156851510X492454.
12
Cf. Robert P. Carroll, ‘‘Poststructuralist Approaches: New Historicism and Postmodernism,’’
in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, ed. John Barton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55---57.
13
Moore and Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar, 103.
14
Cf. Moore and Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar, 40, 116.

Dogara Ishaya Manomi (Nigeria)
Is it in the Bible?
Re-Negotiating Five Biblical Interpretive Boundaries
Introduction
Biblical exegesis today is ever-shifting among and being re-negotiated in three
different locations: geographical --- from the West to the Global South; methodological
--- from historical-critical methods to contextual and activist-oriented
methods on the one hand, and from the academia to ecclesia on the other hand;
and thematic --- from the familiar biblical themes to issues of more direct contemporary
relevance. While we reflect on, appreciate, and participate in these
relocations of biblical interpretation, it is expedient to reflect carefully on certain
aspects of each. This chapter argues that if biblical interpretation in academia
will continue to serve the church in all three of these locations, as it should, it is
meaningful and even necessary to re-negotiate five interpretive boundaries,
namely, thematic boundaries, semantic boundaries, pragmatic boundaries, appropriative
(applicative) boundaries, and intuitive (personal) boundaries.
Difficulties in interpreting biblical texts today arise due to several factors
such as cultural, linguistic, temporal, and geographical differences or distance
between us and the ancient world. Such difficulties in interpretation are what
Blomberg and Markley describe as ‘‘interpretive problems.’’ While some interpretive
problems require a ‘‘fuller exegetical arsenal, incorporating word studies,
grammatical studies, literary context, and historical-cultural background,’’ 1 other
interpretive problems could be resolved using one or two of these interpretive
tools. Whatever interpretive tool one uses, certain frameworks or boundaries are
needed to guide one’s interpretation to avoid arbitrary or subjective interpretations
of biblical texts. This chapter, therefore, proposes five interpretive boundaries
or frameworks that would prevent or reduce the possibility of arbitrary and
unaccountable interpretations: the thematic boundary, pragmatic boundary,
semantic boundary, applicative boundary, and intuitive boundary. In this framework,
despite the tendency to overlap, the thematic boundary applies to thematic
1
Craig L. Blomberg and Jennifer F. Markley, A Handbook of New Testament Exegesis
(Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), 177.

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Dogara Ishaya Manomi
approaches to biblical interpretation; the pragmatic boundary applies to historical-grammatical
or contextual approaches to biblical interpretation; the semantic
boundary applies to lexical or word studies of biblical texts; the applicative
boundary applies to reader-oriented biblical interpretations; and the intuitive
boundary applies to subjective or ‘‘personal’’ interpretations of biblical texts. In
the light of the three major shifts happening in biblical interpretation, namely,
geographical, methodological, and thematic shifts, these five interpretive boundaries
will help keep biblical interpretation exegetically viable and contextually
relevant.
1. Terminology
The first challenge to be encountered in any discussion on biblical interpretation,
whether it is methodology, the actual interpretation, or its appropriation into
contemporary contexts, is the challenge of terminology. Is it hermeneutics, or
exegesis, or interpretation? Are these terms to be used interchangeably or distinctly?
What are we to do with their overlap? Such terminological imprecision
calls for clarity as to the terms that will be used in this chapter and why. Anthony
C. Thiselton, in an attempt to clarify the confusion, has differentiated the
terms as follows: ‘‘Whereas exegesis and interpretation denote the actual process
of interpreting texts, hermeneutics also includes the second-order discipline of
asking critically what exactly we are doing when we read, understand, or apply
texts. Hermeneutics explores the conditions and criteria that operate to try to
ensure responsible, valid, fruitful, or appropriate interpretation.’’ 2
Thiselton’s
definition categorizes hermeneutics differently from exegesis and interpretation,
which are seen as interchangeable. This chapter, however, prefers using the
term ‘‘interpretation’’ to include all the related terms hermeneutics, exegesis,
and application or appropriation. Interpretation is preferred to exegesis because
exegesis is more technical and unfamiliar to non-academic readers while interpretation
is less technical and accessible to a broader audience. Whether one
tries to do hermeneutics, exegesis, or application of biblical texts, the person is,
in my opinion, interpreting the biblical text. Any attempt to make sense of the
biblical text, by way of studying to understand and appreciate the history in the
text or to apply it in today’s context, is an act of interpretation. Hence, the terms
hermeneutics, exegesis, and interpretation (also application, in some contexts)
are interrelated, and are best represented by the overarching term (biblical) interpretation.
It is from this point of view that we refer to ‘‘interpretive boundaries,’’
referring both to the boundaries that need to guide our study and under-
2
Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 4.
Emphasis original. See also Stanley E. Porter and Beth M. Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics:
Five Views (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012), 12.

Is it in the Bible? 91
standing of the biblical text in its original context, and the boundaries that need
to guide our appropriation of the text in our contemporary context.
2. Brief History of Developments and Methods in
Biblical Interpretation
Prior to any attempt to renegotiate interpretive boundaries, it is helpful to briefly
describe certain historical developments and methods that have dominated biblical
interpretation. For this, the three literary categories of finding meaning behind
the text, within the text, and before (in front of) the text are helpful. 3 This
will provide us with not only a clue as to which interpretive boundaries are
marked and / or crossed by each of the major interpretive categories, but also
which concerns motivated the various interpretive categories.
Meaning ‘‘behind the text’’ is what has come to be known in biblical studies
as historical-critical study of biblical texts. Porter and Stovell identify three salient
features of historical criticism that distinguish it from other approaches: first,
its focus on the evolutionary models of biblical texts; second, its focus on historical
reconstructions of biblical texts, and third, its focus on the original or intended
meaning of the text. Simply stated, historical-critical exegesis seeks to locate
the text, the author, and readers within their historical contexts.
The ‘‘within the text’’ category of biblical exegesis emerged as a remedy to
the weaknesses of the historical-critical approaches that sought for meaning
behind the text. This is a structuralist approach to hermeneutics, seeing meaning
as residing within the text in its linguistic structure, not behind it. This approach
led to the emergence of literary criticism, prominent in the 1970s. 4
Narrative
criticism and other related approaches within the broader framework of literary
criticism focus ‘‘on the text as the autonomous means of transmitting meaning,’’ 5
largely independent of what is behind the text. By implication, this approach is a
shift from evolutionary models, which concern themselves with the processes of
development of the text, to communication models, which focus on the nature of
the text in its final stage as we have it. The weakness of this approach, in the
light of our interpretive boundaries, is its neglect of the historical location of
meaning on the one hand, as well as the contemporary location of meaning on
3
For this brief history of the developments and methods in biblical interpretation, we will
depend on the summary presented by Porter and Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics, 12, 13---
20.
4
Narrative criticism has its theoretical basis in what was known in secular literary criticism
as New Criticism, a form of literary reading that dominated literary theory from at
least the 1950s to the 1970s (cf. Porter and Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics, 17).
5
Porter and Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics, 17.

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Dogara Ishaya Manomi
the other hand. The ‘‘pragmatic interpretive boundary’’ of this chapter relates to
the ‘‘meaning within the text’’ category.
In the ‘‘meaning before the text’’ approach, meaning is regarded as something
being produced by the reader rather than discovered, and that meaning is
subjective rather than objective. To be more specific, meaning, in this approach,
is regarded as subjective interpretation in opposition to power structures, hierarchy,
anarchy, and other perceived social evils that are resident behind or in the
text. 6
Proponents of this perspective view historical-critical and literary approaches
(behind and within the text, respectively) as a luxury enterprise of
privileged white male Europeans and Americans. Hence, they employ an activist
orientation, interpreting biblical texts against various forms of oppression and
marginalization including sexism, racism, poverty, corruption, imperialism, etc.
Moreover, in this approach, the Bible is also read from particular theological
standpoints --- for example, Catholic theology or evangelical theology --- bringing
elements of confessional faith into the interpretation. Some of the exegetical
enterprises appropriating such ‘‘reader-response’’ hermeneutic approaches include
feminist interpretations, queer hermeneutics, liberation theology, and
postcolonial interpretations. 7
The three broad approaches to biblical exegesis (behind the text, within the
text, and in front of the text) have been described above because they provide the
starting point for the main thrust of this chapter, namely, renegotiating the five
exegetical boundaries. Whether the reader seeks to locate the meaning of biblical
texts behind, within, or in front of the text, and whether he or she holds to the
historical-critical / grammatical view, literary, modern or postmodern view, philosophical/theological
view, redemptive-historical view, or canonical view to biblical
interpretation, it is necessary to ask and renegotiate five exegetical boundaries
in the light of the three major geographical, methodological, and thematic
shifts or relocations happening in biblical exegesis mentioned above.
3. Re-Negotiating Five Exegetical Boundaries
3.1 The Thematic Boundary
Irrespective of the approach to biblical interpretation, the primary question in
marking the thematic boundary is: is it in the Bible? More specifically, is a given
6
Cf. Porter and Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics, 18.
7
Porter and Stovell follow up the historical developments in biblical exegesis with a detailed
description of the five views that dominate biblical interpretation, which include the
historical-critical/grammatical view, the literary / postmodern view, the philosophical /
theological view, the redemptive-historical view, and the canonical view. Cf. Porter and
Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics, 27---133.

Part 3
Religious Communities: On
Confessional Constructions of the
Bible

Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger (Austria)
The Catholic Understanding of
Scripture
Introduction
To explain Catholic biblical hermeneutics is not very difficult, since there are
several official documents of the Church that treat this subject. The purpose of
this chapter is to survey several important emphases that emerge from these
documents.
The first church document to deal exclusively with questions regarding biblical
interpretation, is the encyclical Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII, published
in 1893. At the time, historical-critical exegesis was reaching its first
pinnacle. Catholic theology was confronted with the question of its own assessment
of this new trend in biblical studies. It had to decide what it could draw
from this method, but it also had to determine which aspects of it were to be
rejected as being in opposition to the Bible as well as to Catholic faith. Since
then, questions of Scriptural interpretation have repeatedly been dealt with in
official Church documents. The next important encyclical on this theme was
Divino afflante Spiritu, published in 1943 by Pope Pius XII. It is seen as a cautious
acknowledgement of modern historical-critical exegesis. The complete and
comprehensive acknowledgement of modern exegesis, however, can be found in
the Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second Vatican Council, titled Dei
Verbum, which was promulgated in 1965.
Furthermore, there are several important documents that were published by
the Pontifical Biblical Commission. This commission was constituted in 1902 by
Pope Leo XIII. Its roundabout thirty members are biblical scholars from many
countries. Their task is to promote biblical studies and support and advise the
Magisterium in matters concerning biblical scholarship. One of its most recent
documents is titled The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church ---- and, we should
note, it is not merely ‘‘The Interpretation of the Bible’’ but ‘‘The Interpretation of
the Bible in the Church’’.

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Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger
1. The Ecclesiological Principle in Catholic
Hermeneutics
This brings us to the first, foundational principle of Catholic hermeneutics: the
ecclesiological principle.
Among popes of all ages, it was Pope Benedict XVI. who had the greatest
concern for questions of Scriptural interpretation. This was the case during his
time as Professor of Theology, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith, and as Pope. In the latter role, he provided the Church with the longest
and most theologically advanced document on the interpretation of Scripture in
the Catholic Church, the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini on the
Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, published on September 30,
2010. 1 Why is this document dated September 30? Who knows the answer? The
Catholic reader should: it is the day commemorating Saint Jerome, patron saint
of the exegetes.
In its German translation, the document comprises 175 pages, divided into
124 sections. I would like to present the foundational principles of Catholic
Scriptural interpretation according to this document. I will particularly be focusing
on sections 29 to 40 of part one, which is captioned ‘‘The Interpretation of
Sacred Scripture in the Church’’, and I will use several quotes from these paragraphs
and indicate the paragraph number in parentheses.
In this document, we encounter the ecclesiological principle as the first
which is named for Catholic biblical understanding: ‘‘The Church as the primary
setting for biblical hermeneutics’’. 2
One of the key statements of this section
reads: ‘‘[T]he primary setting for scriptural interpretation is the life of the Church.
This is not to uphold the ecclesial context as an extrinsic rule to which exegetes
must submit, but rather is something demanded by the very nature of the Scriptures
and the way they gradually came into being’’ (29; emphasis original). This
sentence alone could keep us busy for a while. The traditional objection is: Does
the Church want to dictate to me how I, the exegete, am to interpret the Bible?
This could be discussed extensively. For our purposes, one short comment must
suffice: Exegesis is no purely academic matter. 3 It is a mode of living. Just as we
can only understand other cultures when we take part in them, we can ulti-
1
Available at https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/
hf_ben-xvi_exh_20100930_verbum-domini.html.
2
Cf. Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger, ‘‘Sola scriptura? Luthers Schriftverständnis aus
katholischer Sicht,’’ in Martin Luther im Widerstreit der Konfessionen: Historische und
theologische Perspektiven, ed. Christian Danz and Jan-Heiner Tück (Freiburg: Herder,
2017), 152---74.
3
Cf. Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger, ‘‘‘Keine rein akademische Angelegenheit’: Zum
Verhältnis von Erklären und Verstehen in den Jesus-Büchern von Joseph Ratzinger /
Benedikt XVI.,’’ in Der Theologenpapst: Eine kritische Würdigung Benedikts XVI., ed. Jan-
Heiner Tück (Freiburg: Herder, 2013), 184---206.

The Catholic Understanding of Scripture 137
mately only understand the Bible through participatory observation. We are
caught in this hermeneutical circle --- and this is true for all forms of understanding.
4
Antique philosophical schools likewise saw themselves as ways of life.
Their teachings could not be grasped from a distance and from mere observation;
they had to be lived. Likewise, the Bible is an expression of a way of life. It
wishes to lead us to a form of spiritual practice or more precisely: to a form of
social practice. The principle of participatory observation is relevant in some
form for any kind of understanding. Buddhist texts, for instance, can only be
understood through practice of the same. They are an expression of a practical
form of life. Verbum Domini expresses it as follows: ‘‘Here we see the reason why
an authentic process of interpretation is never purely an intellectual process but
also a lived one, demanding full engagement in the life of the Church, which is
life ‘according to the Spirit’ (Gal 5:16)’’ (38). The first and foundational principle
of Catholic biblical hermeneutics therefore would be: ‘‘The Holy Spirit, who gives
life to the Church, enables us to interpret the Scriptures authoritatively. The
Bible is the Church’s book, and its essential place in the Church’s life gives rise
to its genuine interpretation’’ (29).
2. The Council’s Biblical Hermeneutic: A Directive to
be Appropriated
As was said previously, the Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second
Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, which presented the fundamentals of biblical interpretation
in the Church, brought with it full acceptance of historical-critical
exegesis in the Catholic Church. The classical principles of Scriptural hermeneutics
that were inherited from the Early Church, however, were not thereby relinquished.
They were called to mind and, to a certain extent, simply placed alongside
the model of modern Scriptural interpretation, remaining detached from the
latter. Yet, post-conciliar reception of Dei Verbum almost exclusively focused on
the historical-critical aspect of Scriptural interpretation, whereas traditional
principles such as the unity of Scripture, the multiple senses of Scripture, and
the orientation according to the regula fidei largely fell into oblivion. As a theologian,
Joseph Ratzinger had often criticized a one-sided reception of Dei Verbum. 5
The Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini reminds us of this in the following
words: ‘‘On the one hand, the Council emphasizes the study of literary genres
4
Cf. Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger, ‘‘Kontemplatives Schriftverständnis --- Zur Wechselbeziehung
von kontemplativer Übung und Schriftverständnis,’’ Studies in Spirituality
17 (2007): 115---25.
5
Cf. Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger, ‘‘Zwei antagonistische Modelle der Schriftauslegung
in Dei Verbum?,’’ in Erinnerung an die Zukunft: Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil, ed.
Jan-Heiner Tück (Freiburg: Herder, 2013), 517---29.

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Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger
and historical context as basic elements for understanding the meaning intended
by the sacred author. On the other hand, since Scripture must be interpreted in
the same Spirit in which it was written, the Dogmatic Constitution indicates
three fundamental criteria for an appreciation of the divine dimension of the
Bible: 1) The text must be interpreted with attention to the unity of the whole of
Scripture; nowadays this is called canonical exegesis. 2) Account is to be taken
of the living Tradition of the whole Church. And, finally, 3) respect must be
shown for the analogy of faith. ‘Only where both methodological levels, the historical-critical
and the theological, are respected, can one speak of a theological
exegesis, an exegesis worthy of this book’’’ (34).
3. The Danger of Dualism and a Secularized
Hermeneutic
Pope Benedict XVI thus paid special attention to the enhancement of the theological
dimension of exegesis. Catholic biblical scholarship has reached the same
level of sophistication upheld by all other exegetes applying historical criticism.
Pope Benedict explicitly acknowledged this. However, he was attentive to the
fact that the theological dimension of Scriptural interpretation might thus fall by
the wayside. Accordingly, he warns in the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation
against the danger of dualism: ‘‘If the work of exegesis is restricted to the first
level alone [i.e., the historical-critical], Scripture ends up being a text belonging
only to the past’’ (35; emphasis original). One-sidedness such as this generally
gives rise to mechanisms of compensation. Secular hermeneutics then replace
theological hermeneutics: ‘‘The lack of a hermeneutic of faith with regard to
Scripture entails more than a simple absence; in its place there inevitably enters
another hermeneutic, a positivistic and secularized hermeneutic ultimately based
on the conviction that the Divine does not intervene in human history’’ (35; emphasis
original).
4. Faith and Reason in the Approach to Scripture
Catholic exegesis attempts to avoid two extremes: rationalism on the one hand
and spiritualism on the other. Faith and reason (fides et ratio) belong together in
biblical scholarship. Fideism, leading to fundamentalist interpretations, and
rationalism, which rejects the possibility of divine revelation, are both rejected:
‘‘On the one hand, it calls for a faith which, by maintaining a proper relationship
with right reason, never degenerates into fideism, which in the case of Scripture
would end up in fundamentalism. On the other hand, it calls for a[n understanding
of] reason which, in its investigation of the historical elements present in the