The Return of Oral Hermeneutics: As Good Today as It Was for the Hebrew Bible and First-Century Christianity by Steffen Tom & Bjoraker William

Author:Steffen, Tom & Bjoraker, William [Steffen, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532684821
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2020-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

6

Character Theology

“And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets.”

—Hebrews 11 :32 NIV

“Biblical writings do not teach us concepts of God; they show us how people encountered God, learned to know him and walked with him.”

—Tite Tiénou

“The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.”

—Stanley Hauerwas

Oral hermeneutics, with strong ties to Hebrew hermeneutics, leads naturally to the role of characters in Bible interpretation. Characters in a single story or those who drive the grand narrative serve as a means to grasp what the authors and Divine Author wish us to assimilate. At the same time it provides a strong solution to meet the pedagogical preferences 378 (how people prefer to learn and be taught) of oral and oral-preference audiences globally. This approach calls for a different type of theologizing (process) and theology (product) that will complement systematic theology and biblical theology. Using oral hermeneutics as a means to theologize leads inevitably to character theology.

In this chapter, the authors build on the previous chapters that discussed the influence orality had on the text and teaching, dominance of the narrative genre in Scripture, delivery and dialogue of manuscripts that impact memory (ch. 3 ), Oral Hermeneutics (ch. 4 ), and Hebrew Hermeneutics (ch. 5 ). OH calls for a theologizing process that leads naturally to another required type of theology—character theology (see figure 6 .1 ). We begin by identifying some of our basic assumptions, clear a path to define character theology, consider possible contributions character theology makes in discovering truths within a story, and conclude with the need for character theology.

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