From%20Exegesis%20to%20Contextualization

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From Exegesis to Contextualization
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Contextualizing Meaning

• Goal
• To strive for adequate continuity between meaning
  and its recontextualization in another context

• To avoid hanging applicational
• elephants from interpretive threads
• Hendricks

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Recontextualizing Meaning

• Recontextualization Recognizes that Scriptural
  meaning is already a contextualized meaning

• E.g., Habakkuk speaks into a context of growing
  injustice in the southern country of Judah in
  late 7th century B.C.E. Our questions about
  applying Habakkuks message to a contemporary
  context is really an issue of recontextualizing
  that message

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How to Recontextualize?

• Typical methodology in evangelical circles has
  been a kind of principlizing approach (e.g.,
  Osborne)

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Principlizing (Osborne, 337)

• What it Meant What it Means
•  
• Surface Meaning Specific Context
•  
• Deep Structure Principle General Context
•  
• Original Situation Parallel Situation
• using analogy

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Recent Additional Proposals

• Greater sensitivity to genres of texts (Doriani
  different kinds of texts generate application in
  different ways)
• Paradigmatic Application (C. Wright on OT ethics
  Gods word to Israel is paradigmatic for the
  church, though not always with 11
  correspondence)
• Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic (Webb On a
  particular ethical issue, which direction do the
  biblical writers move in relation to their own
  cultural context?)
• Theodramatic Contextualization (Vanhoozer living
  out the final act of Gods redemptive story, with
  the script for the first four acts provided in
  Scripture)
• Purpose-Guided Contextualization (Brown
  reflecting on the purposes of original
  contextualization in order to recontextualize in
  line with those purposes)

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Purpose-Guided Contextualization

• Draws on Hirschs two questions for valid
  implications of a text
• Continuity (Is there significant continuity
  between meaning and proposed contextualization?)
• Purpose (Does the possible recontextualization
  fit the purposes of the authors original
  meaning?)

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Purpose-Guided Contextualization

• May use various tools of contextualization
  including
• Generalizing (principlizing)
• Particularizing
• Analogy
• Paradigm

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Purpose-Guided Contextualization

• Tends to avoid
• Abstraction of meaning
• Contextualizing too small of a text
• Tends to honor
• Cultural and temporal distance between text and
  reader
• Holistic meaning (cognitive non-cognitive
  perlocutionary intentions)

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Moving from Biblical Texts to Contemporary
Theology/Ethics 2 Major Movements

• Need to move from exegesis of individual texts to
  a synthesis of relevant texts on a specific
  theological or ethical topic
• (Hays synthetic movement)

• Need to move from the cultural context of the
• biblical texts to contemporary contexts
• (Hays hermeneutical movement)

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A Four-fold description of the Theological Task
(Richard Hays)
1.     The Descriptive task doing exegesis of
texts
2.     The Synthetic task placing texts in their
canonical context
3. The Hermeneutical task relating the text to
our own situation
4. The Pragmatic Task living the text

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Complexity of Contextualization

• Canonical Level
• Utterance Level

Contemporary Setting
Original Setting
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C. Final Admonition

• The ultimate aim of exegesisis to produce in
  our lives and the lives of others true
  Spirituality, in which Gods people live in
  faithful fellowship both with one another and
  with the eternal and living God and thus in
  keeping with Gods own purposes in the world. In
  order to do this effectivelytrue Spirituality
  must precede exegesis as well as be the final
  result of it. We must begin as we would conclude,
  standing under the text, not over it with all of
  our scholarly arrogance intact.