Today was the first session in the Reading the Bible Missionally module of Redcliffe’s new postgraduate MA in Bible and Mission.
Students had come prepared by reading the introduction and first two chapters of Chris Wright’s The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. As well as discussing the reading we also looked at the developmet of the methodology of missional hermeneutics.
In particular it is noticeable from the literature how ‘missional hermeneutic’ can mean so many different things. This is, perhaps, inevitable with such a newly developing approach, which can of course be frustrating at times. On the other hand, it’s one of the things that makes it all so exciting!
Here are a couple of resources I’ve come across that try to explain the different approaches people have taken (thanks to Brian Russell for making me aware of the first):
Reading the Bible Missionally by Tony Stiff on his blog Sets ‘n’ Service
The Gospel and Our Culture Issue on Missional Hermeneutics on the Gospel and Our Culture website
Thanks for the links – I’ve just read through Tony Stiff’s pdf which is a great summary of four quite different meanings of a missional hermeneutic! Looking forward to discussing this more next week, if I can get my head around what the different hermeneutics really mean…!
I look forward to doing a little research on missional hermeneutic. I’m taking a research seminar on hermeneutics next semester, I wonder if this perspective will be discussed…
Hi Justin, sounds good – keep me posted! Tim