Evangelical churches (in much of my experience - and from what I gather based on other people's accounts) tend to place a high value on the role of the Bible in their weekly activities, whether Sunday preaching, midweek home groups or shipping people off to teaching conferences. Despite this, I find myself increasingly conscious of the lack of serious engagement with interpretative matters. In the church's I have been a part of the sermon typically follows a descriptive reading of the text, selectively employing pieces of socio-historical description. This description is typically interrupted with little points of application, or a slightly longer application at the end of the talk - usually abstracting timeless truths or fairly uninspiring principles from the text that frankly you could have found in any number of interesting non-sacred texts. The result is that application often seems superficial, and the text still feels very distant and slightly irrelevant to one's personal experience and Christian identity.
I suspect many ministers (who are typically between 40 and 60) received a good theological training back in the day from evangelical colleges (I can't knock this as I took undergraduate study in just such an institution). Nevertheless, the methodology employed often comes across as a piecemeal combination of enlightenment historical critical ideology unreflectively wedded to evangelical doctrinal convictions. There is often the implication that a text has one intrinsic meaning, it's usually deemed to be the plain or obvious meaning to anyone with 'common sense', and all we need to do is use the right tools of careful reading under the guidance of a Tyndale commentary (not to bash these commentaries) and 'bingo!' the right meaning of the text comes out. There is something to be said for close and careful reading of course, but unfortunately it is 2012, and Foucault, and Derrida, and Iser and Eco and liberation and feminism all happened in the past one hundred years, challenging the fundamental naivety of the quest for authorial intent and the 'plain meaning'. The climate for interpreting the bible is radically different now - the academy is in something of a fluster and doesn't know how to handle the plurality of possibilities on the table. Efforts are being made by some to bring together the long segregated realms of biblical studies and theology, and this should be welcomed with open arms by the evangelical community (though a fair amount of the current literature is jargon filled drivel).
I'm not suggesting that those who preach in church need to have a comprehensive understanding of the academic trends of the past century - some of it is of little use at all. But I do think that for a Christian movement (and a jolly big one) that puts such high emphasis on the bible (too much at times), one would think that a concern for greater sophistication in its interpretation and communication would be on the agenda. Historical information isn't enough, nor are abstract 'truths', nor are personality driven topics where pop-psychology is loosely draped over a proof text. Surely preaching is about appropriating the central claims of the gospel - the life transforming message of Jesus Christ's death and ressurection and our reconciliation with God and neighbour - to the lives of regular people today who stand in theological and historical continuity with the people of the book? If so we need a clearer idea of how exactly Scripture interacts with theology, preaching and ethics, and how the theological lenses of our tradition shape the way we read the text.
These are very broad and unhelpful points of appeal - in due course I hope to refine them. It is always easier to identify problems than it is to present viable solutions. My main point is that if evangelicals are going to hold up the Bible as the primary mode of God's communication today (where is the Spirit? Who knows..) then surely it can't be a good thing to be 100 years out of touch with the issues that inform biblical interpretation in academic circles. There is much more to be said on this in due course - I am merely expressing some frustrations.
L
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