Discourse toward Scripture: A methodological proposal for evangelical contextual theology

Evangelicals, especially those directly involved in missional settings, have come to recognize the influence of and thus the need to adequately account for the interpretive context in contextual theologizing. With fitting caution under the Scripture principle, they are seeking to construe various models of contextual theology. While these thinkers rightly focus on biblical fidelity, their proposals remain inadequate for three reasons. They tend to hold a modernist view of biblical language and a structuralist approach to meaning, and/or to disregard the formal process of theologizing.; The primary aim of the project is to address the latter deficiencies and to sufficiently consider the role of interpretive context in the formal process of theologizing, while at once offer a critique against structuralist approaches used by current evangelical models and advance a constructive proposal for a theologizing paradigm that is fully evangelical and appropriately contextual. Such a paradigm includes a dynamic interaction between biblical hermeneutics and theological discourse that properly accounts for the epistemic context-to-text movement through a "thick description" of human learning drawn from Kevin Vanhoozer's description of the reader's role in theological hermeneutics, Colin Gunton's theological construct of human situatedness, Michael Polanyi's epistemological structures and logic of tacit knowing, and Mikhail Bakhtin's linguistic of dialogism.; This thick description of human learning that highlights a context-to-text movement allows an evangelical to remain true to the Scripture principle while making a cultural-linguistic turn that distinguishes this project from the other evangelical models. Even so, the proposed model must be differentiated from the postliberal approach that surrenders the normative status of Scripture to the interpretive context. Ultimately, the Scripture principle and the cultural-linguistic turn can coexist only if the context-to-text epistemic movement through the power of language-in-use is at work. The proposed context-to-text model for contextual theologizing can bring about a proper evangelical nuance of Lamin Sanneh's concession to the vernacular, retaining the primacy of Scripture while accounting for the reality of cultural-linguistic turn in human learning.