Biblical interpretation and the shaping of religious worlds: A study of Bible study for critical contextualization

In bringing the gospel to the nations, a strategy for Bible study that can sufficiently locate itself within the more comprehensive missional strategy of contextualization is vital. However, missional Bible study practices, such as popular and historical critical modes of reading, have tended to have the opposite effect.;This dissertation is concerned with investigating how elements from intercultural communication, discourse analysis and religious studies may contribute to a strategy for Bible study that allows the church to incarnate more fully the gospel in different cultures. This strategy is a contextual approach that consciously brings local cultural life into dialog with biblical texts, a dynamic that at once stimulates and constrains the process of contextualization.;This study considered the work of three scholars: Carley H. Dodd and his contributions to intercultural communication; Joel B. Green, who integrates discourse analysis and biblical scholarship; and William E. Paden's structures of religious world construction. This threefold analysis is framed theoretically by Paul Hiebert's model of critical contextualization and Clifford Geertz's theory of religion as a form of cultural life. This study also assumes a critical realist epistemology, which posits a reality external to our perceptions, which people come to understand dialectically.;This methodology yields a contextualized Bible study strategy that facilitates the development of Christian communal relations among participants so that they increasingly experience interactions with each other as a hermeneutical community. The strategy is put into practice and the results examined for the purposes of demonstrating the adequacy of this strategy where others fail.