| This study integrates theory from missiology and the humanities. It examines missiological reading of the Bible from a meta-hermeneutical, meta-theoretical perspective, paying particular attention to the concept of "purpose." It has three parts: missiological contours, hermeneutic contours and heuristic contours. Part One surveys missiological literature on interpretation and looks at challenges to the validity of missiology's hermeneutic methods in light of proposals about the social formation of knowledge. This part extrapolates aspects of missiology's disciplinary reasoning from missiological treatments of universality and particularity, the kingdom of God, the Gospel, and witness, and uses them to locate missiological commitments theoretically. Part Two explores missiology's theoretical commitments relative to issues of hermeneutic theory, such as transcendence, authorial voice, interpretive horizons, reading communities, historicity and metanarrative. Part Three proposes a heuristic model for meaning and reading that integrates semiotic and literary understandings with missiology's concerns for purpose, language, historicity and holistic human response. |
