A new agenda for rethinking inspiration: How Latin American hermeneutics can help
Program Unit: Gospel of Mark
Cássio Murilo Dias da Silva, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul
The pursuit of the significant convergence between the biblical context and the current context requires a new way of thinking about inspiration. For Latin American Biblical hermeneutics, the fundamental identity of meaning is more important than the analogy between situations. Thus, the “apologetic” approach, which uses the concept of inspiration to prove that Holy Scripture comes from God, has long proven to be inadequate and insufficient. For the Latin American reading, that the Bible is the “Word of God” is an assumption: the problem is not “if” Scripture is the “Word of God,” but “how” it is so. The issues raised by the search for identity of sense refer to how (and why) texts of human authors are received and assumed as Word “of God.” So, hermeneutical reflection about inspiration should stop thinking about the causality of Scripture, and instead begin thinking about the “adequacy” of the text: How do different literary and language strategies express theological differences of parallel texts or about the same subject? How does each text intend to convince and persuade the reader, and what praxis does it intend to lead? How and why is a text, written to another people, another culture, other historical and social circumstances, assumed to be valid for us? How and why do we see ourselves in the biblical text? Is the biblical text the only inspired text or are there others? What makes the biblical text unique? To answer these and other questions, biblical hermeneutics needs the help of linguistics, semantics, semiology / semiotics and other sciences of literature and communication. Several texts of Mark’s Gospel provide good case studies to demonstrate what it means to read the biblical text with a new concept of “inspiration.”
Fonte: 2015 International Meeting, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Meeting Abstracts
