Liberationist hermeneutics is primarily a way of reading which is the product of late twentieth-century political theology. Liberation theology is known from scholarly books and articles but has its roots in the Basic Christian Communities. The community setting means an avoidance of a narrowly individualist religious reading. Theology is not just a matter of abstract reflection, but reflection on understandings which are based on an active involvement. Christianity lives by the norm of the reign of God in the still unrealized future of creation, not by a fixed, completed past. Radford Ruether's hermeneutical model has many affinities with Clodovis Bof's correspondence of relationships model. Historical study enables the reader to explore hitherto neglected corners of the Bible using a method which reflects all that is best in what Hans-Georg Gadamer has illuminated about the hermeneutical basis of research in the humanities.

This chapter presents the genealogy of contemporary feminist readings rather than the broad spectrum of personal names, examples and locations. The term gender-critical includes all these variants that feminist exegesis has engendered. The presupposition will be that it is epistemological changes that have made possible changes in feminist readings and inspired struggles for women's equality and liberation, not the other way round. A focus on past women's experiences gave feminist readers the key to unlock the biblical texts filtered by andocentric and access the social reality behind them, a reality far more complex than the texts allow for. The chapter focuses on how the development of mainly Western Christian feminist readings has been driven forward by changes in the reading subject, the reading position and changes in the status of the Bible. The Bible has been a political tool, a site of contestation and struggle, a weapon and a shield.

This chapter explores the relationship between liberation hermeneutics and extra-biblical post-colonial studies. Typically in hermeneutics, the ancient context of production of the biblical text being interpreted is brought into explicit dialogue with some contemporary context of reception, usually the socio-cultural context of the interpreter. The multinational contributors to Voices from the Margin frequently attend to the lingering spectre of colonialism, insufficiently exorcised even in the majority of former colonies that have officially achieved independence and undergone decolonisation. Sugirtharajah's own relationship to liberation hermeneutics appears to be one of obvious debt and partial estrangement. Not the least significant feature of his work is his bold and extensive internal critique of the liberationist tradition from a post-colonial perspective. In US academia the institutional rewards accruing to any intellectual phenomenon in the humanities seem to be in inverse proportion to its ability to influe.

As Jews began a process of integration into European society, they became increasingly attuned to modern intellectual currents and came to recognise that the philosophical thinking had far-reaching implications for their understanding of Judaism, including their scriptural traditions. European cultural advances further exacerbated the long-standing sensitivity to the deficiencies of Jewish education and scholarship and it resulted in calls for the disciplined and rigorous study of the Bible in particular. The religious heteronomy evident in the Bible, Moses Mendelssohn suggested, was limited exclusively to laws and rituals, which served only as a valuable if not indispensable prod towards metaphysical reflection. In the 1960s, there was a shift of biblical studies from Christian studies at American universities to a history of religion and ancient Near Eastern studies perspective.

Biblical interpreters in church, society and academy have always engaged in some form of conversation, implicitly or explicitly, with past and present hermeneutical traditions, developments and debates. The relationship between biblical and philosophical hermeneutics has not necessarily been one-sided in terms of biblical interpretation merely seeking to respond to hermeneutical initiatives emerging from philosophical schools or individual hermeneuts. Friedrich Schleiermacher combined a Pietistic family background with Romantic and Enlightenment concerns, and provoked a revolution in hermeneutical thinking. Once a sub-discipline of theological and literary disciplines, hermeneutics was now presented as an overarching philosophical discipline essential for anybody wishing to understand another person's linguistic communication. Philosophical hermeneutical reflection is necessary for proper biblical interpretation. Martin Heidegger's philosophy gave rise to an explosion in hermeneutical studies. His philosophical analysis of the human person's existential possibility to decide for or against an authentic life motivated Rudolf Bultmann.

North Africa forms part of the cradle that gave birth to the Bible, participating in the production of the Bible as we now have it. Mediterranean Africa had a marked effect, both in terms of the actual formation of the Bible and its interpretation. The Scriptures continued to play an important part in African receptions of the Bible through the work of North African theologians such as Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian and Augustine. While the city of Alexandria looked north to the cosmopolitan Mediterranean and Greek cultural world, the rural regions of Egypt, with its emerging Coptic language and culture, looked to the desert hinterland. The story in sub-Saharan or tropical Africa is quite different, with the Bible being a relatively recent arrival. Throughout the waves of imperialism and mission the Bible was present, playing a variety of roles, from iconic object of power to political weapon of struggle.

This chapter first traces the history of Bible in North America, and then the issue of publishing of the Scripture. The strongly Protestant cast of American history is indicated no better than in the intense personal application to Scripture undertaken by countless individuals in every generation from the early seventeenth century to the present. Americans also have sustained an enormous rate of bible publication and an even more astonishing appetite for literature about the Bible. The Scripture has been a vital element in American popular life, and has also provided powerful themes for Americans to define themselves politically, both as a people and as a nation. The chapter discusses the experiences of two minority groups in North America, Jews and the African Americans, for whom the Bible has been central. It ends with discussions on the Biblical scholarship, and the history of the Scripture in Canada.

In Latin American history, the Bible is recognised as a message, in opposition to the notion of the Bible as a religious artefact and symbol of the authority of its presumed authorised interpreters including colonial and ecclesiastical authorities. At the end of the colonial period, in particular with the advent of the Bourbonsin Spain, things began to change. The image of the Bible was linked to situations of conquest and theological justifications of unjust appropriation. This undoubtedly had an enormous effect on the work of spreading the Word of God in vast regions of Latin America for many years. Social Romanticism maintained its influence until the 1870s when it began to retreat due to pressure from scientific positivism. Catholic fundamentalism from the beginning of the twentieth century traces its ideological foundations. The Bible par excellence that had the greatest impact on the continent is The Bible for Latin America.

This chapter explores some distinctive features of the reception history of the Bible in Asia. Asia has had its own share of biblical controversies. Asian debates were waged under the rubric of national struggle and national identity in a colonial context. One of the earliest textual confrontations in Asia was that between the Bengali Rammohun Roy and the Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman. The chapter discusses the employment of the Bible in a multi-religious context, highlights four Asian portrayals of Jesus and their distinctive features: Keshub Chunder Sen's idea of Asiatic Christ; the portrayal by T. C. Chao; the portrayal of Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo; and the Asian American Rita Nakashima Brock's portrayal of Jesus. The chapter also presents the recent surfacing of minority voices such as the dalits, burakumin, women and indigenous people and the two recent entrants on the scene, namely post-colonialism and Asian diasporic interpretation.

This chapter traces the reception of the Bible in the Greek-speaking world, Slavic region, Romania, Georgia, and the Arab-speaking world from the seventeenth century. From the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Greek-speaking Orthodox lived within the Ottoman empire. The church continued to fulfil its educational role, with Scripture at its heart. Methodius translated the Bible into Slavonic and laid the foundations for the development of a literary culture among all the different Slavic peoples. The Orthodox Church of Romania traces its roots back to the first century CE, when Christianity was first brought to the land of the ancient Dacians. The translation of the Gospels into Georgian in the fifth century was based on early Syro-Armenian versions. Of the various translations of the Bible made in the Arab Orthodox context, the efforts of the monks of the Monastery of Balamand stand out as significant.

When the reformers began to use the Scripture as a critical norm to flush out biases and problems in the development of the church, the Catholic Church was prompted to reflect on the question of its own position on the authority of the Bible. The understanding of Scripture and tradition became especially apparent at the First Vatican Council of 1869/70. This Council formulated two decrees, one on the Catholic Faith and the other on the Pope. Karl Rahner formulated the idea of sacred writers before anyone had even thought of Second Vatican Council in 1958. The Council had committed itself to a reform process that would put Scripture back into the centre of the church's life and mission. Liberation theology was a significant development which arose in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.

It is hard to think of the modern world without Protestantism and conversely modernity is very much bound up with the Protestant phenomenon. The Bible became fuel for private piety. As for being a witness to the word of God shaping world history, it was only through the public outworking of those private visions that the Bible would have any impact on the wider world. Core Pietism's Biblicism avoided the esoteric and the harsh extremes of the previous century's confessions. In mid-nineteenth century Strasbourg, as evidenced by the biblical theology of Édouard Reuss, a thinking Pietism had helped make space for a counter-attack against the Tübingen School. Around 1920 a coalition of fundamentalists was held together by a common pre-millennial hope which encouraged an anti-social gospel stance, a secularised form of post-millennialism with British sympathisers following the American lead.

This chapter explores the biblical use among new churches, a designation that is itself rather arbitrary, especially given that the preponderance of new churches is Pentecostal in nature. The bulk of new-church Christians in the world are not a part of any formal denomination, making their classification difficult. Classical Pentecostals are typically defined as those who hold that baptism in the Holy Spirit has as its initial evidence speaking in tongues. Pentecostals are stereotypically viewed as spiritual enthusiasts who blindly follow the Spirit more regularly than they follow the Bible. Pentecostalism originally was rather paramodern in that it paralleled modernism as a historical movement. Nevertheless it did not accept modernism's thorough going rationalism. The Pentecostal biblical hermeneutic was motivated negatively by the belief that turn-of-the-twentieth-century Christianity was lacking in power. The Pentecostal hermeneutic is learned mostly through the church's kerygmatic practice.

It is difficult to separate the place and role of the Bible in interfaith dialogue from its role in the missionary expansion of the church into all the regions of the world. In tracing the role of the Bible in interfaith dialogue, it is important to recognise the Bible that provided the rationale for a predominantly missionary approach to peoples of other religious traditions. In Africa the place of the Bible in dialogue has to be seen primarily in terms of Christians entering into an 'inner dialogue' with the religious and cultural traditions to which they belonged at the time. In looking at the role of the Bible in Hindu-Christian dialogue, one needs to make a distinction between the dialogue that the Hindus have had with the Bible by themselves and the role it plays in actual Hindu-Christian dialogues.

Throughout the modern period the Bible's role in society has been substantial. Sunday school and Bible-study groups continue to shape people and society. Forty years after the debates began in England, biblical debates over slavery raged in the United States, until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Both sides in the slavery debate appealed vigorously to the Bible. The cultural underpinnings of slavery were colonial expansions by Western countries. Zionism witnesses uniquely to colonialism. Third World womanist liberationists exposit, white feminist expositions too are found wanting, as in the notable article by Indian writer Mukto Barton. This chapter shows why discernment in biblical interpretation on social moral issues has been difficult in the past, and why it continues to be difficult today. The culture of the global South is closer to the social, cultural and intellectual milieu of biblical times and thus the Bible appeals, producing phenomenal church growth.

The Reformation's emphasis on the Bible as the major authority and the appearance of German criticism inspired many writers of the Enlightenment and the age of Romanticism to present biblical characters and stories in a new humanistic light. Writers presented new interpretations of negative or suffering biblical characters who seem to have been unfairly cursed by God including Adam and Eve, Cain, Hagar, Ishmael, and, later in the nineteenth century, Judas and feminine characters like Mary Magdalene. Inspired by the Christian revelation of God as a God of love, literature often rewrites the Bible in a sympathetic and forgiving Spirit. The 'quest for the historical Jesus' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced several academic and fictional concepts and images. Most fictional Jesus narratives belong to second-rate literature. Pontius Pilate traditionally plays an important role in literature about Jesus, presenting the conflict between earthly and divine power and wisdom.