Congregational Hermeneutics: A Tale of Two Churches

Abstract

The “AHRC Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in Britain” (EFB) project ran over two years, from 2008 to 2009. The network addressed the question “To what extent have Evangelicals in Britain been Fundamentalist?”. This article develops one of the project papers. Drawing on my doctoral research, I explore the relationship between Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism through an ethnographic perspective on how two contrasting evangelical congregations did biblical hermeneutics. The congregational hermeneutics approach addresses the mix of hermeneutical discourses, practices, and artefacts within the churches and I show that congregational hermeneutics are revealing for questions of evangelical identity. I maintain that the language of ‘fundamentalising tendencies’ is to be preferred to more static conceptions, which are not well suited for describing dissonant tendencies within congregations. The study supports the view that fundamentalising tendencies are not identical with Evangelicalism and shows that implicit hermeneutical traditions can be found in such churches with the potential to shape broader congregational traditions.

Notes

1. The term ‘congregational hermeneutics’ was coined by the Anabaptist theologian, Stuart Murray, as an historical and largely normative characterisation of Anabaptist hermeneutics (Murray, esp. Chap. 7). I am using ‘congregational hermeneutics’ in a broader sense, to indicate both descriptive and prescriptive dimensions across the Christian traditions. The descriptive analytic dimension is the focus of this article.

2. ‘Ordinary’ has become a technical term in discussions of ordinary theology and hermeneutics and is also somewhat contested (e.g. Lawrence). Although not a key argument of this article, adapting Astley (56), I take ‘ordinary’ to mean those Bible readers in churches who have limited Bible-related theological education.

3. Harriet Harris dedicates a whole chapter to the possibility of hermeneutics ‘rescinding fundamentalism’ (Fundamentalism Chap. 8). The discussion provides a penetrating analysis of evangelicals’ often pragmatic and partial adoption of hermeneutical thinking. However, Harris works with the narrower prescriptive sense of specific hermeneutical theory and its relation to the works of evangelical spokespersons. By contrast, the ethnographic approach represented here considers the myriad ways in which congregations make connections between text and context, using large Gadamerian categories to frame that analysis.

4. The research was interdisciplinary, so, more precisely, I used the language of “adopting an ethnographic perspective” (Green and Bloome).

5. I have drawn on Shirley Brice Heath, Brian Street, and Molly Mills in following this analytic induction approach. Cases are not selected on the basis of ‘typicality’, as favoured by enumerative induction, but rather by selecting ‘telling’ cases that “show how general principles deriving from some theoretical orientation manifest themselves in some given set of particular circumstances”, with a view to establishing “theoretically valid connections between events and phenomena which previously were ineluctable” (Mitchell 240). Selection of the two congregations was therefore theoretically driven, to provide a telling theological contrast within English evangelicalism. This has similarities to Robert Yin’s two-tail design (53–4).

6. At the time of the research, independent congregations formed the second largest grouping (or largest, depending on how one assigns the congregational categories) within the Evangelical Alliance (Rogers, “Ordinary” Appendix A).

7. Known as the FIEC or Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (see www.fiec.org.uk, access date: 28 July 2008).

8. The guarantee of anonymity means that certain details about the churches need to be omitted. For the use of the term ‘new’ church (replacing ‘house’ church), see Walker, Restoring.

9. I spent eight months in Holder and six months in the Fellowship. Seventeen hour-long interviews were conducted in each congregation. The number of completed questionnaires was 105 for Holder (response rate of 61%) and 75 for the Fellowship (response rate of 53%). This was overt research—the congregations knew I was there as a researcher.

10. In this context, ‘horizon’ indicates ‘world of the text’ or ‘world of the reader/small group/public setting’.

11. More precisely, public small-group and personal Bible settings each have their own horizons, which contribute to the congregational horizon but are nevertheless distinct (cf. Kelleher).

12. The latter phrase is taken from the anthropologist Robin Fox (272).

13. I am aware of the critique of presupposition language by some scholars (e.g. Thiselton 45–6). However, I use the term pragmatically as an alternative to ‘horizon’, as I consider it to be easier to refer to aspects of congregational horizons in this more specific way. I do not intend that such language restricts description to static beliefs or goals.

14. ‘Hermeneutical tradition’ is used here as a sub-set of congregational tradition.

15. E.g. 54% of questionnaire respondents said they read the Bible once a day, rising to 79% who read four or more times a week (N=101).

16. Formally expressed in the FIEC Basis of Faith, see http://www.fiec.org.uk/AboutUs/Beliefs/tabid/509/Default.aspx, access date: 25 June 2007.

17. Broadly speaking, the view that the Bible is without error (although this is sometimes qualified in a variety of ways).

18. ‘A’ refers to the author.

19. Formally expressed in their little viewed Evangelical Alliance Basis of Faith 1970, see http://www.eauk.org/about/basis-of-faith.cfm, access date: 25 February 2006.

20. Open-ended responses were coded and then code frequencies were calculated, hence each respondent could potentially have a number of codes assigned to their open-ended response. Frequency entries of 0 are codes derived from the contrasting church to aid comparison.

21. A less pejorative term for naïve realism (cf. Dretske 202, 602).

22. In foundationalism, one’s beliefs (or noetic structure) are built upon a set of foundations, or basic beliefs, which in themselves require no justification, but provide warrant for other non-basic beliefs, all of which rest upon the basic beliefs (see Plantinga).

23. This existential involvement is seen as the defining feature of ordinary hermeneutics by Hans de Wit, who draws on Ricoeur (de Wit 8–9).

24. ‘Text-linking’ is larger than the emic ‘cross-referencing’ and unencumbered by the theoretical connotations of ‘intertextuality’.

25. ‘Tribe’ is used in the general sense of identifiable groupings within Evangelicalism.

26. James Montgomery Boice, John McArthur, and Warren Wiersbe.

27. Topics that were brought to the surface by this research project.

28. The figure is for distinct songs at Holder and the Fellowship (N=65, N=62, respectively).

29. As this article originated in the EFB project, I draw on some of the results from its workshops, with which I am in broad agreement.

30. David Goodhew’s case study of evangelical churches in York points to the poor fit of a fundamentalist label, with its associations of violence; he argues for ‘conservative’ instead.

31. Ian Jones argues for the language of ‘contours’ rather than neat categorisations (3).

32. Bebbington notes that the Chicago Fundamentalism Project chose to omit Britain (with the exception of Ulster) from its lengthy account of fundamentalisms (see Marty and Appleby).

33. Cf. note 3.