Towards Understanding of the Practice of Proclamation: The Core Element of Russian Baptist Worship, Timofey Cheprasov, 2015

Jones, Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), p 15. "! Geoffrey Stout, “What is the Meaning of a Text?” in New Literary History, Vol. 14 (1982), pp 1-12. ” Fowl and Jones, Reading in Communion, p 15. * Ibid., p 16. 192 Fowl and Jones make an important point saying that while we may discover that different people in the past did not limit themselves to a particular understanding of the text, it would be mistaken to view ‘the history of Scriptural interpretation down to the Enlightenment as a period of interpretive anarchy.’"“ McClendon shares this view arguing that it is wrong to think that today people are much better Bible readers than were people in the past, hence we should not ‘look back with pity, even consternation, upon the grim times before the white light of historical-critical exegesis began to shine.’ So, in this chapter, | will address the way the Bible is read in baptistic communities, allowing them to stay faithful to the biblical message, even though they often neglect various modern hermeneutical theories and approaches to the Text. It has to be noted, however, that whereas | hope that this chapter will be of practical use for Baptist churches in Russia, | am not claiming that | will exhaust the large and important subject of biblical hermeneutics in Baptist communities in the few following pages. *° Rather, this should be seen as an attempt to place the practice of preaching within a context of communal hermeneutics, consequently highlighting the existing unbalanced, and hence damaging to the witness of the Church approach to proclamation. My hope is that this chapter will contribute to the beginning of further research and discussion in the field of hermeneutics and preaching in Russia. | would like to turn now to Puzynin’s critical assessment of the interpretative paradigm currently promoted in the majority of baptistic churches in the post-Soviet area. Puzynin argues that throughout their history, baptistic communities in the Russian Empire and the USSR used the precritical mode of interpretation typical of the evangelicalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reading of the Bible was “ Ibid., p 26. *® McClendon, Doctrine, p 35. See also James Wm. McClendon, Jr., “A New Way to Read the Bible,” in Newson and Wright, The Collected Works of James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Vol. 2, pp 263-264. *® One may find further help in consulting the collection of essays in Helen Dare and Simon Woodman, eds., The Plainly Revealed Word of God? Baptist Hermeneutics in Theory and Practice (Macon, Ga., Mercer University Press, 2011), e.g. those of lan Birch, “Baptists and Biblical Interpretation: Reading the Bible with Christ,” pp 153-171, and Parush R. Parushev, “Baptistic Convictional Hermeneutics,” pp. 172-190. 193 characterised by Christocentrism, intratextuality, litera