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

rests and presuppositions that interpreters bring to their endeavours. The work of interpretation is not so much methodological as conventional.”° Vanhoozer sets himself to address the question of plurality of interpretation without turning interpretation into something infinite and arbitrary, ‘how to affirm the fruitfulness and goodness of textual and interpretive polyphony without discrediting the integrity and specificity of the canonical witness to Jesus Christ.’”° Thus, his approach becomes a corrective to Adam’s subjectivity by insistence on studying the text in its historical context (including linguistic conventions and _ historically appropriated interpretations), whilst allowing the diversity of interpretive methods, which are context (and community) bound.”’ Still Vanhoozer’s main emphasis remains on original authorial intent, since the Scripture is first of all the Word of God.”® 4 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Four Theological Faces of Biblical Interpretation,” in A. K. M. Adam, Stephen E. Fowl, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson, eds., Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2006), p 139. °° Adam, Faithful Interpretation, p 130. 6 Vanhoozer, “Four Theological Faces of Biblical Interpretation,” p 133. 7 Ibid., p 141. 8 Puzynin, “The Tradition of the Gospel Christians...,” p 44. 196 Puzynin identifies several limitations that come with Vanhoozer’s method. First is the impossibility to have access to both biblical writers and their context, since ‘all we have is the final form of a text that has been preserved in different manuscripts, canonized, and interpreted by the interpretive community of the church throughout its history,’ which also creates serious challenges in defining original authorial intent.”? The second problem comes from the understanding that readers cannot contribute to the meaning of the text, they only discover various shades of authorial intention. Vanhoozer wrote, ‘The reader is not the begetter of meaning but rather a wet nurse who nurtures a discourse not of her own making. The text is a child of authorial discourse yet, precisely 730 as begotten by authors, it can grow.” Puzynin rightly points that such understanding does not leave space for various facets of meaning, which are ‘creatively constructed 31 Furthermore, Vanhoozer’s under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (or without it). approach does not resolve the problem of conflicting understandings of authorial intent, thus allowing it to remain arbitrary and subjective. And finally, one of the main weaknesses of this approach is that it leaves little to no part that a Christian community, a church, plays in the process of interpretation. Puzynin wrote, [Vanhoozer’s] approach seems to assume, however, that Christian communities cannot interpret scripture correctly and wisely if they do not have trained scholars with