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

the requisite skills and knowledge for the retrieval of original meanings.°** However, it was demonstrated that the tradition of the Gospel Christians was developed even behind the Iron Curtain, on the assumption that God is the true author of the Russian Synodal translation of the Bible completed in 1876. Despite their lack of professional training, their 9 Ibid., 45. 3° Vanhoozer, “Four Theological Faces of Biblical Interpretation,” p 141. 31 Puzynin, “The Tradition of the Gospel Christians...,” p 45. 2 Puzynin’s critique is reinforced by Fowl and Jones, who argued that despite the important contribution that biblical experts bring into the life of a church, ‘they are not necessary for wise reading of Scripture. Rather, the interpretation of Scripture (which is different from interpreting the Bible) is a difficult task because it involves a lifelong process of learning to become a wise reader of Scripture, who is capable of embodying that reading in life.’ (Stephen E. Fowl and L. Gregory Jones, “Scripture, Exegesis, and Discernment in Christian Ethics,” in Murphy, Kallenberg and Nation, Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition, p 112). 197 readings and literal/figurative interpretations had the power to nourish and transform lives in a totalitarian and hostile milieu.*° Thus Puzynin turns to Pol Vandevelde for an approach that could serve as a middle ground and compensate the shortcomings of Adam’s and Vanhoozer’s opposing methods. Vandevelde argues that the art of interpretation is not a dichotomy based on the necessary choice between monism and pluralism as conflicting interpretative methods. Instead, he develops a notion of purposeful interpretation which attributes an important role to an interpretive community, as well as a text since ‘interpretive communities come to a text with their strategies of reading, and the text serves as an occasion for those strategies to play out.’* Vandevelde suggests that the chasm between monism and pluralism should be viewed not a-s a conflict, but rather ‘two theoretical positions on two different aspects of interpretation.’ Thus, he introduces the concepts of event and act, his way of defining the two distinct approaches, and bringing them together as different facets of one process of interpretation. He writes, By event | mean the fact that we as speakers and interpreters participate in a culture and a language that carry with them concepts, values, and habits of which we might not be aware, so that our interpretation is also something taking place in a tradition. By act, | mean an act of consciousness: someone interpreting a text makes a statement or an utterance and through his or her act is committed regarding the truth of what is said, his or her truthfulness, and the rightness or appropriateness of what is said, so that, if prompted, the interpreter must be ready to defend the interpretation made regarding these three claims.*