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

al Relativism, Philosophy of Language, and the baptist Vision,” in Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey C. Murphy, Mark Nation, eds., Theology Without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1994), p 267. 200 than mere textual interpretation, but interpretation of the Holy Scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. According to Vandevelde as a text the Bible can be read in many different ways and with many different goals. Christians however, do not read the Bible just as a document, as nonbelievers do, but as a revelation... The meaning of words, which is carried by the letter and is thus a literal meaning, is determined by human convention. As such, the words (verba) constitute a “language of the flesh [carnis lingua]”... By contrast, the meaning of the things (res), carrying the divine intention, is the spiritual meaning. Accordingly, Christian biblical interpreters agree that, besides the literal meaning, there is a spiritual sense in the Bible that we can uncover by paying special attention to the text under the guidance of the Spirit." The pursuit of this spiritual sense, which according to McClendon is not ‘an abandonment or discarding of the plain sense, but its appropriation into the whole story of divine and human relations’? is something what has been helping Christian communities across the world to grow deeper in their understanding of faith and enabling them to persevere in their faithful witness, regardless of the hostile outside environment. So, in spite of the progress and wider accessibility of the Christian theological education, the majority of the baptistic churches are being planted, living and growing under the lead (or even without any formal leadership) of people, who have had no formal theological training. The only training they receive is through reading and discussing the Bible in their communities, which did not expose them to any of the modern theories of biblical “* Vandevelde, The Task of the Interpreter, p 127. See also Tod E. Bosinger, who argues that reading of the Scripture must be a self-involving and transformative practice, which goes beyond gaining information or knowledge, ‘To read the Scripture as a performative document means that not only do we look through it to see that grace of Christ coming to and calling us, but we also listen to it as a divine narrative; a story that we are to act out. It is a story that involves us and insists that we enter it.’ (/t Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the community of God Transforms lives (Brazos Press 2004), p 119). “2 McClendon, Doctrine, p 36. See also Curtis Freeman, “The Eclipse of Spiritual Exegesis: Biblical Interpretation from the Reformation to Modernity,” in Southwestern Journal of Theology (Summer, 1993), pp 21-28. 201 interpretation.“? And it is both literal meaning and a spiritual sense of the biblical text discovered within the communi