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

ty of believers that continues to inspire and motivate people to walk the Way of Christ. McClendon notes that despite multiple hermeneutical methods, various interpretive practices and approaches to reading the Scripture, the way the Bible was read has not changed drastically through history. As | have observed earlier, McClendon, following Frei, notes that “3 Fowl and Jones note, ‘Long before the rise of critical scholarship Christians gave a rich variety of faithful readings and embodiments of Scripture without the benefit of source, form, or redaction criticism. They used the diversity within the canon to their advantage, reading various texts in the light of others.’ (“Scripture, Exegesis, and Discernment in Christian Ethics,” p 121). This however, does not diminish or reject the value of the developments in the field of biblical studies. Rather, it is an attempt to make a case for the need to develop various critical skills within a Christian community, enabling its members to discern wisely how the Scripture could be applied to their lives. Thus, instead of this approach being taken as an alternative to more scholarly views of the process of interpretation, it must be seen as another facet or a complex subject of biblical hermeneutics. McClendon reconciles the discrepancy of the church vs. wider community (including non- Christians) methods of reading the Bible, by using the concept developed by Edgar McKnight of two classes of rules that govern the practice of biblical interpretation. The upper-level rules, which ‘are coherent with widely shared convictions of the reading community’ such as ‘Christocentricity and universality of the gospel.’ And the lower-lever rules, which are based on ‘such matters as vocabulary, grammar, and historical-critical reading.’ (McClendon, Doctrine, p 38; also Edgar McKnight, Postmodern Use of the Bible: The Emergence of Reader-oriented Criticism (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1988); also The Bible and the Reader: An Introduction to Literary Criticism (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1985). It would be appropriate to use N. T. Wright’s illustration of the interconnectedness of the above mentioned views of interpretation. He wrote that biblical interpretation can be compared to playing the piano, ‘Sit at a piano, hold down the loud pedal, strike a low note loudly, and listen. You will hear all kinds of higher notes, harmonics, shimmering above the note originally struck. In the same way, the retelling of the story that the Bible actually contains is to function as the striking of the low note, the basic fundamental note of God’s story with his world. As we retell this story there will be harmonics audible, for those, at least, with ears to hear. The problem, of course, is that historical criticism of the Bible has insisted on striking the fundamental notes with the soft pedal on, as though by thus screening out the harmonics it might ensure that the fundamental really made its