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

own point-and then Christians have grumbled that such criticism makes the Bible irrelevant. The equal and opposite danger is that pious Christians have only been interested in the harmonics themselves, and then by actually striking them instead of the fundamentals have produced a narrower range of tone, making up in shrillness what it lacks in historical depth and basic substance.’ (N.T. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” The Laing Lecture 1989, and the Griffith Thomas Lecture 1989. Originally published in Vox Evangelica, 21 (1991), pp 7-32). 202 the main course of Christian Bible reading has held true over the centuries to the plain sense of Scripture — its stories were read as (in the main) real stories about real people; its history, real history, its declarations about God and God’s creatures as saying what they meant and meaning what they said. The Bible was not a code or cipher to be cracked; it was not a book of secrets; it was realistic; it spoke plain.” Obviously, this pattern of reading would be incomplete without the means by which the readers of the Bible moved from the literal sense to the spiritual sense.”° McClendon argues that these means that serve as bridges binding spiritual and literal senses of the Scripture are the ‘types’ through which typological reading of the Bible works. Moreover, for the biblical writers, it was the primary way of reading the Holy Scripture.“° However, this is not an argument in favour of the metaphorical reading of the Bible. On the contrary, McClendon leaves a word of precaution against literary “4 McClendon, Doctrine, p 36. Cf. Stanley Fish makes a similar argument saying that communal interpretation serves as a safe-guarding against subjectivism in interpretation, and leads to the meaning of the text being rather determinate (Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, Duke University Press, 1989), p 138). Responding to the worry of subjectivism in communal interpretation, and thus, addressing the problem of the “hermeneutical circle,” McClendon argues that this problem comes as modernity’s ‘yearning for foundational (and yet nontheological!) truth,’ which presumably could have been resolved if ‘we [Christians] periodically disown our Book, disclaim our intimate connection with it, and attempt to read it as though it were indeed something from an alien world. But apart from the historical detour to be reported next, the alienation was a false one.’ Instead, he suggests that the problem of the ‘hermeneutical circle’ when speaking about the Bible, and the church reading it, is similar to the problem of the ‘hermeneutical circle’ ‘belonging to the letters exchanged between a pair of lovers.’ Thus, he argues that, in reality, the problem does not exist. (McClendon, Doctrines, p 39.). “© McClendon, Doctrine, p 37. “© Ibid., p 37. Cf. George Lindbeck’s argum