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Interpretative Genres and the Inevitability of Pluralism

Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Birmingham. P.O. Box 363, Birmingham B 15 2TT

The genre of interpretation affects the way biblical texts are read. A range of interpretative genres are explored: the commentary, the homily, the theme-study, the literary-critical study, the church report, the sermon, liturgy and hymnography, even systematic theology. The first, namely the commentary, is characterized by reference to its origins in the grammatical and rhetorical schools of Antiquity, and then provides a benchmark for considering the advantages and disadvantages of the various interpretative genres. Commentaries and homilies follow the sequence of the text, whereas other genres create a 'metatext' by deduction. A genre of interpretation may affect the implicit genre of the biblical text: the church report seeks 'rulings' from scripture, for example. Can exegesis deriving from one genre be expected to function in another? Perhaps we should not expect scholarship and preaching to be related as master and slave. A plurality of approaches to interpretation is surely inevitable.

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