Reasonable Doubt: Learning to Dwell in Biblical Ambivalence and Paradox - Softcover

Gutierrez Salazar, Hanz

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798385229475

Publisher: Wipf and Stock, 2024

Synopsis

The Bible itself generates in the reader legitimate doubts. Those doubts do not concern wrong readings but rather the correct ones because every correct reading is always partial and unilateral. No reading ever catches and reflects the whole biblical horizon. That would be idolatrous and dangerous. A healthy interpretation of the Bible acknowledges both, the structural unavailability of the text and the inevitable unilateralism of every reading. Therefore, a biblical hermeneutics of paradox does not aim and stop at the answer, but rather aims at the extension and enrichment of the question. Biblical hermeneutics is not and cannot be a synthetic and resolving instance of meaning. It is not a hermeneutic of clarity, but of complexity. Indeed, of dynamic complexity, that is, of paradox. The meaning sought thus always remains elusive, both in the text from which one starts (Bible), account taken of its structural ambivalence, and in the interpretation to which the reader arrives, because that legitimate and necessary interpretation, derived with effort and enthusiasm, nevertheless remains partial and transitory capable of touching the meaning only tangentially and provisionally. For this reason, the “reasonable doubt” is the best way to stand and marvel in front of the text.

About this title

About the Authors

Hanz Gutierrez Salazar, from Peru, holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and medicine. He is full professor of systematic theology at the Italian Adventist University in Florence, Italy. His latest texts are The Discovery of the We: Chronicles of a Pandemic (2021), The Joy of the Body: Beyond Renunciation and Transgression (2023), Beyond the Bible, Beyond the West: The "Eros" of Interpretation (2023), and The Ecological Kingdom of God: For a Post-Humanist Reading of the Book of Psalms (2024).



Miguel A. De La Torre has authored numerous articles and more than thirty books, including the award-winning Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002); Santeria: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (2004); Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (2014); and Hispanic American Religious Cultures (2009). He presently serves as Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver. He was the 2012 President of the Society of Christian Ethics.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798385229475
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 254