We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About The Reformation And The Right Reading Of Scripture
Product description In 1517, Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church. Luther’s seemingly inconsequential act ultimately launched the Reformation, a movement that forever transformed both the Church and Western culture. The repositioning of the Bible as beginning, middle, and end of Christian faith was crucial to the Reformation. Two words alone captured this emphasis on the Bible’s divine inspiration, its abiding authority, and its clarity, efficacy, and sufficiency: sola scriptura. In the five centuries since the Reformation, the confidence Luther and the Reformers placed in the Bible has slowly eroded. Enlightened modernity came to treat the Bible like any other text, subjecting it to a near endless array of historical-critical methods derived from the sciences and philosophy. The result is that in many quarters of Protestantism today the Bible as word has ceased to be the Word. In The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture, Iain Provan aims to restore a Reformation-like confidence in the Bible by recovering a Reformation-like reading strategy. To accomplish these aims Provan first acknowledges the value in the Church’s precritical appropriation of the Bible and, then, in a chastened use of modern and postmodern critical methods. But Provan resolutely returns to the Reformers’ affirmation of the centrality of the literal sense of the text, in the Bible’s original languages, for a right-minded biblical interpretation. In the end the volume shows that it is possible to arrive at an approach to biblical interpretation for the twenty-first century that does not simply replicate the Protestant hermeneutics of the sixteenth, but stands in fundamental continuity with them. Such lavish attention to, and importance placed upon, a seriously literal interpretation of Scripture is appropriate to the Christian confession of the word as Word―the one God’s Word for the one world. Review As a source for learning about the history of biblical interpretation, this book covers an impressive amount of material. Ten chapters examine interpretive issues addressed by Christians in the early church and the Middle Ages, five chapters cover the interpretive goals and methods of the reformers and early modern Protestants, and six chapters evaluate contemporary movements in biblical hermeneutics such as form criticism, narrative criticism, and the canonical reading of scripture. (Martin Lohrmann Lutheran Quarterly) In the Reformation, the inspiration and authority of the Bible―its perspicuity, efficacy, and sufficiency―came to the fore. For the present generation that has lost its confidence in the Bible, Iain Provan’s book has recaptured and recovered the internal structure and logic of the Reformation hermeneutic, with its emphasis on the literal sense (Dennis Ngien Renaissance and Reformation) Iain Provan's new work is an impressive and timely book with an ambitious purpose–nothing less than an elucidation and defence of a reformed hermeneutic of Scripture in relation to the whole history of Bible interpretation, both pre- and post-Reformation. In it he defends a literal reading of Scripture, which he defines in terms of the dynamic relation of both the letter of the text and the communicative intentions of its human (and divine) authors. (Simon Burton Expository Times) Review This prodigiously well-read, well-written, elegant, and accessible study has a passionate and serious treatise to expound. As its title hints, it is not another book on the history of interpretation, except in the sense that Professor Provan believes that the history of interpretation, especially in the time of the Fathers and the Reformers, has vital significance for the twenty-first century. So, we need to pay attention if we are to get interpretation on the right track five hundred years after Luther posted his theses. Aspects of Professor Provan’s own thesis about literal interpretation are unfashionable and therefore need
