Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy

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Hermeneutical Methods in Biblical Interpretation in Africa Matters Arising
(JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIETY VOLUME, 2016-04) Dairo, Afolorunso
Africa is a continent with a variety of cultures; such complexities make any meaningful study a bit difficult. Howbeit, a careful biblical hermeneutics will highlight the importance of the African context in biblical interpretation. Hermeneutical method emphasizes the context of the reader rather than that of the audience. It is from this method that African Biblical hermeneutics has been developed. African biblical hermeneutics is a contextual method of biblical criticism that presents a paradigm shift because of the new demands emanating from the various questions raised by Africans in their quest for appropriate biblical texts. Essentially, it seeks to make a to and fro move, from reader to text and to context (as in the traditional approach), to new context (African) to new text (contextualization) to new reader (African reader). Focus is here placed more on the audience in biblical interpretation. This is elucidated in this article by looking at a few methods employed by scholars in doing this in contemporary Africa.