Customer Reviews

Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach

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Tate is brilliant on interpretation!!!

If you're a "thinker", you will love this book! Tate gets you thinking and opens your eyes to how one really interprets the Bible, and why they do interpret the way they do, all the presuppositions they bring to the table, and how that effects their interpretation.

He goes in depth on the three different forms of interpretation: Author centered, Text centered, and Reader centered. -- Later in the book he explores form criticism, source criticism, and redactional criticism and dozens of other forms of literary criticism.

I highly recommend this book to any serious student of the Bible! For you not so serious students, don't get this book, buy Gordon Fee's book on interpretation, it's much more understandable to the lay-man. Both are great books, this one is just much more technical and way more comprehensive.

You will not be dissapointed with this book (unless you were hoping for some easy reading).

Eric

In this valuable book the author discusses three predominant areas of Biblical interpretation: author centered, text centered, and reader centered. Although it is technical in its writing, W. Randolph Tate managed to explore the science and art of hermeneutics in a practical manner avoiding sterile theories and abstract philosophies. He takes an integrative approach to the interpretative process that is understandable and relevant.

The author brilliantly engages the scholarly literature on the subject and explains the methods and procedures of discovering and unlocking the divine-human intention behind the Biblical text. He contends that hermeneutics is primarily a corridor from text to context from the original meaning of texts to their significance for us today. Biblical interpretation and exegesis are absolutely necessary for any Christian who wrestles with the scriptures in order to be able to discover, understand and apply the meaning of Biblical text.

In this textbook the author discusses the importance of language and of the grammatical, historical, cultural, and ideological backgrounds of the Biblical text. After dealing with the historical-critical method of interpretation and its elements of source, form and redaction criticism the author moves on to discuss how the Bible communicates as literature and concludes by showing how the reader's presuppositions and methods affect the interpretation and thus the application of the Biblical text.

Because of its quality of scholarly approach to Biblical interpretation I definitely recommend this volume as well as Tate's other book Interpreting the Bible: A Handbook of Terms And Methods.

I ordered this book and I must say it is very good written. It describes and evaluates various approaches to the Bible from the point of view of the author, the text autonomony and the reader's role. It reflects past and current positions of the biblical research.