Call for Abstracts

Many Christians think they can just open up a copy of the Bible, read it, and then understand enough of what it says to discover God’s plan of salvation, to know something about God’s will for their lives, or to learn the essentials of Christian orthodoxy.

To many scholars, this seems like an unrealistic way of reading the Bible for various interconnected reasons. It seems too simple–neglectful of textual transmission and translation issues as well as of the cultural gap between the original readers and us. It seems naive to think that an individual reader could understand something brilliant minds have debated for millennia. It seems to ignore the important fact that people read the Bible and actually disagree what it means. It seems like something post-Enlightenment western Protestant evangelicals would try to do–not like the ways of reading the Bible practiced by Church Fathers, medieval Christians, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox believers, or the global church in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and Latin America.

Sometimes we need to criticize criticism and problematize our problematizing. The thesis that the Bible cannot realistically be read devoutly and straightforwardly calls for critical examination.

We plan to edit a book of essays exploring the viability of devout and straightforward readings of the Bible, particularly with reference to questions such as the following:
--If the Bible is the Word of a good and truthful God, does it follow that we can read it straightforwardly and hope to understand its meaning to some significant degree?
--If the Bible can be read devoutly and straightforwardly, why do intelligent people still disagree about its meaning?
--Do the literary genres of the different books of the Bible themselves call for a straightforward and devout hermeneutic?
--There are criticisms of biblicism as a modern western evangelical hermeneutic, but are these criticisms themselves culturally conditioned?
--To what extent are historical readings of the Bible (Patristic, medieval, Reformation, etc.) devout and straightforward?
--Need straightforward and literal readings always be the same thing?
--Do readings allegorical, typological, or tropological sometimes themselves function as straightforward readings? Do they at times come alongside and supplement straightforward readings?
--Is a straightforward biblical hermeneutic serving the church well outside the west (sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, etc.)?

We welcome abstracts for papers exploring these or other questions within the scope of this topic. We expect that final papers would be around 5,000-7,000 words.

Please submit abstracts by: 27 June, 2025.

Abstract length: 150 to 250 words.

(Neither submission nor acceptance of an abstract is a guarantee of publication.)

Please email abstracts and/or questions to: Mark J. Boone at PlatoAndAugustine@Gmail.com and Jonathan W. Johnson at JohnsonJ@HKU.hk.