Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9798385229475

Table of Contents

Reviews

""In Reasonable Doubt: Learning to Dwell in Biblical Ambivalence and Paradox, Hanz Gutierrez Salazar gives the religious believer and the non-religious observer a hermeneutical framework for engaging the Bible not as a dead letter forever stuck in the past, nor as an authoritarian moral compass from which there is no deviation, but as an encounter with the Other circumscribed by this simple paradox: a text written, preserved, and disseminated by human acts is also Word of God. The author concludes, 'Truth is only in the search for truth, and the engine of that search is reasonable doubt.'"" --Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Clarence Louis and Helen Steber professor of theological studies, Saint Louis University, from the foreword ""In Reasonable Doubt, Gutierrez offers a methodological approach for how interpreters of Scripture can, and must, recognize themselves as unwritten living documents of sacred humanity. As I am a teacher of homiletics, this text will be a valuable resource for my classes in helping students learn how to not reduce preaching to lectures of biblical texts. Rather it will them that preachers engage in lively, dangerous interactions that 'prolong the exuberance and sobriety of biblical language.'"" --Maury D. Jackson, chair and professor, pastoral studies department, HMS Richards Divinity School, La Sierra University

Author Information

Hanz Gutierrez Salazar, from Peru, holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and medicine. He is full professor of systematic theology at the Adventist Italian 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).

Tab Content 6

Countries Available