South Wales Baptist College
54, Richmond Road, Cardiff
Wednesday 7th March 2012
| Dr Lloyd Pietersen
Senior Lecturer & Research Coordinator in New Testament Studies University of Gloucestershire. |
|
1:30pm Reading the Bible from the Margins:
Disavowing Christendom Readings
Throughout Christendom authorised interpretations of the Bible have been in the hands of professionally trained church ministers, theologians and biblical scholars. These have traditionally been part of the intellectual elite, usually priests and, until recently, almost exclusively male. Ordinary church members have thus been brought up predominantly on biblical readings originating in a powerful, priestly, male hierarchy. This lecture, drawing on recent examples from the Occupy Movement, argues that, with the on-going demise of Christendom, fresh culturally relevant readings of the Bible will emerge, sometimes in unlikely places.
3:30 pm The Big Story and the Little Stories:
Learning to Read the Whole Bible
In our post-Christendom era much of the Bible is seldom read or understood, even among churchgoers, so there is little understanding of either the big picture or the smaller narratives embedded in Scripture. Where ‘the big picture’ is expounded it is usually articulated within a creation-fall-redemption schema. This approach, with its emphasis on ‘the fall’, renders human persons and communities powerless and hands authority over the forgiveness of sin to the imperial church. This lecture, drawing on the notion of the Bible as drama, argues for a different rendering of the Big Story and advocates painstaking attention to the little stories contained therein.
Lloyd Pietersen’s latest book Reading the Bible after Christendom, published in Paternoster’s After Christendom series, forms the basis for these two lectures.
