Even though the Bible has been the most essential text of both missiology and biblical studies, each disciplines’ approaches in reading the Bible have been very different. On the one hand, missiologists approach the Bible too superficially by ignoring the richness of the biblical text, and selecting a few biblical text to naively support their missionary enterprise. As a result, missiologists’ approaches to the biblical text easily fall into the problem of reductionalism. On the other hand, biblical scholars tend to fall into the other problem. As emphasizing the diversity of the text, biblical scholars become very reluctant to use Bible as the guide for the today’s mission work of the churches. Due to their reluctance of connecting Bible and mission, they seems to fail to provide the appropriate answer to the legitimate question of churches regarding mission. The gap between two disciplines seems insoluble. Currently new attempts to overcome the gap between two disciplines in dealing with the Bible began to appear and more constructive models have been developed. I had identified two models in this article, and they are the ‘dialogue model’ and the ‘model of reading the Bible as tapestry’. The ‘dialogue model’ has been first suggested by David Bosch with the name of ‘critical hermeneutic.’ And the dialogue model, based on critical hermeneutic approach, has been developed by Johannes Nessen. In my opinion, the ‘dialogue model’ is the new approach mainly carried out by biblical scholars. Second, ‘the model of reading Bible as Tapestry’ was started by Johannes Verkyul and later much developed by Charles Van Engen. This model has been developed mainly by missiologists. Recently, as realizing that reading the Bible missiologically takes in-depth approaches, new approaches was more suggested with the title of ‘missional hermeneutic.’ Even though the same terminology of ‘missional hermeneutic’ has been used, the contents are different according to scholars. James Brownson and Michael Barram emphasize the plurality of the interpretation which was originated from the diverse context of the interpreters. They emphasize the significance of interpreter’s social location and to privilege the missiological location as the key to faithful approach to the Bible. Christopher Wright also emphasizes ‘missional hermeneutic’ from a slight different view. For him, missional hermeneutic is to read the Bible with the premise that the Bible itself is missional phenomena, because the Bible is self-revealing story of mission of God. Therefore, Wright suggests that missional hermeneutic is to read the Bible in the light of five perspective; the perspective of God’s purpose for his whole creation, the perspective of God’s purpose for human life, the perspective of God’s historical election of Israel and role in relation to the nations, the perspective of the centrality of Jesus of Nazareth, and finally the perspective of God’s calling of the church to be the agent of God’s blessing to the nations. As the writer examines various attempts to construct missional hermeneutics, none of them are fully satisfactory, and the journey of searching the missional hermeneutic seems to be still on the way. Such task will be finally accomplished by the constant interaction between missiologists and biblical scholars to build missional hermeneutics. Even thought such task can not complete easily, the search for missional hermeneutic itself is meaningful process and it may be the characteristics of ‘mission on the way.’

• 박보경(장신대 교수ㆍ선교신학) | Park Bokyoung