would focus upon the growing individual from childhood to adolescence
and sociological studies would focus on the community and its predisposi-
tion to favor one interpretation over another.
As an example of the practice of empirical theology (which accepts
both sociological and psychological engagement) in relation to herme-
neutics, one can turn to the work of Andrew Village. 19 He distributed a
questionnaire to worshippers in eleven different Anglican congregations
in England and received 404 completed returns. By keeping his sample to
Anglican churches, he deliberately removed one source of variance. Even
so, Anglicanism is a “broad church” in the sense that it is large enough
to contain several streams within it. In a systematic way, Village exam-
ined a range of factors impacting on beliefs about the Bible and compiled
them into a scale with standard psychometric properties and then found
a sharp and consistent difference between Anglo-Catholic Anglicans and
evangelical Anglicans. In one aspect of his study he focused on literalism
(the simplest hermeneutic) to fi nd out whether evangelicals, broad church
believers and Anglo-Catholics differ on this point and discovered readers
are sensitive to genre and distinguish between parables and historical pas-
sages but that, beyond this, a literalistic reading is less likely among those
who have been educated to tertiary level—apart from evangelicals among
whom education has no effect, what infl uences evangelicals is charismatic
experience. 20 Literalists are therefore formed of three groups: lay people
with little or no higher education, educated evangelicals, and those for
whom the abandonment of literalism would also imply the abandonment
of a key belief like the resurrection.
In respect of the viewpoint that predominates in any unraveling of
Scriptural meaning (or the “horizon”), there may be a horizon associated
with the author of a text, what he or she intended to say at the moment
of writing, or with the text itself regardless of the purported intention of
the author because the text itself creates an internal world quite differ-
ent from the world of the author or the world of the reader. And then
the reader will have a viewpoint dependent on life experience, member-
ship of a community and spirituality. These three horizons may converge
or diverge, or one or another may predominate. In general, one would
expect education to elevate the horizon of the text or the author and
to diminish the reader’s contribution to meaning. This is what Village’s
questionnaire-based empirical study found. 21 Education, both theological
and general, shifted preferences away from the reader to the author while
enhancing the importance of the horizon of the text itself. The educated
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