Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Mind of Christ How the Baptist Tradition of Discernment Can Serve as a Resource for the Dialogue between Practical Theology and the Social Sciences

Abstract

Recent conversations in practical theology have wrestled with how to allow social scientific research to critique theological beliefs and practices without allowing theology to adopt a naturalistic world view. This article proposes that enough attention has not been paid to the theological assumptions of the epistemology used in these conversations. The article suggests that the hermeneutical theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer provides a framework for understanding how the Baptist tradition of discerning the mind of Christ can serve as a resource for integrating knowledge gained from the social sciences with theological beliefs in a way that resists passively adopting an essentially deistic view of the world.