The plain version:
Autobiographical biblical interpretation is a hermeneutical approach that examines scripture through the lens of the reader's lived experience and social location. It is a dialogical process in which the interpreter critically engages their own subjectivity to read the text, while simultaneously allowing the text to read, challenge, and transform their relationship to themselves, others, and the world.The academic version:
Autobiographical biblical interpretation is a critical hermeneutic that centralizes the reader's lived experience as the primary locus of engagement with scripture. It moves beyond historical-critical distance by acknowledging the interpreter's specific social, cultural, and personal location as an essential lens for meaning-making. This approach is inherently dialogical: the self actively interrogates the text to explore its relation to the self, others, and the world, while the self also serves as a receptacle for the text's transformative power, allowing scripture to re-author the reader's own narrative.
The critical version:
Critical autobiographical interpretation is a rigorous hermeneutical method that centralizes the scholar's lived experience and intersectional social location as an indispensable analytical lens for reading scripture. Moving beyond the illusion of an objective, disembodied interpreter, this approach demands a reflexive engagement where the self critically interrogates the text, and the text is permitted to interrogate the self. It is a dual, dialogical process: the scholar uses their specific historical and personal reality to generate new exegetical insights, while simultaneously examining how the power of the biblical text acts upon, challenges, and re-authors the self in relation to others and the broader world.
The critical version:
Critical autobiographical interpretation is a rigorous hermeneutical method that centralizes the scholar's lived experience and intersectional social location as an indispensable analytical lens for reading scripture. Moving beyond the illusion of an objective, disembodied interpreter, this approach demands a reflexive engagement where the self critically interrogates the text, and the text is permitted to interrogate the self. It is a dual, dialogical process: the scholar uses their specific historical and personal reality to generate new exegetical insights, while simultaneously examining how the power of the biblical text acts upon, challenges, and re-authors the self in relation to others and the broader world.