Reviews for The Pattern of Chinese History: Cycles, Development, Or Stagnation?

The average rating for The Pattern of Chinese History: Cycles, Development, Or Stagnation? based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2006-08-10 00:00:00 Sandra Fenton-goss I don't agree with Soulen's view of inspiration. Nonetheless, he provides a brief, yet beneficial, account of the history of interpretation. Hans Frei contribution is interesting.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-28 00:00:00 John Dimaggio Richard Soulen, Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at the School of Theology, Virginia Union University, has written an interesting book on the history of Biblical interpretation. Hermeneutics is a very interesting subject to me. It was with pleasure, then, that I read this book for the purpose of reviewing it. The book is designed to give a brief history of Biblical interpretation, showing the various forms that it took in different times. First of all the author takes the time to establish how the various books came to be in the Biblical canon, dealing with the Old Testament and New Testament in separate chapters. I found no surprises here. It was interesting to read about the textual issue in the section entitled “Which Manuscripts?” The information presented concerning various textual groups/families and various discoveries did justice to the subject, considering the length and purpose of this book. I was especially surprised to read the section “Which Translation?” This author actually seems to like the Geneva more than the KJV! The aims of translation as well as the challenges of translation are presented to the reader. The author seems to present the reader with no either/or position on the matter of formal equivalence of dynamic equivalence. In fact, I gathered that he felt that there was a place for both sorts of translation philosophies. I was not favorably impressed with the chapter on Scripure's interpretation of Scripture. While typology is certainly present in the Bible, I'm not sure that it is as prevalent as the writer seems to think it is. From chapter six to the conclusion we have the meat of the book in that the history of interpretation is contained mostly in these chapters. The chapters deal with a few of the early Church fathers, the quadriga, the “center” of Scripture and the quest to determine what it is (The hermeneutics of Luther and early Protestants), the literal sense of the Scripture, and then the modern and contemporary ideas relating to interpretation as well as the relationship of the various forms of criticism to the issue of interpretation. There's much to interest the reader in this book, and I think it was well done. There was one glaring omission, however. That is the grammatical-historical method of interpretation. There are a few things spoken concerning the literal hermeneutic, but not much. It didn't seem to be seriously dealt with after the manner that many evangelicals and fundamentalists view it. On the whole, however, this book is an interesting study in the history of the Scriptures and how they have been understood down through the years.