Author: Charles Dufour
Dufour, Charles, 2019 Lay people’s understanding of God’s forgiveness of sins: A hermeneutical comparison of John 20:19-23 between exegetes and lay people, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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God’s forgiveness of sins—and human participation in it—has always been controversial, theologically, doctrinally, denominationally and personally. Having reviewed the history and Biblical foundation of this topic, this qualitative study seeks to understand God’s forgiveness of sins based on John 20:19-23 from a lay perspective in four Christian congregations located in the city of Adelaide, South Australia. Forty-eight (48) respondents from the Bethlehem Lutheran Church, St Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Cathedral, St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral and Pilgrim Uniting Church were interviewed over a couple of months. The research question was: from your faith perspective, how do you understand God’s forgiveness of sins based on John 20:19-23? Face-to-face interviews were conducted, and all respondents freely selected the location for their interview. To ensure the trustworthiness of the findings, a standard protocol for data collection and data analysis was utilised.
Six themes were evident in the interview data: God, faith, agent of forgiveness, the Eucharistic Church service, confession and absolution, and anointing and blessing. These themes were compared to exegesis of the passage from the Gospel of John guided by the following four Biblical scholars: Rudolf Karl Bultmann, Charles Kingsley Barrett, Edwyn Clement Hoskyns and Raymond Edward Brown.
The study found that Biblical scholars and respondents were situated at different points of the hermeneutic spiral. While respondents answered the research question from their personal experience of God, Biblical scholars answered the same question from a general view and understanding of the text’s original meaning. To a degree, lay people and exegetes were found to meet at certain points of the hermeneutical spiral, for example, regarding the identity of God and the importance of faith for the forgiveness of sins. Despite some similarity, a huge gap was evident between the understanding of lay people and Biblical scholars of God’s forgiveness of sin based on the text of John: this warrants further study in the area of practical theology. This research would comprise investigation of the specific understanding of those who are pastorally ministering directly to lay people. Research could also be conducted on the training of those involved in the Biblical and pastoral understanding of John 20:19-23. The next logical scholarly step would be to expand an exploration of this gap between scholars and lay people to a wider range of people, congregations or denominations.
Keywords: forgiveness of sins, John 20:19-23, lay people, lay perspective, God, faith, agent of forgiveness, the Eucharistic Church service, confession and absolution, and anointing and blessing, hermeneutical spiral, human participation in forgiveness
Subject: Theology thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2019
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Dr Vicky Balabanski