CONTEXTUALIZING BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS: THE QUEST FOR CULTURAL HYBRIDITY DYNAMICS IN AFRICAN ADVENTIST HERMENEUTICS FOR EFFECTIVE GROWTH

No indigenous hermeneutic framework exists for the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Church in Africa, which accounts for about a third of the world church. The continued use of Western interpretive paradigms has systematically marginalized African oral resources, proverbs, storytelling and community-based wisdom creating a missiological vacuum. This cultural dissonance creates scholarly conflict, restricts church growth and drives members to Pentecostal and African Initiated Churches that address existential concerns (witchcraft, sickness, ancestral beliefs) through their own presumed stylistic biblical interpretations. This qualitative theoretical synthesis draws on postcolonial theory of hybridities (Homi K. Bhabha), a comparative exegesis of Romans 13:1-17 and John 4:1-42, and a systematic review of the African biblical hermeneutics literature. Three dynamics of hybridity are used as analytical tools to mediate between Western and African poles of interpretation: calculated negotiation, prudent affiliation and idealized memory. The tension between the Western historical-grammatical methods and legitimate African contextual concerns is still unresolved and hermeneutical conflicts among Adventist scholars continue. Pentecostal movements address existential questions (witchcraft, sickness, ancestor mediation) with culturally resonant symbols, filling a void mainstream Adventism has left open. A hybridized hermeneutic working in Bhabha's "Third Space" reconciles Western interpretive norms with African oral traditions without compromising Adventist orthodoxy. Indeed, the dynamics of hybridity which African Adventist hermeneutics calls for are exemplified precisely in Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman (John 4) and Paul's strategy in Romans 13. This study offers a constr