A statue, a fiery furnace and a dismal swamp: a reflection on some issues in biblical hermeneutics

2005 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-307
Author(s):  
Ernest C. Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Tacit Knowledge ◽  
Critical Philosophy ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
Dismal Swamp ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophy Of Knowledge

A discussion of the history of interpretation of three passages in Daniel (3:17; 2:31-45; 9:24-27) is used as the basis for some initial reflections on how it is possible to accept a ‘hermeneutic of unfolding’ which involves the participation of the reader while maintaining that a text has an inherent meaning. It is suggested that a distinction can be made between this ‘meaning’ and the differing ‘significances’ that a text may have for particular readers. Michael Polanyi’s ‘post-critical’ philosophy of knowledge, which involves the personal participation of the knower in the act of understanding, is outlined briefly. It is argued that his concepts of ‘tacit knowledge’, ‘indwelling’ and ‘imaginative sympathy’, and the roles they play in gaining knowledge, provide support for the approach to a hermeneutic of unfolding proposed earlier in the paper.

Atonement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Mind Reading ◽  
Shared Attention ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eleonore Stump

The doctrine that Christ has saved human beings from their sins, with all that that salvation entails, is the distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Over the course of many centuries of reflection on the doctrine, highly diverse understandings have been proposed, many of which have also raised strong positive or negative emotions in those who have reflected on them. In this book, in the context of this history of interpretation, Eleonore Stump considers this theological doctrine with philosophical care. The central question of the book is the nature of the atonement. That is, what is it that is accomplished by the passion and death of Christ (or the life, passion, and death, of Christ)? Whatever exactly it is, it is supposed to include a solution to the problem of the post-Fall human condition, with its guilt and shame. This volume canvasses major interpretations of the doctrine of the atonement that attempt to explain this solution, and it argues that all of them have serious shortcomings. In their place, Stump employs an extension of a Thomistic account of love and forgiveness to argue for a relatively novel interpretation of the doctrine, which she calls ‘the Marian interpretation.’ Stump argues that this Marian interpretation makes better sense of the doctrine of the atonement than other interpretations do, including Anselm’s well-known theory. In the process of constructing the Marian interpretation, she also discusses love, union, guilt, shame, forgiveness, retribution, punishment, shared attention, mind-reading, empathy, and various other issues in moral psychology and ethics.

Reception History and the Interpretation of Revelation

2020 ◽  
pp. 375-393
Author(s):  
Ian Boxall
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts

The chapter describes the discipline of reception history as the study of the ongoing use, interpretation, and impact of a biblical text. If the history of interpretation has often focused on the ways biblical texts are understood in commentaries and theological writings, reception history also considers how a book was received in spirituality and worship, in music, drama, literature, visual art, and textual criticism. Criteria for selecting and organizing materials useful for reception history are discussed, and there is a review of recent attempts to provide broad overviews of Revelation’s reception history, along with specific examples of the value of the discipline for interpreting Revelation.

Postcolonial Liberation: Decolonizing Biblical Studies in the South African Postcolony

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald O. West
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
The South ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
African Black ◽  
History Of ◽  
Land Economics ◽  
The 1960S

Liberation biblical interpretation and postcolonial biblical interpretation have a long history of mutual constitution. This essay analyzes a particular context in which these discourses and their praxis have forged a third conversation partner: decolonial biblical interpretation. African and specifically South African biblical hermeneutics are the focus of reflections in this essay. The South African postcolony is a “special type” of postcolony, as the South African Communist Party argued in the 1960s. The essay charts the characteristics of the South African postcolony and locates decolonial biblical interpretation within the intersections of these features. Race, culture, land, economics, and the Bible are forged in new ways by contemporary social movements, such as #FeesMustFall. South African biblical studies continues to draw deeply on the legacy of South African black theology, thus reimagining African biblical studies as decolonial African biblical studies—a hybrid of African liberation and African postcolonial biblical interpretation.

Transforming Historical Objectivism into Historical Hermeneutics: From “Historical Illness” to Properly Lived Historicality

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-515
Author(s):  
Thomas Tops
Keyword(s):  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts

Summary The present study analyses recent criticisms against the use of modern-historical methodologies in Biblical Studies. These methodologies abstract from the historical horizon of the researcher. In order to relate properly to the historicality of the researcher, historical objectivism needs to be transformed into historical hermeneutics. Recent developments in the historical methodology of biblical scholars are unable to reckon with the historicality of the researcher due to the partial or incorrect implementation of Gadamer’s views on reception history. I analyse the views of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Gadamer on historicality and contend that the study of reception history is a necessary condition for conducting historical study from within the limits of our historicality. Reception history should not be a distinct methodological step to study the “Nachleben” of biblical texts, but needs to clarify how the understanding of these texts is already effected by their history of interpretation. The awareness of the presuppositions that have guided previous interpretations of biblical texts enables us to be confronted by their alterity. This confrontation calls for a synthesis between reception-historical and historical-critical methodology that introduces a new paradigm for conducting historical study in Biblical Studies in dialogue with other theological disciplines.

The Problematic Text of Athenagoras of Athens’s Leg. 12.3: A Proposed Emendation

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-334
Author(s):  
Devin L. White
Keyword(s):  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Argument Proceeds ◽  
Text Context

This study argues that Athenagoras of Athens’s Leg. 12.3 contains a lacuna. A vital clause should be emended to read ὑπὸ µόνου δὲ παραπεµπόµενοι τοῦ τὸν ὄντως θεὸν καὶ τὸν παρ’αὐτοῦ λόγον [πνεύµατος] εἰδέναι. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, an overview of the text, context, and history of interpretation of Leg. 12.3 will demonstrate that the text contains a lacuna. Second, a brief survey of Athenagoras’s religious epistemology will argue that πνεύµατος was the most likely original word. Finally, an analysis of the Spirit’s role in Leg. 7.2-3 will demonstrate that the reconstructed text of Leg. 12.3 is consistent with Athenagoras’s pneumatology, which relied upon traditional Jewish exegesis of the creation narratives.

The Hermeneutics of Allegory and the History of Interpretation

1988 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald L. Bruns ◽  
Jon Whitman ◽  
Robert L. Lamberton
Keyword(s):  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
History Of
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