Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theological hermeneutics in the twilight of modernity
- Part I The modern roots of suspicion
- Part II Christian imagination in a postmodern world
- 6 The hermeneutics of difference: suspicion in postmodern guise
- 7 The hermeneutic imperative: interpretation and the theological task
- 8 The faithful imagination: suspicion and trust in a postmodern world
- Appendix: Hamann's letter to Kraus
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The hermeneutic imperative: interpretation and the theological task
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theological hermeneutics in the twilight of modernity
- Part I The modern roots of suspicion
- Part II Christian imagination in a postmodern world
- 6 The hermeneutics of difference: suspicion in postmodern guise
- 7 The hermeneutic imperative: interpretation and the theological task
- 8 The faithful imagination: suspicion and trust in a postmodern world
- Appendix: Hamann's letter to Kraus
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
… a good interpretation of a text is one that has “breathing space,” that is to say, one in which no hermeneutic finally allows you to resolve the text – there is something that is left to bother, something that is wrong, something that is not yet interpreted.
FreiAnd beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted
to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
Luke 24.27The late modern crisis of interpretation, occasioned by the rise of the hermeneutics of suspicion, is part of a larger pattern of change in the way our culture reads texts, especially its sacred texts, those that nourish and undergird our sense of reality and orient us in the world. Hans Frei has shown how and why realistic narrative reading of the Bible went into “eclipse” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hermeneutics. Before the rise of historical criticism, Christians from the earliest times “had envisioned the real world as formed by the sequence told by the biblical stories.” Under the sway of this precritical hermeneutic, the biblical story was read literally, which meant that people took for granted that the narratives described actual events; but Frei points out how different this assumption was from the modern practice of treating the text as “evidence” that certain historical happenings actually took place.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Theology, Hermeneutics, and ImaginationThe Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity, pp. 167 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999