<Theofragen>

Here is the second of three installments on the historical/theological/philosophical development of hermeneutics that I promised. If you missed the first post you can read it here. Again, the purpose of this discussion is to offer a broad overview of hermeneutics to family and friends who may not be familiar with the technical aspects of my posts regarding inerrancy and other difficult topics. In these posts I am breaking my own blogging rules in that I am writing way too much and that I am being very broad (a thing that makes one susceptible to charges of essentialism or reductionism). Nevertheless, I hope that this helps to explain my understanding of how we interpret the Bible today.

In this post I think it would be helpful to recount the development of philosophical hermeneutics because the philosophical works of such noted philosophers as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (I will deal with Ricoeur and Habermas some other time) have greatly impacted the way in which theologians and biblical scholars interpret the Bible; whether they wish to admit it or not. You might be wondering why I would want to tell you about philosophers when you are concerned with how to interpret the Bible. I'm glad you asked. Philosophy and theology have long been allied fields--significant developments in one impact the other. So, by recounting the contributions of each of these philosophers to the field of general hermeneutics we will be in a better place to understand why later theologians will make the moves that they do in their method of interpreting the Bible.

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Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is often regarded as "the father of modern hermeneutics". He came to regard hermeneutics as the art of understanding, as opposed to mere interpretation. Schleiermacher helped to dispel the assumption that interpretation was a science, where by one could employ a proper method and always end up with the same results. Rather he saw hermeneutics as an art and this impacted the way he approached the topic philosophically. A further significant contribution to the field was his insistence that all understanding is inextricably wrapped up in language. Think about it, can you have a thought in your head without having to rely on language to conceptualize it? As he thought more about this he realized that there are two dimensions to language: the objective (grammatical) aspect and the subjective (psychological) aspect. In order for genuine understanding to take place, he argued, we must wrestle with both. However, as he thought more about the art of understanding he realized how little we actually understand. In any act of communication, he thought, misunderstanding occurs more than understanding. Following from this assumption he felt that all understanding would be at best an approximation. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher offered specific rules for interpreting a text that took seriously the language of the author’s original context and how that language interacts with our contemporary linguistic system. So, the only way one can truly understand a text is to immerse oneself entirely into that linguistic system. Then and only then can interpreters begin to understand the text by attempting to appropriate the author's meaning into a contemporary linguistic scheme. This may not seem like a big deal but, by opening up the Bible to philosophical rules of understanding and by acknowledging the difficulty of genuine understanding, Schleiermacher paved the way for future philosophers and theologians to begin the task of 1) ‘getting behind the text’ to understand its original context and 2) focusing on the subjective dimension of the interpreter in the process of hermeneutics.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) represents the next major player in the development of philosophical hermeneutics. Arguably his greatest accomplishment was popularizing and spreading his intellectual progenitor’s (Schleiermacher) hermeneutical program. Dilthey bridges the gap between the 19th and 20th century method of interpretation and hence is worthy of a few comments. Dilthey worked at a time when the Enlightenment emphasis on scientific method was at its heyday. His hope was that by retrieving Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics he could prove to his scientific colleagues that scientific objectivity could be achieved in the humanities as well as the hard-sciences (biology, physics, chemistry, etc.). So what he was really after was a grand, overarching, scientific methodology that could be used in all branches of the humanities. Dilthey appropriated Schleiermacher’s notion of understanding as the key end of the humanities. Furthermore, he emphasized Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the psychological aspects of understanding. In Schleiermacher’s footsteps he wrote, “The final goal of the hermeneutic procedure is to understand the author better than he understood himself.” (hermeneutics Inquiry I, 104). Dilthey expanded Schleiermacher’s notion of the subjective (psychological) aspects of understanding in a manner that objectified all of our subjectivities into what he called the “objective mind”. Therefore, Dilthey’s hermeneutic focused on the subjective dimension of a text’s author but he objectified our own work at understanding said text due to an overly-idealistic notion of modern reason. Dilthey opened up Schleiermacher to future philosophers and Dilthey’s own development of that work set the stage for an acknowledgment of presuppositions in our act of understanding.

Following on the heals of Dilthey, we are led to the phenomenological hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Heidegger appropriated the philosophical work of his teacher (Edmund Husserl), which led to a new emphasis on the “things themselves” as opposed to theory laden philosophical systems. Phenomenology, put simply, focuses on the object of observation (the phenomenon) as it appears to the person doing the observing. Heidegger’s most famous book, Being and Time, focused on the temporal and existential aspects of the interpreter in the act of interpreting. Heidegger rejected the “objective” assumption of earlier philosophers in favor of explicit recognition of the interpreter’s presuppositions she brings with her to the process of interpretation. Heidegger emphasized the circular nature of understanding, noting, “Any interpretation which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted” (67). In other words, we approach any phenomenon (in our case, the Bible) from a certain pre-understanding of the subject matter and carry with us certain presuppositions and prejudices that influence how we understand that phenomenon.

For example, if I handed you a car-repair manual and you had no idea what it was you would approach it without any pre-understanding. However, let’s assume that I handed you the manual and told you that it was the best poetry in the world. Your pre-judgment about poetry in general would influence how you would read the manual. You might try to find a rhyme scheme or marks of consonance, assonance or alliteration. Indeed you might throw the manual down and say it was the crappiest bit of poetry you had ever read or you may challenge my previous statement that it was representative of poetry at all. This is hermeneutics with an awareness on the thing itself as well as our pre-judgments about that thing. Heidegger’s work would prove quite influential on the latter work of Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann as well as the next philosopher of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002).

Gadamer was mainly a professor of Aesthetics, focusing on Greek Art and he was able to detect this ancient work in his contemporary’s works. After Martin Heiddegar's publication of Being and Time in 1926, in which he created the notion of “Dasein”= (roughly) being there, in time, Gadamer began to focus on philosophical hermeneutics. This was not as drastic of a jump as one might imagine because, for Gadamer, the interpretation of a piece of art or of a text (like the Bible) was a congruent endeavor. In any interpretation, another’s locatedness impacts my location in time and in relationship to others—this confronted modernity’s assumption of the distanced observer. Gadamer focused on Dasein—being thrown into existence—in his interpretations. One prominent aspect of Gadamer's work is on the "Hermeneutical Circle"—between the interpreter and the subject matter. Gadamer maintained that there is always a to-and-fro movement between the text and interpreter and that the starting point is typically with the interpreter. There are two dimensions to the Hermeneutical Circle: the textual dimension—what is the structure of the text (literary criticism), what is the setting of the passage within the canon, how does one text relate to another, what is the relation of the text to its historical context and the subjective dimension—the interpreting subject. Gadamer held that there is always a subject (you or I) that must be considered in the hermeneutical circle. The interaction between the subject and the object is called "play" by Gadamer. This dimension unlocks some of the meaning of the text—this has been charged with subjectivism (yet this does not supplant the textual dimension). We all have bias and interpretive horizons (T.S. Elliot said, “The only way we can move beyond our interpretive horizon is to admit that we have one.”). In hermeneutics, Gadamer insisted, we guard against subjectivism by accounting for the hermeneutical subject!

Hermeneutics, for Gadamer, is the interaction between the subject and the object. From the subjective side we encounter the problems of prejudice, pre-judgment, presuppositions, and pre-understanding, which all impact our interpretation. We bring to the text our prior knowledge that impacts the ‘root metaphors’ that we draw out from the text (i.e. Kingdom of God, love, guilt, fear of death, etc); presuppositions are not just intellectual stances but holistic life experience, its existential for Gadamer. In the act of interpreting we have a fusion of horizons—which is how the text's and subject's horizon fuse together in the space between. In my last post on this topic I will attempt to trace biblical hermeneutics from Calvin to the present, but don't expect it any time soon. Peace.

Introducing Hermeneutics (Part 2)

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