Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stanley E. Porter is president, dean, professor of New Testament, and holder of the Roy A. Hope Chair in Christian Worldview at McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, Ontario.

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Hermeneutics

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................xivPreface................................................................................................xvi1. What Is Hermeneutics?...............................................................................12. Hermeneutics and New Foundations: Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey......................233. Phenomenology and Existential Hermeneutics: Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.....................484. Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics.....................................................745. Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutic Phenomenology............................................................1056. Jürgen Habermas's Critical Hermeneutics........................................................1317. Structuralism and Daniel Patte......................................................................1548. Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction..................................................................1909. Dialectical Theology and Exegesis: Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann...................................21410. Theological Hermeneutics: Anthony Thiselton and Kevin Vanhoozer....................................24511. Literary Hermeneutics: Alan Culpepper and Stephen Moore............................................27412. Conclusion.........................................................................................297Author Index...........................................................................................304

Chapter One

Introduction

Hermeneutics has a long and complex history with many surprising twists and turns. As a discipline in its own right it is relatively modern, yet the idea of hermeneutics may be traced as far back as the ancient Greeks. In its most basic sense hermeneutics refers to the many ways in which we may theorize about the nature of human interpretation, whether that means understanding books, works of art, architecture, verbal communication, or even nonverbal bodily gestures. Indeed, as we shall see in the following chapters, the nature of human understanding, and therefore our ideas about hermeneutics and interpretive theory, face a number of interesting challenges that make a complete description of "what it means to understand" difficult.

What do we mean when we say that we understand something? While most of us may pick up an apple and immediately know that it is red and that, if we take a bite, it tastes delicious, we are unable to answer how it is that we know what we know. Few of us stop to consider what is going on when we experience things. An apple is self-evident to each of us who holds one. We do not need to be convinced that it exists and that it has properties we see, taste, and touch. Yet what makes our interaction with the apple possible remains a mystery. From a hermeneutical perspective, this is not just a question about how our senses work in relation to our cognitive processes. Perhaps the eating of a candied apple at a fair or circus represents an experience that holds special meaning. If it does, then the question of perceiving the object, the candy apple, clearly involves a unique context — a history, an event, a specific micro-world — that only the individual involved knows. It is a context that influences how one experiences that object. And now, as we think about it, it is a context that conditions our recollection. In a similar way, our experiences of people, books, social events, and so on, are all conditioned by surrounding circumstances. We do not merely hold a book in our hands, see the letters on the page, and understand the sentences and paragraphs as they exist in front of us. We experience the meaning in relation to our own histories, desires, memories, imaginations, etc. Thus the question of what it means to understand becomes a very large one. Hermeneutics attempts to answer the question by examining closely the hidden realm of activity behind the scenes of our own lives. The aim is to make the structure, or perhaps the lack of structure, of human understanding as explicit as possible.

There are many different explanations as to what might be transpiring in the act of human understanding, e.g., sociological, psychological, biological, chemical, neurological. Some of these have met with more success than others. There are also many different hermeneutical descriptions, many of which do not agree with one another or with the more scientific explanations. One of the unique claims of hermeneutics is that it goes beyond the biological, psychological, etc., because it looks at what makes all of them possible. Most importantly, hermeneutics tries to avoid reducing "understanding" to its lowest common denominator, e.g., describing it only in terms of specific neural networks working in specific electro-chemical ways within the brain. Hermeneutics is successful only to the degree that it is able to include as much of what makes us human as possible, e.g., our social, historical, linguistic, theological, and biological influences. Broadly speaking then, to think hermeneutically means to ask what we mean by human understanding universally, i.e., what we all do naturally, regardless of our specific cultures, languages, or traditions. However, most hermeneutical descriptions also pay close attention to how our cultures, languages, and traditions influence the ways in which we understand. In short, hermeneutics asks three important questions. What is understanding? How might we describe it best? And how might we understand better?

"Hermeneutics" comes from the Greek verb hermeneuein, which means "to interpret" or "to translate." Today it refers to the science, theory, and practice of human interpretation. The term has an interesting historical association with the Greek god Hermes. Hermes, a character in the ancient Greek poems the Iliad and Odyssey, played a number of interesting roles — one of them was to deliver messages from the gods to mortals. He was a medial figure that worked in the "in-between" as an interpreter of the gods, communicating a message from Olympus so humans might understand the meaning. In this way, Hermes, son of Zeus, was responsible for fostering genuine understanding — comprehension — which required more effort than if he merely transliterated (interpreting letter for letter, word for word without any modification or adaptation). Hermes had to interpret the meaning of the messages on behalf of his listeners and in doing so had to go far beyond merely repeating the intended truth. He had to re-create or reproduce the meaning that would connect to his audience's history, culture, and concepts in order to make sense of things. In like manner, hermeneutics tries to describe the daily mediation of understanding we all experience in which meaning does not emerge as a mere exchange of symbols, a direct and straightforward transmission of binary code, or a simple yes or no. Rather, meaning happens by virtue of a "go-between" that bridges the alien with the familiar, connecting cultures, languages, traditions, and perspectives that may be similar or millennia apart. The go-between is the activity of human understanding that, like Hermes, tries to make sense of the world...