Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics Hermes, Trickster, Fool

Hermeneutics can be said to be operative when something is not immediately intelligible. The divine, experiences of God and the sacred, are of course a notorious hermeneutical problem. How to render, translate, interpret the unintelligible, the infinitely untranslatable without indeed admitting to its impossibility? This book argues that interpretive agency has aspects that are represented by the figures of Hermes, trickster, and fool. These figures reveal, perform, and challenge the status quo of a society and its structures of power, knowledge and belief. As hermeneutical acts are notoriously multivalent, engagement with these figures can help reframe hermeneutical work as a vibrant reminder of the play between humility and courage in reinterpreting the divine through mythos and logos anew each day. These figures can help to reconstruct theology as mytho-logy in teaching us greater respect for the dynamics of mythological narrativity and its logical exfoliation.

Marion Grau is Associate Professor of Theology at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, USA, and the Graduate Theological Union, USA. She is the author of Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Soteriology Beyond Imperialism (2011), Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption (2004), and the co-edited volume Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to Radical Orthodoxy (2006).

1. Theology as Mythology: Tilting the Tale
2. Unsealing Hermeneutics: Of God/s and Messengers
3. Re/Integrating Mythos and Logos
4. Similarities and Differences in Interpretation
5. Reconstructing Hermeneutics
6. Tricksters of the Trade
7. Holy Fools