The Promise of Hermeneutics

This work presents an engaging interdisciplinary study of the nature and scope of interpretation, one of the most important areas of inquiry in today's postmodern world. The three authors, all acknowledged experts in the field, bring the resources of the Bible, Christian tradition, and intellectual history to bear upon contemporary hermeneutical disputes.

Roger Lundin is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Clarence Walhout is professor emeritus of English at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Anthony C. Thiselton is professor of Christian theology at the University of Nottingham, England.

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

Interpreting Orphans: Hermeneutics in the Cartesian Tradition

1

(64)

Roger Lundin

Descartes: The Endless Recuperation

6

(19)

``Beautiful Fruit Already Picked from the Tree'': Texts in an Orphaned Age

25

(17)

``The Shadow of Absence'': Orphans and the Interpretive Quest

42

(12)

Beyond the Orphaned First Person

54

(8)

Confessing Our Part

62

(3)

Narrative Hermeneutics

65

(68)

Clarence Walhout

Texts as Objects of Action

65

(25)

Texts and Contexts

66

(5)

Reference and Mimesis

71

(8)

Imagined and Actual Worlds

79

(5)

Textual Analysis

84

(6)

Texts as Instruments of Action

90

(43)

Relativism in Interpretation

91

(9)

Truth and Fiction: Authorial Stance

100

(7)

Truth and Fiction: The Text and the Reader

107

(11)

Ethics and Fiction: The Reader's Response

118

(15)

Communicative Action and Promise in Interdisciplinary, Biblical, and Theological Hermeneutics

133

(108)

Anthony C. Thiselton

The Unity and Coherence of the Argument throughout This Study

133

(19)

Autonomy? Or Respect for the Other's Otherness as Given and Giving

133

(4)

Between the Scylla of Mechanical Replication and the Charybdis of Orphaned Indeterminancy

137

(7)

Some Presuppositions and Entailments of Illocutionary Speech-Acts

144

(8)

Reader-Response Theories and Biblical and Theological Fiction

152

(31)

``Why Hasn't Reader-Response Criticism Caught on in New Testament Studies?'': A Diagnosis Suggesting Five Reasons

154

(10)

The Value of Some Specific Reader-Response Models for Reading Biblical Fiction and the Role of Imagination in Interpreting Plot

164

(8)

Polyphonic Voices in Theological Fiction: Job, Eliot, and Dostoyevsky on Evil

172

(11)

Hermeneutics within the Horizon of Time: Temporality, Reception, Action

183

(26)

Natural Time, Clock Time, and Human Time: Temporality, Hermeneutics, and Theology

183

(8)

The Temporal and Historical Character of Jauss's Aesthetics of Reception

191

(9)

Some Implications for Speech-Act Theory in Hermeneutics and for the Post-History of Biblical Texts

200

(9)

Further Implications and the Paradigmatic Status of Promise as Communicative Action

209

(32)

Further Implications for Theories of Knowledge and Philosophy

209

(5)

Socio-Ethical and Political Individualism and a Theological Critique of Autonomy

214

(9)

The Paradigm of Biblical Promise as Trustworthy, Temporal, Transformative Speech-Action

223

(8)

Promise as a Key Example for Understanding Illocutions in Speech-Act Theory

231

(10)

Selected Bibliography

241

(14)

Index

255

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The Promise of Hermeneutics

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials