The Promise of Hermeneutics

by Lundin, Roger; Thiselton, Anthony C.; Walhout, Clarence

• ISBN13: 9780802846358
• ISBN10: 0802846351
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-07-01
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

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