9 Theological Hermeneutics (YDS 13-205)

9
Theological Hermeneutics (YDS 13-205)

This is the first lecture from a course on theological hermeneutics given in
either 1976 or 1978. CPH 1976l. After some practical matters, Frei
continues:
(2) Theological hermeneutics is not a unified field. One has to impose some
sort of arbitrary order on many different things under one name.
(3) What are some of the component parts?
(a) Theological hermeneutics, not general hermeneutics
(b) Biblical hermeneutics, because thats what for a long time theological
hermeneutics amounted to. Why?
(c) General Hermeneutics; one could also say philosophical
hermeneutics. Even Karl Barth agreed that no special biblical
hermeneutics.
(4) Hermeneutics:
(a) How does one read a text? Are there any rules or principles for doing
so? Thats hermeneutics in an old-fashioned setting, especially in 18thcentury Protestantism.
(b) In particular, the abiding or normative meaning or sense of a text was
what one was looking for. Hirsch: objectively valid interpretation.
(c) This involved at least one kind of distinction in re Bible (presumably
other texts also): (I) Information about the text and its cultural context
and background (II) Reading of the text itself, as something that makes
sense in its own right (but that very idea is disputed!). The latter again
breaks down into two different things: (I) Meaning of words and
sentences: What does it literally say there? (II) Question of meaning
What is there there beyond grammatical sense? What shall I say
when I want to say what it says there in other words? What is the
common meaning or (sometimes) subject matter between the two
statements? (Remember even the formulations, the ways of conceiving
issues and distinctions receive challenges constantly!)
(5) Saying it in other words already introduces a very modern topic which
would have been puzzling to earlier people going a long way back. Saying
the same thing in different words, equivalence-talk you might say, involves
an activity of your own. In other words, repeating, even if you know the
grammatical and syntactical rules, is not the same as understanding (Barth
grants this others celebrate it.) So there is a second topic in
hermeneutics, in theory of interpretation, that usually (for a variety of
reasons) is thought to have a polar relation to the first.
113
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
If the first topic is that asking about meaning of texts, what or where is
the meaning of a text, the second one is, how do we understand, by what
process. What is it to understand, given the facts (1) that mere verbal
reiterations arent the same as understanding and (2) that there is some
parallel between the meaning and our understanding of it, i.e., that there is
a certain mystery to the text.
We have what it means in, with, and through the words, but the words
arent all thats there. And whatever else is there is cognate to, and
therefore accessible to understanding. So we ask, What is it to understand?
Both topics interpretation as theory of meaning and interpretation as
theory of understanding have evoked considerable skepticism on the part
of some people. It is as though the two words erected into mental or
intellectual constructs having their own reality certain words and related
ones (consciousness) that make sense in many different ways, but not
in that way. Have to take account of that protest. However, protesters and
their opponents do have in common one thing.
You may not be able to draw up general rules for interpreting texts but you
are confronted with literature, i.e., with distinctively human works,
concepts, content or the uniquely human, the unique spiritual aspect of a
text. This in contrast a science that studies the life of signs within society
showing what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.1 Linguistic
study has its ordering principles not so much in the history of a language as
in the logic of relation and oppositions among the signs of any given
language-system at a particular time. Robert Scholes: the essence of
poetry [is] in its verbal formulations as they emerge in poetic syntax.2
Theological hermeneutics Bible
(a) Perspicuity of Bible vs. need for interpretive community, tradition,
teaching authority;
(b) Unity of the Bible
(c) Inspiration of the Bible in three ways: Reliable information, true
teachings, verbal inspiration.
My own agenda:
(a) Relative unity of canon
(b) Narrative sense
(c) Unity ?through Testaments
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. C. Bally and A.

Sechehaye; tr. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p.16.
Elements of Poetry (New York: OUP, 1969), pp.18, 32.
114

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Theological Hermeneutics (YDS 13-205)

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. C. Bally and A.

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