The Aim of Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics explores how we read, understand, and handle texts, especially those written in another time or in a context of life different from our own. Biblical hermeneutics investigates more specifically how we read, understand, apply, and respond to biblical texts. More broadly, from the early nineteenth century onward, notably following the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), hermeneutics has involved more than one academic discipline.
(1) Biblical hermeneutics raises biblical and theological questions.
(2) It raises philosophical questions about how we come to understand, and the basis on which understanding is possible.
(3) It involves literary questions about types of texts and processes of reading.
(4) It includes social, critical, or sociological questions about how vested interests, sometimes of class, race, gender, or prior belief, may influence how we read.
(5) It draws on theories of communication and sometimes general linguistics because it explores the whole process of communicating a content or effect to readers or to a community.
In the era of the Church Fathers (up to around a.d. 500) and from the Reformation to the early nineteenth century, hermeneutics was regularly defined as “rules for the interpretation of Scripture.” Among many writers, although not all, hermeneutics was almost equivalent to exegesis, or at least to rules for going about exegesis in a responsible way. Only in the nineteenth century with Schleiermacher and especially in the later twentieth century with Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) did the notion emerge that hermeneutics was an art rather than a science.
Nevertheless, the notion that we can formulate “rules” for hermeneutics or for the interpretation of texts has a long history, and in some quarters it still persists today. It is not surprising that early rabbinic traditions of “rules for interpretation” should take this form. First, interpretations of the sacred biblical text became enshrined in fixed rabbinic traditions (even though these often developed to address new situations). Second, these early formulations had more to do with deductive logic than with hermeneutics in the broader sense of the term. Seven rules of interpretation were traditionally ascribed to Rabbi Hillel (about 30 b.c.).
The first five of these were, in effect, rules of deductive and inductive logic. The first (called “light and heavy”) related to drawing inferences. The second concerned the application of comparisons or analogy. The third, fourth, and fifth concerned deduction (drawing inferences from a general principle to a particular case) and induction (formulating a general axiom on the basis of inferences from particular cases). The sixth and seventh rules, by contrast, were more genuinely hermeneutical. They asked: What is the bearing of one passage of Scripture on the meaning of another? How does the wider context of a passage elucidate its meaning?
We should not overstate the significance of these seven “rules” (or middoth), for they were often subsequently applied in arbitrary ways, and rabbinic inquiry (midrash) into the sacred text held together belief in the definitive authority of the text with the possibility of radically multiple interpretations and applications. The so-called rules also had much in common with principles formulated in Hellenistic rhetoric of the times.
This concern for the whole process as it involves author, text, and reader, as an act or event of communication, distinguishes hermeneutics from exegesis in one of several different ways.
Finally, whereas exegesis and interpretation denote the actual processes of interpreting texts, hermeneutics also includes the second-order discipline of asking critically what exactly we are doing when we read, understand, or apply texts. Hermeneutics explores the conditions and criteria that operate to try to ensure responsible, valid, fruitful, or appropriate interpretation.
The importance of listening to a text on its own terms, rather than rushing in with premature assumptions or making the text fit in with prior concepts and expectations they may have.
Hermeneutics, by virtue of its multidisciplinary nature, provides an integrating dimension to … theological and religious studies.
This abridged excerpt is from Hermeneutics: An Introduction by Anthony C. Thiselton. It can be purchased on Amazon.