Hermeneutics A Very Short Introduction

[Melissa Hassel]

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What does hermeneutics mean? Where did the term originate and how is it used in day-to-day life? Jens Zimmermann, author of Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction, tell us 9 things everyone should know about hermeneutics.

Jens Zimmermann is Professor of Humanities and Canada Research Chair for Interpretation, Religion and Culture at Trinity Western University, Canada. He is the author of Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction.

Hermeneutics defines the rules used to search out the meaning of Scripture. Throughout church history, interpreters have approached biblical interpretation in different ways, using different tools and methods. This book conveniently and accessibly surveys major biblical interpreters and approaches to hermeneutics from the patristic period to the present days. It provides a theoretical basis for understanding the processes of hermeneutics in different faith traditions.

This short introduction to hermeneutics has grown directly out of years of classroom teaching, mainly in the University of Glasgow and most recently in the University of Iowa. In the last two years, the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Glasgow has developed a distance-taught degree in religious studies, and this proved to be a golden opportunity to set my increasingly dog-eared lecture notes out into a more comprehensible, ordered, and up-to-date form. That is the immediate basis for this book.

It is, therefore, very modest in its aims and objectives (to use the ghastly quality assurance parlance of the modern university). Its scholarship is, I trust, well founded, but it makes absolutely no claims to originality. Indeed, quite the opposite, for my aim is to give the reader a good grounding in the basic issues and in historical information on which further thought and reading may be built. It is limited very largely to the Western Christian tradition and its roots in the interpretation of the Bible.

Generations of students have contributed ideas, and I thank all of them! My colleagues in Glasgow, Marije Althorf, Darlene Bird, Andrew Hass (now of the University of Stirling), and Sarah Nicholson, have helped me teach this material at one time or another, and especial thanks go to them. Dr. Nicholson, in particular, was the genius behind the distance-taught degree, and has labored valiantly over lecture notes to make them comprehensible and coherent outside the walls of the traditional classroom. For most recent help, I must thank Professor David E. Klemm and his colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. The bestowal on me of an Ida Cordelia Beam Visiting Professorship in the spring semester of 2003 gave me the space and time actually to write the book and put it into its present expanded form.

The German nineteenth-century theologian and scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher reminds us that the task of hermeneutics is never finished. Reading is an art as much as writing, and a skill with many parts. This book is just a first step along the road, but one that will, I hope, set the reader in the right direction with a little more confidence and mindful of the company of many who have gone before and acquired a little wisdom in their travels.

Donald K. McKim begins the Introduction to his book A Guide to Contemporary Hermeneutics (1986) with a fine understatement that is nevertheless profoundly true! To launch into the field of hermeneutics is a major undertaking. The student of the present book will encounter issues in a bewildering range of intellectual disciplines, frequently, it seems, at odds with one another: historical inquiry, literary studies, philosophy, theology, and more. This small work is intended only as a brief introduction to this hermeneutical minefield, but I hope a useful one, inasmuch as it seeks to provide the reader who has little or no prior knowledge of the subject with a map that will enable him or her to get around a little more easily as the going becomes tougher later on. Its background is largely limited to the Western Christian tradition and its ways of reading the Bible, as a way to more general questions about texts and reading and the issues facing us in our contemporary cultural situations. It makes no claims to be more than a beginning, but it will, I trust, provide a good foundation for the future. As important as any information that it contains are the questions it poses. It must be made clear from the start, however, that to these there are no final or correct answers.

For instance, 1 and 2 Chronicles are essentially a rewriting of the books of Kings to suit a different culture, and different theological and even different ethical requirements. We need to be aware of what is happening in such a process. Part of this process is also the history of the development of the canon of Scripture, to which some attention will be given. Understanding a book is not simply a matter of looking at how it was written, but also the history of how it has been read and accepted as authoritative.

My hope is that after working through this book, the reader should be in a position to understand and reflect on the history and theory of interpretation in the West, both in the context of biblical study and in the range of disciplines taught in departments of religion and seminaries. I hope that it will also be useful for all students of literature, whether they are concerned with the Bible or not. Its purpose is to provide a point of reference for students and teachers from which they can advance to further thought and study. From it the reader will be able to acquire a clear knowledge of biblical hermeneutics from a historical perspective as well as an introductory knowledge of the theoretical and philosophical issues that underlie their development. In addition, this knowledge will be closely related to contemporary questions in literature, religion, and theology and the place and authority of the Bible in our culture.

Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, ed. The Hermeneutics Reader. Blackwell, 1985. (This deals only with the eighteenth century to the present day. It is not specifically concerned with religious questions, but is an excellent introduction to the primary critical issues.)

**Jeanrond, Werner G. Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance. Macmillan, 1991. (Recently republished by SCM Press. Clear, straightforward, and essential reading. This deals with both ideas and the historical development of the subject as a category of theological thinking.)

*McKim, Donald K., ed. A Guide to Contemporary Hermeneutics: Major Trends in Biblical Interpretation. Reprint Wipf & Stock, 1999. (A very useful collection of essays indicating the range and complexity of the subject, by major authors.)

Caputo, John D. Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Indiana University Press, 1987. (This is a difficult book, not for the fainthearted, but one of the best introductions to contemporary and postmodern hermeneutics.)

Jasper, David. The New Testament and the Literary Imagination. Macmillan, 1987. (A simple and straightforward introduction to New Testament interpretation, which covers particular questions concerning such matters as narrative, proverbial form, the problem of history, and the nature of biblical poetry.)

*Lundin, Roger, Anthony C. Thiselton, and Clarence Walhout. The Responsibility of Hermeneutics. Eerdmans, 1985. (Recently reprinted. This is a clear and straightforward defense of why hermeneutics is important.)

Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace. Fortress Press, 1995. (A selection of essays by Ricoeur that provide a very good introduction to his work and thought.)

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics and Criticism, and Other Writings. Edited by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge University Press, 1998. (The best and most accessible way into this pivotal figure in the history of hermeneutics through selections of his writings, with an excellent critical introduction that sets Schleiermacher in historical and philosophical context.)

Wadsworth, Michael, ed. Ways of Reading the Bible. Harvester Press, 1981. (This book, now sadly long out of print, is a series of fascinating essays on different issues in biblical hermeneutics through particular texts such as the parables of Jesus.)

The topic of this article, then, is hermeneutics insofar as it isgrasped as the philosophy of interpretation and as the historicalmovement associated with this area. In this, hermeneutics isconcerned, first of all, to clarify and, in turn, to establish thescope and validity of interpretive experience.

Now, philosophers associated with hermeneutics describe the success ofunderstanding in a number of manners. However else the success ofunderstanding is described, though, it is typically also described asedifying or educative. Indeed, Hans-Georg Gadamer, thephilosopher perhaps most closely associated with hermeneutics in ourtimes, closely connects interpretive experience with education. Byeducation, he has in mind the concept of formation (Bildung)that had been developed in Weimar classicism and that continued toinfluence nineteenth-century romanticism and historicism in Germany(Truth and Method, Part I.1).[1] Education, as formation, involves more than the acquisition ofexpertise, knowledge, or information; it concerns the enlargement ofour person through formal instruction, especially in the arts andhumanities, as well as through extensive and variegated experience.Accordingly, the success of understanding is educative in that welearn from our interpretive experience, perhaps not only about amatter, but thereby also about ourselves, the world, and others.

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