For students of the theory and practice of biblical interpretation, the work of Paul Ricoeur increases in importance. He has not written a single work that comes close to summarizing all aspects of his thought on Bible interpretation. 14 The meaning of the text is taken seriously among other constructions of the human condition that enter into dialogue with it.
Ricoeur's chosen task is not to interpret the Bible within a religious community. An early program for his attempt to do this appears in the last chapter of The Symbolism of Evil. It is not the mythological bearer of the gospel message that prevents us from hearing.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND
Ricoeur says that we "read" our limits in the objectivities we encounter, by consulting the signs generated when these givens of the human situation are explored by "counter-disciplines". This "reading" of the meaning of my consciousness by reference to objective accounts of that consciousness establishes a connection that Ricoeur calls "diagnostic," a designation that rests on an inverted medical analogy. The hermeneutic problem thus becomes a problem of the analytic of this being, Dasein, which exists through understanding."30.
He finds that the Adamic myth encapsulates and synthesizes many of the themes of other myths, and thus functions as the most adequate imaginative expression of what is involved in our connotations with evil. The case of the symbolism of evil is not an exception, a branch of the gloomy experience of evil. It is in these objects, in the broadest sense of the word, that the Ego must lose itself and find itself.
INTERPRETING BIBLICAL TEXTS
What must be appropriated is the meaning of the text itself, understood in a dynamic way as the direction of thought opened by the text.'39. Primarily, what is the nature of the process that produces a text that purports to be a revealing testimony to the truth? For Ricoeur, "the Christian fact itself is understood by producing a change of meaning within the ancient Scriptures."50 The kerygma is a rereading of the Old Testament.
With this observation we find ourselves in the middle of the second question raised by Ricoeur's philosophy of testimony. 34; the immediacy of this decision at the expense of the historical, communal and cosmic temporal aspects contained in the hope of the Resurrection."74. 34; inseparable from deciphering the signs of the new creation."75 We are still further here from the existential interpretation.
THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUALIZATION
In these circumstances, the conditions for the "regeneration" of the will cannot be deduced from the form. For, as Ricoeur points out, in the Dialectic in Kant's Second Critique we find the question of the "complete or complete" object of the will. Such an ideal, it seems, would be a counterpart to the articulation of the freedom of self-abdication.
34;servant will." It would be an articulation of the symbols and metaphors of humanity as recreated and fulfilled. This articulation has begun, but only barely, in Ricoeur's treatment of the resurrection texts. Ricoeur has preached from time to time in Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago and elsewhere.
Essays on Biblical Interpretation by Paul Ricoeur
Preface to Bultmann
- THE HERMENEUTIC QUESTION
- DEMYTHOLOGIZATION
- THE TASK OF INTERPRETATION
This insight is the fruit of the scientific spirit, and in this sense it is a recent acquisition. It is the very first distance between the listener and the witness to the event. It is not the life of the author that controls the understanding, but the essence of the meaning expressed in the text.
It is the objectivity of the text, understood as content — the carrier of meaning and the demand for it. Only if we begin with the essence of the Holy can we think about the essence of divinity. And only in the light of the essence of divinity can anything be a word that God names.
Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation
- THE ORIGINARY EXPRESSIONS OF REVELATION I will begin on the side of revelation and my first remarks will be
- PROPHETIC DISCOURSE
- NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
- PRESCRIPTIVE DISCOURSE
- WISDOM DISCOURSE
- HYMNIC DISCOURSE
- THE RESPONSE OF A HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY
- THE WORLD OF THE TEXT AND THE NEW BEING My first investigation, into what I will call the space of the
- MEDIATING REFLECTION AND TESTIMONY
Which of the biblical forms of discourse should be taken as the basic referent for a meditation on the idea of revelation. The idea of the Covenant defines a whole complex of relations, starting from the most fearful and exacting obedience to it. The same applies to the Torah, as well as to the spiritual character of the hymn.
What announces itself there is in each case qualified by the form of the announcement. According to the vision of the burning bush, it is, in a way, their vanishing point. Just as the world of the poetic texts opens up over the ruins of
It is a special case, because the Bible is one of the great songs of existence. This third concept corresponds in the "subjective" order to the concept of the sacred text in the "objective" order. The subjective concept corresponding to the concept of the sacred text is the concept of appropriation.
This act is the exact counterpart of the autonomy of writing and the externalization of the work.
The Hermeneutics of Testimony
- THE PROBLEM
- SEMANTICS OF TESTIMONY
- IRRUPTION OF THE PROPHETIC AND KERYGMATIC DIMENSION
- THE HERMENEUTICS OF TESTIMONY
A philosophy that seeks to unite an experience of the absolute with the idea of the absolute. This depouillment is not only ethical, but also speculative; is when the thought of. But we immediately see the enormity of the paradox that the philosophy of testimony evokes.
It is this quality that is implicit in the decisive, active and voluntary aspect of the judgment that decides. The involvement of the witness in testimony is the fixed point why the scope of. Quantitatively, it is in the fourth Gospel that we find the vast majority of the words martus (47 out of 77) and marturia (30 out of 37).
The function of the witness is raised to the level of the last judge. The inner witness of the Holy Spirit takes on all its meaning in the struggle that takes place. Nowhere is the theology of testimony more clearly connected to that of the great trial.
It is therefore in the perspective of the trial that the martyr indicates the superior seal of testimony. The internal testimony of the spirit in the community replaces the testimony of outward signs. But Hegel claims to collect the meaning historically found in the logic of the concept.
The awakening of consciousness and the recognition of the absolute in its signs are reciprocal.
Freedom in the Light of Hope
- THE KERYGMA OF FREEDOM
- A PHILOSOPHICAL APPROXIMATION OF FREEDOM IN THE LIGHT OF HOPE
It is this temporary constitution of the "promise" that must now guide us in the interpretation of the New Testament. How can we interpret the Resurrection in terms of hope, of promise, of the future. The Resurrection is the sign that the promise is henceforth for all; the meaning of the.
Freedom in the light of hope, expressed in psychological terms, is nothing more than this creative imagination of the possible. Covenant, Law, Liberty, as power to obey or disobey, are derivative aspects of the promise. This logic of surplus and excess is as much the folly of the cross as it is the wisdom of the resurrection.
Passion for the possible, mission and exodus, the denial of the reality of death, the response of the abundance of meaning to. This great philosophy of the will is, to me, an inexhaustible reservoir of descriptions and mediations. A theology of hope cannot fail to be in dialogue with it, so close to it is the problem of activating freedom.
As a thought of the world, it appears at a time when reality has completed its development. What does Kant say about freedom as the object of the postulate of practical reason. The second postulate only succeeds in developing the temporal-existential aspect of the postulate of freedom; I will say: this is the dimension of the hope of freedom itself.
Radical evil means that the contingency of the evil maxim is the expression of a necessarily corrupt nature of freedom.
Paul Ricoeur's Reply to Lewis S
Mudge
It is at this point that I encounter Lewis Mudge's reorganization of the entire field, no longer in terms of the sequence of my works, but in terms of their inner structure as a whole. By picking up this category, Mudge shows how some of the issues I discussed at different times and within are different. The first of these constellations brings together the philosophical wager which, in The Symbolism of Evil, leads me to underline the centrality of the biblical account of the Fall among other myths or stories, and the kind of foreknowledge that provides orientation to the Fall.
Once again, according to Mudge, it is the testimony given to irreducible meanings that is the soul of resistance to all reductive efforts. In other words, there is no direct path from myself to myself except through the roundabout. And he sees this ongoing process working on three levels, within the texts themselves understood as a repository of traditions, at the level of doxologies and theological interpretations, at the level of the community, which builds its own identity on this process of interpretation.
34. Is there a connection,” asks Mudge, “between the critical disciplines and the search for truth, which distinguishes between true and false testimony for the reader of the Bible today? Frei says in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics that the question of the referential claims of these stories remains unavoidable. One of the ways out of this labyrinth would be to say that the world depicted in biblical stories that destroys our ordinary conceptions of the "real" world is not a historical world, a world of real events, but the world of text. .
It does not describe any real-world object, but generates an emotional pattern that reshapes our entire world. But the issue comes back to the relationship between this ontological atmosphere of the work and its ethical perspectives, on the one hand, and the historical events that are simultaneously described by those historical stories, on the other. Should we then say about the Resurrection that something happened, but that we only have the trace of the event in the testimonies that are already interpretations.
34;The Speech of God." I think Mudge is right to suggest that a philosophy of the border in the Kantian sense—which would be the philosophical equivalent of negative theology—does not exclude but requires a special kind of symbol whose function would be to "imagine the border, through which the demand of conceptual knowledge for completeness cannot exceed.” Moreover, as I suggested in my.
