Biblical Interpretation: Old and New Testaments, a New Hermeneutic(s)?

Abstract

Does mimetic theory involve or presuppose a new hermeneutic? At least in the sense that Girardian mimetic theory presupposes and uses a continuation or adaptation of the kind of figural or typological interpretation that characterized much Christian reading of the Bible from Antiquity to the onset of Modernity, the answer is no. But on the other hand, it is only fairly recently that something such as figural or typological interpretation has been undertaken in an age of, and in conversation with, scientifically verifiable critical realism and historical criticism—which is often, at the outset, assumed to have supplanted or invalidated figural or typological interpretation. In that sense, mimetic theory, especially in the ways in which it has been recently developing in the writings of both Girard and his Christian interpreters, does involve what can seem to be a “new” hermeneutic.