HERMENEUTICS AND CHRISTIAN PRAXIS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF HERMENEUTICS1

Abstract

The history of philosophical hermeneutics since Schleiermacher can be read as a story of success. Understanding and explanation, the two principal dimensions of any act of critical interpretation, have been well examined. The hermeneutical circle and the necessity of initial prejudgements as to the overall meaning of the text have been analysed in depth. We know that our understanding of written and oral texts needs to be validated by a detailed analysis of the textual strategies, i.e. all the syntactical and semantic procedures which together produce the textuality of the text. We know also, especially since the Gadamer-Habermas-debate in the 1970s, that a critical interpretation theory must include a critique of ideologies in order to be able to detect hidden interests and systematic distortions possibly operative in the act of interpretation. We have seen the usefulness of comparing the hermeneutical activity with human conversation and there fore speak today of'the hemeneutical conversation between reader and text'. The result of this conversation we may call with Hans-Georg Gadamer 'the fusion of horizons', that is the fusion of the horizon of the reader with the horizon of the texts. We have been helped by Paul Ricoeur to acknowledge that any serious reading of literary or religious texts may result in challenging us to review our present mode of being in the world in the light of the mode of being in the world disclosed by the text in the act of reading. And we have been made aware by David Tracy that some texts are able to attract the reader's attention more than others. Such texts which have