Paul Ricoeur’s Biblical Hermeneutics: the Meaning of the Bible as a Text

Abstract

This article aims to argue that the Bible as a sacred text can be understood and interpreted from the perspective of hermeneutics. There is a question whether literary theories could be applied to the understanding of the Bible. Since Friedrich Schleiermacher began to search for the possibility of the interaction between the Bible and literary perspectives in the 19th Century, Biblical Hermeneutics has developed in various ways. In spite of the divine authority of the Bible, one of the basic grounds for Biblical Hermeneutics is that the Bible was written by an individual author in a specific historical context and a human language. Paul Ricoeur tries to show that the Bible is regarded as a text to be interpreted from the perspective of a literary theory by establishing an inclusive hermeneutical frame. Particularly, Ricoeur investigates the relationship between revelation and the various forms of discourse, and points out the variety of God’s revelation in each discourse. In addition, the process of establishing the Canon is considered in the relationship between the text and the community. There is a mutual relationship of interpretation between them in that they define each other.