HERMENEUTICS AS THE STUDY of interpretation has been understood in many different ways and applied to many different practices. One article can cover only small portion of vast subject: our concern here is with relationship between living religious traditions and their task of engaging in an ongoing way with wider cultures to whose historical formation they have made significant contributions. (1) This article, written by historian, presumes general inadequacy of Enlightenment and modern understandings of and turns to question of what should replace these to foster Christian engagement in future. (2) It asks what one's hermeneutics, so far as they apply to interpretation of would look like if we significantly abandoned Enlightenment categories, but did not simply return to premodern ideas. As is often case, in order to overcome problems that arose in modernity, this article returns to developments that existed before modern period, but were not at that time fully explored. goal is to rethink our past, to end of addressing our present. First an overview. I will restrict myself to theWest, but good deal of recent writing on such things as Global systems theory suggests that things were not that different elsewhere. (3) Around world, most people used some form of cosmological framework (Fire, Water, Earth, and Sky) into which they placed whatever more localized story they had to tell. About 700 B.C., Greek Hesiod presented as descending from or beginning with gods: title of one of his works, Theogony, which narrates story of how cosmos took form, bringing this down to creation of humans and human can be translated The Descent of Gods. By time of Thucydides (c. 460-c. 404 B.C.), larger cosmological framework could be dispensed with in favor of an essentially political interpretive or this-worldly framework. How much one lived in the time of gods or in the time of man varied from writer to writer and culture to culture, and, where Western Enlightenment has little penetrated, some have continued a life among gods to present. (4) In book of enduring significance, Karl Lowith stressed that, though strong tendency of nineteenth-century thought was to label such interpretive frameworks philosophies of history, they were generally more theological than philosophical in nature. (5) Christopher Dawson went step further, and suggested that Christian view of not be called philosophy of history at all, but theology of history. (6) In any case, from beginning cosmologies were used to frame historical narratives, and, outside Jewish and Christian traditions, without much attention to what hermeneutically speaking was involved in so doing. Thucydides, for instance, did not prove that of its very nature should be political narrative, but assumed this. It was his faith, or what passed as faith in an apparently secularized writer. One might say that he wanted to provide storyline for his time, and though he could see from evidence that of Peloponnesian war could provide one, he could not find in this evidence that narrative political frame is intrinsically better than Hesiod's old god-oriented line. Thucydides's approach could show utility of seeing as centrally about politics, but it could not show that political was more important category for understanding than, say, economical. In writings of Thucydides, idea that is essentially political is something brought to historical record rather than something rising from it. Among ancient thinkers, he was not alone in making such an assumption: no ancient really recognized that historical framework he used was more assumed than philosophically grounded. Greater clarity concerning such issues emerged when Christianity came to center stage. …