Hermeneutical Key Research Articles

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man: Nabokov's Evolving Body Paradigm

This article explores ways in which Peter Brooks' notions of the semiotization of the body and of the somatization of story may furnish hermeneutic keys to Nabokov's works. It focuses on the latter's non-fictional writings from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as his novels ­— notably Lolita , Ada and especially The Original of Laura ­—, so as to examine how the paradigms of agon and eros operate in the writer's figuring of the reader and in his elaboration of embodied narratives.

Discernimiento cristiano de la revelación divina. Los «pasajes oscuros» del Antiguo Testamento según Benedicto XVI y la Comisión Teológica Internacional

In its recent document God the Trinity and the Unity of Humanity, the International Theological Commission offers principles to reconcile the many Old Testament texts in which God ostensibly acts against his own nature by commanding deeds such as the slaughter of men, women, and children. This piece frames discussion of so-called «dark passages» in light of three hermeneutical keys: the divine pedagogy, the discernment of authorial assertions, and the spiritual sense. In particular, these principles will be applied to Psalm 137, one of the most beautiful and yet disturbing texts of the Old Testament.

Orality and Context in a Hermeneutical Key

This paper shows that pentecostal hermeneutics (Latina/o–Canadian hermeneutics specifically), is fluid, dynamic, and participatory, and follows a narratival approach to the reading of the biblical text. Instead of perceiving the Bible as containing a foreign story, for pentecostals the Bible narrates their own journey of faith, as they seek communion with God. As an expression of the popular character of pentecostalism, this paper highlights the elements of orality, participation, experiential contextuality, and scriptural pneumatology as key hermeneutical principles in engaging the biblical text. I argue that for pentecostals reading the Bible is not a mere exercise, but rather it is a sacramental space of the Spirit by which people listen to the message of good news. Pentecostal hermeneutics can be better understood as a conversation with the text so as to tease out the divine voice and its relevance for Christian living. In order to show how these elements are interwoven, I will engage the Latina/o–Canadian pentecostalism, as a example of the complex and fluid character of pentecostal hermeneutics.

The Hermeneutic Key “Charity” in the Comprehension of Church according to the Vatican Council II: A Study Focused on the Teachings about Hierarchy

The Hermeneutic Key “Charity” in the Comprehension of Church according to the Vatican Council II: A Study Focused on the Teachings about Hierarchy

“United but not Confused”: Calvin's Anthropology as Hermeneutical Key to Understanding his Societal Doctrine

“United but not Confused”: Calvin's Anthropology as Hermeneutical Key to Understanding his Societal Doctrine

DOES CONTEXTUAL EXEGESIS REQUIRE AN AFFIRMING BIBLE? LESSONS FROM ‘APARTHEID’ AND ‘AFRICA’ AS NARCISSISTIC HERMENEUTICAL KEYS

It has become almost impossible to critique the concept of contextual exegesis of the Bible in Africa. Moreover, “relevance” in biblical interpretation is implicitly understood as the texts of the Bible affirming the current socio-political project(s) of a group with a current claim to power. Clearly, such hermeneutics are ideologically determined efforts at seeking legitimacy for these socio-political projects. Criticism of or alternatives to such efforts in biblical interpretation are regarded with severe suspicion. Building forth on previous studies, this paper analyses the ways in which, first, “apartheid” and now, “Africa”, have functioned as such narcissistic hermeneutical keys. The critical religious and socio-political functions of the biblical texts are thus lost in this “political carnival” (J Ellul).

DamayanthiNiles, Worshipping at the Feet of Our Ancestors: Hendrik Kraemer and the Making of Contextual Theology in South Asia. Berlin and Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012. 128 pp.

Damayanthi Niles, Worshipping at the Feet of Our Ancestors: Hendrik Kraemer and the Making of Contextual Theology in South Asia. Berlin and Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012.128 pp. One of the major turning points within the Protestant theological tradition was the challenge the two world wars and the atrocities related to them brought to the emerging liberal theological tradition of the late 19m century. The liberal movement had been attempting to move away from some of the central themes of the classical theological traditions by bringing the historical Jesus into focus and by insisting that human beings, in responding to the challenge of discipleship, would be able to build through their own efforts a stable world based on peace and justice. When this confidence in human ability to usher in the kingdom of God was in shambles, Karl Barth came to the rescue by re-introducing, albeit from a new angle, the classical themes of the absolute transcendence of God, the sinfulness of the human condition and the Gospel message as the only hope for the fallen While the significance and impact of neo-orthodoxy introduced by Barth and his followers is very widely acknowledged, Christian theology has not given equal attention to the way neo-orthodoxy was translated and applied to Protestant missiology and the impact this has had on Christian attitudes to other religions and the practice of mission in the world. At the centre of the interpretation of neo-orthodoxy for mission stands the Dutch missiologist Hendrik Kraemer. The role Kraemer played at the third World Missionary Conference in in 1938 and the Tambaram controversy that followed are essential to understanding 19th and 20th century theology of missions and the Asian theological responses to it. Damayanthi Niles has done a valuable service in the search for authentic Asian theology today by re-visiting the debate in and especially by exploring the way some of the South Asian theologians dealt with it in the course of their own struggle to do theology in the context of resurgent religions in the post-independent South Asian nations like India and Sri Lanka. Having given a clear and concise statement of the issues at stake and the foci of the chapters to follow in her Introduction, Niles devotes her first two chapters to giving an account of Kraemer's positions in his preparatory volume for the conference, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, and the animated and divisive debate that followed it. She puts her finger correctly on the three main pillars on which Kraemer built his argument, namely, his understanding of religion, his affirmation of the sinfulness of human beings that deprives them of having any saving knowledge of God by their own efforts and the elevation of the Gospel message above all religions, including Christianity as a religious phenomenon. She gives some insightful perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of the positions taken by the respondents to Kraemer, including Pandippedi Chenchiah, Alfred George Hogg, David G. Moses and Karl Hartenstein. In the subsequent chapters Niles examines the theology of four of the leading post-Tambaram theologians in South Asia, M. M. Thomas, Lynn A. de Silva, Aloysius Pieris and Lakshman Wickremasinghe, taking their approach to religion and their responses to the neo-orthodox separation of the gospel from religions as the hermeneutical keys for her assessment. While recognizing the contributions made by M. M. Thomas and Lynn de Silva, Niles rightly points out how their approaches to other religions were curtailed by their commitment to the neo-orthodox insistence on elevating the gospel above all religions. She shows that Pieris and Wickremasinghe were able to find more adequate ways of relating to religious plurality by moving away from neo-orthodoxy and Kraemer's highly contested understanding of religions. In the limited pages allotted to M. …

Frei aber arm? Soziale Sicherheit als Schlüssel zum Verhältnis der Sklavenfreilassungsgesetze im Pentateuch

Abstract A synoptic examination of the laws concerning the liberation of slaves in Ex 21:2-11, Lev 25:39-46 and Dtn 15:12-18 which considers the relationship of all three texts to each other seems to suggest that the law in Dtn combines the other two texts. This is supported by the observation of A. Schenker that the stipulations in Lev 25:39-46 and Ex 21:3-4 are complementary. The earlier arguments for a dependency of Lev 25 on Dtn 15—critically evaluated in the version of Stackert here—are no longer sustainable. It seems that Dtn 15:12-18 is an attempt to transfer the complementary stipulations of Ex 21:2-11 and Lev 25:39-46 into a consistent rule doing justice to both laws. The hermeneutical key is social protection.

누가의 ‘예수의 죽음’ 이해(눅 23:44-49)

The aim of this study is to examine Luke’s understanding of Jesus’ death which has been described in Luke 23:44-49. For this purpose, we have conducted examinations utilizing the approach of intertextuality between Luke 23:44-49 and the Peter"s Pentecost speech in Acts 2:14-41.<BR> Findings from this study are as follows.<BR> In Luke 23:44-49, Jesus has been portrayed as the obedient son of God doing His will. This theme has been expressed by the last word of Jesus on the cross (Luke 23:46; Ps. 30:6 quotation), exposing Jesus’ complete trust in God. Through the lips of Peter, Luke says that Jesus" death was ‘the plan of God’(Acts 2:23), and proclaims that the promise of God about the resurrection of Jesus has been fulfilled (Acts 2:24-28). In Luke, the death of Jesus was on the way to the eschatological ‘last days’(Luke 23:44-45), and the ‘last days’ have been inaugurated by the Jesus’ pouring out of the Spirit upon the disciples on the Pentecost(Acts 2:17-21; Joel 2:28-32 LXX quotation). Furthermore, Luke declares that Jesus was not only the ‘innocent’ but also the ‘righteous’ one(23:47). This notion is supported by Psalm 15 LXX(Acts 2:25-28 quotation) in which it is implied that according to the late Jewish thought about life after death: the righteous one does not go down to ‘sheol’ but ascends directly to the paradise in heaven. The reference of Luke about the people’s guilty feeling about Jesus’ death in Peter"s speech(Acts 2:37), appears similarly in the death of Jesus(Luke 23:48).<BR> Luke 23:44-49 and Acts 2:14-41 are the hermeneutical keys for each other and illustrate the dynamics of the texts. Luke saw Jesus on the cross, who had been faithful to God and who entrusted himself to God until the last moment. On the basis of this understanding, Luke depicted the death of Jesus through a sophisticated literary work.

Maimonides, Spinoza, and Buber Read the Hebrew Bible: The Hermeneutical Keys of Divine “Fire” and “Spirit” (Ruach)

In this study I will focus on three seminal thinkers within the philosophical tradition generally and, more particularly, within Jewish thought, not regularly mentioned together owing to the profound historical and intellectual distances between them. However, Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77), and Martin Buber (1878–1965), aside from their common roots in Judaism, shared an abiding interest in the Hebrew Bible, especially in developing hermeneutical approaches that would best meet the challenges posed to it by their respective intellectual and historical contexts. Each was exquisitely attuned to the nuances of biblical Hebrew and each had an overarching concern for establishing a hermeneutic dedicated to communicating the truest sense of the biblical text. Their respective biblical lexicographic projects come into sharper focus when placed in dialogue with one other. This is true especially as Spinoza’s primary critical target in his hermeneutical enterprise is Maimonides, with whom he had more in common than the chronological distance between them of nearly half a millennium would suggest. Buber engages both, explicitly and implicitly, in formulating what he would term an “encounter with,” rather than a simple reading of, the text. The latter is best articulated in a series of studies explicating his approach to the monumental

INSTITUTIONALISED CHRISTIANITY AND THE QUESTION OF GENDER HIERARCHY

The paper develops, from a feminist point of view, the issues of emergence and presence of patriarchal principles, gender hierarchy and unequal distribution of power between the genders within Christianity. First of all, it poses the question as to whether patriarchal supremacy is proper to and ordained by the Christian tradition or has developed and strengthened throughout the process of the institutionalisation of Christianity. The western world, shaped under the influence of Christianity, has been recording an increased number of critical questions concerning the issue of gender hierarchy within individual Christian Churches, the Catholic Church in particular. The patriarchal character of the Church order is called into question and put under a microscope. With the help of a scientific methodology that employs the hermeneutic key of feminist theology the paper endeavours to trace the origins of patriarchal androcentrism and unequal appreciation of the two genders. The results of the discussion corroborate the hypothesis that during the process of institutionalisation the Catholic Church adopted the patriarchal denotation of the culture in which it developed, and confirm the theory that Christianity in its doctrine sets a strong imperative of gender equality, grounded both in the person of Jesus Christ and his attitude towards women as well as in the Bible.

The Day of Atonement as a Hermeneutical Key to the Understanding of Christology in Hebrews

ABSTRACTThis study contributes to the discussion of the hermeneutics of Hebrews by considering the book's background thought and central theme. Specifically, we attempt to show how the worldview(s) and references to the Israelite cult form the décor against which the book's Christology acts out a new, supreme story of atonement. Crucial to the Christology of Hebrews is the role of Christ as High Priest, found in Hebrews in the context of the Jewish festival, the Day of Atonement. It is precisely this relationship between the Christology of Hebrews and the Day of Atonement that forms the focus of the study. Focusing on both the background and central theme of the book (its Christology), this study proposes that the priesthood and the Day of Atonement define the contours within which the Christology of Hebrews should be interpreted. We argue that the Day of Atonement functions as a hermeneutical key to the Christology of Hebrews and—since this is the book's central theme—to the book of Hebrews as a whole. We propose, furthermore, that references to the Day of Atonement offer an interpreted religious and liturgical space for Christ to function as the superior High Priest. In this capacity, He is able to bring about a new covenant in which perfect atonement is achieved once and for all.

El legado filosófico-político del exilio español del 39

The political thought of the Spanish exile of 1939 offers, seventy years later, fruitful and current perspectives. Besides a systematic and well-known work, linked to critical Marxism, such as the one of Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, include other expressions, fragmented and meandering character, which focuses this paper. These were, namely, the early genealogy of fascism pointed out by Eugenio Imaz and Maria Zambrano using different hermeneutical keys, but overlapping in linking it to the secularizing progression of modern reason. Second, the memory of own exile to both appealed against a complacent present about the victims of his more recent past, thereby leading to a debate between history and memory impregnated of political meaning. And third, the critique of contractarian logic pointed out by Eduardo Nicol on the horizon of a global techno-scientific rationality whose political implications affected the Spanish democracy instituted after the dictatorship.

Slow Man and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing

Summary This article addresses the problems of reading Slow Man (Coetzee 2005) through tracking its engagement with various levels of the real as well as its representation of the complex relationship between author, narrator and character. The real difficulty that besets the writer trying to produce a story from an inchoate idea is explored through the concept of substitution, one of the hermeneutic keys that structure the novel. Thus I examine the continuous slippage between the “real” and representation. The novel's turning of itself inside out is read, like Rachel Whiteread's sculpture, “House”, as an absence-as-presence that also points to its overt engagement with photography.

Memoria del exilio y exilio de la memoria

History and memory are not equivalent terms, still less when they point a past marked by exclusion and injustice. If history tends to reduce that past according to the criterion of scientific objectivity, memory marks his critical actuality. So the tension raised by an episode as the Spanish exile of 1939. Some reflections of three emblematic philosophers of that exile as Eugenio Imaz, Maria Zambrano and Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, are illuminating in this way. Written at moments and contexts so much significant as the pos-war, the second Franquism and the horizon of democratic Spain, they suggest excellent hermeneutic keys to state a memory of exile.

¿Pensamiento crítico en español?. De la dominación al exilio

The raising of a thought in Spanish, in critical terms, stumbles over the historical experience of the engagement of this language with the cultural and political project of exclusion and imperial expansion meant around 1492, as well as with the authoritarian inertias generated from then. So the relevancy of exiles in the Hispanic world, as hermeneutic fundamental key of a critical thought that answers not only opposite to those inertias, but also opposite to the alienating eurocentrismo. Special mention deserves the Spanish exile of 39, in view of his Spanish American meaning, tied in addition to the radical crisis that at the time crosses the European civilization. Works as those of Jose Gaos, Eduardo Nicol or Joaquin Xirau, among others, raised answers in this respect.

The Concept of "Gift" as Hermeneutical Key to the Dignity of the Human Person

The Concept of "Gift" as Hermeneutical Key to the Dignity of the Human Person Damian P. Fedoryka (bio) One of the concepts cutting across confessional, ethnic, and even political lines is the concept of human dignity. In some real sense it is truly "ecumenical." At the same time, the power of this idea is such that it can galvanize individuals, groups, and even nations into conflicts that threaten the very reality of human dignity. This paradoxical nature of the idea is itself grounded in a more or less explicit understanding of what it means to be human and to have the dignity of a person. Our understanding of dignity is built on our understanding and our experience of what it means to be a human person. The issue of human dignity is particularly difficult because there is something in human nature itself that allows two different individuals of the same human nature to have diametrically opposed experiences. We need to consider the kind of experience that allows for what can perhaps be called the "dialectic" that emerges in the conflicting accounts of human dignity. In doing this we will use the concept of the gift as what Pope John Paul II calls the "hermeneutics of the gift."1 We speak of the "experience" of the external world. Thus, we can experience a sunrise or a sunset. The sun presents itself to us as [End Page 49] rising and setting. The experience in question shapes our very language. And then, one day, a discovery occurs: the facts of the case are that the sun neither rises nor sets nor does it move across the sky. It is stationary. It is the observer that is moving. We come to know the facts of the case. And yet, the appearance of the rising and the setting sun does not change. The distinction between fact and experience shapes the consciousness of "modern human beings." Things are one way; they appear in another way. Or, we could say, things are not what they seem. It is the task of the scientist to discover a reality that is hiding behind appearances. And so, we have the expert, the scientist, telling the uninitiated what the world is really like. Love, for the romantic, appears to be one thing, but in reality, we are told, it is an evolutionary mechanism assuring the survival of a gene pool. God, for the religious sentiment, is an omnipotent and benevolent being, but in reality, we are told that sentiment is the product of impotence and imagination. As a result of this bifurcation of experience and so called scientific knowledge, we have a devaluation of "subjective experience" that is subordinated to if not crushed by objective, that is, "scientific" truth. This has its consequences for the experience of one's own dignity. Self affirmation, in the face of what appears an apparently relentless and dehumanizing progress of science and objective truth, almost inevitably brings with it, as a self protective response, a spreading skepticism and relativism. It is as if the affirmation of one's own dignity required the rejection of objective truth, which binds the subject. Thus, outside of the sphere of the strict empirical sciences, we find a proliferation of theories supposedly affirming subjectivity but in fact establishing a subjectivism.2 Frequently heard expressions of this are phrases such as, "The world is what you make of it," or "Existence is a state of mind," or "What is good for you may not be good for me," or finally, "Don't impose your opinions on others." A specific relativism, presenting itself as spiritual and mental pluralism with regard to truth, has emerged side by side with a legitimate cultural pluralism. Human dignity seems to require this. [End Page 50] But the very understanding of human nature and personal dignity itself becomes a casualty of such relativism and pluralism. In an attempt to recover the authentic dignity of the human person, we need to focus on experience of another sort. In this case, we move from the experience of the external world and turn to experience as the specific way in which we have our acts and perform them from "within...

The economy of consumption as a socio-theoretical proposal

We propose the concept of &quot;economy of consumption&quot; as a way of examining the multiple effects of contemporary consumption. We present an interdisciplinary approach to the factors and social processes that have configured Puerto Rico as an economy of consumption. If one considers the specific ways in which modernization has affected the country, as well as the social transformations it has undergone in recent decades,&nbsp; one can take a contextual view of Puerto Rico as an economy of consumption. The transformations of capital and the inscription within consumption itself, as an order of signification, are the hermeneutic keys of this analysis.

Silences du roman: Balzac et le romanesque contemporain

In this bold and refreshingly un-academic essay, Aline Mura asks the simple question: ‘Que reste-t-il de Balzac dans la littérature contemporaine?’. The value of her answer derives from a scrupulous reformulation of that question within an epistemological framework that bears scant resemblance to traditional literary history and depends still less on chronology. The subtlety of her none the less emphatic study stems from its recognition that the rediscovery of the machinery of the romanesque by some of the most original novelists writing in France today bears no resemblance to an act of pastiche or to the ossified practice that certain nouveaux romanciers made their all too easy target. It depends, likewise, on a view of Balzac's ‘modernity’ that Mura's fellow specialists may feel is no longer in need of militant propagation, but which doubtless retains an important corrective function in milieux where, in spite of the efforts of writers such as Pierre Michon, Robbe-Grillet's view of Balzac continues to hold sway. Her discussion thus assumes ‘l’écriture balzacienne' to be characterized by fragmentation, metatextuality and dialogism, though in respect of its specific arguments it proves consistently arresting. Any risk that the continuities she identifies between Balzac's experience of the romanesque and that of the impressive array of modern writers she brings into play (des Forêts's Le Bavard, La Chute, Aragon's Blanche ou l'oubli, the novels of Marguerite Duras, but, more especially, the work of Quignard, Millet, Oster and Juliet) will dissolve into a morass of generalization is obviated by her adoption of silence as a hermeneutic key. The numerous works of fiction adduced are revealed to constitute a rich and diverse reflection on silence (seen not as an absence of language but as another form of language) within the actual activity of writing. If Genette provides her with basic tools and an analytical rigour to match her own formidable powers of analysis, Mura's discussion is permeated by Blanchot, to the extent that her chosen writers' stance in the face of silence is viewed in terms of a heroism analogous to that attributed by Blanchot to Mallarmé. The eschewal of a chronological approach leads to her essay assuming the form of a series of concentric circles that succeed admirably in deepening our understanding, while none the less incorporating a certain amount of expendable repetition. Although it would be ungrateful to regret the absence of Proust, or to wish that the analysis of Beckett (via Juliet) went deeper, Mura's claim that bavards are strangely absent from the Comédie humaine is, itself, strange. The volume is marred by some glaring misprints and might, usefully, have contained both an index and a bibliography listing all the studies previously mentioned. These are, however, but small blemishes alongside its many insights, which are conveyed with an enviable talent for lapidary formulations. In its essentials, Mura's study constitutes an exemplary mode of access to the contemporary French novel and may, more humbly, serve as a convenient compendium of references to works with much to offer the student in search of a dissertation subject.

Exclusivist or Universalist? Origen the ‘Wise Steward of the Word’ (CommRom. V.1.7) and the Issue of Genre

Abstract: This article explores the issue of Origen's universalism. It identifies the two seemingly self‐contradictory strands in the Origen corpus which have led to dual pictures of Origen as either an arch‐universalist or an exclusivist. To make sense of this, the hermeneutical key of CommRom. V.1.7 (in which Origen states Paul covers over his universalism to be a ‘wise steward of the word’) is applied to Origen's own texts. Identifying the different genres in Origen's works, it is clear that different stances on universalism are taken dependent upon the genre of his work. The question is posed as to whether such a move in theology is justifiable and biblical.