Indholdsfortegnelse

Sammenfatning og konklusion 189
Summary in English
Text and Interpretation in Paul Ricoeur and Hans W. Frei
- An account with reference to the relation between philosophy of religion and exegesis
Introduction. It is the aim of this paper to call attention to the presence and nature of philosophical
implications of the theological exegetical interpretation of the Biblical scriptures,
through an account of the text-theoretical aspects in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and the
theology of Hans W. Frei. Through all of church history this interpretation of Scripture has
been object to a debate, which has accumulated due to the "linguistic turn" of philosophy in
the twentieth century.
Ch. 1 Text and Interpretation in Paul Ricoeur. This chapter first discusses the influence
on Ricoeur by a number of philosophers and his use of these. They are arranged along an
anthropological "line" from the centering of the subject by Descartes and Kant via a decentering
by Hegel, Freud and Heidegger to Ricoeur’s own synthesis, "the 'wounded' cogito",
whereby he tries to sustain the tension between these two movements. The human ego must
become a self through an interpretation of the signs that has been sat in the world by itself and
by culture.
The passage What is a text? encircles the text-theory of Ricoeur through a description of
the development in the authorship from word to sentence to work. Ricoeur defines text as
discourse fixed by writing. Discourse contains a dialectics of event and meaning. Text, as
discourse, has the character of event both by its becoming and by the reader’s appropriation,
but it is the discourse meaning which is kept by the scriptural fixation in writing and thereby
gives the discourse an endurance made possible by a simultaneous distanciation from the author.
The discourse escapes the author and a "semantic autonomy" arises.
This semantic autonomy is the condition of possibility for a surplus of meaning in the text,
which encounters the reader in symbol, metaphor and narrative. In the double meaning of the
symbol a second meaning is both given and hidden in the immediate meaning, and the symbol
indicates the opening of language towards a non-linguistic world. Being solely intra-textual
the metaphor unfolds at sentence level as a tension in the discourse which creates new meaning.
The narrative is the most important type of creative discourse at work level, where it produces
meaning by projecting out a world, which the reader can inhabit by appropriation. In
this way the reader’s existence is re-figured by his/her encounter with the text. Ricoeur uses