Indholdsfortegnelse

190 Sammenfatning og konklusion
the narrative as the answer to the aporie between experienced and cosmic time viewing it as
the creator of a "historical" time.
The surplus of meaning in the text necessitates interpretation. Ricoeur evolves his interpretation
theory firstly through a confrontation of opposite viewpoints in hermeneutics versus
critique of ideology and structuralism and secondly against the background of the distance
implicated in text as written discourse and the idea of a world of the text projected by the text
as work or narrative. The theory includes both critique and appropriation in one hermeneutical
movement corresponding to the dialectic of life between belonging and alienation. It is a
movement from naive understanding via explanation to a substantiated understanding, a post
critical appropriation, which is the telos of interpretation, in which the reader makes the
meaning of the text her/his own and thereby understands her-/himself better.
Working with specifically religious language Ricoeur approaches the subject as a philosopher
seeking to identify a religious belief through its language, which as proclamation stays
in a tensional relationship to a phenomenology of the sign of the holy, its manifestation. Ricoeur
recognises a re-establishing of the holy - as a manifestation in the life of the believer -
in the Word delivered as witness fixed in writing. The subject of the Biblical texts, the world
they unfold, is the Kingdom of God, and these texts which "create what they name", and this
power forms their character of revelation. The Biblical texts include a wide range of discourse
forms. The purpose of the religious texts is giving rise to faith, and this faith is an appropriation
of and trust in what the text says and a new life in the world created by the text.
Some concluding critical remarks are raised concerning Ricoeur’s project: Does the focusing
on the subject’s appropriation entail a disadvantageous anthropocentrism? Does the concrete,
physical life disappear in Ricoeur’s "world of the text" made up by meaning and possibility?
Is the elimination of the author intention valid? In spite of these objections it is concluded,
that Ricour’s text-theory and philosophy form a suitable starting point for the discussion
of text and interpretation in a theological context.
Ch. 2 Hans W. Frei and the Realistic Narrative. The chapter is an account of the considerations
concerning text-theory, narrative and theory of science made by the American
theologian, Hans W. Frei, who is greatly influenced by the literary movement The New Criticism.
Frei further belongs to the postliberal Yale School both as a person who has inspired
others and as being influenced himself by among other things G. Lindbeck’s thinking concerning
a "cultural-linguistic" approach as method for a theology closer to sociology than to
philosophy.
Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative is examined and an illumination of Frei’s assessment
of a great number of hermeneutical and theological groupings and individuals is
made, in order to elucidate Frei’s insistence on the "realistic narrative", which contains its
meaning in itself. Frei has through this work made topical the nature of text meaning as field