Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.4 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
Schleiermacher was well aware, the 'whole' was not simply the whole particular
writing, but the whole language and historical reality to which the particular text
belonged. 68 It is called a circle, because the hermeneutical process is unavoidably
a movement back and forth round the circle, where understanding is ever
provisional and subject to clarification and correction as the whole is illuminated
by the parts and the part by the whole. As Schleiermacher's pupil, P. A. Boeckh,
went on to point out, this hermeneutical circle 'cannot be resolved in all cases,
and can never be resolved completely'. Boeckh continues:
every single utterance is conditioned by an infinite number of circumstances,
and it is therefore impossible to bring to clear communication. . . . Thus the
task of interpretation is to reach as close an approximation as possible by
gradual, step-by-step approximation; it cannot hope to reach the limit. 69
The similarity to the procedures of historical study indicated above (§6.3) should
be obvious.
By way of immediate corollary, it is worth observing that narrative criticism
has attempted in effect to narrow the hermeneutical circle of whole and
parts, by limiting the whole to the text itself. 70 In narrative criticism, in order to
make sense of a part, verse, or passage of a Gospel, the hermeneutical circle need
only take in the whole of the Gospel itself. But all that has already been said
should be enough to show the weakness of this model of the hermeneutical circle.
The reality is that the historical text draws on (and its communicative potential
depends on) wider linguistic usage of the time; it makes references and allusions
to characters and customs which are not explained within 'the closed
universe' 71 of the text; it cannot be adequately understood without some awareness
of the society of the time. 72 For example, without knowledge of the extratextual
social tensions between Jews and Samaritans, a central thrust of the parable
of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) will be lost. 73 Without a knowledge of who
68. In Mueller-Vollmer, Hermeneutics Reader 84-85. Gadamer notes that 'this circular
relationship between the whole and the parts . . . was already known to classical rhetoric, which
compares perfect speech with the organic body, with the relationship between head and limbs'
(Truth 175).
69. In Mueller-Vollmer, Hermeneutics Reader 138.
70. See above, §5.6.
71. See chapter 5, n. 142 above.
72. B. J. Malina, The Social Gospel of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) 1-13 speaks
for the recent sociological perspective on the Jesus tradition when he suggests that 'The Bible
is necessarily misunderstood if one's reading of it is not grounded in an appreciation of the social
systems from which its documents arose' (5).
73. See further K. E. Bailey, Poet and Peasant: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables
in Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976) ch. 2.
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