Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.4 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
(which students of the NT still needed to hear) that 'there cannot be any such
thing as presuppositionless exegesis'. 'A specific understanding of the subject
matter of the text, on the basis of a "life-relation" to it, is always presupposed by
exegesis', hence the term, 'pre-understanding'. 82 The point is sometimes missed
when more conservative biblical scholars deem it sufficient to declare their presuppositions
before embarking on what most of their fellow scholars would regard
as uncritical exegesis, as though the declaration of presuppositions somehow
vindicated the exegesis itself (since 'Everyone has presuppositions'). But
the point is not simply that any reading of a text is shaped by the preunderstanding
brought to it. The point is rather that as the exegete moves round
the hermeneutical circle between pre-understanding and text, the text reacts back
upon the pre-understanding, both sharpening it and requiring of it revision at one
or another point, and thus enabling a fresh scrutiny of the text, necessitating in
turn a further revision of pre-understanding, and so on and on.
The most vicious form of the hermeneutical circle, however, has proved to
be that between reader and text as it has been developed within postmodern literary
criticism. Indeed, deconstructionist hermeneutics attempt in effect to undermine
the whole procedure envisaged in the hermeneutical circle by suggesting
that the reality is an infinite series of interlocking circles, where the search for
meaning is never ending and the play between signifier and signified goes on ad
infinitum. The image conjured up is of a computer game without an end, or of an
internet search into the infinity of cyberspace as web pages direct to other web
pages in an endless sequence, or indeed of a computer hacker who has succeeded
in so overloading a system that it crashes, or perhaps again of an academic colleague
who always insists on the impossibility of any effective discussion of an
academic subject or political policy without first resolving the problem of what
human consciousness is. Intellectually challenging as such exercises are, they do
not much assist in the living of life, the advance of knowledge, or the building of
community. To conceive the hermeneutical process as an infinitely regressive
intertextuality is a counsel of despair which quickly reduces all meaningful communication
to impossibility and all communication to a game of 'trivial pursuit'.
Perhaps it has been the image of a 'circle' which has misled us, since it invites
the picture of an endless 'going round in circles'. In fact, however, from its
earliest use, the hermeneutical circles were always perceived as a progressive exercise,
in which the circles, as it were, became smaller. Alternatively expressed,
the circle was seen more as a spiral, the circle in effect as a three-dimensional
cone, so that successive circlings resulted in a spiralling towards a common centre.
Wilhelm von Humboldt expressed the point well (though with nineteenth-
82. Bultmann, 'Exegesis without Presuppositions' 343-44, 347. See also Gadamer's
striking 'defence' of prejudice (Truth 270-71, 276-68).
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