Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.4 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
gree a product of the text; it is a consciousness of the text to be interpreted. It is
because the interpreter's consciousness has been thus 'effected' that it can be 'effectual
in finding the right questions to ask'. 87
Still more influential 88 has been Gadaraer's conception of the two 'horizons'
involved in hermeneutics, 'the horizon in which the person seeking to understand
lives and the historical horizon within which he places himself. But it
is not enough to think of the hermeneutical process as a transposition from the familiar
contemporary horizon to the alien horizon of the text. For the horizons,
particularly that of the interpreter, are neither static nor closed; they shift, they
are revisable. 'The horizon of the present is continually in the process of being
formed . . . (and) cannot be formed without the past'. Hence, 'understanding is
always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves'. 89
The value of this way of re-envisaging the hermeneutical circle is twofold.
90 First, it recognizes and affirms the fact of distance and difference between
the interpreter and the text. Even in the 'fusion of horizons' (Horizontverschmelzung)
the distinctiveness and difference of the other horizon are not
to be lost to sight. Second, the hermeneutical process is seen to be more than
simply Romanticism's empathetic feeling with the author; it is rather a movement
of growing recognition both of the text's otherness and yet also of its effect
(great or small, for good or ill) on the interpreter's own self-identity. The
fusion of horizons is another way of saying that the reciprocally revisionary
character of the hermeneutical circle is a spiral not only into an enlarging/
deepening understanding of the text; it is also a spiral into an enlarging/deepening
understanding of oneself.
No wonder, then, that Gadamer has proved to be such an ally to those who
want to maintain that faith is not in principle at odds with the hermeneutical process
in its application to study of the NT, conceived as it has been in terms of Enlightenment
historicism or through analogy as determined by 'modern' consciousness.
Gadamer has made us aware of dimensions of self-consciousness
without which a critical hermeneutic cannot be sufficiently self-critical. 91
87. Gadamer, Truth 340-41, 301.
88. Illustrated particularly by Thiselton's two major studies, Two Horizons and New Horizons.
89. Gadamer, Truth 302-307.
90. Cf. Ricoeur's reflections arising from Gadamer's work, in the closing section of
'The Task of Hermeneutics' and in 'The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation', which followed
{Text to Action 73-88).
91. Not surprisingly, Ben Meyer was the first to recognize the significance of Gadamer
for historical study of Jesus {Aims 59).
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