Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

f. Reading as Encounter
FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.4
If I prefer the image of hermeneutics as a 'dialogue' it is not to deny or ignore the
important points which emerge from considering the hermeneutical circle. I simply
find the image of dialogue as personal encounter more appealing, partly because
it gives weight to the idea of hermeneutics as in some sense a process of
personal formation, and partly because it recognizes the text as communicative
act. Hermeneutics is best conceived as a dialogue where both partners must be allowed
to speak in their own terms, rather than as an interrogation of the text
where the text is only allowed to answer the questions asked. To put the same
point another way, for a dialogue to be fruitful there must also be genuine engagement
of the interpreter with the text. Here again we have consciously to
move on from the old scientific paradigm of dispassionate, clinical research, as
though the text was a corpse in the pathology lab waiting to be dissected by the
scalpels of the historical method. The point was already recognized emotionally
in Pietism and the Romantic revival, theologically in Barth's theology of encounter
with the kerygmatic word and Bultmann's existentialism and hermeneutically
in the more conservative forms of reader-response criticism, in Ricoeur's conception
of a second naivete, 92 and in George Steiner's exposition of 'real presence'.
93 Even deconstruction can be seen as an attempt to ensure that the hegemony
wrested from the author is not simply assumed by the reader; the text itself
deconstructs all interpretations! The point is that without the interpreter's openness
to being addressed by the text, the interpreter can scarcely hope to avoid
abusing the text. Unless the text is, at least in some sense, allowed to set its own
agenda, it is questionable whether it is being heard at all.
In short, if we sum up the hermeneutical issues by responding to the
postmodern question 'Is there meaning in the text?', the answer has to be either a
qualified Yes or a qualified No. It is not that the encounter is a 'picnic' to which
the text brings the words and the reader the meaning, to pick up Northrop Frye's
engaging metaphor. The truth has to be somewhere in between, indeed precisely
in the integration of these two too simplistically separated terms, in the 'fusion'
of these two polarities. The text in its language and syntactical relationships already
has a potentiality for meaning, a potentiality which becomes active and effective
in the encounter of reading, whether the first reading or the thousandth
reading. As with the critically realist approach to the history of Christianity's be-
92. P. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon, 1969) 351. See further Ricoeur,
Essays 6, 23; also 'Preface to Bultmann' 67-69; also 'Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation'
84-88; Thiselton, New Horizons 359-60.
93. G. Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber and
Faber, 1989).
124