Hermeneutics: The Only Way to Transcendence

Abstract To blame hermeneutics is to shoot the messenger. Hermeneutics does not prevent the revelation of transcendence from reaching us; it merely diagnoses a problem that was already there whether or not we were aware of it. This essay contends that the widespread disagreement among Christians today on the normative message of the Bible casts doubt on our ability to discern what God is saying to the church. Hermeneutics, far from causing the problem, is the only resource that can help us get back on track. It does this by confronting us with our finitude. Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics is ideally suited to this, because it is based on awareness of finitude as the source of its insights. For Ricœur, finitude means the limitations and particularity of our perspective that come from our historical and cultural situatedness. Transcendence becomes inaccessible when we implicitly deny our finitude by presuming that we can attain Godlike knowledge: certainty, absoluteness, totality. In other words, we cease to hear God’s voice when we place ourselves in the position of God. We need to repent of our pride in construing our interpretation of scripture as total and absolute, recognising instead the multiplicity of interpretations as a diversity of valid perspectives on the same object. However, sometimes interpretations are incompatible, meaning that at least one must be wrong. In this case we must also repent of the sin that distorts our perspective, and the best means to do this, according to Ricœur, is to pass through the purifying fire of the Masters of Suspicion: Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. These three help us to diagnose structural and institutional biases that unconsciously shape our interpretation of scripture. Only by repenting of these biases can we hope to recover access to transcendence and hear the voice of God in scripture again.