Text as mediator: Mazamisa’s Dialectica Reconciliae as a heuristic device for 1 Samuel 28

Although his work ‘has never been well received or known by his generation’, this article concurs with Hombana’s sentiment that Welile Llewelyn Mazamisa ‘should be counted as one of the fathers of reconciliation in the course of New Testament interpretation’. Based on this understanding, the article foregrounds the philosophical hermeneutical approach of Dialectica Reconciliae in biblical hermeneutics propounded by Mazamisa. Specifically, it proposes Dialectica Reconciliae as a heuristic device for biblical interpretation. Following Mazamisa’s Dialectica Reconciliae, the article discourages ‘rigid and exclusivist’ hermeneutics that lead to ‘alienating one-sidedness’. It introduces the concept of a ‘text as a mediator’. To clarify the concept of the ‘text as a mediator’, the article employs a building as a metaphor. To demonstrate the mediating role of the text, 1 Samuel 28 is used as a case study. It evidences how 1 Samuel 28 leaves ‘gaps’, namely missing details or ambiguities, that require the reader to infer meaning. The article asserts that in inferring meaning from these ‘gaps’, interpreters draw from their ontological and epistemological presuppositions. Contribution: This discussion departs from the premise that ‘an author cannot possibly incorporate every detail from the real world into the text, for the text would become unmanageable’. For this reason, there are gaps of silence within the text’. Readers are required to fill these gaps in ‘by drawing from their own repertoires’. Thus, this discussion identifies the gaps in the text and shows how they allow different perspectives to focus on various points in the text to justify their standpoints. Bae and Van der Merwe, on one side, and Kiboko and Mulaudzi, on the other, are brought together in a debate to exemplify how readers, drawing from their own repertoires, justify their own perspectives by focusing on different aspects of the text.