Thiselton on Hermeneutics

The Collected Works and New Essays of Anthony Thiselton

Anthony C. Thiselton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351879460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Hermeneutics is an interdisciplinary study of how we interpret texts, especially biblical texts, in the light of theories of understanding in philosophy, meaning in literary theory, and of theology. This volume brings together the seminal thought of a leading contemporary pioneer in this field. Thiselton's The Two Horizons was a classic on how horizons of biblical texts engage creatively with the horizons of the modern world. The author's later New Horizons in Hermeneutics explored still more deeply the transforming capacities of biblical texts, while his massive commentary on 1 Corinthians interpreted an epistle. This volume collects many of Anthony Thiselton's more notable writings from some seven books and 70 articles, to which he adds his own re-appraisals of earlier work. It uniquely expounds the thought of a major contemporary British theologian through his own words, and includes his own critical assessments.

Part I
Situating the Subject

Chapter One
Situating the Explorations: “Thirty Years of Hermeneutics” (1996)

This essay was written for the International Symposium on the Interpretation of the Bible in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 17–20 September 1996, and published by The Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and Sheffield Academic Press, in 1998. I have edited the text a little here and there to take account of any observation that has been overtaken by events since 1996, or which otherwise might have been unclear.

The style and content of these first two essays differ in character from the other contributions included in this collection. All of the other essays are primarily research publications. By contrast this first article is an autobiographical account of my developing concerns from 1964 to 1996. I considered omitting it from this volume, but it provides an easily readable introduction to an agenda that has motivated much of my research and writing since 1964. I have indicated in particular the contexts and motivations that have influenced my work at each stage.

Professor José Kra

ovec has granted me a rare privilege, namely to offer “at least a short summary of your hermeneutical works”. One could hardly volunteer such an enterprise, without undue self-advertisement. However, in response to this gracious invitation, I propose to trace how a series of issues emerged from a developing context of ideas in teaching and research in hermeneutics in four universities of the United Kingdom over some thirty years.

I shall also offer some tentative comments about prospects for the discipline. Here the issue of the challenge of postmodern perspectives looms large, and readers may note parallels, although not necessarily full agreements, with the contentions of Professor David J.A. Clines who writes elsewhere in this volume [that is, that published by the Slovenian Academy], and with whom I worked as a close colleague in the University of Sheffield from 1970 to 1985.¹

I
Work on Fuchs, Wittgenstein and Austin (Bristol, 1964–70)

I was teaching in the University of Bristol when a student asked my advice about English-language books on hermeneutics. This seemingly innocent question initiated me into an almost fruitless literature search. Richard E. Palmer’s Hermeneutics (1969) had not yet appeared, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode awaited translation successively in 1975 and again freshly in 1989. I had already worked both on NT interpretation and on the philosophy of language, especially on Wittgenstein, and these interacted to make me discontented with the more traditional textbooks on “biblical interpretation”. Alongside these unimaginative text-books on biblical interpretation, there seemed to be only Robert W. Funk’s Language, Hermeneutic and Word of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) and the volume edited by James Robinson and J. Cobb Jr, New Frontiers in Theology: II, The New Hermeneutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

I was also invited to deliver a paper at Oxford on “The New Hermeneutic”. I had already written a review on Ebeling’s Word and Faith (1963), but now set myself to draft an outline of Ernst Fuchs’s major writings, together with my own critical survey of Gadamer’s Truth and Method. I was impressed by the notion of projected “worlds” into which the reader was drawn, especially where these “narrative worlds” constituted precognitive value-systems into which the reader was seduced or enticed, only to find the world and the reader’s expectations subverted and reversed. Fuchs undertook an excellent piece of work on the “reversal” of expectations of (mere) “justice” alone in the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard in Matthew 20:1–16.² I pressed on to explore “worldhood” in Heidegger’s Being and Time, since Fuchs openly expressed his indebtedness to this work.

However, I came to believe that not all was well on the level of the philosophy of language. Funk had described the view of Fuchs on language-event (Sprachereignis) as “performative”.³ But from 1963 I had become increasingly familiar with the work of Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin. Austin’s “performatives” presupposed institutional states of affairs and specific contextual conventions, whereas Heidegger and Fuchs regarded assertions, propositions and conventions as at best derivative and secondary to a kind of force that was different from Austin’s illocutionary acts. I expressed this combination of appreciation and unease in “The Parables as Language-Event: Some Comments on Fuchs’s Hermeneutics in the Light of Linguistic Philosophy” in 1970.⁴

I had been further alerted to the problems left by the “devaluing” of assertions in Heidegger and Gadamer by reading Wolfhart Pannenberg on hermeneutics. In 1969 my wife and I had the great privilege of entertaining Professor and Frau Pannenberg in our Bristol home for a few days, and his incisive oral comments on this issue convinced me further of this point. Pannenberg has always remained a major influence on my thinking. I attempted to present a balanced critique of the New Hermeneutic of Fuchs and Ebeling in the volume New Testament Interpretation. I wrote my essay in 1973–74, although it did not appear until 1977.⁵ Meanwhile I remained concerned to draw equally on the Anglo-American tradition of philosophical analysis and on Continental European traditions. I viewed Wittgenstein as a key figure, who combined the incisiveness and rigour which largely characterized British analytical philosophy with the Continental suspicion of exclusively rationalist method and with a deeper concern about human subjectivity and life-worlds.⁶ In Wittgenstein this was formulated in terms of “forms-of-life” and “language-games”. Wittgenstein’s observations on Frazer’s The Golden Bough offers a seminal hermeneutic.⁷

II
Teaching Hermeneutics as an Interdisciplinary Course (Sheffield, 1970–85)

A decisive turning-point occurred for me when I moved to the University of Sheffield in 1970. Our Head of Department at Sheffield, Professor James Atkinson, gave his younger colleagues every encouragement to explore new avenues of enquiry and to design fresh courses for students. He encouraged me to design what I believe to be the first final-year Honours degree course in hermeneutics for students in Biblical Studies, Biblical Studies and English, or Philosophy and Theology. It was thus inter-disciplinary from the first, combining biblical studies, theology, philosophy and literary theory. I was warmly welcomed into the Department of Philosophy, where I offered public lectures on Wittgenstein in 1971–72, and into the Department of Linguistics where I shared some teaching on semantics and (later) shared doctoral supervision. The stage was set for teaching a full critical survey of hermeneutical theory, in the context of research in biblical studies, the philosophy of language, and literary theory.

My work on semantics and on persuasive definition led to “The Meaning of Sarx in 1 Cor. 5:5: A Fresh Approach in the Light of Logical and Semantic Factors”.⁸ What Paul perceived as “to be destroyed”, I urged, was the incestuous man’s disposition of complacent self-sufficiency, not his physical body. Paul had redefined sarx in the way that conveyed his theological point, and exclusion from the church was to lead to the man’s salvation by striking at the root of his self-confidence. This more philosophical work on “persuasive definition” is nowadays seen more clearly in semiotic terms. An excellent example is John Moore’s appeal to the notion of “code-switching” in Eco.⁹ However, I felt that my most creative use of J.L. Austin appeared in “The Supposed Power of Words in the Biblical Writings”.¹⁰ O. Grether, W. Zimmerli, L. Dürr and even Gerhard von Rad had ascribed the “power” of words in the OT to their being Kraftgeladen in some causal sense, as “an objective reality endowed with mysterious power”.¹¹ Zimmerli spoke of a world of curse or of blessing as “a missile with a time-fuse”.¹² But Austin clearly drew a contrast between the causal force of perlocutionary speech-acts and the institutional force of illocutionary acts. A curse or a blessing could not be recalled not because it carries a mysterious Kraftgeladen word-magic, but because while the Hebrew-Christian tradition carries institutional procedures for, for example, “I bless”, “I baptize”, “I commit this body to the ground”, it has no such procedure for “I un-bless”, “I un-baptize”, “I un-commit this body out of the ground again”.

During my Sheffield period from 1970 to 1985 my lectures on hermeneutics developed in several directions. Initially I set Palmer’s book Hermeneutics and several others, especially on Bultmann and myth.¹³ The course included the origins and development of hermeneutics; the foundation of the modern discipline with Schleiermacher and Dilthey; Bultmann and demythologizing; Heidegger, Gadamer and the New Hermeneutic; functions of language with reference to Wittgenstein and to speech-acts in Austin; issues concerning theological context and the status of the Bible as Scripture; an evaluation of narrative theory, and the relation between hermeneutics and semantics. My concern for the multi-functional multilevel operation of language emerged in a short study on language in liturgy.¹⁴

Continuing work on semantics found expression in “Semantics and NT Interpretation” and another related paper.¹⁵ There I took up, for example, the theme of Wittgenstein and Ramsey that everyday vocabulary is used with a particular contextual logic. I drew on Austin to illustrate that such speech-acts as “I repent” or “I believe” are acts of repentance or of commitment or confession, not attempts to inform God of a context of which he is aware. This also found ex...