Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics

Hermes, Trickster, Fool

M. Grau

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349460007, 9781137326850
• eBook ISBN: 9781137324559
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophical Hermeneutics

Grau reconsiders the relationship between "logos" and "mythos" as a precondition to opening theological hermeneutics to discourse from other cultures and genres, other modes of telling and retelling.

1. Unsealing Hermeneutics

THE “NOT IMMEDIATELY INTELLIGIBLE”

“Hermeneutics operates whenever something is not immediately intelligible.”¹

With this basic, if broad, definition offered by Hans-Georg Gadamer, we might consider hermeneutics—that is, interpretation of that which is given and which we encounter in the world around us—as something that is pertinent whenever we engage with what seems unintelligible or what we need to make sense of through a conscious or unconscious process.² This process concerns the spoken word and text as much as nonverbal and other sensual data, bodies of flesh as well as bodies of water, weather, and landscapes. Theological hermeneutics in particular concerns itself with the experience of the unintelligible and the infinitely untranslatable, stretching the bounds of translatability with each apparently impossible utterance about the Divine. Its economy of expression falls notoriously short of the ability to grasp the Divine and is prone to inflicting damage when we claim to understand and thus control the verbal and ritual expression of the Divine.

In his introductory text on theological hermeneutics, Werner Jeanrond makes the following observation:

It is thus evident that any consideration of the various forms of belonging as well as of ultimate belonging requires hermeneutic decisions, that is, strategies of interpreting authentic forms of Christian life and developing criteria of authenticity for Christian life. No form of human belonging can escape this hermeneutical predicament.³

Acknowledging the apophatic strands in the engagement with the Divine, many theologians, past and present, have stated that theology and other forms of religious discourse are not a precise science. In fact a closer look reveals that most sciences are far from precise; rather, they are constantly shifting discourses and practices. As we fumble in the dark of what we cannot know, we feel strangely compelled to explore and express what we experience. Exploring the double entendre of un/sealing would mean unsealing the discourse of theological hermeneutics and exploring the patterns of sealing involved in Hermes’s tricky art of interpretation.

Throughout the early use of the term in Greek, hermeneia referred to the interpretation of various kinds of messages, an ambivalent act of attempting to understand and translate utterances of all kinds, including messages from divine agents. This movement to interpretation has been intimately tied to the theology and the poetry of conceptualizing the sacred nature of the world and the relationships therein, sometimes affirming (kataphatic), sometimes denying (apophatic). Aristotle opens his treatise Peri Hermeneias (On Interpretation) with just that first basic distinction:

Let us, first of all, define noun and verb, then explain what is meant by denial [apophasis], affirmation [kataphasis], proposition [apophasis], and sentence [logos].⁴

Here, these terms are simple grammatical distinctions. Denial/apophasis states something by stating that it is not the case. We might consider a biblical example to illustrate this. In Matthew 12:30, the phrase “whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” mixes and matches apophasis/denial “not with” and affirmation “is against me.” The presumable meaning is that a person who is not explicitly working with Jesus is in fact against him, which eradicates space for neutrality. Mark 9:40, on the other hand, states that “whoever is not against us is for us,” shifting denial to “not against” and affirmation to “is for.” Jesus here seems to be saying the opposite, opening up a space for neutrality, since even those not explicitly with him are not counted as against him. A rather slight grammatical difference describes in fact a very different sense of what relating to Jesus looks like, at least in these two statements. An easy-to-overlook variation offers a powerful hermeneutical alternative. The composite picture of Jesus refracted by just these two phrases from two different gospels renders Jesus hermeneutically complex, and his attitude toward those taking a stance toward him seems to fluctuate.

Christians adapted and reinterpreted a variety of existing interpretive patterns and techniques for their own hermeneutics. The apostolic letters and gospels represent a particular hermeneutic aiming to engage and transform known oral and written traditions. Much of Christian theology lives in the dynamic tension between the apophatic and the kataphatic, saying and unsaying, affirming and denying what we can and cannot know about God. The sense of God as being beyond understanding is a sentiment widespread within Platonic traditions, and it became a vital aspect of Christian theological expression.⁵ A future theological hermeneutics might employ the categories of kataphatic and apophatic to realize interpretive silences and point to gaps in the practices of poetic, intercultural, interdisciplinary, and interreligious interpretation.

Translation as a hermeneutic act of decoding the Other is woven throughout the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Indeed, the “emergence of Christianity is intimately tied with translation” and expresses a powerful “translational impulse.”⁶ Christian attempts to translate the claims of the faith from and into the idiom of other languages and cultures aimed to render the message of the gospel compelling across cultural, geographic, and temporal distances.

Christian theology at its best articulates faith from the deep context of our lives, in an increasingly global and comparative space. Theology must make sense of ordinary people’s lives and inform our wrestling with how we can live together well. While it ought to inspire us to live more in touch with the values of our faith so they can inform our day to day practices, how this should exactly happen presents an ongoing challenge: What factors should inform and determine our reading of biblical and theological heritage? How should political, economic, ecological, and social and personal context factor in? Living according to the values of one’s faith continues to be grounds for negotiation, and such deliberations highlight the importance of conscious engagement with interpretive processes.

Christian theology is also in deep conversation with the many ethnic, cultural and religious traditions that have fed and continue to feed into its river of thought. Theological hermeneutics—interpretation of the Divine and the sacred elements of the universe—happens within and between religio-cultural traditions. And, in this connected, blended, endlessly related world, interpreting across difference continues to increase in complexity and importance.

Theology involves many modes of thinking and genres of expression. As its role in society shifts, theologians must seek new, and reinvent old, ways of naming the unnameable and unsealing the sealed. In order to become more flexible to undertake such a task, it is crucial that some Christian voices formulate hermeneutical approaches that take into account the complexity of both their own and other cultures and traditions. There is space for a constructive theological hermeneutics to work from the historical archives while remaining fully open and engaged with deepening forms of transreligious and transcultural encounters. Such theological hermeneutics resists simple oppositions and clear definitions and confronts reductionist reasoning. It challenges ingrained injustices in the political system or discourse while articulating a resolute polydox theopoetics,⁷ both grounded and flexible and seeking to embody such creative, interpretive acts.

The present time and context call for a radical rethinking of theological hermeneutics. Theology, written in deep conversation with other religious and cultural narratives, drawing deeply from the wells of time and place, between parochial and universal, is located, yet radically alert to the dynamic of the story just as the local weather and climate patterns are always already shaped and affected by events and places both far and near.

It is the claim of this book that figures like Hermes, trickster, and fool reveal, perform, and challenge human interpretive processes. Narratives that feature these figures have much to teach us about meaning making. Stories of tricksters and fools make visible the status quo of a society and its structures of power, knowledge, and belief. Remembering that hermeneutical acts are notoriously polyvalent, these figures can help reframe theological hermeneutics as a vibrant reminder of the need for both humility and resolute courage in reinterpreting the divine through mythos and logos anew each day. The key aim of this project is to point interpretive communities facing situations of economic and ecological crisis toward a radical rethinking of theological hermeneutics as a prelude to reconstructing Christian theology for the contextual eventualities that confront it.

REFRAMING HERMENEUTICS AS PATTERN RECOGNITION

Understood as pattern recognition, hermeneutics is a common human activity that involves the reading and interpreting of bodies, ecological systems, economic exchanges, societies, and situations. The term “pattern recognition” employed here for certain kinds of correlation hopes to capture something between globalizing universalisms and singular, particularistic “incomparable” uniquenesses, a place where we may observe, recognize, and link patterns in life and narrative not to insist unhelpfully on some kind of nonexisting uniformity, but rather to make enough connection for various lifeworlds to come into a better view of one another. I propose a form of pattern recognition that has a number of similarities to the work of any historian, ethnographer, or anthropologist: the available data are fragmented, perhaps more readily displaying gaps rather than offering solid evidence, and often engaged in a narrative ideology that see...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Unsealing Hermeneutics
• 2.  Theological Hermeneutics as Pattern Recognition
• 3.  Logos, Mythos, and Mysticism
• 4.  Putting Hermes Back into Hermeneutics
• 5.  The Trickster as Hermeneut
• 6.  Fool’s Errand: Holy Fools and Divine Folly as Hermeneutical Figures
• 7.  Reframing Mythos and Logos: Theology as Mytho-Logy
• 8.  Reframing Theological Hermeneutics
• Index