RT Article
T1 Between Gadamer and Ricoeur: Preserving Dialogue in the Hermeneutical Arc for the Sake of a God Who Speaks and Listens
JF Sophia
VO 53
IS 4
SP 553
OP 573
A1 Dickman, Nathan Eric
LA English
PB Springer Netherlands
YR 2014
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1785593498
AB Wolterstorff defends the claim not only that ‘God speaks’ through the Bible but also that the reader gains ever new insights upon subsequent readings of it. I qualify this project with the philosophical hermeneutics he rejects—namely that of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Wolterstorff thinks what he calls ‘authorial discourse interpretation’ provides warrant for religious communities believing that ‘God speaks’ to them through a text. In developing this hermeneutic, he dismisses the viability of Gadamer and Ricoeur's approach because, Wolterstorff asserts, their form of interpretation is merely an operation performed on an artifact. While a cursory study of Gadamer and Ricoeur might support such dismissal, particularly Ricoeur's emphasis on writing's obliteration of dialogue, a closer study guided by the hermeneutic priority of questioning complicates Wolterstorff's caricature. If writing obliterates dialogue, what happens to questions and responses? My thesis is that dialogue with another is preserved through the hermeneutical arc. I demonstrate this through specifying distinct logics of question and answer that occur in the reading process, and I delimit these logics by way of appeal to contemporary literacy pedagogy and its taxonomies of questions. A voice does speak with and listen to a reader in the event of reading, in this case a God who is not behind but before the text. Isolating this other who speaks and listens provides reinforcement for constructive theological work aligned with Gadamer and Ricoeur's hermeneutics, and answers for the experience of hearing ‘God speak’ differently through sacred texts.
K1 theological humanism
K1 Hermeneutics
K1 Dialogue
K1 Questions
K1 Wolterstorff
K1 Ricoeur
K1 Gadamer
DO 10.1007/s11841-013-0402-0