This document contains a concise, but complete summary of the book A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics. In my opinion, this document can be used as a replacement of the original book, since all important information has been summarized. This document is also a good short introduction for people wh...
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, David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics, 2004 | Summary SumSam | 2019
Introduction
Hermeneutics is a technical term to describe our understanding of the nature of texts and how we
interpret and use them. Especially with respect to the Bible, a collection of ancient texts with
distinctive and abiding authority.
The aim of this book is to give students an understanding of the importance of hermeneutical
reflection for religious thought and understanding in the broad context of the Bible and later Christian
theology, noting the historical and philosophical contexts of the subjects as it develops from the
earliest days of the Christian history to the present day.
Christian and Western understanding of such terms as “text”, “reading” and “meaning” is actually
quite limited and by no means should be taken as universal or absolute.
1. Texts and Readers: Reading and Writing
1. Introduction
Hermeneutics, a word being derived from the Greek word hermeneus, which means an
interpreter/expounder, is about interpretation, and especially the interpretation of sacred texts. What is
a text? In the “literature-as-action” model a text is not merely seen as language, but as performance
and action. Texts can make us do things as well as understand meaning.
2. Faith and Suspicion, Texts and Readers
The predominant way of reading the Bible for at least the first fifteen hundred years of Christian
history is called a hermeneutics of faith. This attitude means that you believe in the text you read, and
that we allow the text to draw us into its world and the lives of the characters who inhabit this world.
However, we can also read a text with caution, even scepticism, determined to test every claim and
proposition against such humanly defined standards as the light of reason or the evidence of history.
This we call a hermeneutics of suspicion. However, ,on the whole, it must be said, we do have a
tendency to believe what is written down in a text.
What do we mean by “meaning”?
Actually the distinction between the literal and the literary truth is extremely difficult to pin down. We
sometimes speak of the literal truth as if a literal reading stands in curdy contrast to the vain
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, David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics, 2004 | Summary SumSam | 2019
imaginings of metaphor or rather vaguely understood terms. In this book we shall see what meaning is
and where it is located according to different hermeneutists or philosophers.
Hermeneutics warns us about taking too simply and straightforwardly the idea that a text is just
exactly what it was intended to be in the mind and intention of its author, as if understanding the
letters of Paul were equivalent to entering into the mind and purpose of the apostle himself. A too
straightforward conflation of text and author’s intentions is called the intentional fallacy.
Hermeneutics recognizes the slippage between intention and meaning.
Our understanding of a text is not simply dependent on universal principles that are equally shared by
all, but depends on such things as age, gender, cultural assumptions, and so on. Also, as readers we
change.
Above all, we need to recognize that although we can read the words, we have very little idea what it
was like to be a first-century Christian in the Roman Empire.
3. Reading and Writing
The change from the handwritten to the printed word altered the whole way in which the world was
perceived and understood, shifting communication from dependency on the vagaries of the
individually copied text (with all its inevitable “mistakes”), to texts that guaranteed uniformity and
could be endlessly reprinted on the production-line model.
From Greek tradition and works we gain our assumptions that texts “have meaning” and
characteristically have a clear beginning, middle, and end with a unity that brings about a conclusion.
The Christian tradition has interpreted the Bible against this background:
1. Biblical history is finite, and the Bible is essentially a historical document.
2. The Biblical story has a beginning, a middle and an end.
3. The plot of history has a hidden author who is also its director and the guarantor of things to
come.
However, we have to be clear that none of these things about the Bible are necessarily true.
Great religious traditions, like Islam or Hinduism, have their own distinctive hermeneutics and “ways
of reading” their sacred texts (e.g. the Qu’ran properly cannot be translated).
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