General Hermeneutics

What’s needed is not a general hermeneutics developed from some philosophy of language or metaphysics. Rather, what’s needed is a general hermeneutics developed from the premise that NT readings of the OT do not represent some bizarre exception to the normal way of reading but provide a model for all reading.

Hence, for instance, the NT readings of the OT raise (and perhaps help to resolve) questions about how meanings change with changed circumstances. Does Genesis 1:1 mean something different (something more?) now that John 1:1 has been written? How does the end of the story affect the meaning of its beginning and middle?

Or, to take another instance, can the logic of Paul’s use of Torah in the changed cultural and redemptive-historical circumstances of the first century provide a model for legal interpretation in general?

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

A Catholic Approach to Immigration

Kelsey Reinhardt

In the USCCB’s recent Special Pastoral Message, the bishops of the United States highlight the suffering inflicted…

The Classroom Heals the Wounds of Generations

Peter J. Leithart

“Hope,” wrote the German-American polymath Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “is the deity of youth.” Wholly dependent on adults, children…

Still Life, Still Sacred

Andreas Lombard

Renaissance painters would use life-sized wooden dolls called manichini to study how drapery folds on the human…