FROM EXEGESIS TO HERMENEUTICS - Rice School of Pastoral ...

Schneiders: From Exegesis to Hermeneutics 33Interpretation Theory. 34 Obviously, I cannot summarize in this paper themonumental work of these two thinkers, but I will extract a central ideafrom each in order to illustrate how the evolving hermeneutical modelwould affect our understanding of biblical scholarship and its relationshipto the pastoral work of the Church.A major contribution of Ricoeur is his masterful analysis of thenotion of "text." 35 He challenges our naïve conception that a text issimply "talk writ down," a dialogue fixed on paper. He maintains thatthe act of writing fundamentally alters the nature of the communicationand calls into play a different set of operations from those we use intrying to understand our partner in a conversation. Hermeneutics, saysRicoeur, begins when dialogue ends. 36 Now, exegesis as we described itin the second model is based on an unexamined assumption of theessential identity of text with talk, precisely the identity Ricoeur challenges.When a text is composed, says Ricoeur, several sea-changes occur.First, the text becomes semantically independent of the intention of itsauthor. 37 It now means whatever it actually says, not necessarily whatthe author intended to say. By way of analogy, if a student objects to thefailing grade I gave her on an exam by saying that I did not understandwhat she meant to say, my response can only be that I had to grade whatshe actually wrote, not what she meant. To write what she meant was hertask. Once the text was written her intention ceased to play a determiningrole. The meaning of the text is now independent of its author.Unlike the conversation partner who can continually re-express herthought until she makes herself understood, the author ceases to functiononce the text is completed.Secondly, a text is always composed within some form, such asnarrative, poetry, play, or the like. Literary genre is not simply a usefuldevice for classifying texts but is actually a code which shapes thematerial in a certain way and also determines in certain ways the interpretiveactivity of the reader. 38 In other words, a text is not astraightforward communication of factual data which the reader absorbsbut a strategy for involving the reader in a certain way and on severallevels with the subject matter of the text.Thirdly, a text once written is no longer determined by the understandingof the original audience. 39 It is now open to whoever can read itand different audiences will read it from within their own situations.34 P. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (FortWorth, TX: The Texas Christian University Press, 1976).35 Ibid., pp. 25-44.m Ibid., p. 32.37 Ibid., pp. 25-37.38 ibid., pp. 32-34.m Ibid., pp. 31-32.