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36 HORIZONScause it challenges one's own. The purpose of interpretation is to comecloser to the truth on the subject by letting the text challenge our preconceptionsand by questioning the text from our perspective so that ityields more, in the light of our shared tradition, than it could whenoriginally composed. 47Gadamer says that biblical hermeneutics is much like legal hermeneutics.48 One must know what the law says, but even more importantis figuring out how the law applies to the present case. Surely the framersof the American Declaration of Independence, in saying that "all men arecreated equal" understood "men" to mean adult, white, propertyholding,male colonists. But is that how we should understand thepreamble today? And if we are to understand "all men" today as meaningall human beings how can we justify this seeming departure from theintention of the authors ? Gadamer would reply that the act of interpretationinvolves first discerning the question behind the text. 49 What questionwere the founding fathers answering in the preamble? They wereanswering a question somewhat like this: "What really grounds ourclaims to political and personal self-determination?" Their answer wasthe divinely ordained natural equality of men as human beings. They didnot really think blacks or native Americans were fully human nor didthey attend to the humanity of women or children. When we addressourselves to the same question about what grounds the claim of peopleto self-determination we can affirm the insight of the founding fathersthat it is the divinely ordained equality of human beings. But we affirm itwithin our much expanded horizons of understanding of what thecategory "human" includes because history has led us to reflectexplicitly on the real humanity of blacks, native Americans, women,children, the poor, and foreigners. In other words, because we and thefounding fathers share a common tradition which leads us to be concernedwith the same great issues, we can discuss the question behindthe text in terms of the direction of the original answer. 50 But because ofour own historical situation we can also raise to the light new aspects ofthe question and extract an expanded meaning from the text which isboth faithful to the text and more adequate to the reality which both itand we are addressing.The same is true of our approach to biblical texts. To exegete a text inthe sense of establishing what the author said about an important issue isnot enough. We might, for example, establish that Paul forbade divorceamong the baptized. But is the real question behind the text, "Is divorceallowed?" or is the real question something about how the baptized areto manifest the great mystery of the union of Christ and the Church and47 Ibid., pp. 270-74.48 Ibid., pp. 289-305.49 Ibid., p. 333.50 Ibid., pp. 333-41.
Schneiders: From Exegesis to Hermeneutics 37respond to God's call of Christ's members to peace? 51 If we try to getbiblical texts to supply straightforward answers to modern questionsrather than trying to dialogue from the standpoint of our questions withthe text about its questions, we vitiate the hermeneutical process. Wemust engage the text's questions so as to illuminate our world with itsinsights and allow our new questions about the same subject matter toextract from the text the riches which are grounded in the author'sintention but which can only emerge in a later event of meaning.As Catholics we can recall that this approach is not entirely new.Patristic, and especially medieval exegesis with its interpretive theory ofthe plurality of levels of meaning in the text, were quite sensitive to thevery problem Gadamer raises. 52 However, the medievale did not have thesame scientific capacity to recover the original meaning of the text thatwe do. While we need tò reappropriate their sense of the nature of thebiblical text as many-leveled religious literature and their concern forthe truth claims of the inspired text we must also continue to wrestlewith the tension they did not experience between what the text meantand what the text means. An exclusively historical critical approach thatis one-sidedly concerned with the former is sterile. But an exclusive anduncritical concern with the latter will result in fundamentalism or uninformedpietism. The task of our own time is to appreciate and exploit thecreative possibilities of the tension between what the text meant andwhat the text means.In summary then, our third model, the hermeneutical model, isbased on a new understanding of the text as written work and a newunderstanding of the act of interpretation as a fusion of our own horizonwith that of the text on the basis of a shared tradition of concerns. Theultimate object of the biblical research, in other words, is precisely thecontemporary meaning of the text.HI. Implications of the Three Models for the Question ofPastoral Use of the Results of Biblical ResearchIn this final section I would like to suggest that the answers to thequestions of whether biblical research is a practical or speculative disciplineand whether biblical data is pastoral or theoretical is that it alldepends on what model of biblical interpretation one is using.If one is working within the proof-text model then biblical researchis eminently practical. Its task is to find texts to support either speculativetheological positions or pastoral prescriptions. The texts themselvesare presented as theoretical or practical depending on the context in51 See Donahue, "Divorce: New Testament Perspectives."52 See Steinmetz, "The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis." I am grateful to RaymondBrown whose helpful reflection on this section of the paper led me to formulate thisxParagraph.
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