Biblical Hermeneutics - National Open University of Nigeria

CTH 601 Biblical Hermeneutics
which occurs within and through language.” Gadamer’s significant
contribution to Hermeneutics is the contemporary emphasis of the
cultural distance between the Biblical world and our own.
The new Hermeneutic accepts and builds on the Hermeneutical
principles of Bultmann as seen in the thoughts of his pupils, Fuchs and
Gehard Ebeling. Fuchs worked on the narrative ‘world’ of the parable.
The reader enters the world and it is grasped by it. The Hermeneutical
focus is “on the text actively addressing and scrutinizing the
interpreter.” This implies that the text must first of all translate the
reader before the reader can translate the text.
For the new Hermeneutic interpretation is not a matter of simply using
the right method. Whereas the traditional Hermeneutics was concerned
with the detailed principles of interpretation, the new Hermeneutic looks
upon this as merely a special problem within the much wider activity of
interpretation.”
The new Hermeneutic asserts that language itself is interpretation.
Words and sentences can be used in different ways: pragmatic,
existential, factual/scientific and formal. The new hermeneutic thus
rejects the neutral, objective, scientific approach to exegesis as done by
Oscar Cullman.
Some of the criticisms of the new Hermeneutic are:
1. Its critical methodology, that is in the liberal tradition.
2. Restricted understanding of the supernatural and destruction of
prophecy.
3. By stressing the purely existential and kerygmatic elements, it
has a limited focus.
4. It is very subjective.
5. The anthropology is narrow and defective.
6. Its concept of the Word of God as existential communication is
opaque and empty.
Self – Assessment Exercise
Highlight and evaluate the “New” Hermeneutics.
4.0 CONCLUSION
Modern Theology and Hermeneutics began with Friedrich
Schleiemacher. He and some other Biblical Theologians made Biblical
studies to be open to scientific, critical methodology, modern,
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